Representing Parliament: Poets, Mps, and the Rhetoric of Public Reason, 1640-1660 Rory Tanner Thesis Presented to the School Of
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Representing Parliament: Poets, MPs, and the Rhetoric of Public Reason, 1640-1660 Rory Tanner Thesis presented to the School of Graduate Studies, University of Ottawa, in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy, English Literature. Department of English Faculty of Arts University of Ottawa © Rory Tanner, Ottawa, Canada, 2014 Abstract Much recent scholarship celebrates the early modern period for its development of broader public political engagement through printed media and coffeehouse culture. It is the argument of this study that the formation in England under Charles II of a public sphere may be shown to have followed a reassessment of political discourse that began at Westminster during the troubled reign of that king’s father, Charles I. The narrative of parliament’s growth in this era from an “event to an institution,” as one historian describes it, tells of more than opposition to the King on the battlefields of the English Civil War. Parliament- work in the early years of England’s revolutionary decade also set new expectations for rhetorical deliberation as a means of directing policy in the House of Commons. The ideals of discursive politics that were voiced in the Short Parliament (May 1640), and more fully put into practice in the opening session of the Long Parliament (November 1640), were soon also accepted by politically-minded authors and readers outside Westminster. Prose controversy published in print and political poetry that circulated in manuscript both demonstrate that the burgeoning culture of debate outside parliament could still issue “in a parliamentary way.” Such promotion of productive textual engagements eventually constituted a wider, notional assembly, whose participants – citizen readers – were as much a product of deliberate education and fashioning as they were of the “conjuring,” “interpellation,” or “summoning” that recent scholarly vocabulary suggests. Following the spirit of reform in the English parliament, and subsequently developing through the years of 2 partisan political writing that followed, public opinion, like the Commons, established itself in this era as an institution in its own right. These public and private assemblies disseminated the unprecedented amount of parliamentary writing and record-keeping that distinguishes the period under review, and this rich archive provides the literary and historical context for this study. 3 Table of contents Acknowledgements 5 Conventions 6 List of figures 7 Introduction: Coming to Terms with Dissent 8 I Parliaments 1 Schism of State, Burgeoning Debate, Spring 1640 33 I ANTICIPATING AND REPRESENTING THE SHORT PARLIAMENT 37 II DEBATE, DELIBERATION, DISSENT 51 III DISSOLVING PARLIAMENT AND FORMING PUBLIC OPINION 72 2 Representing and Defining Parliament: Milton, Smectymnuus, and the Long Parliament, 1640-1644 96 I PROTECTING AND PROMOTING PARLIAMENTARY DEBATES 102 II THE SMECTYMNUUS CONTROVERSY AND PARLIAMENTARY POLEMIC 114 III MILTON AGAINST THE SOPHISTS 131 II Publics 3 “Parliaments of Paper” and Public Readers, 1640-1650 155 I PUBLIC REASON AND ITS CRITICS 159 II VOTERS, READERS, AND MEDIA LITERACY 177 III MAKING MISCELLANIES, MAKING PUBLICS 198 4 Post-partisan Reflections, 1650-1660 211 I THOMAS FAIRFAX AND THE TEXTUALITY OF THOUGHT 218 II THOMAS HALL, PUBLIC RHETORIC, AND POST-PARTISAN MYTHOLOGY 242 Conclusion: Revolutions Remembered 267 Bibliography 274 4 Acknowledgements The completion of this project has been supported by many colleagues and friends since its outset in 2007. I am very grateful to have been a part of the community of scholars at the University of Ottawa, and among these Professor Victoria Burke, Danny Gorny, Neal Hackler, and Professor Sara Landreth have provided particularly helpful comments on this work in its various stages of development. Professor Burke’s manuscript studies seminar provided what would prove to be a key inspiration for this study, as well as a methodological approach to the archival materials under review. I have also appreciated the input of Martin Dzelzanis, Andrew Hopper, and Mark Knights, whose advice and scholarship have informed this project in various ways. Generous funding from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council has benefitted this study immeasurably by permitting my extensive consultation of manuscript materials at English and American archives, and my participation in international academic conferences. For first introducing me to the world of Milton and Marvell, I am most grateful to my dissertation supervisor, Nicholas von Maltzahn. His kind mentorship and gifted scholarship both have been a constant support along the way, and promise to be sources of lasting inspiration. 5 Conventions Outdated spellings encountered in the seventeenth-century texts (excluding titles) quoted here have been modernized where necessary to improve accessibility to the text in view. Old-style dates have also been modernized. Unless otherwise stated, biblical quotations are from the Authorized version (King James), and the place of publication for early printed documents is London. All reproductions of seventeenth-century printed publications included here originate from document scans made available through Early English Books Online (EEBO). Quotations from John Milton’s prose are drawn from The Complete Prose Works of John Milton, gen. ed. Don M. Wolfe (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1953-82), which is cited here in abbreviated form as YP. 6 List of figures An exact description of the manner how His Majesty and his nobles went to Parliament (1640) 39 “Parliament dictionary, or a ... metamorphosis.” [Bod. MS Eng. B. hist. 203] 78 Wits Recreation, Selected from the Finest Fancies of Moderne Muses (1640) 193 Bodleian Library MS Rawl. Poet. 71 221 Brotherton Library MS Lt 105 221 The Full Proceedings of the High Court of Justice against King Charles (1654) 255 7 Introduction: Coming to Terms with Dissent This is a study of the ways that public political discussions gained legitimacy, sophistication, and participants in mid-seventeenth century England. This advancement will be considered here in relation to two political developments that help define the early modern period, each of which in turn tested the merit and potential of deliberative discourse. First, the English parliament’s protracted but ultimately successful shift in these years from “an event to an institution”1 reflects increasing expectations for deliberative discourse in that “quintessentially public”2 but also ostensibly private forum. Second, the notable sophistication of the engagements between political authors and readers within the broader public forum of discussion outside Westminster comes during the revolutionary decade increasingly to justify that external deliberative assembly’s later constitution as a “public sphere.” The establishment of these two forums follows in order as the later developments in public political discourse are shown in this study to depend in many ways upon parliamentary achievements in the years that led to the English Civil War. Examination of the rhetorical and literary work that supported these developments – including the reform of parliamentary process and the circulation of political writing – reveals the crucial 1 Michael Braddick, God’s Fury, England’s Fire (London: Allen Lane, 2008), 56. See also Conrad Russell, Parliaments and English Politics, 1621-1629 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1979), 3. 2 Peter Lake and Steven Pincus, “Rethinking the public sphere,” in The Politics of the Public Sphere in Early Modern England, ed. Peter Lake and Steven Pincus (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2007), 5. 8 connections between reading practices and public political activity in the period under review. It has become a commonplace in studies of this period that literature can be found at or at least somewhere near the “epicenter” of the English Revolution.3 But the active exchange between literature and revolution, where “the art of politics was becoming what we would call the art of spin”4 and readers might thereby determine their allegiance, was only one aspect of what I suggest was a more basic, more pervasive, and perhaps also more unsettled relationship existing in this period: that between revolution and political discourse. This was an era in which England was fully “intoxicated with language,”5 and where politicians, preachers, and authors all strove variously to determine and prove its capabilities, shortcomings, and failures. If the main front of the “war of words”6 said to have accompanied the English civil wars was that between textual representations promoting the authority either of the king or of the parliament, then the second front was that which saw the dispute over the capacities of discourse, whether as it issued among MPs in the Commons, or as encountered in writing through scribal or print publication. The body of literature dating to the English Civil War invites its study not only as an arena for testing competing political identities, but also as a means also of testing the productive powers of the language used in political discussion. This study is divided in two sections, each responding to a line of questioning that arose during England’s revolutionary decade (1640-1650). The first section, comprising 3 Nigel Smith, Literature and Revolution in England, 1640-1660 (New Haven : Yale University Press, 1994), 1. 4 Kevin Sharpe, Image Wars : promoting kings and commonwealths in England, 1603- 1660 (New Haven: Yale University