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The Poetry of the Caroline Court WARTON LECTURE ON ENGLISH POETRY The Poetry of the Caroline Court THOMAS N. CORNS University of Wales, Bangor I MY SUBJECT IS THE WORK of those writers who have generally been called ‘Cavalier poets’. It is a term that I resist, because it encourages the unhelpful practice of reading the literature of the late 1620s and the 1630s as it were backwards, from points of retrospection in 1642 or later. Paradoxically, it is a perspective which was encouraged among readers of the Civil War period as a positive recommendation of such poetry, while among later critics hindsight has supported an ethical criticism of a negative kind. Although in the seven- teenth century it added a purposefulness and a heroism to the poets, since Dr Johnson it serves to incorporate them into the crises of the 1640s, not as witnesses but as accomplices in the early Stuart political disaster. The approach reached extreme expression in C. V. Wedgwood’s influential Poetry and Politics under the Stuarts,1 which directly or indirectly did something to set the agenda for even the best of recent accounts of these poets. Thus, Warren Chernaik finds himself drawn into an ethical discussion of Waller: ‘This study . is an attempt not to rehabilitate Waller but to do him simple justice . .’.2 Again, Kevin Sharpe’s ground-breaking account of Carew, Davenant, and Townshend vindicates them (and simultaneously the Caroline court) by seek- ing to demonstrate that they did indeed whisper critical advice to their political masters, and that their masters were open to respectful dissent. He concludes, ‘The equation of the court with sycophancy cannot stand; criticism, we have 1 C. V. Wedgwood, Poetry and Politics under the Stuarts (Cambridge, 1960). 2 Warren L. Chernaik, The Poetry of Limitation: A Study of Edmund Waller (New Haven and London, 1968), p. 14. Proceedings of the British Academy, 97, 51–73. The British Academy 1998. Read at the Academy 29 April 1997 Copyright © The British Academy 1998 – all rights reserved 52 Thomas N. Corns now seen, was articulated insistently from within the court as well as from outside.’3 Though he confutes the received position, he does so in terms which concede the primacy of the exculpation of the poetry of the 1620s and 1630s from the catastrophes of the 1640s. The fullest and most sensitive study, that of Earl Miner, in its periodisation has the work of Charles Cotton (d. 1687) as its terminus ad quem, and in so doing necessarily reads the poetry of the 1630s as ideologically and ethically continuous with that of the 1640s and after. Thus, Miner sets himself the agenda of describing ‘conceptions of the self, of life, and the world . which one group, the Cavaliers, tended to set forth in terms of certain styles, certain recurring subjects, certain recurring approaches, and certain cultural assumptions’.4 That word ‘Cavalier’ certainly compounds the problem, and it ties twentieth- century misperceptions to those of the Civil War period. Before 1641, it had currency as a fashionable term for a fashionable phenomenon, ‘a courtly gentleman, a gallant’,5 sometimes, I suspect, already with a pejorative edge. Sir John Suckling uses the word in that sense in the Dramatis Personae of The Goblins (?1637–1641).6 But after 1641 it rapidly becomes the name for the stereotypical representation of the royalist activist, initially as a pejorative, thereafter as a word current with both sides. Thus William Lilly, writing in 1651 of what he had witnessed in 1641–2, ‘all that took part or appeared for his Majestie [were termed] Cavaliers, few of the vulgar knowing the sence of the word Cavalier’. Indeed, with the word came, in parliamentarian propaganda, a wealth of association with hard-drinking, hard-living, rakehell womanising.7 The hostile representation contains much that can be with facility nudged into a positive and rather gratifying self-fashioning. After the fiasco of the Bishops’ Wars, an anonymous lampoon counselled Suckling: Since under Mars thou wert not borne, To Venus fly and thinke no scorne, Letitbemyadvice....8 But after the Army Plot of 1641, in which he played a leading role, parlia- mentarian propaganda demonises him in altogether more attractive ways, as in the broadside The Sucklington Faction, or Suckling’s Roaring Boys,9 in which 3 Kevin Sharpe, Criticism and Compliment: The politics of literature in the England of Charles I (Cambridge, 1987), p. 291. 4 Earl Miner, The Cavalier Mode from Jonson to Cotton (Princeton, New Jersey, 1971), p. vii. 5 OED s.v. ‘Cavalier’ sb. 2. 6 The Works of Sir John Suckling: The Plays, edited by L. A. Beaurline (Oxford, 1971), p. 124: on the possible dating, see p. 274. 7 See Thomas N. Corns, Uncloistered Virtue: English Political Literature 1640–1660 (Oxford, 1992), pp. 3–7. 8 ‘Upon Sir John Suckling’s hundred horse’, lines 37–9, in The Works of Sir John Suckling: the Non-dramatic Works, edited by Thomas Clayton (Oxford, 1971), p. 205. 9 Anon., The Sucklington Faction, or Sucklings roaring boys (London, 1641). Copyright © The British Academy 1998 – all rights reserved THE POETRY OF THE CAROLINE COURT 53 the ‘cavalier’ life seems not without its discreet charm. By the time of his death, in exile and in uncertain circumstances, the negative associations of cavalierism are set aside by Suckling’s apologists, and he emerges as the epitome of all that is best in that cultural phenomenon: Thinke on a schollar without pride, A Souldier with much bloud un-dyed, A Statesman, yet noe whit ambitious, A Libertine, and yet not vitious, Thinke to the heigth, if man could bee, Or ere was perfect, this was hee . 10 The dead Suckling could scarcely be responsible for how he was repre- sented. But court poets of the 1630s saw in the 1640s the advantages of appropriating elements of the stereotype into the deflection of their own self-representation in more heroic directions. Thus, Herrick offers his blessing to ‘His Cavalier,’ ‘the virtuous man’ who can ‘Saile against Rocks, and split them too; | I! and a world of Pikes passe through’.11 Edmund Waller’s 1645 collection, when he was already in exile for his part in the ‘Waller Plot’, concludes with a significant variant on the love lyric that characterises much of the volume, ‘To Chloris upon a favour received’: Chloris, since first our calme of peace Was frighted hence, this good we finde. Your favours with your feares increase, And growing mischiefs make you kinde: So the fayre tree which still preserves Her fruit and state whilst no wind blows, In stormes from that uprightnesse swerves, And the glad earth about her strowes With treasure from her yielding boughs.12 Waller as always is decorous, but the ‘yielding boughs’ approach explicitness; evidently times of war reverse the game of love, and his characteristic sighing and frustrated devotion give way to the soldier’s rewards. In this he anticipates Richard Lovelace’s characteristic posture in his first Lucasta (1649), in which an eroticised notion of warfare relates sexual value and achievement to die-hard royalism: ‘I could not love thee (Deare) so much, | Lov’d I not Honour more.’13 Plainly most of the Lovelace oeuvre postdates 1640, and with Herrick’s only volume, Hesperides (1648), it is difficult or impossible to determine when 10 ‘An Epitaph upon Sir John Suckling’, tentatively attributed by Clayton to James Paulin, Non-dramatic Works, pp. 191–2, 341. 11 ‘His Cavalier’, lines 7–9, The Poetical Works of Robert Herrick,editedbyL.C.Martin (Oxford, 1956), p. 31. 12 Edmund Waller, Poems 1645 (Menston, 1971), p. 96. 13 Richard Lovelace, ‘To Lucasta, Going to the Warres’, Lucasta (London, 1649), p. 3. Copyright © The British Academy 1998 – all rights reserved 54 Thomas N. Corns some of the poems were written, and all his pre-1640 material printed in Hesperides necessarily assumes a rather changed ideological value in changed circumstances; simple poems of celebration, for example, are suffused with defiant nostalgia and a poignant sense of loss. But in the case of Waller’s poems, published while in exile, and in the case of the dead poets Suckling (d. probably 1642) and Thomas Carew (d. 1640), booksellers—most actively Thomas Walkley and the redoubtable Humphrey Moseley—saw advantages in incorporating works produced during the person- al rule into a movement, a royalist and indeed cavalier culture, displaced from manuscript and performance into print by the diaspora of the royal court. (Among the poets who concern me today, only William Davenant, with his Madagascar collection of 1637, had published a volume before 1640.) Thus, the printed collections bear a striking resemblance to each other, and increas- ingly their title-pages tie them to the royalist cause, incorporating them into the rather desperate die-hard loyalism that, at the time of their writing, would simply have been inappropriate. Thus, Moseley’s edition of Waller has a title-page alluding to his political life and, in his connections with Henry Lawes, to his place in the royal court; Moseley’s preface describes the poems ‘going abroad . and like the present condition of the Author himselfe, they are expos’d to the wide world, to travell, and try their fortunes’.14 The title-page of Walkley’s first and second editions of Carew has his by-line ‘One of the Gentlemen of the Privie-Chamber, and Sewer in Ordinary to His Majesty.’15 Moseley’s edition of 1651 styles him ‘Sewer in Ordinary to His late Majesty’ and connects him with Henry Lawes, ‘one of his late Majesties Private Musick’.16 Moseley (I presume) called his posthumous first edition of Suckling’s works Fragmenta Aurea, the golden fragments of a life broken in the cause of the king.
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