Stuart Debauchery in Restoration Satire Neal Hackler A thesis submitted to the Faculty of Graduate and Postdoctoral Studies in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the PhD degree in English Supervised by Dr. Nicholas von Maltzahn Department of English Faculty of Arts University of Ottawa © Neal Hackler, Ottawa, Canada, 2015. ii Contents Acknowledgements ............................................................................................................ iii Abstract .............................................................................................................................. iv List of Figures and Illustrations.............................................................................................v List of Abbreviations .......................................................................................................... vi Note on Poems on Affairs of State titles ............................................................................. vii Stuart Debauchery in Restoration Satire Introduction – Making a Merry Monarch...................................................................1 Chapter I – Abundance, Excess, and Eikon Basilike ..................................................8 Chapter II – Debauchery and English Constitutions ................................................. 66 Chapter III – Rochester, “Rochester,” and more Rochester .................................... 116 Chapter IV – Satirists and Secret Historians .......................................................... 185 Conclusion – From “Shepherd Charles” to Circe’s Swine...................................... 241 Bibliography ..................................................................................................................... 248 iii Acknowledgements I am grateful to the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada and the Ontario Graduate Scholarship for their generosity, and to the innumerable individuals who have provided me with academic and moral support in recent years. Most of all, I thank my supervisor, Nicholas von Maltzahn, as his patience and tireless efforts have made this study possible. iv Abstract The Restoration Era, 1660-1688, has long borne a reputation as an exceptionally debauched period of English history. That reputation is however a caricature, amplified from a handful of recognizable features. That rhetoric of debauchery originates in the Restoration’s own discourse, constructed as a language for opposing the rising French-style absolutism of the late Stuart kings, Charles II and James II. When Charles II was restored in 1660, enthusiastic panegyrists returned to the official aesthetics of his father Charles I, who had formulated power as abundance through pastoral, mythological, and utopian art. Oppositional satirists in the Restoration subverted that language of cornucopian abundance to represent Charles II and his court as instead excessive, diseased, and predatory. After the Glorious Revolution of 1688-9, Williamite satirists and secret historians continued to wield these themes against the exiled Jacobites. Gradually, the political facets of Stuart excess dulled, but the caricature of the debauched Restoration survived in eighteenth-century state poem collections and historiography. The authors most emphasized in this study are John Wilmot, Earl of Rochester, and Andrew Marvell. Works by John Milton, John Dryden, Edmund Waller, King Charles I, and Gilbert Burnet also receive sustained attention. v List of Figures and Illustrations Figure 1 A Proclamation against Debauched and Prophane Persons (1660), 2. Figure 2 Anthony van Dyck, Charles I and Henrietta Maria (ca. 1632-1634),15. Figure 3 William Marshall, frontispiece, in Robert Herrick, Hesperides (London, 1648), 34. Figure 4 Frontispiece, in Eikon Alethine (London, 1649), 56. Figure 5 Anthony van Dyck, Queen Henrietta Maria with Sir Jeffrey Hudson, 102. Figure 6 Frontispiece, in John Wilmot, Earl of Rochester, Poems (1680), Wing R1753, Huntington Library, 121. Figure 7 William Dobson, Charles II, When Prince of Wales, with a Page, 195. Figure 8 [William Dobson], Charles II, as Prince of Wales, 196. Figure 9 Frontispiece, Eikon Basilike Deutera (1694), 198. vi List of Abbreviations CELM Catalogue of English Literary Manuscripts 1450-1700, ed. Peter Beal (online). ECCO Eighteenth Century Collections Online. EEBO Early English Books Online. ESTC English Short Title Catalogue. ODNB Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (online). OED Oxford English Dictionary. POAS Early-modern editions of Poems on Affairs of State, see below. Source Index Source Index to English Clandestine Satire, 1660-1702, ed. Harold Love (online). vii Note on Poems on Affairs of State titles The multitude of Poems on Affairs of State volumes from 1689 onward boast a confusing array of very similar titles. Many of these volumes are only distinguishable from one another in the sub- or sub-sub-title, and most have different contents. I have chosen to follow a consistent logic of abbreviation rather than to provide any comprehensive list. Those entitled Poems on Affairs of State, or with close variations on that title, are abbreviated as POAS and designated with the year as announced on the frontispiece. If two distinct books appear in the same year under the POAS heading, I add a keyword from the full title, for example, POAS from K. James (1703) and POAS from Cromwell (1703). If a volume announces itself as a sequel, an Arabic numeral is added accordingly. For example, The Third Part of Poems on Affairs of State (1689) becomes POAS3 (1689). Competing state-poem series, such as State-Poems Continued from the Time of Oliver Cromwell..., or The Muses Farwel to Popery and Slavery..., are truncated accordingly to State-Poems or The Muses Farwel. The long-form title, Poems on Affairs of State, is reserved wherever possible for the modern Yale University Press edition, a series edited by George deForest Lord et al. 1 Introduction Making a Merry Monarch Cast your Capps and Cares away, this is the Beggers Holiday At the Crowning of our King, Thus we ever Dance and Sing: Be it Peace or be it Warre, Here at Liberty we are, And enjoy our Ease and Rest, to the Fields wee are not Prest, Nor are Call’d into the Towne, To be troubled with a Gowne. In the world look out and see, where’s so happy a King as he, Where the Nation live so free, And so happy as doe wee.1 The Restoration witnessed the revival of a narrative of national abundance that had informed the aesthetics of Charles II’s father’s and grandfather’s reigns, during which time Stuart power had been formulated in paradisal, idyllic, or pastoral terms. That the Restoration was met with delight and goodwill is a common historical assessment. Charles II’s return marked an end to the failed settlements and military tensions that followed Oliver Cromwell’s death, and it suggested a possible return to the stability and abundance of English courtly culture in the 1630s, remembered as “halcyon days,” and so named for the kingfisher associated in myth with a season of peace and harmony. Such watershed moments as the reopening of the theatres are often cited to contrast the two eras of Stuart England with the perceived Puritan sobriety and military seriousness of the Interregnum. But Restoration brought the challenge of self-representation to the nascent regime. To bridge the early and late Stuart reigns, myths of monarchical continuity were carefully wrought. A celebratory emphasis on the anniversary of the Restoration rather than on the standard hereditary accession date distanced Charles II’s reign from the regicide and helped 1 John Wilson, Cheerful Ayres or Ballads (London, 1660), 22-3. 2 to whitewash the mid-century collapse of monarchy.2 A clumsy propagandistic strategy could easily have proven destructive by placing the wrong emphasis on the humiliations, defeats, and exile of the House of Stuart in the 1640s and 50s. Instead the art of the 1630s provided Restoration tributes, odes, and panegyrics with more appropriate material in which dynastic continuity could be celebrated. But the distinction between festivity and debauchery is a fine one, and mostly a matter of perspective. Those Figure 1: A Proclamation against Debauched and Prophane Persons (1660). uneasy with monarchy and courtly pomp decried them using the language of excess. Scholarly and historical commentary on the goodwill of the Restoration often understates the bacchanalia of that moment in 1660. Public joy and optimism certainly greeted Charles II, but other less optimistic accounts also emphasized the disorderly celebrations for the king’s return and coronation. The immediate public responses to the Restoration were so exuberant that they provoked a royal response in one of Charles II’s first political acts as king. On 30 May 1660, Charles issued, from Whitehall, A Proclamation against Debauched and Profane 2 Lois Potter, “The Royal Martyr in the Restoration,” in The Royal Image: Representations of Charles I, ed. Thomas N. Corns (London: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 244. 3 Persons, who, on Pretense of Regard to the King, revile and threaten others,3 an attempt to temper excessive celebrations. Edmund Ludlow alleges in his memoir that the proclamation was a concession “for the satisfying of the presbiterians, for whom he [had yet?] a job to doe,” in the name of public order and morality.4 Nor was this a riotous celebration limited to a single London evening. The public’s disorderly response to the king’s return was widespread