Two Horatian Odes

Two ‘Horatian Odes’ after Marvell, using his famous, but surprisingly little used metre. Both poems are elegiac, about General Sherman after his death in old age, and Abraham Lincoln after his assassination. This tends to remove the inner tremor of Marvell’s poem, drawn as it is between rejoicing and misgiving at the living and very active Cromwell’s fearsome potential.

The poem by Louise Guiney is, I think, superior. The Stoddard poem is too long, isn’t quite able to overcome its own snobbery, and veers into a deplorable racism. But then maybe Stoddard, uneasy with Abraham Lincoln’s untutored genius, has more of the Marvellian weighing up.

But the interesting thing is that these are two poems in the critical heritage of Marvell, Marvell as the republican who can, like Horace before him, recognise Augustan greatness and allow it scope. Guiney seems deliberately to re-work Marvell’s opening in hers – that pleasingly quirky ‘early-armoured citizen’ is the ‘forward youth’ who rises to the moment, taking the corselet off the wall, ready for the struggle ahead. Guiney liked Sherman’s refusal of high office, and in the stanza beginning ‘Would have nor seat nor bays, nor bring / The Caesar in him to be king’ she is also thinking about Cromwell. In the quatrain from line 17, ‘In whom the Commonwealth withstood / Again the Carolinian blood’, we hover between Sherman’s campaign through Carolina, and the English Civil War.

Marvell perhaps also supplies a model for a certain slipperiness. Sherman’s recourse to, or indeed, invention of total war as he marched his armies through the south turns into the grand, carefully bland praise of ‘To conquer like a friend’, which reminds me of Marvell’s Irish implausibly affirming Cromwell’s praises best.

Guiney subscribes to the Roman model for her hero (‘A simple Roman excellence’), Stoddard has such big ideas (one suspects) about the Romans that Lincoln (‘Common his mind’) doesn’t match up (‘No hero this of Roman mould’). Stoddard’s seems to me a more Victorian poem. It moralises with an explicit reference to the Christian God ‘(God lets bad instruments / Produce the best events)’, which Marvell’s poem avoided doing in such a studied fashion. And this happens at a point where Stoddard has to correct violently after the reflections on John Wilkes Booth (‘Tyrants have fallen by such as thou’) seem to be pulling him far away from his proper theme, as his evident difficulties accepting a hero who was ‘One of the people’ surface and bring him to side for a moment with the assassin. ‘Victorian’ too is the way Stoddard poeticizes that most American of machines for Lincoln’s funeral procession, a wood-burning railway engine, into ‘the awful car!’

Guiney is more enthusiastically republican. She does go in for some of that American obsession with flags, but the sentimental note of the battle flags fading over the tomb worked well in its way.

What I cannot imagine, is Browning or Tennyson producing poems that engage as intelligently with the Marvellian mode. For this, one has to blame Queen Victoria (her existence, and England with its a compromised democracy).


Louise Imogen Guiney, ‘Sherman: An Horatian Ode’

This was the truest man of men,
The early-armored citizen,
Who had, with most of sight,
Most passion for the right;

Who first forecasting treason's scope
Able to sap the Founders' hope,
First to the laic arm
Cried ultimate alarm;

Who bent upon his guns the while
A misconceived and aching smile,
And felt, thro' havoc's part,
A torment of the heart,

Sure, when he cut the moated South
From Shiloh to Savannah's mouth,
Braved grandly to the end,
To conquer like a friend;

In whom the Commonwealth withstood
Again the Carolinian blood,
The beautiful proud line
Beneath an evil sign,

And taught his foes and doubters still
How fatal is a good man's will,
That like a sun or sod
Thinks not itself, but God!

Many the captains of our wrath
Sought thus the pious civic path,
Knowing in what a land
Their destiny was planned,

And after, with a forward sense,
A simple Roman excellence,
Pledge in their spirit bore
That war should be no more.

Thrice Roman he, who saw the shock
(Calm as a weather-wrinkled rock,)
Roll in the Georgian fen;
And steadfast aye as then

In plenitude of old control
That asked, secure of his own soul,
No pardon and no aid,
If clear his way were made,

Would have nor seat nor bays, nor bring
The Cæsar in him to be king,
But with abstracted ear
Rode pleased without a cheer.

Now he declines from peace and age,
And home, his triple heritage,
The last and dearest head
Of all our perfect dead,

O what if sorrow cannot reach
Far in the shallow fords of speech,
But leads us silent round
The sad Missouri ground,

Where on her hero Freedom lays
The scroll and blazon of her praise,
And bids to him belong
Arms trailing, and a song,

And broken flags with ruined dyes
(Bright once in young and dying eyes),
Against the morn to shake
For love's familiar sake?

The blessèd broken flags unfurled
Above a healed and happier world!
There let them droop, and be
His tent of victory;

There, in each year's auguster light,
Lean in, and loose their red and white,
Like apple-blossoms strewn
Upon his burial-stone.

For nothing more, the ages thro',
Can nature or the nation do
For him who helped retrieve
Our life, as we believe,

Save that we also, trooping by
In sound yet of his battle-cry,
Safeguard with general mind
Our pact as brothers kind,

And, ever nearer to our star,
Adore indeed not what we are,
But wise reprovings hold
Thankworthier than gold;

And bear in faith and rapture such
As can eternal issues touch,
Whole from the final field,
Our father Sherman's shield.


Richard Henry Stoddard,
‘ABRAHAM LINCOLN.
A HORATIAN ODE’


Not as when some great Captain falls
In battle, where his Country calls,
Beyond the struggling lines
That push his dread designs

To doom, by some stray ball struck dead:
Or, in the last charge, at the head
Of his determined men,
Who must be victors then.

Nor as when sink the civic great,
The safer pillars of the State,
Whose calm, mature, wise words
Suppress the need of swords.

With no such tears as e'er were shed
Above the noblest of our dead
Do we to-day deplore
The Man that is no more.

Our sorrow hath a wider scope,
Too strange for fear, too vast for hope,
A wonder, blind and dumb,
That waits---what is to come!

Not more astounded had we been
If Madness, that dark night, unseen,
Had in our chambers crept,
And murdered while we slept!

We woke to find a mourning earth,
Our Lares shivered on the hearth,
The roof-tree fallen, all
That could affright, appall!

Such thunderbolts, in other lands,
Have smitten the rod from royal hands,
But spared, with us, till now,
Each laurelled Cæsar's brow.

No Cæsar he whom we lament,
A Man without a precedent,
Sent, it would seem, to do
His work, and perish, too.

Not by the weary cares of State,
The endless tasks, which will not wait,
Which, often done in vain,
Must yet be done again:

Not in the dark, wild tide of war,
Which rose so high, and rolled so far,
Sweeping from sea to sea
In awful anarchy:

Four fateful years of mortal strife,
Which slowly drained the nation's life,
(Yet for each drop that ran
There sprang an armèd man!)

Not then; but when, by measures meet,
By victory, and by defeat,
By courage, patience, skill,
The people's fixed " We will !"

Had pierced, had crushed Rebellion dead,
Without a hand, without a head,
At last, when all was well,
He fell, O how he fell!

The time, the place, the stealing shape,
The coward shot, the swift escape,
The wife, the widow's scream---
It is a hideous Dream!

A dream? What means this pageant, then?
These multitudes of solemn men,
Who speak not when they meet,
But throng the silent street?

The flags half-mast that late so high
Flaunted at each new victory?
(The stars no brightness shed,
But bloody looks the red!)

The black festoons that stretch for miles,
And turn the streets to funeral aisles?
(No house too poor to show
The nation's badge of woe.)

The cannon's sudden, sullen boom,
The bells that toll of death and doom,
The rolling of the drums,
The dreadful car that comes?

Cursed be the hand that fired the shot,
The frenzied brain that hatched the plot,
Thy country's Father slain
Be thee, thou worse than Cain!

Tyrants have fallen by such as thou,
And good hath followed---may it now!
(God lets bad instruments
Produce the best events.)

But he, the man we mourn to-day,
No tyrant was: so mild a sway
In one such weight who bore
Was never known before.

Cool should he be, of balanced powers,
The ruler of a race like ours,
Impatient, headstrong, wild,
The Man to guide the Child.

And this he was, who most unfit
(So hard the sense of God to hit,)
Did seem to fill his place.
With such a homely face,

Such rustic manners, speech uncouth,
(That somehow blundered out the truth,)
Untried, untrained to bear
The more than kingly care.

Ay! And his genius put to scorn
The proudest in the purple born,
Whose wisdom never grew
To what, untaught, he knew,

The People, of whom he was one.
No gentleman, like Washington,
(Whose bones, methinks, make room,
To have him in their tomb!)

A laboring man, with horny hands,
Who swung the axe, who tilled his lands,
Who shrank from nothing new,
But did as poor men do.

One of the People! Born to be
Their curious epitome;
To share yet rise above
Their shifting hate and love.

Common his mind, (it seemed so then,)
His thoughts the thoughts of other men:
Plain were his words, and poor,
But now they will endure!

No hasty fool, of stubborn will,
But prudent, cautious, pliant still;
Who since his work was good
Would do it as he could.

Doubting, was not ashamed to doubt,
And, lacking prescience, went without:
Often appeared to halt,
And was, of course, at fault;

Heard all opinions, nothing loath,
And, loving both sides, angered both:
Was--- not like Justice, blind,
But, watchful, clement, kind.

No hero this of Roman mould,
Nor like our stately sires of old:
Perhaps he was not great,
But he preserved the State!

O honest face, which all men knew!
O tender heart, but known to few!
O wonder of the age,
Cut off by tragic rage!

Peace! Let the long procession come,
For hark, the mournful, muffled drum,
The trumpet's wail afar,
And see, the awful car!

Peace! Let the sad procession go,
While cannon boom and bells toll slow.
And go, thou sacred car,
Bearing our woe afar!

Go, darkly borne, from State to State,
Whose loyal, sorrowing cities wait
To honor all they can
The dust of that good man.

Go, grandly borne, with such a train
As greatest kings might die to gain.
The just, the wise, the brave,
Attend thee to the grave.

And you, the soldiers of our wars,
Bronzed veterans, grim with noble scars,
Salute him once again,
Your late commander---slain!

Yes, let your tears indignant fall,
But leave your muskets on the wall;
Your country needs you now
Beside the forge---the plough.

(When Justice shall unsheathe her brand,
If Mercy may not stay her hand,
Nor would we have it so,
She must direct the blow.)

And you, amid the master-race,
Who seem so strangely out of place,
Know ye who cometh? He
Who hath declared ye free.

Bow while the body passes---nay,
Fall on your knees, and weep, and pray!
Weep, weep---I would ye might---
Your poor black faces white!

And, children, you must come in bands,
With garlands in your little hands,
Of blue and white and red,
To strew before the dead.

So sweetly, sadly, sternly goes
The Fallen to his last repose.
Beneath no mighty dome,
But in his modest home;

The churchyard where his children rest,
The quiet spot that suits him best,
There shall his grave be made,
And there his bones be laid.

And there his countrymen shall come,
With memory proud, with pity dumb,
And strangers far and near,
For many and many a year.

For many a year and many an age,
While History on her ample page
The virtues shall enroll
On that Paternal Soul.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Louise_Imogen_Guiney
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Tecumseh_Sherman


http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Henry_Stoddard
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abraham_Lincoln

"We took particular Notice of one of those She-Astrologers": 17th century Venice

I have posted before about a woman astrologer’s advert in mid 17^th century London (both the adverts reproduced in this post have George Thomason’s hostile annotations about their being circulated by ‘one of Lilly’s whelps):

http://roy25booth.blogspot.com/2009/04/two-adverts-1651-and-1653.html

In late 17^th century Venice, women astrologers were part of the fun of carnival. I found the following story in Jean Dumont’s A new voyage to the Levant containing an account of the most remarkable curiosities in Germany, France, Italy, Malta, and Turkey; … done into English, and adorn’d with figures (1696). I have added paragraphs and modernized the spelling. During these public (and largely jocular) consultations, a ‘trunk’ – a tube – was used for more discreet communication between the woman astrologer mounted on her stage and the particular client below. In the story, the German officer asks for the tube to be reversed, so it must be a kind of elongated speaking trumpet. He then propositions her…

“During the Fair, the whole Place of S. Mark, and part of the Broglio, is covered with Shops: The other part is full of Jugglers, Tumblers, Puppet-Players, Bears, and Mountebanks, who are dancing frequented by all sorts of People, from the Nobleman to the Gondolier.

But the greatest Crowd is about certain Female-Astrologers, who are mounted on little Stages or Scaffolds, covered with Lace and Ribbons like Puppets; their Faces painted white and red, and surrounded with a great Number of Books, full of Figures and Characters, tho' they understand no more of 'em than to distinguish the White from the Black. There are also some Men who follow the same Trade; but they are not so much followed as the Women, whose triple Top-knots draw the Multitude after 'em. They sit upon a Chair, from whence, as from a Tripos, they blow good Fortune to their Customers thro' a Tin Trunk eight or ten Foot long, the Querist putting the other End to his Ear. The Price of a Consultation is no more than Five-pence; and for so small a Sum you may have the Promise of as much Honour and Riches as you please.

These Wenches, who sometimes are not ugly, observe an admirable Gravity in pronouncing their Responses; but they are not so starch’d in private, and may be easily prevailed with to lay aside their affected Severity. One of my Friends, who is a German Officer, happened t’other Day to try the Experiment; and since the Story is not unpleasant, I shall make bold to entertain you with it. As we were taking our Diversion in the Fair, we took particular Notice of one of those She-Astrologers, who was one of the prettiest and gravest of the whole Tribe. She was surrounded with a Crowd of People of all Ages and Ranks, who approached one after another to the End of her Trunk to learn their Fate, and to hear the Oraculous Sentences which she pronounced with an incredible Majesty and Authority. My Friend took his Turn among the rest, and after she had acquainted him with his Fortune, told her that he was desirous to consult her about some private Affair, and therefore entreated her to turn the other End of the Trunk, that he might communicate his Secret to her without disclosing it to the Company. But instead of proposing some Questions to her about his Fortune, he told her thro' her Trunk, that he came not to desire the Assistance of her pretended Art, which served only to amuse the Vulgar; that 'twas in her Power to grant him a more solid Favour; and that his Business was to enquire where and when he might spend a Night with her.

As soon as she had heard his Proposal, she turned the Trunk and replied, that he ought not to be surprised at her way of Living, by imposing upon the Credulity of the People, since the only Occupation of the greatest part of Mankind consisted in cheating one another, every one in his own Way, and according to the Nature of his Employment; and that for her part she thought five or six Crowns a day but a moderate Recompense for the Pains she took in deceiving those that were willing to be deceived; adding however that she was glad she had found a Man of Sense, that knew the Infirmities of Humane Nature, and would laugh with her at the Follies of Mankind, and concluded with giving him an Assignation at an Inn, where she promised to meet him that Evening. Her agreeable Humour furnished us with Matter of Discourse for above an Hour; but this was the End of the Adventure, for the Officer did not think fit to drive the Jest further.”

That’s a poor ending to the story: she ought to have been given the chance to swindle him in private. But he doesn’t even go as far as to ‘make an excuse and leave’, the craven. The image is a Venetian painting (for I have failed to find an image of the women astrologers, though I am sure there must be one), Antonio Zanchi’s ‘Abraham teaching astrology to the Egyptians’, out of Josephus, a painting of c.1665, says WGA.

John Chapman’s New Year’s Gift: documenting the Westerham landslip, 1596.

Google Earth image contributed by Malcolm Page,
see comment from him below the post

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John Chapman presented his pamphlet A most true report of the myraculous moving and sinking of a plot of ground, about nine acres, at Westram in Kent, which began the 18. of December, and so continued till the 29. of the same moneth to Margaret, Baroness Dacre as a New Year’s gift early in 1596 (she was the sister of the Gregory Fiennes, Baron Dacre, who had been executed for murder in 1594).

It’s an interesting pamphlet, carefully written and unsensationalised, about a creeping landslip near Crockham Hill, in Kent. 27 male witnesses verify the account – the local JP, the vicar, a physician, 12 gentlemen and 12 yeomen. As far as I can pick up from local village websites, there does not seem to be any current local knowledge of this historical happening in their pretty landscape.

Chapman supplies everything we need to understand what happened, geomorphologically. We are in 1596, and Shakespeareans all remember how at that time

the winds, piping to us in vain,
As in revenge, have suck'd up from the sea
Contagious fogs; which, falling in the land,
Hath every pelting river made so proud
That they have overborne their continents.
The ox hath therefore stretch'd his yoke in vain,
The ploughman lost his sweat, and the green corn
Hath rotted ere his youth attain'd a beard;
The fold stands empty in the drowned field,
And crows are fatted with the murrion flock;
The nine men's morris is fill'd up with mud,
And the quaint mazes in the wanton green,
For lack of tread, are undistinguishable.

Chapman confirms this at local level, writing finally of how by “the great aboundance of water, and continuall rayne which have fallen so many months together of late, sundry great bowrnes (bournes), and violent streames have broken out in many places of this land, and at the least seaven such within xii miles of this place every way, the least whereof is able to drive a corne Mill”.

That’s a lot of ground water. England was saturated, and if you look at this map, my best guess as to where the landslip occurred, you can see (switch to the OS map) the spring line beneath the higher ground to the north.

http://www.multimap.com/s/PE4ZqMSR

Chapman makes, for his own reasons, which I will come to, a big point about how the rain water did not increase the flow of two ‘gozelles’ in the area that slipped (for ‘gozelle’, the OED cites 1695 KENNETT …a gutter is in Lincolnshire a Gool, in Kent a Guzzle, in Wiltshire a Gushill, and Gooshill”). I imagine some feature of the local geology saturated the top soils, which maybe traveled on a slippery clay layer below. As far as I can judge by my geological map, Crockham Hill seems to be precisely at the northern boundary of the Weald Clay, which is succeeded by the overlying Lower Greensand. I think that would be the impermeable layer which prompts the spring line upslope.

This Wikipedia page has a nice animated gif of a similar slump landslide over several days:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Landslide . Though that’s on a far steeper slope, with no saturation. As Chapman writes, vividly, the two ‘closes’ or fields that slipped and merged into one further downslope “were Adant (sic? Not in OED), and upon the shoot (= rising?) of an hill, but not so much that a bowle being cast up against the hill might easily have layen and settled without tumbling backe againe perforce”. The ground was not steep enough for a sudden slide, but just gave way in a gradual slumping.

On the 18^th of December, the whole area (nine acres!) started to move, leaving a scar at the point of detachment of six and a half feet. On the 19^th December, there was thirteen feet more of slippage, then eighty feet on the 20^th. People stood on it, experiencing how it managed “to move, slide, and shoote southward, not with any suddaine shot, but creeping by little, and little, so as the motion and stirring thereof was not discerned nor perceived, by them that were presently standing upon it, but onlie by the sundrie effects that followed, as the cracking of the roots of trees, the brushing of boughs, the noise of the hedge-wood breaking, the gaping of the ground, and the riving of the earth asunder”.

The slide was measured at one stage as fourteen “handfulls by measure in one houre and a halfe” – 56 inches, nearly 6 feet. After eleven days of movement, Chapman outdoes the Beatles’ count of ‘10,000 holes in Blackburn Lancashire’ with a conscientious tally of “eleven thousand furrows, riffes, cracks, and clefts in diverse places here and there”. The nine acres of ground had moved by eight perches or more (a perch is that useful old English measure, of sixteen and a half feet, or coincidentally close to five metres). He describes the way the upslope material ended up on top of the lower lying ground: “the hinder ground coming faster forward … then the former ground did give way unto it, caused it to swell uppe in rounde hillocks like unto graves, the green turf remaining still whole and unbroken above”. In other places, the higher material had gone like a broken wave over the lower.

Everything went with the topsoil layers: a hedge that ran across the slip was displaced southward by seven perches, its trees either still upright and apparently growing, or overthrown. There had been “two standing water pools” in the upper of the two fields. These also moved “four perches south, with their tuftes of Alders still standing upon them, but withal, they are mounted up aloft, and become hilles, standing yet to be seen with their sedge, flags, and black mudde upon the toppe of them still”. In their place, dramatically, a “great hole made by sinking of the earth, to the depth of 30 feet” opened further down the slide.

This gentle slumping after a very rainy year hardly seems unaccountable. But what is interesting (from the early modern mindset side of things) is the way that Chapman sets out to interpret all this: as he saw no increase in the runoff through the ‘gozelles’ (the flow in each could be accommodated by an auger hole of one and a half inches, he says, and it didn’t rise at all during all the deluge), the landslip, he firmly decides, “cannot be imputed to the aboundance of water enforcing it as the cause thereof”.

The great Crockham Hill landslip is in fact for him a tremendous act of God, through which the deity gives ‘unto our eies a sencible testimony of his most certaine being”. We do not have to travel far, Chapman says, to have stirred up in ourselves “a strong and fruitfull impression of the great deitie”. Fifteen miles south of London will do.

This local and rather quietly impressive event is a manifestation of the God who “hurleth downe hilles … and exalteth the lowe vallies”. “Every valley shall be exalted, and every mountain and hill shall be made low” said Isaiah, and here it is locally, as Chapman triumphantly, and piously, concludes his description: “By means of all which confusion, it is come to passe, that where the highest hilles were heretofore, there the deepest dales be now. And where the lowest dales were then, now the ground lyeth mounted heist”.

As the creeping earth was moving so slowly, people had plenty of time to get aboard for the ride. Chapman says that 4,000 people have visited the site, from London and elsewhere: “to whom it hath seemed to be a very strange and fearefull sight, giving occasion unto some of them, to thinke upon that great opening of the earth that shalbe in the latter day when she shall yeelde up her dead, that be in her to come to the resurrection”. He makes their experience one of supernatural, not natural, wonder.

So it was, in Chapman’s eyes, as though the visitors were on a slow ride in a divine theme park. He remarked at the start of his pamphlet that God by his “wonderfull and unsearchable providence … doth from time to time … alter and change” the world He created. Here was the local instance, though it is rather evident that Chapman would have liked it rather better if God could have contrived to swallow up a few atheists, those who ‘in their own hearts … saye plainely … that there is no God at all’. He has an excellent Bible example in mind. Chapman says “this damnable impiety deserves to be punished”: either with the fires that fell on Sodom, “or the sudden gaping of the ground that swallowed up Corah.”

He refers to Korah, in Numbers 16, who complained to Moses about having left behind one land flowing with milk and honey, and not having arrived in the promised land: Moses refutes these objections to his handling of the wilderness years, remarking to the Israelites: “But if the LORD make a new thing, and the earth open her mouth, and swallow them up, with all that appertain unto them, and they go down quick into the pit; then ye shall understand that these men have provoked the LORD. And it came to pass, as he had made an end of speaking all these words, that the ground clave asunder that was under them: And the earth opened her mouth, and swallowed them up, and their houses, and all the men that appertained unto Korah, and all their goods. They, and all that appertained to them, went down alive into the pit, and the earth closed upon them: and they perished from among the congregation.”

Chapman emerges well from the pamphlet. I think he has to be the ‘yeoman’ of the same name listed among the witnesses. He is a credit to local education: meticulous, observant, and capable of writing very vividly. But this bit of local slope instability cannot for him be accounted for by secondary causes: the primary cause is the important one. God is reshaping his world. Or rather, bible texts fill out Chapman’s response to what he witnessed: it’s Isaiah, The Book of Numbers, and what the earth will look like when the dead awaken. His religious beliefs give meaning to what he saw.

(St) Philip Howard takes upon him a quarrel

I came across this thrasonical document on EEBO, where it is attributed to St Philip Howard, Earl of Arundel. It is a challenge at tilt, issued in print, and in the spirit of Elizabethan neo-medieval chivalry of which Sidney and Essex were exponents – the opening flourish here could be in the Arcadia:

“Callophisus, being brought by the greatest perfection in another to the smallest liberty in himself, having the foundation of his choice so firm as it cannot decay, and finding the place of his imprisonment so strong as he cannot escape: will be at the Tilts end upon the two and twenty day of January next ensuing, at one of the Clock in the afternoon, there to defend and maintain against all men whosoever, for six courses a piece, the whole six, or any of the six Articles which follow, whereunto he challengeth all, that either Honour any Lady, whom they may brag of for any worth: or serve a Mistress, which hath reason to boast of her self for any beauty, by these first three Articles.

1 The first, that his Mistress is for Beauty of her face, and the Grace of her person, the most perfect creature, that ever either the eye of man hath beheld, the Arte of Nature hath framed, or the compass of the earth hath enjoyed.

2 The second, that it is as impossible for any other whosoever, to abide the beams of his Mistress’ look, as for the Clouds to endure the shining and appearing of the Sun, and that the one doth not sooner vanish at the showing of the Sun, then the other will suddenly fade at the presence of his Mistress,

3 The third, that the perfections of his Mistress, are in number so infinite, in quality so excellent, and in operation so effectual, as she by the help of them, and they by the direction of her, do make more men without liberty, and more bodies without hearts, then any, or all the women in the world besides.

And because Callophisus doubteth that the taking upon him a quarrel which is so just on his side, will make that he shall have none to defend the contrary against him, and that the worthiness of his mistress will steal away the Servants of other Ladies, he will with one only assistant, challenge all that either have opinion in the constancy of their love, or assurance in the greatness of their affection, by these other three Articles.

4 The first, that Callophisus for his faith will yield to none, and for his loyalty doth think himself above all, and in these two respects pronounceth himself most worthy to be accepted into favor with his Mistress· or to receive grace at the hands of the fairest.

5 The second, that the good will and affection of Callophisus to his Mistress, is for impression so deep, for continuance so lasting, and for passion so extreme, as it is impossible for any other to carry so perfect love, or to conceive the like affection.

6 The third, that those adventures and hazards, which cannot but be most sour, to any other for the pleasing of any Lady (whom they Honour) are most sweet unto him, for the contentment of the Mistress whom he serveth.

And if they neither will contend with him for the superiority of his Mistress in worthiness, nor for the prerogative of himself in affection, having not their judgement veiled with so partial an humor as may lead them to resist of manifest and open truth, and doubting a bad success in a wrong opinion, because Veritas vincet omnia, then will he, & his said assistant, with all such, run six courses, to join with them in honouring of his Mistress, which hath no equal, and expressing of his affection which cannot be matched.

Whereas this challenge of Jousts, was signified by way of device before her Majesty, on Twelfth night last past, to have been performed the fifteenth day of January, her Majesty’s pleasure is for divers considerations, that it be deferred until the two and twenty of the same month, and then to be held at Westminster, the accustomed place.

Proclaimed by the sound of Trumpet, and a Herald.”

The final paragraph betrays a moment where reality intrudes upon this fantasy. Howard, swarthy of skin, and long of face and body, had the money to sustain his role as ‘Callophisus’ (I guess that the romance name is meant to suggest ‘beautiful face’), but didn’t have, in the all-important opinion of the Queen, the looks to hold her attention. He seems to have spent enormous sums of money on these efforts to draw favour to himself (in an account cited in the ODNB, he “Wasted a great part of that Estate which was left him, by profused expences of great Summs of money in diverse Tiltings & Tourneys made upon the anniversary dayes of the Queen's Coronation to please her, and at the entertainment of Certain great Embassadors, and also by the entertaining of the Queen her self”). But it seems that on 12^th Night 1581, the Queen could not face sitting through another set of jousts by the lanky Earl, and put him back a week. I assume that she would have been the royal ‘Mistress’ whose virtue and beauty are so extravagantly touted in the challenge.

If this big event ever came to anything (for the printed announcement seems to come down to Howard actually expecting no challenger, and that he anticipates going through the motions with his ‘assistant’), it cannot have gratified his hopes, for 1581 was the year when Howard flung away from the court in pique at his neglect, and found that Arundel Castle was seething with the Jesuits and priests harbored there by the wife he had been ignoring for ten years. Disaffected, Howard was an easy mark. At last he had someone prepared to give him the attention he had sought. He wavered in faith straight away, and was converted by 1584. In 1585 he tried to flee abroad, but like his other enterprises, this was ineptly carried out: he was captured, and spent the rest of his life in the Tower of London.

His sainthood (1970) seems largely to have been founded on the still surviving inscription he carved on the walls of his cell: “quanto plus afflictionis pro Christo in hoc saeculo, tanto plus gloriae cum Christo in futuro’ (‘the more affliction we endure for Christ in this world, the more glory we shall obtain with Christ in the next’, the ODNB author translates it, though wouldn’t ‘in this age’ seem more accurate for ‘in hoc saeculo’?)

http://www.flickr.com/photos/60861613@N00/3501418915/

He was also alleged to have died of poison, and so he had been a kind of martyr. But it does seem to me that he was potentially worth more to the Queen alive. She didn’t like him, the Howards were far too wealthy, and he’d turned Catholic: but I’d have thought the Queen rather hoped for a big payout when he had finally had enough of the Tower. He, though, was offended enough, obstinate enough (or sincere enough) to hold out. As for the Queen, she did promise to restore him to all his honours if he attended Church of England services, but just maybe with the thought that his freedom would involve her in having to pay polite attention to all that jousting all over again.

After his unlikely canonization, Howard’s remains were installed in a shrine in the Catholic Cathedral at Arundel, where he is visited by Catholic bloggers who otherwise busily seek out the 39 martyrs, their relics, and Tridentine masses.

But what a surprising document his announcement that he will be on display jousting at the tilt-yard is! The spirit of medieval romance, but put into print - no doubt circulation was confined to court circles, but wasn’t it still classier to send your herald round with a trumpet and a vellum scroll? In print, Howard seems more nakedly self-advertising, to be desperately promoting an entertainment already bumped down the royal schedule. It survives in the Folger Shakespeare Library, I do not know with what provenance. An early hand has practiced penmanship on it, the reverse has a superscription “O Lorde save my soule, for I doe put my truste in thee”. I suppose this might even be the Earl himself, for that was the reverse side of the posturing Callophisus, searching for an ideal to defend, a service in which to be the unchallenged paladin.

A riotous Christmas at Canterbury, 1647

The anonymous pamphlet titled The declaration of many thousands of the city of Canterbury, or county of Kent. Concerning the late tumult in the city of Canterbury

(1647) tells a sad tale of oppression by the puritan mayor, whose miserable opposition to Christmas celebrations leads him to ban as ‘superstitious’ even a Christmas day sermon the good people of his town gathered to hear. These modestly festive folk were then attacked by his men.

As you read the account in the brief pamphlet, hints of the real circumstances appear amid the general ‘what is the world coming to?’ note of pious indignation:

“The cause of this so sudden a posture of defence (sic) which we have put ourselves into, was the violent proceedings of the Mayor of this City of Canterbury and his uncivill carriage in pursuance of some petty order of the House of Commons for hindring the celebration of Christs Nativity so long continued in the Church of God. That which we so much desired that day was but a Sermon, which any other day of the week was tolerable by the orders & practice of the two Houses and all their adherents, but that day (because it was Christs birth day) we must have none; that which is good all the year long, yet is this day superstitious. The Mayor causing some of us to be beaten contrary to his oath and office, who ought to preserve the peace, and to that purpose chiefly is the sword of justice put into his hands, and wrongfully imprisoned divers of us, because we did assemble our selves to hear the word of God, which he was pleased to interpret a Ryot, yet we were unarmed, behaved ourselves civilly, intending no such tumult as afterwards we were forc’d into: but at last seeing the manifest wrong done to our children, servants, and neighbours, by beating, wounding, and imprisoning them, we were moved to vindicate the wrong done them, and to release them that were imprisoned, and did call unto our assistance our brethren of the County of Kent, who very readily came in to us, and have associated themselves to us in this our just and lawfull defence, and do concurre with us in this our Remonstrance concerning the Kings majestie, and the settlement of Peace in this Kingdome.”

Dress it up as he may, the writer cannot quite conceal that a demonstration, a pointed political act, had been intended. Could those ‘brethren’ of the County of Kent have assembled quite so quickly when called to come to the assistance of the royalist townsfolk? Who exactly was to give this edifying sermon all had come to hear? - the writer rather suspiciously does not say. When the mayor sent whatever forces he had against the assembled people, we are told that they provoked the riot by beating just the children, servants, and neighbours of these civilly behaved citizens, who were of course “intending no such tumult as afterwards we were forc’d into” (‘forc’d’ is nicely judged here). These same citizens had by January 5^th published in London a direct repudiation of the commonwealth, demand for the King’s release from Carisbrooke, and general diatribe against the injustices of the supposedly ‘reformed’ Commonwealth.

Perhaps the mayor did panic and overreact: that so commonly happens in such circumstances. But it seems quite likely he had a good understanding of what was going to happen if the Christmas day sermon had gone ahead, and it might even have been worse. What a way to spend your Christmas!

The declaration of many thousands of the city of Canterbury, or county of Kent. Concerning the late tumult in the city of Canterbury, provokt by the Mayors violent proceedings against those who desired to continue the celebration of the Feast of Christs Nativity, 1500 yeers and upwards maintained in the Church. Together with their resolutions for the restitution of His Majestie to his Crown and dignity, whereby religion may be restored to its ancient splendour, and the known laws of this Kingdom maintained. As also, their desires to all His Majesties loyall subjects within his Dominions, for their concurrence and assistance in this so good and pious work 1647

My image is a map of Canterbury from William Somner’s The most accurate history of the ancient city, and famous cathedral of Canterbury 1641. Object ‘S’, just outside the gate into the cathedral close, is the stake for bear-baiting.

That animals can't look upwards: George Hakewill, 1608

George Hakewill’s THE VANITIE OF THE EYE, First beganne for the Comfort of a Gentlewoman bereaved of her sight, and since upon occasion enlarged & published for the Common good (1608; 1615) does what it says on the title page (at least for those able to read it), opening out the “disputable question whither we should more regard the benefit of nature in the one (i.e., seeing things we need to see ), or the hazard of grace and virtue in the other” (i.e., being able to see things we ought not to see).

Hakewill set out to write a brief consolatory exposition, but found that the “particular vices, which flow from the eye” offered him the chance of a far more widely edifying discourse than he had at first envisaged, and he went into print with the expanded version.

As you’d expect from a man appointed chaplain to Prince Charles “with special orders from the king never to leave the prince and to protect him from any influence of Roman Catholicism” (ODNB), of the vices which stem from the vanity of the eye “among the chiefest … is Idolatry, which as it had his original from the eye, so is it still nourished by the same”.

The first idolatrous act was original sin: “we find the first outward occasion of it to have been the fairness of the apple apprehended by the woman’s eye, & the punishment first inflicted on it to have been the opening of the eyes, whether of the mind or the body I dispute not.”

When I next have my Longman Annotated Andrew Marvell to hand, I will check if Nigel Smith (that busy annotator!) connected this book to Marvell’s ‘Eyes and Tears’, for Hakewill continues:

“Whence it may be in the Hebrew the same word signifieth as well an eye as a fountain; to show that from it as from a spring or fountain did flow both sin itself, the cause of sin, and misery the punishment of both; and because by the eye came the greatest hurt, therefore God hath placed in it the greatest tokens of sorrow. For from it comes tears, by which the expressing of sorrow is peculiar to man alone.”

(“How wisely Nature did decree,
With the same Eyes to weep and see!
That, having view'd the object vain,
They might be ready to complain.”)

The final idolatry is, predictably, that of the Catholic faith, to which Hakewill gives a chapter headed: “That the popish religion consists more in eye service then the reformed” - “Our adversaries indeed, place a great and main part of their superstitious worship in the eye-service; in the magnifike & pompous fabric, and furniture of their Churches and attiring their Priests…”

But fortunately, once Hakewill has got the moral issues sorted out (with this splendid bit of Solomon’s wisdom aptly cited “Thine eyes shall look upon strange women, & thine heart shall speak lewd things”), and adroitly passing by those awkward New Testament moments when Christ takes the trouble to cure the blind, he can digress into a rather entertaining fund of stories. We get the tale of the rat-catcher of ‘Hammel’, drawn in as an instance of the devil’s power to deceive the eye “(I confess I urge it not so much for the fitness, as the strangeness of the story)”. From his secular reading we get Mark Antony exploiting the power of sight by displaying the dead Caesar’s blood-stained garments to the Roman mob, followed shortly afterwards by the story of Humphrey, Duke of Gloucester getting the beggar who had falsely proclaimed a miracle at the shrine of St Albans to betray himself by correctly nominating the colours of men’s gowns. It’s a fuller account than in Henry VI Part 2, but the proximity to Mark Anthony perhaps hints that our Oxford fellow knew his Shakespeare, and, in thinking of stories about the dangerous power of sight, and about blindness, recalled these two anecdotes. But it could be a coincidence, for, officially at least, Hakewill disapproves of theatre: “Hither also may be referred, the lewd masking, which the Papists use in their Carnivals, or rather Bacchanals, at Shrovetide; the women marching through the open streets, in man’s apparel, and the men in women’s; as also the Jesuits exhibiting of heaven and hell, God & the divell, the damned, and the elect, upon their stages”. This said, he seems to know rather a lot about it, for instance the “lascivious gross action, which is ever represented, in the French Comedies and dances, and sometimes in our common Mercenary interludes here at home, whereat the greatest part, would surely otherwise rather blush, then laugh; but that they hold that place in a manner privileged…” In a definite literary allusion, he refers to Sir Thomas More’s apologue about pride in the story of how the “Anemolian Ambassadors … thinking to dazzle the eyes of the poor Utopians, with the lustre, and glistering of their chains, & precious stones” (discovered that) “the children playing in the streets, took them for great boys, which had not yet laid aside their brooches, & baubles.”

Hakewill digresses most on the way the eye is deceived. It’s a strange mixture of stories. He mentions many diabolic deceits, as practiced by conjurers like Agrippa and Faustus, a recently reported story of a possessed girl at Frankfort who was apparently able to stretch out an empty hand and pluck real money out of thin air (a simple conjuring trick, one would think), “an old woman in the Dukes of Meckelburges country, who appearing in the shape of a great Mastiff dog the hounds espying her, ran with full mouth upon her, & the country hinds with prongs, and pike staves, fell about her, till at length she being sore wounded, the shape of the Mastiff vanished, and nothing was left to the flake (sic – a hurdle on which to drag a criminal to execution?), but a poor silly old woman, begging mercy & pardon”. But Hakewill also describes common optical illusions and the camera obscura, which he tells you how to make: “The practise is thus; take a study, or closet, where (by closing the wooden leaves) you may shut out all the light: then bore an hole, through the midst of one of the leaves to the bigness of a pease, and cover it with a piece of spectacle glass, and when the sun shines on the ground before the window, hold on the inside right before the hole (to the distance of two foot or thereabout) a sheet of white paper or a large piece of faire linen; and you shall perfectly discern by the shadows; the shapes, and motions of men, and dogs, and horses, & birds, with the just proportion of trees, and chimneys, and towers, which fall within the compass of the sun near the window”.

In its way, Hakewill’s prose has striking moments: here he reflects on the eye not being able to see itself. I normally modernize my quotations, to make them easier to read, but this one I will leave as it appears, as the spelling ‘eie’ appears so much more appropriate than ‘eye’ for the enamourment with self he here complains of:

“nature hauing so framed the eie, as it can neither behold it selfe, nor the face, in which it is set, yet haue men invented for the supplying of that vse looking-glasses, as the artificial eies of pride; the eie being as it were a liuing looking-glasse, & the looking-glas again a dead eie, by means wherof many Narcissus like become enamored of themselues”

The moral point he wants to make leads him into this story, most uncompassionately told to show the dangers of mirrors and the self-love they promote: “I remember I have heard, of a young Gentleman of this University, who being newly recovered from the small pox, & by chance seeing the change of his face in a looking-glass, for mere grief fell into a relapse, and within short time died.”

Hakewill consoles his first audience, the newly blind gentlewoman, and edifies his readership, with a series of accounts of those who have overcome their disability: princes, poets, soldiers, scholars “And lastly for the work of the ministry, my self have seen more then once in this University a blind man in our solemn meetings, making a godly & profitable sermon to the body of the University assembled” (odd that he didn’t switch here to having ‘heard’ this blind man preach). I did not know how the Venerable Bede was supposed to have got his name. Hakewill tells a story from an unspecified life of Bede, about Bede after he had gone blind: “it is a merry jest howbeit seriously related by him who hath written Bedaes life, that his guide persuading him one day as he passed by an heap of stones, that the people (according to their wonted manner) were there assembled to hear him preach; the good old man moved at his speech, was content to give them a sermon, but there being no body present to say, amen, at his conclusion, the very stones cried out amen venerable Priest, by which means being then baptized by the name of venerable, he hath retained it ever since…”

Hakewill argues tenuously that as night is “the mantle of defects & imperfections, and by consequent the mother of union and love; the repose and closing up of the day’s labours … if then the night bring not tediousness with it, why should a day which is like a night be thought to bring it?” But this leads him on to the way that people who are blind can nevertheless excel “in those very sports which seem necessarily to require (sight), as bowling, shooting, quoiting, shoufgrating, & the like”. I wonder what you were doing when you ‘shoufgrated’?

My image is Durer’s drawing of an apostle looking up to heaven, which I chose because Hakewill anticipates an objection to his general argument about sight being morally bad, that God gave man alone “an upright figure of body to the end he might behold the heavens”. It was apparently proved (“as the Anatomists have observed”) to everyone’s satisfaction that humankind has “one nerve (i.e., muscle) more than …Brute beasts, for the turning of the eye upward, to the end he might behold the heavens, and in them … the glory of their maker.” Animals, it was affirmed, can’t look upwards (this reminds me of Adam, Godlike erect in Paradise Lost). But Hakewill explains that such divinely augmented eye control could only have been used properly by unfallen man “I answer that man indeed considered in the state of integrity, might & would have made excellent use thereof; but in the state of corruption the greatest part, either thereby are induced to Idolatry (as hath been before showed)”.

The mad house poems of James Carkesse

‘To a Lady, who was very kind to him in the place.’

Madam, when first your Beauty shin’d
Into my Cell, on me confin’d,
I grew in Love with my dark Cloister;
Slighted (poor and hungry) Pearl and Oyster:
The Apricots which you me threw,
The thoughts of Paradise renew;
In Eden’s Garden sure they grew,
Transplanted to Moorfields by you.
You gave me Silver; whence I hold,
I ought not to Envy Danae’s Gold;
For though on her Jove rain’d a Shower,
'Twa’nt real, but Poetic Ore.
You me with Paper, Pen, and Ink,
Madam, suppli’d, as well as Chink;
This my Muse studies to requite
In part, to you when she does Write.

Your Charity sent me a Shirt, each thread
Whereof, to you me fast does Wed;
And thus from your extended hand,
The Shirt in mine, turns to a Band.
At Night in Straw, Lying a-long,
To th’Oaten Pipes this was my Song.

A search on EEBO for early works on, about, or treating of madness (prompted by the mad-house in The Changeling) led me to James Carkesse’s Lucida intervalla, containing divers miscellaneous poems, written at Finsbury and Bethlem by the Doctors patient extraordinary (1679). Carkesse, who brought all his troubles upon himself, was incarcerated in Bedlam in 1678, and wrote his book of verses there (and at Finsbury). He probably experienced madness; he certainly experienced the treatment of the insane meted out by the Bedlam regime.

In the poem above, we see some of the inhumanities which his poems complain of at large: being kept in the dark, with nothing to do (when Carkesse wanted to write his way out of confinement, by addressing versified complaints to former patrons and protectors), sleeping in straw, and naked: “Without either Shirt, or Cloaths, / I lodg’d my merry Mad Youth”, another poem has his doctor gloat.

His lady visitor seems to be on the cusp between visiting Bedlam for the old reason of idle amusement, and an age of sensibility, visiting to perform charity. She was probably one of Carkesse’s supporters, as her gifts met all his needs: writing materials, money, a shirt, and throwing him the apricots as a change of diet.

Other poems reveal more about the regime: the vermin (“In a place I did him stow, /
Where Rats and Mice do swarm”, a poem makes his doctor say). “I’m opprest with cold”, says another. He was chained up: “Iron locks my Leg fast”, and beaten if he resisted treatment.

The brief ODNB entry on Carkesse says that by the standards of the time, the doctor in charge, Thomas Allen, introduced a relatively thoughtful regime in Bedlam. Purgings and phlebotomy were the medical norms for just about all ailments, and the inmates were subjected to both. Carkesse says he resisted as best he could. In the poem written to be voiced by Thomas Allen, the doctor complains about his patient:

My Chirurgeon he fiercely withstood,
And he led him such a Dance;
That to let this same Gown-man Blood,
A Sword was more fit than a Lance.
I order’d his Keeper, at Large,
On occasion to ply him with Blows,
That what Jugular did not discharge,
The mad Blood might come out at his Nose.

I can imagine copious blood-letting might have kept the wretched inmates quiet. More specific as a treatment was Allen’s notion that an infantile diet might reduce his mad patients to a more docile condition:

His Diet was most of it Milk,
To reduce him again to a Child;
And Butter as soft as Silk,
To smooth the Fierce and the Wild.
My Potions he turn’d into Drenches,
For he freely would take ne’re a jot;
But by Thomas and the Wenches,
They were forced down his Throat.

The potions Carkesse threw down would have been purgatives and emetics.

Here’s another complete poem – it uses the conceits of a love poem to express gratitude to another lady visitor:

On the Ladies looking into his Cell.

When Doctor Mad-Quack me I’th’Dark had put,
And a close Prisoner in my Cloyster shut;
A Lady chanc’d peep in, whose Beauty bright
Enlarg’d the crannies, and let in new light:
Quack, I'm now pleas’d, without the Sun, confin’d
See how he Blushes, by my Star, out-shin’d.

Throughout his ‘Lucid Intervals’, Carkesse maintains that he has been thrown into Bedlam by the contrivance of his enemies:

Satan’s Agents, my false Friends, combine
A Minister to Silence and confine.
I’m forc’d (though Sober) Bedlam to inherit,
When they, who put me here, the Prison merit;
For they’re possest, not I, by th’Evil Spirit…

These enemies seem to include, interestingly, Samuel Pepys, who had caught Carkesse peculating at the Navy Office, and had him dismissed from office:

… Mr. Pepys, who hath my Rival been
For the Duk’es favour, more than years thirteen:
But I excluded, he High and Fortunate…

Elsewhere, he blames his wife: “me to be Tam’d, / My Shrewish Wife and her Relations send”.

His actual confinement seems to have been prompted by an outrage against the Dissenters. Carkesse fancied himself to be a parson. “I am a Minister of God’s holy Word”, says the poem he addressed to the King (the ODNB entry says there is no evidence to suggest that this was true), and to have a divine mission. The revealing poem title is ‘On his being Seiz’d on for a Madman, only for having endeavoured to reduce Dissenters unto the CHURCH.’

“Whether Carkesse was incarcerated for a specific offence is difficult to determine” says the ODNB. It may not be quite so obscure a matter as this makes it sound. One has to imagine that there was at the time a pretty broad tolerance for attacks upon dissenters, but he seems to have gone just too far. In a poem in which he imagines himself in self-defensive dialogue with his doctor, we learn that Carkesse went dressed as a parson to a ‘Conventicle’, where he seems to have torn his parson’s gown. He was probably doubly drunk on zeal and spirits. His poem tries to explain these circumstances away: “in a Conventicle, / Who Sober would wear a Gown?” The Dissenters seem to have locked him out, so Carkesse tried to break in: “Oh but, Parson, you break the Wall, / And Burglary you commit”. Carkesse does not think that these charges warrant defending:

“the way to Build up the Church,
Is to pull down the Chapel o’th’Devil.
Then throw the House out at Window,
And lay it flat with the Ground.”

In other poems Carkesse suggests that he had also strongly taken to the taint of madness about the ‘Popish Plot’: “Titus destroy’d Jerusalem; and Rome / Her self, from Titus, may expect her doom. / Grow, Titus Oates, and thriving in this Land, / A Promise of our future Triumph, stand.” Jesuits and the Dissenters both set him off.

At other moments in the ‘Lucid Intervals’, he tries to assert that the whole incident was a feigned enragement, a piece of devout acting: “Madness in Masquerade …A Mad-man I have Acted, as a Feat”. Perhaps this half admits that he was merely dressed as a parson, and tore up the robe on being challenged about his right to wear it. Carkesse makes allusions to plays like The Humorous Lieutenant and The Mad Lover, in which insanity is performed by the actor in the role, rather than a medical condition.

But the self-exposing ‘On his being Seiz’d on for a Madman, only for having endeavoured to reduce Dissenters unto the CHURCH’ indicates that Carkesse was taken straight off to the asylum after his attack on the ‘Conventicle’, looking very much like a dangerous maniac, but (from his point of view) on his dignity and determined to make it look as though he went without constraint:

as I did pass,
I arm’d my hands in Coach with broken Glass;
Threatning the Slaves, which waited on my wheel,
That if they touch’d me, they should find 'twas steel,
Th’affrighted multitude observe their distance,
Without their help I enter, or my resistance:
But the great Tumult, and such solemn state,
Amus’d the Officers of Bedlam-Gate:
So well I Acted, that they did not stick,
Me to receive as their Arch-Lunatic…

The old print DNB apparently said that Carkesse ended up as a Catholic. The current ODNB says this is not evidenced. But he was, to say the least, unstable, and may have ended up in one of the churches he had previously attacked. My image is of course one of Goya’s mad houses.

Mr Haddock in deep waters

My little find this week is in Thomas Bayly’s Witty apophthegms delivered at several times, and upon several occasions by King James, King Charls, the Marquess of Worcester, Francis Lord Bacon, and Sir Thomas Moor; collected and revised (1669). This book goes a long way to convince any reader that the Stuart Kings simply did not deliver ‘witty apothegms’ at all. Most of the book was clearly compiled during a visit by King Charles to Ragland (Rutland) Castle, and to bulk out the collection Bayly plagiarised Ben Agar’s King James, his apopthegmes, or table-talke as they were by him delivered occasionally and by the publisher (his quondam servant) carefully received, and now humbly offered to publique view, as not impertinent to the present times by B.A. gent (1643).

I opt for the later version of the text, as Bayly’s prose is rather easier to follow than Agar’s, but will add back in some of the extra details which Agar had included, which Bayly edited out when lifting the text.

So, to our story:

King James produced the apothegm that: “That there were many ways to find out truth besides evidence of real witness”.

“whereupon Master Hugh May replied and mentioned Master Haddocks good report and opinion conceived of him in Oxford, and yet was found at last a great offender”. I take it that Mr May tried to steer the remark towards a recent triumph for the King’s capacity to find out truths. The flattery doesn’t quite take: “whereupon his Majesty replied, the case in him was not after his meaning, and thereupon insisted further to exemplify his offence, confessing [the sense is ‘confess’ verb 1 ‘to declare’] the same to be high & capital in respect of God and man, meaning Mr. Haddock, who preached in his sleep…”

This is worth pausing over: it rather looks as though Mr Haddock was found such a great offender that he was in the end executed for his pains. The King continues in what must have been a familiar vein of self-congratulation:

“that his Majesty [1] did God and the Country good service, in discovering that man. 2. That his practice was diabolical & a new way to sin, that his Majesty never heard of before. 3. That he did therein practice against God himself, in that he did endeavour to make his own inventions as the oracle of God, and by that means to bind men’s consciences thereto to believe.”

So far, this is just James reiterating his opinion; that he came to the conclusion that the practice was ‘diabolical’ does not bode well for Mr Haddock. But the third royal point is astute: by feigning to be delivering a sermon while asleep, Mr Haddock would indeed lead credulous hearers to believe that he was ‘channeling’ the word of God.

But forwards to the way the King proved Mr Haddock to be a fraud:

“4. That his Majesty discovered him by his own papers and notes which were brought unto the King, the which Mr. Haddock confessed to be his own handwriting, and the notes of his Sermon which men say he preached in his sleep, but for answer thereunto, said he only noted his Sermons first in writing, and so in the night dreamed thereof, and of the same thing that he had penned before, but by his answer his Majesty convinced him upon his own experience [This is OED sense ‘convince’ , verb, II 4, ‘To prove (a person) to be guilty, or in the wrong, esp. by judicial procedure’] concerning dreams and visions in the night, that things studied or mentioned in the day time may be dreamed of in the night, but always irregularly, without order, but not as his Sermons were, both good and learned…”

The King simply produced the undeniable authority of his own royal experience: dreams are jumbles, while Mr Haddock’s discourse was simply too orderly. It then emerges that the remarkable (and suspect) Mr Haddock had been hauled in and had the folly to perform his act in front of the king himself:

“as in particular in that very Sermon which he preached before his Majesty in his sleep, concerning David’s waters, Psalm 69. where in he treated. 1. physically, then theologically, which is not usual in dreams so to do.”

It has to be admired here that Mr Haddock appositely chose as his text Psalm 69: ¹Save me, O God; for the waters are come in unto my soul. ² I sink in deep mire, where there is no standing: I am come into deep waters, where the floods overflow me.

How fishy can you get?

It seems that Mr Haddock was hung up shortly after this, and James justifies this as heading off legal chaos:

“5. That Mr. Haddocks sin being granted for liberty, and good, then would all sins be protected and allowed, as blasphemy against God, Treason against the King, slander against any man; and at last all defended under colour of being asleep.”

This is of course ludicrous: a heavy-handed punishment of a silly man pretending to give a sermon in his sleep is hardly justified by the thought that crimes that can hardly be committed while asleep might have found legal precedent for mercy by the perpetrators claiming they were asleep at the time. But the quality of King James’ legal thinking is aptly caught in another of these precious royal aphorisms: “That it were better twenty innocents did suffer, then to have all dishonest men go free”. Or, best to hang people, just to be on the safe side.

Rather surprisingly for 1669, Bayly omitted another royal observation preserved in the 1643 version of the anecdote, which reveals at Mr Bayly’s politics and religious stance: “Sixthly, that in all his Sermons, he had always some sayings in defense, or in excuse of the Puritans. After the discourse ended concerning Master Haddock, as aforesaid; his Maiesty proceeded to mention his great trouble with that sect in Scotland”.

But Bayly, from somewhere, produces two further pieces of royal acumen, which are all too typical of James: for they show that the King did have some human understanding of the person he is about to have executed:

“and further his Majesty declared his opinion, that the reason that moved the aforesaid Mr. Haddock to put in practice his preaching in his sleep did proceed from two natural infirmities, to which he was subject, the one was stammering in speech, so finding himself more ready to speak being quiet in his bed, and his eyes shut from any object to trouble his mind, he could utter himself more perfectly. The second reason was his practice to talk in his sleep…”

These are reasonable deductions about how Haddock ended up performing his dangerous act – but neither stops the King from leaping to a third opinion: “these two as the King conceived, put him on to that foul practice and illusion of Satan’s”. Satan enters the picture, and Mr Haddock is doomed.

So, here is King James once again investigating a fraud, as he did in the case of demoniacs up and down his kingdom. Usually, he discovers the demoniac to be fraudulent, and the case ends there, but Mr Haddock is simultaneously discovered to be a fraud (via the discovery of his notes for his somniloquous sermon) and a tool of Satanic illusion. The King convicted Mr Haddock on the grounds that his sermon was too orderly, “both good and learned”, but also inferred that this good sermon was coming direct from Satan.

I have not been able to find more than one other reference to Mr Haddock, in Thomas Pierce’s Heautontimoroumenos, or, The self-revenger exemplified in Mr. William Barlee. (1658): “In how many more places he did asperse me as a Socinian, I must needs be forgetful, as well as he. He hints my erring about the very Trinity, but holds forth nothing; only dreams of a Manuscript, and talks as impertinently out of it, nay a great deal more, then Mr. Haddock did in his sleep.”

My image is Durer’s ‘The Dream of the Doctor’.