The mutable James Howell

I had meant to read James Howell’s Dendrologia Dodona’s grove, or, The vocall forest (for a few talking and ambulant trees) as a follow up to my last post, but I rebounded and digressed to another work by the same writer, Therologia, The parly of beasts, or, Morphandra, queen of the inchanted iland wherein men were found, who being transmuted to beasts, though proffer’d to be dis-inchanted, and to becom men again, yet, in regard of the crying sins and rebellious humors of the times, they prefer the life of a brute animal before that of a rational creture ... : with reflexes upon the present state of most countries in Christendom (1660).

The narrative line here is simple. A voyaging prince, Pererius, has reached an idyllic island ruled by the enchantress ‘Morphandra’, who emphatically explains that she is not a witch, but has transformed certain humans into animal shape. He may talk with them, for she can re-imbue them with the power of speech, and, if he can persuade them to give up their animal form, he may sail away with them - and repatriate them should he wish.

So, in the immediate background is Spenser’s ‘Bower of Bliss’ and its enchantress Acrasia, and those concluding stanzas in which Gryll, transformed back from pig to man, repines, and announces that he wishes to remain a pig: ‘Let Gryll be Gryll, and have his hoggish mind’, concludes Guyon’s Palmer (his Reason), and they leave him there. However, Howell’s satiric point involves an inversion of Spenser’s fable: in this version, the human state is far more corrupt than the animal, so not heading back for home and human society is the more moral choice. As Howell’s full title explains, Pererius fails again and again, until finally a hive of bees collectively assent to become once more a nunnery full of nuns – which is curious, as they have just been praised as a model of a perfect commonwealth, intolerant of idleness. If Howell was thinking about this (for he does seem to fall foul of the active life /contemplative life divide), one can suppose that a nunnery constitutes a human community separated from the vices of the world. Howell’s more than slightly odd work ends with the bees intoning a church gradual hymn of praise to God. They might do this better if they waited till they were nuns again. But if your fable has bees that can talk, why not have them singing too?

There’s a lot of fun to be had on the way. The first interviewee is an Otter, who was when formerly human one of those amphibious neither-sea-nor-land Dutch folk. He condemns the human body: human excrement, symptomatically, even smells worse than any other creature’s: “ther is none whose excrements are more faetid, and stinking; the fewmets of a Deer, the lesses of a Fox, the crotells of a Hare, the dung of a Horse, and the spraints that I use to void backward, are nothing so foetid”.

“Well, let’s give over these impertinent altercations pro & con…” says Pererius later in the work, having haggled with a former Venetian courtesan, in her new shape as a white hind with a black spotted ‘shingle’ (her tail). Argument for and against was one way Howell, like so many others of his time, showed his wit. The otter produces a fulminating attack on his former nation, so Pererius conversely praises the Dutch, in terms that make you think of Vermeer’s paintings and all those neat Dutch interiors:

“How much are they to be commended for their neatness? Go to their Ships, they may be said to be as cleanly as a milking-pail; in their Kitchins, the outside of their Utensils are as bright as the inside; ther’s never a room in their house, where so much dust may be found as to draw the name of Slutt upon it.” I like that suggestion of domestic practice: that if you found a dusty surface, maybe it was acceptable to indicate with a finger-tip scrawl what you thought of the maid’s deficient standards.

The ape refuses re-transformation in these terms, as Howell vents his sense of how bad things have become: “Man! Truly Sir, I am sorry the shape I now bear resembleth Man so much, I could wish it were far more unlike, for the horrid and unheard-of sacrileges and perjuries of my own Nation makes me abhor the very name of Man, much more his nature”. Into the ape’s testimony he inserts a Dantean vision of hell. Hell is extensively re-equipped with new instruments for the perpetual torment of the malefactors of the civil war and instigators of the execution of King Charles, both male and female:

“My good Spirit answered, All these, except Ixion’s wheel, are new torments appointed for Gherionian Sectaries, who had destroyed from top to bottom all Government both of Church and State, And as their brains turn’d round upon earth after every wind of Doctrine, so their souls turn here in perpetuall torments of rotation … Couches of Toads, Scorpions, Asps, and Serpents were in a corner hard by; I asked for whom they were prepared, I was answered, for som Evangelizing Gherionian Ladies, which did egg on their husbands to War.”

‘Gherionian’ is Howell’s name for England, and he says it means a ‘land of wool’. Howell had begun his whole work with a couplet addressing the reader “If you will ope this Work with ease, / You must from Greece go fetch your Keys”, but fortunately he had relented, and supplied ‘An Etymologicall Derivation of som Words and Anagrams in the Parly of Beasts, according to the ALPHABET.’

Perhaps the best part of the work comes in the dialogue with the hind, formerly a cortigiana onesta in Venice. They debate views of women, and the hind, though she will refuse to resume her former shape, is smartly feminist. She is keen to assert a woman’s equal part in conception, and takes a swipe at Sir Thomas Browne. Pererius, agreeing with her, has just argued that mules are clear evidence of how both male and female contribute to the mixed nature of offspring. She continues “You may well add hereunto that the child oftentimes resembleth the mother, therfore she must also be an active principle in the formation; If it be so, what a wrong is it to the justice and rules of nature that Women shold be held but little better than Slaves? how comes it that they shold be so vilipended and revil’d? As that foolish Naturalist or Ninny, who wish’d ther were another way to propagat Mankind than by copulation with Women.”

Pererius makes his usual offer: “I told you that Queen Morphandra is willing, at my intercession, to restore you unto your former nature, and I have a lusty Galeon in port to convey you to Marcopolis, that renowned and rare City”. But she says that while she would like, if possible, to retain the power of speech, she would prefer to stay in her form as hind. Deer, she explains, have a blessedly short mating season, and their act of sexual congress itself is quickly over. They are temperate and clean (she testifies, like Marvell’s nymph, to the sweetness of a deer’s breath). Best of all, they do not menstruate:

“But, Sir, touching my former nature, truly I wold desire nothing of it again but the faculty of speech that I might talk somtimes; In all other things I prefer by many degrees this species wherin I am now invested by Queen Morphandra, which is far more chaste and temperat, far more healthfull and longer-liv’d: Touching the first, Ther's no creture whose season of carnall copulation is shorter, for the Rutting-time lasts but from the midst of September to the end of October, nor is there any other creture whose enjoyment of plesure is shorter in the act; moreover when we are full, we never after keep company with the male for eight months; Concerning the second, viz. our temperatnes, we never use to overcharge or cloy nature with excesse, besides our food is simple, those green leafs and grasse you see are our nutriment, which our common mother the Earth affords us so gently, we require no variety of Viands, which makes that our breath is sweeter than the fairest Ladies in Marcopolis, and our fewmishes with what else comes from within us is nothing so unsavoury; Nor need we that monthly purgation which is so improperly called Flowers, it being such rank poyson that it will crack a tru crystall glass; Nay 'tis observed, that if a menstruous woman come near an alveary or hive of Bees, they forsake their food all the while, finding the aire to be infected.”

Howell’s work is full of points sustained by such unlikely yarns. But he was, among his other activities as a man of letters, a collector of proverbs, and these help prevent his work from becoming intolerably verbose: “Well, I find here two Proverbs verified, the one is a homely one, viz. Chanter a un Asne, il vous donnera un pet, Sing to an Asse and he will give you a Bum-crack.”

Actually, he did intolerably verbose pretty well: the ass counter-attacks from the charge of braying with a long account of what laughing does to the human form divine:

“the eyes extenuat, they half shut themselfs, and grow humid, the nose crumples up, and growes sharp, the lipps retire and lengthen, ther is an ill-favor’d kind of gaping, and discovery of the teeth, the cheeks lift up themselfs and grow more stiff, they have pitts digg’d in them during the time, the mouth is forc’d to open, and discovers the tremblings of the suspended toung, it thrusts out an obstreperous interrupted sound, and oftentimes ther is a stopping of breath, the neck swells and shortens it self, all the veins grow greter, and extended, an extraordinary hue disperseth it self over all the face, which grows reddish, the brest is impetuously agitated, and with sudden reiterated shakes, that it hinders respiration, the perfect use of speech is lost, and it is impossible to swallow during the fit, a pain rises in the flanck, the whole body bends … The hands becom feeble, the leggs cannot support themselves, and the body is constrained to fall, and tumble, nay it causeth sometimes dangerous syncopes in the heart, and so brings death.”

After this particular dialogue, Morphandra twits the prince about his success in bandying arguments with the ass: “I saw you somwhat earnest in banding arguments with that Asse, but how have you sped? doth he desire to be disasinated, and becom Man again, as I promised he should be, provided his will concurred therunto?” I love that nonce-word, ‘disasinated’.

Therologia was a fable about mutations. In my favourite passage from his letters, Epistolae Ho-elianae, Howell reflects on a less obvious form of mutation, on how we mutate into ourselves. He is in Venice, and is prompted to reflect by seeing the Doge’s state barge, the Bucentore. Like Lord Nelson’s H.M.S. Victory at Southampton, it exists as a continuous reconstruction of itself, or as a reproduction of itself. This makes Howell reflect on himself, brilliantly: is he really continuous with his former self, or has his bodily selfhood completely changed?

“I fell, I say, to consider whither our bodies may be said to be of like condition with this Bucentore; which though it be reputed still the same Vessell, yet I beleeve ther’s not a foot of that Timber remaining which it had upon the first Dock, having bin as they tell me, so often plank’d and ribb’d, caulk’d and peec’d: In like manner our bodies may be said to be daily repaired by new sustenance, which begets new bloud, and consequently new spirits, new humours, and I may say new flesh, the old by continuall deperdition and insensible transpirations evaporating still out of us, and giving way to fresh; so that I make a question, whither by reason of these perpetuall reparations, and accretions, the body of man may be said to be the same numericall body in his old age that he had in his manhood, or the same in his manhood, that he had in his youth, the same in his youth that he carried about him in his childhood, or the same in his childhood which he wore first in the Womb: I make a doubt, whither I had the same identicall, individually numericall body, when I carried a Calf-Leather Sachell to School in Hereford, as when I woar a Lamskin Hood in Oxford, or whither I have the same masse of bloud in my Veins, and the same Flesh now in Venice which I carried about me three yeers since, up and down London streets, having in lieu of Beer and Ale, drunk Wine all this while, and fed upon different Viands; now the stomach is like a crusible, for it hath a chymicall kind of vertue to transmute one body into another, to transubstantiat Fish and Fruits into Flesh within, and about us; but though it be questionable, whither I wear the same Flesh which is fluxible, I am sure my Hair is not the same, for you may remember I went flaxen-hair’d out of England, but you shall find me return’d with a very dark Brown, which I impute not onely to the heat and ayr of those hot Countries I have eat my bread in, but to the quality and difference of food; but you will say, that hair is but an excrementitious thing, and makes not to this purpose; moreover, me thinks I hear you say, that this may be true, onely in the bloud and spirits, or such fluid parts, not in the solid and heterogeneall parts: But I will presse no further at this time this Philosophical notion which the sight of Bucentore infus’d into me, for it hath already made me exceed the bounds of a Letter.”

“The same identicall, individually numericall body…” Are we ‘individually numerical’, can we be counted just the once, was he the unique James Howell, or is he in effect a sequence of ‘fluxible’ James Howells? He sees his selfhood as a series of processes. Nor does he jump to the soul as a reassuring answer. In Therologia, none of the mutated humans worry about being soulless (as animals), indeed the otter refers to the Turks believing that “we also sensitive Cretures have a better World provided for us after we have run out our cours here”: that animals have souls (and that they obey divine laws, rather than transgress them).

Therologia reads as hyperbolised satire, a rhetorical display of condemnation. But it may also hint, alongside the passage about his own mutating body, at a deeper philosophical gloom in Howell.

(Throughout this post, I have retained Howell’s own spelling. Usually, I lightly modernise my early texts, but Howell was a spelling-reformer, who believed that English would only spread beyond its narrow use in the world if it were made easier for other nationalities to learn, so it should be spelled as it sounds, without confusing superfluous letters. His printers did not always heed his dictates, but the spelling is his own as given.

My images are of Howell himself, communing with a tree, and the illustration of Morphandra, the Prince, and his animal interlocutors from 'Therologia')

Meetings with remarkable early modern trees

I recently bought a copy of Gillian Tindall’s The Man Who Drew London: Wenceslaus Hollar in reality and imagination (2002). An odd book, a composite of a biography and a Tracey Chevalier style narrative. In many of Tindall’s fictionalised passages, she tries to give a voice to the women in Hollar’s life. I suppose that one could agree that women were an important subject for Hollar, and that he treats them with great sympathy, never pruriently (not even when illustrating Juvenal). The author must have been tempted to try to bring to life the women Hollar knew.

But I was most interested by her small illustration (on p.124) of the Hollow Tree on Hampstead Heath. It took me a while to find it, as it doesn’t seem to be in the apparently comprehensive (and undeniably excellent) University of Toronto Hollar Digital Collection:

http://link.library.utoronto.ca/hollar/browse.cfm?Main=All

I traced it finally in Robert Codrington’s single sheet (double-sided), The dimension of the hollow tree of Hampsted (1653). EEBO does us proud here, with a transcript of the text, the page images, and all the minor contributors to the publication indexed.

As we are having a meeting with a remarkable early modern tree, let’s have the statistics of the tree itself first. It was an elm tree: “The Bottom above ground in Compass is 28 foot; The Breadth of the door is 2 foot; The Compass of the turret on the Top is 34 foot; The Door in Height to go in is 6 foot 2 Inches; The Height to the Turret is 33 foot; The Lights into the Tree is 16; The Steps to go up is 42; The Seat above the Steps, Six may Sit on, and round about room for fourteen more. All the way you go up within the Hollow Tree.”

This isn’t as hyperbolic in size as Codrington’s verses make it sound. The ‘lights into the tree’ are the windows for the spiral staircase cut inside the trunk.

Codrington’s poem is charmingly of its time. It’s cast, largely, in a vein of high compliment to the tree, treated as a ‘wooden majesty’. From the top of this quasi-royal tree he looks to the forlorn royal palaces, now uninhabited. It’s loco-descriptive, as Codrington enjoys the view from the top in the manner of Denham, especially the section about the distant Thames, and it makes one remember Marvell:

‘Of the height and hollowness of the great Elm at Hampstead.’

What shall I call thee who so great and high,
Present’st thy self unto my wondring eye?
Thou Travellers 'fence, and guide, the Enterlude
O’th ranting storms, and giant of the wood!
How in thy summer’s robes doest thou appear,
The Sylvans’ joy, and honour of the year?
How the bold winds play with thy lofty locks!
How doest thou scorn, and makest them but thy mocks,
Deaf to their sighs, and whispers! Let me here
(So please thy Wooden Majesty) draw near
To thy first door, and looking up discry
Where Hall, where Parlor, how thy Chambers lie.
Essex’ Broad-Oak (which twenty miles we see
And more) is but a twig compar’d to thee;
So vast a compass doth thy might command,
That a whole Grove within thy self might stand,
And spread and flourish, and may fruitful add
To thee a growing progeny: which had
No doubt been so, but that thou thought’st not good
To leave out Men, to entertain a Wood.
Art here, and Order do in one engage
To make this Round complete, their Equipage
Extols thy greatness, in less room I find
With all his trusty Knights King Arthur din’d.
As yet more high upon the stairs I rise,
What are these windows which enrich mine eyes?
Happy you lights, whose air so pure and thin
The morning courts to let the Sun come in,
And drink it, to refresh his heavy head
Sick with the vapours of moist Thetis’ Bed;
For which (not staying) he with all his wealth,
Gilds this blest place, and thanks it for his health.
Now is my progress finish’d, to the height
Of all thy Turret I am come, and straight
Here on the world’s Redeemer think, when he
(Set on the Temple’s Pinnacle) did see
All Kingdoms of the earth at once, so stand
The Towns now subject to my eyes command,
Which to repeat the Muse forbears, for why?
The Towns would often give the verse the lye,
Whose names as Churlish as themselves are known,
And will endure no Numbers but their own.
Six neighbouring Counties do on tip-toe all
Gaze on thy mighty limbs, and seem to call
Unto thy patient Greatness, when to wait
To pay thee homage for thy nobler height,
But only Harrow on the Hill plays Rex,
And will have none more high in Middlesex.
And yonder the familiar Thames (the more
To grace thy prospect) rolls along the shore
Her Crystal treasures, and doth seem to me
Softly to murmur 'cause so far from thee.
See how the Ships in numerous array.
Dance on her waves, and their proud wings display
More white then Snow, as now the Thames did carry
A moving wood i’th’midst of January.
Not all Meander’s Swans, nor those on Po,
Join’d with her own, make half so fair a show:
Nor all the beauteous Ladies that have been
These twice three summers on thy Turrets seen.
But what amongst these various objects, what
Is that which so much takes my eyes? 'tis not
Thy leavy Antlers, nor thy shoulders, high,
Though one would brush, and th’other bore the sky;
Nor thy five hundred Arms by which we see
Briareus only was a type of thee,
Arms which vain winds doe twist in every storm
And fain would put them in akimbo form.
Tis not thy ample body, though it be
So full of pleasure, and humanity,
That as to the quick a Palace would be found,
So to the dead their Coffins, and surround
Their loose and crumbling dusts. Tis not thy feet,
To cover which so many Acres meet:
Tis not those stately structures where the Court
Had late their mansions, when our Kings would sport;
Of whom depriv’d they mourn, and desolate
Like Widows look on their forlorn estate.
Tis not smooth Richmond’s streams, nor Acton’s Mill,
Nor Windsor’s Castle, nor yet Shooters hill.
Nor groves nor plains which further off do stand,
Like Landskips portray’d by some happy hand:
But a swift view which most delightful shows,
And doth them all, and all at once enclose.


Codrington dates his poem 24^th July 1653. Then there follows a set of distiches by four other visitors, who also date their poems to the same day. I just give the English version of each poem, but each one has a Latin version of itself (again, like Marvell sometimes does). English couplets, moralising and making religious reflections, mixed with Latinity takes us a bit closer to what was going on here among these early modern Hampstead intellectuals:

Upon Hampstead Elm.

Although the heart of this fair Tree be out,
Yet it doth spread its branches round about.

(Roger Coleman)

Upon Hampstead Elm.

As in this Tree we go through dark to light,
So Saints ascend through death to heaven bright.

(John Lee)

Upon Hampstead Elm. Psalm 52. 13. 14.

God’s Tree and this do differ in one thing,
That shall not, this will cease fruit forth to bring.

(Moses Browne)

In Ulmum Hampstedensem.

Here all may see this stately Elm to bear
An Apple strange, which it brings ev’ry year.

T. W.

These writers scarcely experience the tree directly: what they see and do is related to their religious inner life. John Lee finds a symbol, Moses Browne is reminded of the cross, T.W. somehow finds an apple (an elm rarely fruits, and the fruit body is small and papery). We had at the start of the ascent a set of ‘Verses on the DOOR.’ These are part-Herrick, part Herbert – or rather, Herbert will be clearer at the top. So it’s a climb from a sinful world to a greater proximity to heaven (and divine scrutiny):

Civil people, you welcome be,
That come to view this Hollow Tree.
Debaucht Drunkard, Ranting Whore,
Come no such within this Door:
Wanton Boys and ranting Rigs,
Cut no Bowes, break no Sprigs.

‘Verses on the Top of the TREE in the TURRET.’

Now you are ascended up on high,
Think here upon Eternity.
Take heed what you do morn or ev’n,
The Son will see’t and tell’t in Heaven:
What ever you think, or speak, or say,
You answer must at Judgement-Day.

I think that the ‘verses on’ simply meant, as usual, ‘verses on the subject of’. But it is also possible that the poems provided might have been transcribed on placards for visitors like the lady visitors Codrington’s verses mention. This whole production was ‘Printed by E. Cotes for M. S. at the Blue Bible in Green Arbour, and are to be given or sold on the Hollow Tree at Hampsted.’ ‘M.S.’ was Michael Sparke, the bookseller. So the work was a promotional flyer, but one that has, as we might say, its own agenda too.

Now hollow trees, if you trace them through early modern literature, are places in which people hide (after the model of Aeneas in his flight from Troy), or hide letters (in romances), and they were where early ornithologists and poets like Carew thought cuckoos over-wintered. But a large tree could shelter a religious meeting. Hollow trees are mentioned being used this way in satire (because of the ludicrous cuckoo associations, I think), as in the title Some small and simple reasons delivered in a hollow-tree in Waltham Forrest in a lecture on the 33. of March last by Aminadab Blower a devout bellowsmender of Pimlico; shewing the causes in generall and particular wherefore thay doe, might, would, should, or ought, except against and quite refuse the liturgy or Book of Common-Prayer (1643).

Codrington has another set of verses, in a Procul, O procul este profane mode: we learn in them that this is ‘an elm that’s orthodox’:

‘The Elm it self, to some of the new Religion that would make a Preachment under his reverend shade.’

How numerous and extravagant are these
Thus buzz about me like a swarm of Bees?
Remove your station friends, I’m not so fickle,
To cast a shade for such a Conventicle:
You talk to me of Slaney, How, and Cox,
Why do you vex an Elm that’s Orthodox?
To sort with your complexions, I profess
There are no Elms in all my Diocese;
If only such are for your purpose, know,
You must as far as unto Bordeaux go.

‘How’ would be Samuel How, author of The sufficiencie of the spirits teaching, without humane-learning (1640 and eds.) - the title alone says enough. Now if it’s a surprise to see the old radical bookseller Michael Sparke mixed in with such men as Codrington busily praising orthodoxy, perhaps the connection is respect for learning. For besides orthodoxy in religion at this elm, there’s a lot of instruction going on. In the next verses, Michael Sparke himself, signing his piece as ‘Scintilla’, praises ‘Domino Auriga’ (the name means charioteer), who has delivered a cartload of books to this place. Sparke himself (who would die in December of 1653) lived in Hampstead, and here he seems to be proprietorial, writing about ‘my arbour’:

‘Amico meo fidelissimo Domino Auriga.’

Welcome most learned Waggoner, welcome to me,
That bring’st such loading, to this hollow Tree;
What is thy carriage? Learning, Virtue, Wit.
Here then unlade, this Elm for thee is fit.
This is the Tree, on which such fruit doth spring,
Which made the Muses dance, to laugh and sing:
Such carriage, thou hast brought to this my Arbour,
As never richer Ship came loaden into Harbour.
Twelve virtuous Plants, this exile tutor’d so
Upon this Tree, the like let England show.
Drive on see the youngest Branch so flourish,
That Air, and Hill, and Well, and School may cherish:
And when thy wheels do off thy Wagon go,
In spite of death, thy Plants will fairly grow;
And though by him thou wrapped art in Lead,
Yet Time in spight of Death thy seeds will spread.

Sparke also contributes ‘The Close’:

Blush England, blush, a shame it is to see
An Exile here, to teach civility,
More then some Natives, and for pious care
To train up youth, his pains he doth not spare;
For he on top of all (this Tree) above the shade,
His Scholars taught, where they such Verses made
As spread his honour, and do blaze the fame
Of Hampstead Schoole, I’ll trumpet up the same:
Johannes A Comenius thy Countryman so rare,
For Arts and Parts thou mayst with him compare.
Exile drive on thy Wagon, here take rest,
And all thy carriage be for ever blest.

I think we finally get some chance to understand the set up at the Hampstead Elm. Michael Spark was probably its owner or keeper. Codrington’s verses seem to say that the elm had been equipped with its winding interior stair and platform for six years by 1653. In the very near vicinity, an exiled scholar kept a school, perhaps in the buildings seen behind the tree in Hollar’s etching, which the unworldly and over-worked Hollar perhaps contributed to assist a fellow exile. I think the teacher must have been a follower of the educationalist Johannes Comenius. Comenius gets mentioned by Sparke: he had been in England at Samuel Hartlib’s invitation in 1641, some of his educational writings had been published in England by Sparke, and the Moravian scholar might have established Chelsea College as a Baconian research institute, a ‘universal college of the learned’. The same ideals seem to inform the teaching of this unknown subsequent exile: the tree itself might have been carpentered to meet imagery derived from Comenius, to symbolise an instructive ascent via a Baconian winding stair through darkness to illumination, a Comenian Via Lucis. If the platform on top of the Hampstead Elm was designed as an arboreal classroom, this would have been an idea Comenius would have warmly endorsed, for instruction was in his pedagogic theory always meant to be enjoyed.

And who wouldn’t? Thomas Pakenham, 8^th Earl of Longford, a remarkable early modern tree for you!

Two early modern royal souvenirs

Well, royalty is the theme of the day, so I thought I'd post two early modern royal images, or (at a stretch) souvenirs. My first is this quite astonishing portrait miniature in silk, from the collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art's collection. They don't have it on show, and one imagines its colours are most probably kept from the light of day in a black velvet-lined box. But their web exhibit is very good, here:
http://www.metmuseum.org/toah/works-of-art/39.13.7,29.23.8


As they rightly say about it, "this embroidered portrait miniature ... is one of the most beautifully executed examples of professional embroidery from the seventeenth century". It is all worked in stitching: "All of the elements, from the lace collar and medallion of the Order of the Garter worn by the king, to the highlights in his eyes and hair, are rendered in minute stitches of silk and metal thread." The Met's website gives magnified close ups so you can appreciate the work that went into it:

The image of the martyr-king is after Wencelas Hollar, and before him, of course, Van Dyck. The same image is used as the frontispiece for the 1651 Reliquiae Sacrae Carolae. The execution of the portrait is a work of extreme skill, and reverence too: this level of work could only be paralleled in vestments or copes (which sometimes have pictorial elements). The Met site says that "a number of similar portraits survive in public and private collections". Someone bought a late example at this sale for £3,400:
http://www.tooveys.com/lots.asp?WEBLOTID=163601&LOTID=890

Here's the other end of the scale, from the single sheet publication of 1613, The Royall line of kings, queenes, and princes, from the vniting of the two royall houses, Yorke and Lancaster

Here are the Tudors and the Stuarts: Henry VII and Henry VIII, Edward VI, Mary and Elizabeth, James I, Prince Henry (who has just died), Anne of Denmark, the youthful Prince Charles, Princess Elizabeth and her husband, Frederick, Count Palatine, labelled 'R.B'. for Rex Bohemiae. The verses are these:

OF these, the first, is He, that did Unite,
The two sweet Roses; made Contention, Peace:
The second, He, at whose Majestique sight,
All that opposd him did recoile and cease.
The third, young Edward, of that name the sixt,
Where pious thoughts and Royal blood were mixt.

The Fourth Queen Mary; (in this steame, a staine,)
To Rome, a friend, but to the Truth, a Foe;
The Fift Eliza, in whose blessed Raigne,
Not any room was left, for Rome, to show
A wooden God, to kneele to: Truth and She.
One Septer swayed, with one cleere eye did see.

The Sixt is He, that now makes Englands Seat,
The Seat of Vertue, (that including all,
The Stock of Goodnesse) One, as Good as Great,
Before whose Shine, Clowded abuses fall:
The seaventh, that Prince, that while he here did liuv,
As Faire Hopes gave, as ere fresh youth could giue.

The Eight, Queene Anne, The Ninth, the Royall Charles:
The Tenth Elizabeth (of these) the last
Her Royall Husband: All these, Lucent Pearles
That in their Vertues, such a luster cast,
As all admire, and Love. Who to the Fame
Of these bear Envy, may they end in Shame.


The prominence of Frederick makes this a souvenir for the 1613 royal wedding.

The case of the pewter flying saucers, 1645

The John Rylands library has put up a set of page images from Nehemiah Wallington’s Great marcys continued, or yet God is good to Israel (1645), a compilation by the devout but despair-prone Wallington of a year’s worth of 52 signal mercies extended by God to England.

Wallington seems to have assembled his various collections for biblio-therapeutic purposes, to help him fight off his thoughts of suicide (these were brought on, poor man, by a mixture of doubt about whether he was among the elect, and deaths among his children). The ODNB life by P. S. Seaver, who was also author of Wallington’s world: a puritan artisan in seventeenth-century London (1985) indicates that Wallington would purchase (and transcribe) newsletters in his continued effort to find reassurance in a troubled life.

http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/28567?docPos=2

I was interested in those pages of the Great Marcys (and the John Rylands web-pages can be narrowed to the relevant nine images by a search confined to pages about witchcraft, http://enriqueta.man.ac.uk:8180/luna/servlet/view/search?q==witchcraft%20LIMIT:Manchester~91~1&sort=Reference_Number,Image_Sequence_Number,Page,Title )

in which Wallington transcribes his copy of A true relation of the araignment of thirty witches at Che[lm]sford in Essex, before Judge Conyers, fourteene whereof were hanged on Friday last, July 25. 1645. there being at this time a hundred more in severall prisons in Suffolke and Essex. Setting forth the confessions of the principall of them. Also shewing how the divell had carnall copulation with Rebecca West, a young maid, daughter to one Ann West. And how they bewitched men, women, children, and cattell to death: with many other strange things, the like was never heard of before (1645). This brief pamphlet is actually not on EEBO (yet), but a transcript of sorts can be found on the internet. It does not seem as though Wallington accessed H. F’s more authoritative A true and exact relation of the severall informations, examinations, and confessions of the late witches, arraigned and executed in the county of Essex; I suppose that he gave his limited further context to his transcription from newsletters.

The unknown author of Wallington’s source was not reliable (his “great mistake” in naming a minister’s wife as among the executed women was denounced in another pamphlet). After giving what information he could about Rebecca West, the ‘confessing witch’ among the Chelmsford accused, then about the failed attack by demonic imps upon the minister Master Long (“the power of God was above the devil”), he finally launched into a strange pair of stories. I give them in Wallington’s transcript, with the printed text reading added in square brackets when Wallington varied from his source:

“When these witches came first into ye Gaole at Colchester the Gailer lost his meat often & mistrusted that the witches had got it upon a time bought a [good] shoulder of Mutton & said he would look to the dressing of it himself, but when it was ready the witches [had got it, and all the while the witches] were at supper with it the Gaoler instead of Mutton was eating Hogwash.

After this the Gaoler desiered [desirous to see more of their feats intreated some of] them to show him a little of their cunning thinking to make himself merry for the losse of his meat Whereupon one of the witches bid him goe fetch her foure pewter dishes wherein never water came straitaway went ye gailer to a pewterer and got 4 new dishes and before he brought them to the witch he wet one of them, contrary to the witches direction nevertheless as soon as the witch had them she put her hands & her feet into the foure dishes and upon an Instant was lifted into the ayre with three 3 dishes that were dry, the fo[u]rth falling off was found in a meadow about half a mille off and brought back to prison.”

The interest here in these page-filling yarns is in the first place the suggestion of a witchcraft report veering off (as so often) in the direction of entertainment. The story of the jailer’s shoulder of mutton being magically pilfered, and consumed by the witches while he eats hogwash (without noticing?) sounds very close to the wedding banquet stolen away by magic in The Late Lancashire Witches of 1634. Then, like the conspiratorial Robin, or Doughty, frustrated by the loss of his sirloin in that play, the jailer is willing to see what the witches can do to entertain him by way of recompense for his losses: he is game to test them, maybe try to outwit them.

This transfer of what I take to be a tale of the magical transfer and exchange of food possibly remotely derived from the play into the pamphlet, reminds us that the play had pointedly dramatized the witches’ total loss of the power to cast enchantments after their arrest. But in Essex and Suffolk in 1645 and 1646, Hopkins and Sterne believed that that the women they had arrested (and were torturing) still had dangerous powers, and claimed to witness their threatening ‘imps’.

When I wrote by EMLS piece about transvection, I had not read this pamphlet, it being well off my not exactly infallible radar by not being available on EEBO. This method of flight using early modern flying saucers (well, pewter dishes), was quite new to me. Wallington avidly transcribes it all without considering for a moment the wild unlikelihood: a jailer providing the means for a captive to take flight (literally), and her act of levitation supposedly successful enough to see one of her engines of flight drop off half a mile away. Wasn’t she by then far enough away to disappear? Couldn’t Wallington pause and take stock?

Witches were supposed to sail on water in sieves, eggshells and the like, so to fly through the air on 17^th century lead-heavy pewter makes a kind of analogy, being magically held up by something utterly unlikely. Witches and water don’t go together, and hence, I suppose, the demand that the set of flying dishes be brand new and unwashed, and failure of the one rinsed lifting-unit.

Pewter was quite a political commodity and being talked about at the time. King Charles had obliged its use on all innkeepers, and for all measures, to protect the Cornish tin mines when report came of tin deposits being found in ‘Barbary’ in 1640. The solid royalism of the south-west had then kept tin from out of parliament’s hands throughout the civil war. A rumoured tax based on every householder’s pewterware was indignantly denied by parliament in 1642; aggressive selling abroad of tin by 1646 led ‘I. S. A desirer of his Countries Freedomes’ to declare on behalf of pewter-makers that “not in any City or Towne in England out of Cornewall is one block of Tinne to be bought for any Money”, and complain of the metal being “at this great price”. None of this illuminates its use in witchcraft: I suspect that pewter was just being talked about, and temporarily rare, and thus part of the fun of the story.

Wallington’s ready credulity exhibits a 17^th century witchcraft reader swallowing any unlikely story. That’s interesting in itself, for the pamphlets and other reports about the Essex and Suffolk witches were markedly anxious about what could be believed.

As James Sharpe notes, one of the few (surviving) newsletters to report the 1645 trials (and August executions), The moderate intelligencer for 4th-11th September 1645 takes an ‘equivocal stance’. It’s actually more striking than his quotation makes it sound, asking the pointed questions about just what game the devil can be up to: ‘whence is it that Devils should choose to be conversant with silly Women that know not their right hands from their left, is a great wonder … If the Devil be so wise, and wise to do evil, why should he not choose to deale with wise Men, and great Men? That were the way to make the world his, by which he may do most mischief. Assist a Prince or a Generall in a Cause against True Religion, and the True Professors of Jesus Christ, were a wiser way then to attend old women, and kill hens, Geese, Pigs, Hogs, Calves, and little Children.”

Typically, this anxiety, this perturbed response perhaps prompted by the sheer number of those condemned, is then set aside in the face of the ‘evidence’ - whatever the devil’s motive is, it all happens: “But let it not be disputed, Experience is above all: They will meddle with none but poor old Women: as appears by what we received this day from Bury [St Edmunds], 100 Indictments against such … Divers are condemned, and some executed, and more like to be”. Sharpe quotes the final comment by the London editor (John Dillingham): “Life is precious, and there’s need of great inquisition before it be taken away.”

The tone by Dillingham is exactly like the preface to H. F.’s A true and exact relation pamphlet, eloquent about how the devil has “insnared and drawne these poore silly creatures into these horrid and detestable practices … yet now when the light of the Gospel shineth so gloriously, that such a generation of poore deluded soules (and to such anumber as hath of late been discovered) should be found amongst us, is much more a matter of admiration and astonishment. I doubt not but these things may seem as incredible unto some, as they are matter of admiration unto others”.

There’s clear evidence that H. F. was worried by the witchfinding: he urges that “reasonable men be perswaded not too much (as is usuall) to swell with indignation, or to be puffed with impatience … but soberly, modestly and discreetly, so far forth be contented to pursue the triall and just way of their discoverie.”

H. F. finally comes to the question of transvection (and perhaps) bodily metamorphosis:

“The greatest doubt and question will be, whether it be in the power of the Devill to perform such asportation and locall translation of the bodies of the Witches; it seemeth in reason a thing whereunto the Devill is unable.” (‘Asportation’ means ‘carrying off’.) As usual, the Bible is cited, and Satan carrying Christ to the pinnacle; H. F. sagely concludes that all apparent instances of flight and transformation are “but seeming and juggling transmutations of the Devill”.

The Murder at the White Horse Inn, Chelmsford, 1654.

My blog here has been a stranded whale since before Christmas. Last term precluded any extras: teaching, marking and being admissions tutor took up all my time.

Still, I hope to start picking things back up a little, and my post today gives an example of laudable persistence. Prior to a pre-Easter trip into Suffolk, I have been looking at a few Suffolk-related witchcraft pamphlets, and also happened on A True relation of a horrid murder committed upon the person of Thomas Kidderminster, of Tupsley in the county of Hereford, Gent., at the White-Horse Inn in Chelmsford, in the county of Essex, in the month of April, 1654.

This pamphlet was not published until 1688, and it relates events that began in 1654, but came to light only in 1662-3. Quite why the pamphlet appears so late is a mystery, a mystery deepened by the condition of the EEBO copy, which does look like an editor or censor’s hand has gone through it, marking passages for deletion.

Thomas Kidderminster was a man who first lost all his inheritance, and then was brutally killed for the fortune he had managed to make through his own exertions. His father, who had re-married, died when Thomas was 11: Thomas’ step-mother then re-married, and proceeded to divest her first husband’s son and heir of his estate.

Kidderminster gave up on all this, and set out to make his own way: he became a steward to the Bishop of Ely, came to own land, and lent money too. Boosted by this, he married, and, spotting a bad debtor in the making up (Sir Miles Sandys, who had speculated ruinously on reclaiming fenlands) in Ely, decided that he wanted to relocate his resources elsewhere, and that he would pull out of all his Ely properties, and reclaim what debts he could from Sir Miles.

After making his local transactions, Kidderminster changed £600 of silver for gold in Cambridge. He then faced a trip to London, and, considering the main route more likely to be dangerous, opted to take what is described in the text as the by-road through Chelmsford. As he had on other occasions, he stopped at the White Horse Inn in Chelmsford (which is still there). This was at some date in April 1654. He never arrived back in London, where his pregnant wife was awaiting his return.

Mistress Anne Kidderminster gave birth in August 1654. She made inquiries about her husband, but was hardly placed to retrace his likely journey and ask around (though it is clear that there would have been plenty of local gossip if she had inquired in Chelmsford). Her husband was variously reported to be in Amsterdam, Cork, and Jamaica. She found means to have inquiry made in all these places. Nothing was to be heard of him. Obliged to fend for herself, Anne Kidderminster became a wet nurse in Gloucestershire.

What had become of her husband remained a mystery. Then, one day in 1662 or 1663, her sister was reading ‘the then News-Pamphlet’ in her company, and suddenly made the dramatic announcement ‘ Sister, here is news of your Husband’.

What had happened was that the White Horse had changed owners at the death of the Innkeeper, who had been a man called Sewell. The new owner had decided to replace a fence between his ground and his neighbours with a clay wall. During the necessary digging, what was initially taken to be a brown bowl was unearthed: this was quickly identified as a skull, with an ominous hole in its left side, and the rest of the skeleton was soon found. The body had been crammed into the grave, bent double. At a local inquest, where the surviving Mrs Sewell had been inconclusively questioned, Sir Orlando Bridgeman had decided that the only way forward, to find the identity of the victim, was to place an account in the ‘Publick Diurnal’. It was this account Mistress Kidderminster’s sister had read. The account in the newspaper apparently suggested that the victim might have been buried ten years ago.

It was put to Anne Kidderminster by her friends that she might give up her quest: but she apparently had visions of her late husband, ‘in the habit he usually wore, looking very sternly upon her; but one night, as she lay in Bed, her Husband appear’d to her in a White Sheet, with Streaks of Blood upon it’ . So she set off towards Chelmsford with a male companion. En route, they were benighted at Rumford, some 15 miles short, but there she met a Mary Mattocks, wife of a sawyer, who was there on the merest chance: she had forgotten to purchase a piece of chalk, without which her sawyer husband could not work. On this trip back to Rumford, she met Anne Kidderminster, who asked her about Chelmsford, and than about the White Horse. Mary Mattocks has plenty to say (we learn later that she had overheard the chief witness to the events describe them to her aunt): that the present Innkeeper there is a good man, but the previous one, Sewell, ought to have been hanged, ‘for there was certainly a gentleman Murder’d in the House.’. The hostler at the inn she also accuses of involvement, and he actually now lives in Rumford. But a messenger sent to him says too much, and he refuses to come to meet Mistress Kidderminster.

She is sent on to Chelmsford by her eager informant, with the suggestion that she stay with her aunt, a Mistress Shute, at the sign of the Cock: but on arrival, Mistress Shute has since died of the plague, so Mistress Kidderminster goes to the White Horse Inn, and talks to the new innkeeper, Master Turner. Turner has a good reputation, but his Inn doesn’t: for business reasons, he is keen to have this case of the unknown murder victim cleared up. He suggests that they leave the back way, and go straight to the widow Sewell’s. This they do, and the widow is at first vociferous about Turner causing trouble for her, but learning who Anne Kidderminster is, will say no more.

Mistress Kidderminster stays the night at the White Horse, in the room adjacent to the one where her husband had been murdered. She is so frightened at this prospect that she has the maid sleep in the same bed with her. Unsurprisingly, Anne alone hears ‘a great Noise in the next Room, which went out into the Gallery, where something seem’d to fall with that violence, that she thought the Room shook, and afterwards came to her Chamber-door, and lifted up the Latch’. All the landlord can say is that it has been ‘such things had been often heard before’.

In his efforts to clear the reputation of his Inn, Turner had had the local JP’s issue an arrest warrant against Sewell and his wife. Sewell died suddenly after this warrant was issued, after a spell of walking about ‘like a man who had been craz’d in his understanding’, during which he had very nearly confessed everything to an old civil war comrade (from the parliamentary army), who had warned him against saying any more, for if he said more than he had, he would be obliged to denounce him. The local word was that Sewell had been poisoned by his wife to silence him permanently.

Mistress Kidderminster now shifted her inquiries to the former hostler, and man with the splendid fenland name of Moses Drayne: when she gets to Rumford, he is pointed out to her as he stands in a glover’s shop, and she follows him to the One Bell Inn. There she confronted him about the man who left his horse behind at the White Horse Inn. Was it her husband? She speaks of the victim’s clothes, which seem to correspond, but Kidderminster’s grey satin cap did not correspond to a cap Drayne says was black. She says that her husband’s cap was black. Drayne’s face (well, why fight a cliché?) drains of colour, and he falls silent, nor will he meet her eyes. But he tells her to go to the village of Kilden, and ask for Mary Kendall, who had been a servant in the Inn ‘at the time of the Gentleman’s being there’. A warrant for Drayne’s arrest, at Mary Mattock’s evidence is issued, but forgotten about.

Mistress Kidderminster does two things: she finds out her late husband’s manservant in Ely, to have confirmation of the clothes he was wearing at the time of his journey. She then finds Mary Kendall, who has already been questioned by Justices who have bound her over: Kendall refuses to say anything. Kendall later jumps bail, and is only rediscovered by the merest chance: the coroner on the Chelmsford case is out riding near the house of Kendall’s brother, when a carrier delivers a letter from her. This enables her to be traced to the Walnut Tree in Mile-End Green. Mary is taken to Newgate, where her fellow prisoners assure her that her flight will convict her. She decides to tell all she knows.

At this point, the second plague victim in this narrative: the widow Sewell dies. But the arrest warrant on Drayne is remembered and finally carried out. In prison, he says enigmatically that ‘he fears nothing but the dyer’. Mary Kendall’s story when she tells it is dramatic, and completely true, if likely to be a bit self-serving. She was maidservant at the White Horse, and saw Kidderminster in his room, talked to him, folded him a sleeping cap from a napkin. In her presence, he (foolish man) entrusted his cloak bag with £600 in gold in it to his landlord.

She was sent by her mistress to sleep with the younger children, ‘that being not her usual Lodging’, and locked in there. Between one and two in the morning, she heard ‘a great fall of something, that it shook the Room where she lay’. When she got up the next morning, her master, mistress, and the hostler were in front of the fire drinking. Neither they nor the Sewell’s two daughters (Betty and Priss) seemed to have been to bed. She is told that the gentleman had left, leaving her a groat as a tip, but her suggestion that she should then go and tidy the room is turned down: the room, she is told, has already been set to rights. This room then stayed locked for eight to nine weeks. Eventually there came a day when her master sent her to fetch him his cloak. In his wardrobe were garments she recognised at the gentleman’s, and the cloak bag. Mary Kendall said that, taking the incriminating clothes downstairs with her, she had directly challenged her mistress, had been bloodily attacked by her, until finally her master had told her to be quiet. Quite obviously she took £20 from her master as hush money (but Kendall subsequently denied having received any money at all). Moses Drayne the hostler, Kendall asserts, took £60 from the £600 and the victim’s clothes, which he sent to a dyer in Mousam to be dyed black. The dyer had asked him why he is doing this, as the clothes were of a ‘better colour’ as they were, but Drayne asserted that he does not like the grey. The sudden prosperity of both the Sewells and Moses Drayne is recollected in detail.

Mary Mattocks in her evidence confirms Kendall’s: three women met while drying washing in the church yard, and she heard Kendall tell the whole story to her aunt Shute. This was shortly after the beating she had received from the Innkeeper’s wife. Mattocks testifies that she heard Kendall tell her aunt Shute about how her master had pulled his wife and the struggling Kendall apart, and gave the latter £20 hush money. Shute advised Kendall to give the money back, for the £20 might hang her in twenty year’s time. But clearly this was a large enough sum to purchase some kind of silence.

Brought to court, Drayne was challenged to pick up the early modern ‘Exhibit A’, Kidderminster’s battered skull: he trembles so much he can scarcely do it. A further tale is told of a boy servant at the fatal inn: Sewell had him tied to a bed post and was whipping him mercilessly when Kendall entered the room. The boy cried at this point that ‘It was well for him she came, or else his Master would have murder’s him, as they did the Gentleman, when he blooded him into the Hogs-Pail’. The boy also said ‘He had heard that the Gentleman was knock’d on the side of the Haed with a Pole-ax, and afterwards his Throat was cut by his Mistriss, with the help of her Daughter Betty’. This boy is not in court: somehow the Sewells had shipped him off to Barbados for spreading his story round town. But Mistress Kidderminster, directed by the coroner, finds the Merchant in Billingsgate to whom the boy was sold (sold? – that’s what it says).

Neighbours are brought into court, who claim they heard cries during the night of the murder, but were fobbed off by the Sewells when they went round in the morning to inquire if all was well. The local washerwoman had been asked (it is also reported), if, after the night of the murder, she had cleaned any linen from the Inn which was ‘more bloody than ordinary’ (I suppose that blood stains from preparing meat are implied. The boy’s words imply that Kidderminster’s blood was drained from his body in the same way that a pig has its throat cut and is hanged up to bleed. This could have been very messy, if done indoors). The washerwoman denied this vehemently, asserting that she had not seen any such thing, and saying that ‘she might rot alive’ if this story was in any way untrue. The generally factual narrative veers once more towards a more 16^th century sort of story of how providence, though not always seen, works out its mysterious course: ‘and so it hapned; for a little time after her Bowels began to rot away, and she became detestably loathsome till she died’.

A local farmer testifies that he had stopped at the Inn after selling barley. He had £20 on his person: he put furniture against the door of his room: and heard Sewell and Drayne come and try the door in the middle of the night…

Drayne is sentenced to death for his part in the murder. In the usual bundling together of cases in a seventeenth century court, a woman sentenced to death for having two husbands (so it says) challenges the hostler to tell the truth, and save Kendall, who has been imprisoned ‘during pleasure’: he confirms that her story was true, and that she had no part in the murder. But then his wife appears and shuts him up: he is subsequently silent even at the gallows. The two daughters of Sewell, who have both Kendall’s evidence and Drayne’s partial confession against them, were also arrested and tried, but the Grand Jury decided that there is not enough evidence to convict them.

After her success in Chelmsford, the widow Kidderminster remarried, and tried to recover her husband’s inheritance in Herefordshire on behalf of their daughter. . Here, she was less fortunate, even though between the years 1670 and 1680, she had ‘three ejectments brought at Common law, and three Bills exhibited in the High Court of Chancery’ against the surviving son of the usurping couple: he asserts that the property had been justly purchased.

The 1688 pamphlet is interesting for its date: why then, and not before? I suppose Mistress Kidderminster did her best to recover the Herefordshire properties, failed, and then found a sympathetic ear, and told her whole story. More remarkable still is the way the EEBO copy seems to have been in the hands of an editor or censor. This reader crosses out whole passages. The first encounter between Mistress Kidderminster and Mary Mattocks is crossed out, and the account of the widow hearing the bumps in the night when she stays at the White Horse. Also, he firmly deletes from the text the names of the various JP’s and Judges that the narrative mentions, as though a proper regard for the legal profession keeps the personal names of the chief officers of the law out of mere pamphlets. Conversely, a Christian name is written in, and then there are an intriguing looking set of annotations which disappear into the crease of the physical book, and so cannot possibly be read on the page image off the microfilm.

What do we learn from all this? The toughness of 17^th century women, their ramshackle legal processes, that boys could be sold, that women dried washing in churchyards, what the price of silence was (and how limited a silence could be so purchased).

"They feel least cold and pain who plunge at once into it" - Abraham Cowley faces up to a New Year

Two melancholy New Year poems. Cowley indulges his usual affectation of being afflicted by love, though he’s a better poet when he addresses getting older, the plangent theme of the second stanza, and the very rational fears of life simply getting sadder (stanza three) – “uncleanly poverty”, as the poem puts it with unsparing accuracy, might arrive in the New Year. The final stanza turns round on the whole endeavour of trying to look forward, imagining what misery it would be if we could look forward at all. The poem finally resolves to just plunge into the New Year – the second stanza was about having no choice but to do otherwise.

Abraham Cowley, ‘To the New Year’

1.

Great Janus, who dost sure my Mistris view
With all thine eyes, yet think’st them all too few:
If thy Fore-face do see
No better things prepar’d for me
Then did thy Face behind,
If still her Breast must shut against me be
(For 'tis not Peace that Temple’s Gate does bind)
Oh let my Life, if thou so many deaths a-coming find,
With thine old year its voyage take
Born down, that stream of Time which no return can make.

2.

Alas, what need I thus to pray?
Th’old avaritious year
Whether I would or no, will bear
At least a part of Me away.
His well-horst Troops, the Months, and Days, and Hours,
Though never anywhere they stay,
Make in their passage all their Prey.
The Months, Days, Hours that march i'th'Rear can find
Nought of Value left behind.
All the good Wine of Life our drunken youth devours;
Sourness and Lees, which to the bottom sink,
Remain for latter years to Drink.
Until some one offended with the taste
The Vessel breaks, and out the wretched Reliques run at last.

3.

If then, young year, thou needs must come,
(For in Times fruitful womb
The Birth beyond its Time can never tarry,
Nor ever can miscarry)
Choose thy Attendants well; for 'tis not Thee
We fear, but 'tis thy Company,
Let neither Loss of Friends, or Fame, or Liberty,
Nor pining Sickness, nor tormenting Pain,
Nor Sadness, nor uncleanly Poverty,
Be seen among thy Train,
Nor let thy Livery be
Either black Sin, or gaudy vanity;
Nay, if thou lov’st me, gentle Year,
Let not so much as Love be there:
Vain fruitless Love, I mean; for, gentle Year,
Although I fear,
There’s of this Caution little need,
Yet, gentle Year, take heed
How thou dost make
Such a Mistake.
Such Love I mean alone
As by thy cruel Predecessors has been shown,
For though I’have too much cause to doubt it,
I fain would try for once if Life can Live without it.

4.

Into the Future Times why do we pry,
And seek to Antedate our Misery?
Like Jealous men why are we longing still
To See the thing which only seeing makes an Ill ?
'Tis well the Face is vail’d ; for 'twere a Sight
That would even Happiest men affright,
And something still they’d spy that would destroy
The past and Present Joy.
In whatsoever Character
The Book of Fate is writ,
'Tis well we understand not it -
We should grow Mad with little Learning there.
Upon the Brink of every Ill we did Foresee,
Undecently and foolishly
We should stand shivering, and but slowly venter
The Fatal Flood to enter,
Since willing, or unwilling we must do it,
They feel least cold and pain who plunge at once into it.

Tennyson’s uncanny poem has far less of mind and resolution in it: no plunging forward into the future for him. He can’t believe in the spirit he claims one can hear, but then again, neither can he personify with Cowley’s utter lack of restraint, so it’s just a spirit who might be ‘Time’, or ‘Death’, or the Old Year, senile and demented. The heavily aspirated refrain makes anyone speaking the poem breathe out to their last bit of breath. The sunflower, the now immobile former heliotrope no longer follows the sun, but looks only down into the earth, Hamlet-like. The suggestion of the coffin below in the ‘fading edges of box beneath’ in this ill-tended parterre, and hanging on syntactically at the end of it all, ‘the year’s last rose’ – all these things could not be bettered. Wild, melancholy, indulgent Tennyson! The flowers just die, or have been hanged like some innocent in the 19^th century penal system. A hollyhock produces masses of seed: “the seed is of a quick spirit and cometh up the sixth day” (if you collect and sow in March) notes Stephen Blake in his The compleat gardeners practice of 1664. So does the sunflower. But Tennyson resists all the suggestions of a natural cycle, the old flowers have their own sexton preparing them for their graves.

I

A spirit haunts the year’s last hours
Dwelling amid these yellowing bowers:
To himself he talks;
For at eventide, listening earnestly,
At his work you may hear him sob and sigh
In the walks;
Earthward he boweth the heavy stalks
Of the mouldering flowers:
Heavily hangs the broad sunflower
Over its grave i’the earth so chilly;
Heavily hangs the hollyhock,
Heavily hangs the tiger-lily.

II

The air is damp, and hush’d, and close,
As a sick man’s room when he taketh repose
An hour before death;
My very heart faints and my whole soul grieves
At the moist rich smell of the rotting leaves,
And the breath
Of the fading edges of box beneath,

And the year’s last rose.

Heavily hangs the broad sunflower
Over its grave i’the earth so chilly;
Heavily hangs the hollyhock,
Heavily hangs the tiger-lily.

I couldn't find a Tennysonian garden today, but took my photograph in some river sallows near Hambleden.