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.

Protestant meets Catholic on the way to Smithfield

The metynge of Doctor Barons and doctor Powell at Paradise gate [and] of theyr communications bothe drawen to Smithfylde fro[m] the towar. The one burned for heresye as the papistes do saye truly and the other quartered for popery and all within one houre (1548).

So, two imminent martyrs meet on their way to Smithfield: ‘Doctor Barons’ is Robert Barnes(c.1495–1540), a reformer, and Doctor Powell is Edward Powell (c.1478–1540), a Catholic priest (since beatified). The sorry occasion was, effectively, the brand new Church of England declaring itself open for business, and ready to do the business, when on ‘30 July 1540, Barnes, Garrard, and Jerome were taken to Smithfield, where they were burnt at the same time that three Catholics, Thomas Abell, Edward Powell, and Richard Fetherstone, were hanged, drawn, and quartered for treason’ (from the ODNB life of Barnes).

Barnes got himself to the stake for knowing the wrong person (his protector and patron Thomas Cromwell had fallen), and being in the wrong place at the wrong time. His Church of England credentials were apparently impeccable, as he asserted the real presence of Christ in the Eucharist, unlike many reformers. Even so, because of his present and former associates, he was chosen as a protestant ‘heretic’ for this nicely symmetrical auto da fé. Powell could not accept the Act of Supremacy, and died as Sir Thomas More had done before him.

These nuances, however, are lost or ignored in the verse pamphlet about their meeting. The anonymous writer tantalized by having a good basic idea: his work, delivered in tumbling verse, is cast as a dialogue between the two doomed men. But an exploration of the ironies of a shared fate in the two different victims was outside his range. The publication date is a minor mystery: the work is mentioned by the ODNB as appearing first in 1540, but it’s only in EEBO from a 1548 text (the work refers to Edward VI, so this clearly is the proper date for this particular edition in EEBO):

“then wold they quicly open the gate

of true doctrine which of late

king henry did bring to light

god save kig Edwards noble grace

& send his highness tyme and psace

to continewe forth his godly trace…”

Despite the difficulties John Foxe would later have (says the ODNB life) with Barnes’ actual beliefs, in the verse pamphlet, he is just a protestant martyr, and Powell is his enemy, a ‘papist’.

‘The one burned for heresye as the papistes do saye truly and the other quartered for popery and all within one houre…’ says the title, but the promise of that oddly floating ‘truly’ (between ‘these people truly did call him a heretic’ and ‘they called him a heretic, and it was true’) isn’t sustained.

The interest of the pamphlet is perhaps interest by default: in the utter refusal of nuance, irony, the way the author’s mind cannot perceive inconsistency, and (of course) the selectiveness of the human sympathy. How the three Catholics and the three imputedly heretical Protestants regarded on another on that day 470 years ago can only be imagined: this author didn’t try. Barnes, who had tried his best to land an acceptable recantation, must have felt he was being burned despite holding exactly the same beliefs as his persecutors. In the verse account, the author seems to forget that Powell was also there to be hacked to pieces. The two men argue, with Powell denouncing Barnes as an “abhominable hereticke” and saying that if he carries on abusing the church, he will leave:

“do no longer rayle

for els I will not fayle

to leave thee here alone…”

But this was hardly an option; Powell’s “holi church” was no longer in power, the two men were both there to die; Barnes to be burned as heretic by the King he is made to praise for having opened the gate of ‘true doctrine’, Powell suffering as a traitor.

The stark black letter type of the pamphlet, and the way some of the terse early Tudor spelling looks more modern than high-Elizabethan habits of spelling, contribute a little to the placard-like directness of the text. This author just did not do subtle: his ‘papist’ accuses his ‘Christian’ of ‘railing’ (abuse against the true church), and the text has Barnes do just that, sometimes with macaronic touches:

“o thou popish asse

shall I let passe

the prelates iniquitas…”

Would a man facing the stake refer quite so brutally to that form of death as being ‘fried’? The author doesn’t care:

“it is wel knowne and now espied

by my bloude and other that fryed

in Smithefild god’s word hath tried…”

Finally, Barnes is given a rant against what Catholicism instills in its believers, which:

“make us beleve on stoks and stons

drunken blockes and drye bones

to be all helpers for the nones

for our wicked behaviour

holly bred and holly water

with red letters written in paper

and to the cake as to our maker

to trust they did us teach…”

This comes on [Sig. B2v] – back over the leaf on [Sig. B2], the printer put into a blank space a curiously insouciant note:

“A faut escaping on the other side of this page the iii. line for drunken blockes rede d[ ] kes bloud”

You’d have thought that rather than squeeze this into the forme, it would have been better to correct the type already set. It seems as though Barnes was meant to decry the real presence in the Eucharist, something he actually did believe in. An early owner has written ‘make good’ in the [Sig. B2v] margin. Obviously the compositor setting the passage leapt mentally from ‘stocks’ to ‘blocks’.

But how curiously unbothered! This was the very essence of difference between the shades of faith, but the error is not put straight, even in what seems to be a reprint eight years on.

In fact, the author is as careless about accuracy as the Bishops burning Barnes as a heretic. Perhaps in that sub-title the pamphlet the author really wanted to write peeps out: “The one burned for heresye … and the other quartered for popery and all within one houre”. But an honestly brutal relish at the speed with which these wretched men were dispatched disappeared in the clumsy attempt to re-make Robert Barnes into a different kind of hero.

Hardly a festive season posting, this one. Again!

Three score and twelve?

Just a short one for St Lucy’s Day. This is the 1538 Sarum primer, and there she is on her Saint’s Day, ‘saynt lucy vyrgyn’ on ‘xii i’.

But I was more amused by the verses under the woodcut (itself not concerned to end the year with a cheerful Yuletide, but depicting a dying man receiving the last rites from a tonsured priest. An acolyte holds up the service book, a young woman in a fur-edged gown prays, and one has to concede that the persective of the four poster bed has gone wrong, so that they are in front of it rather than on or beside it). These are the verses:

The yere by December taketh his ende

and so dooth man at thre score and twelve.

Nature with aege wyll hym on message sende

The tyme is come that he must go him selve.

‘Three score and twelve’?! This seems a little high-handed in the face of the much cited witness of King David (as they would have considered it) in Psalm 90:

⁹ For all our days are passed away in thy wrath: we spend our years as a tale that is told.

¹⁰ The days of our years are threescore years and ten; and if by reason of strength they be fourscore years, yet is their strength labour and sorrow; for it is soon cut off, and we fly away.

¹¹ Who knoweth the power of thine anger? even according to thy fear, so is thy wrath.

¹² So teach us to number our days, that we may apply our hearts unto wisdom.

I gave the whole context rather than the single verse, because verse 9 reminded me of Macbeth, the text which also ha:

“Threescore and ten I can remember well:
Within the volume of which time I have seen
Hours dreadful and things strange.”

Back in the Sarum primer, the two year extension in ‘twelve’ is the first B rhyme in the ABAB quatrain, so hardly looks forced by having to find a rhyme (‘ten’ anyone could rhyme to, after all). Perhaps it stemmed, rather, from wanting to tie the life of man more closely to the twelve months.

I chased ‘threescore and ten’ for a while: into Thomas Hardcastle’s Christian geography and arithmetick (1674), reflecting lugubriously “that our Dayes are numbred does denote the shortness of them; Eternity cannot be numbred, what ever is in God is incomprehensible and innumerable, the Dayes of God are not to be numbred. We say he is a Poor man that can number his Flock, that can tell how many sheep and cattel he has, the Dayes of a Man are soon told they are quickly reckoned up, he that hath but a little skill in Arithmetick, may cast up the number.”

I liked this epigram about desire outliving performance in Henry Parrot’s Cures for the itch (1626):

Old Limpus faine would live & see good days,
Fully attain'd to threescore years and ten,
Who though from wenching much his strength decays
Yet has he will as well as youngest men.

Richard Steele published a comprehensive guide to the topic in A discourse concerning old-age tending to the instruction, caution and comfort of aged persons (1688):

“The Antediluvians lived eight or nine hundred years. Those which were born after the Flood, did scarce live half so long; for Arphaxad, who was born after it, lived but 440 years, Gen 11. 13. And in the time of Peleg his Grand-child, the Age of man was shrunk half in half shorter; he lived only 239 years, Gen. 11. 21. And in the Age of Nahor, great Grand-child to Peleg, it fell to 150. Gen. 11. 25. And so the ordinary term of mans life was by degrees curtail'd, that in Moses time, the dayes of his years were reckon'd at threescore years and ten…”

And the formula appears reliably often in comic drama, as when Old Gerald announces his plans to marry a fifteen year old in that excellent farceur Edward Ravenscroft’s The Anatomist:
OR, The Sham Doctor (1697):

Martin.

No Sir, if you had been contemporary with the Patriarchs, you had been counted now a very youth, but in this short-liv'd age we live in, Sir, you are, as one may say, worn to the stumps.

Old Gerald.

Hold your prating; Threescore is mans ripe Age.

Martin.

Yes, and his rotten Age too; but you, if I mistake not, are threescore and ten.

Old Gerald.

No more of Age: 'Tis a thing never to be inquired into, but when you are buying Horses.

Martin.

How? Not in Marriage Sir.

Old Gerald.

Not if a man be very rich.

Ichabod!

I have ended the teaching term with a session on Donne’s Anniversaries, a trial of endurance alleviated for the students only by a dole of sherry and mince pie. Preparing the session led me to look for works of the same kind, and so I found my way to the mournful (sorry!) The honour of vertue. Or the monument erected by the sorowfull husband, and the epitaphes annexed by learned and worthy men, to the immortall memory of that worthy gentle-woman Mrs Elizabeth Crashawe (1620).

The situation here was all too typical: a godly young wife, dying in giving birth to her first child. But it wasn’t, in the main, the anniversaries of Donne that I was reminded of, but his verse epistle ‘To Mr Tilman, after he had taken orders’, with its candid address to the social status of the clergyman in a society which, while officially giving the church the greatest respect, evidently never forgot birth and social rank when it came to the individual cleric.

For Mistress Crashaw was a ‘gentlewoman’, as the memorial pamphlet says in its title. The little publication, its type carefully set out in places like the carving of a memorial inscription, can be thought of as a substitute for the canopied tomb her status would have secured, had she not married down, to a clergyman, a widower of twice her years.

The pamphlet repeated mentions this signal act of virtue. The funeral sermon of Doctor James Ussher (no less) is paraphrased, and it enumerated her virtues:

“2. Being yong, faire, comely, brought up as a Gentlewoman, in musicke, dancing, and like to be of great estate, and therefore much sought after by yong gallants, and rich heires, and good jointures offered, yet she chose a divine, twise her own age. 3 Her extraordinary love and almost strange affection to her husband, expressed in such excellent and well tempered passages of kindnesse, as is too rare to find in one of her age, person, and parts…”

…. “6. her husbands discretion being questioned by some, for such a choice; and it being the common conceit, that by this marriage they had lost a good Preacher: contrariwise her comeliness in attire, and excellencie of behaviour graced him everywhere; and her zeale in religion, her kindnesse to him, her care of his health, and her honorable estimation of his profession, encouraged him to do more than he ever he did…”

Or, among the elegies, my near namesake ‘R. Boothe of Cantab’ (wrong University, though) similarly cannot quite get over the choice she made:

“Religion was her soules delight,

Good workes her Recreations were

To’th’poor as free as aire and light,

That shedd their comforts everywhere.

Young, faire, wise, comely, yet refus’d

Both youth and braveries golden Rayes

And dubble her owne age she chus’d,

With a Divine to spend her dayes…”

Altogether, the tributes paid to Elizabeth Crashaw give an impression of the godly rallying round. William Crashaw the husband had been, rather hearteningly, chosen by the ‘Rara avis in terris’ (‘CW of the Inner Temple’, writing in Latin and English, actually uses the Juvenalian phrase). God had taken her away, and maybe there’s a slight insecurity behind their effusions – the very best go first, they affirm, anxious not to suggest that those whose marriages flout the social rank God had seen fit to place them in are also susceptible to an early departure.

But in the end the longest elegy in the book did look like the work of a writer who had read the Anniversaries. The italicized first couplet in the quotation below is repeated a later points, as though Donne’s ‘She, she is dead, when thou knowest this’ couplets were being imitated. The poem is impersonal, unsigned, but it might conceivably be by her husband: its extra length makes it prominent, and the writer appears really worried about his grief. Here are some extracts, with a few comments:

‘An elegie, or mournefull meditation upon the uncertainty, and vanity of this life, occasioned upon the untimely and deplorable death of that thrice worthy Gentlewoman Mistress Elizabeth Crashawe: of whom the world was not worthy.’

O Earth, Earth Earth, O all mortality,

Know God is just, and thou mere vanity:

Fooles talke of fortune, lotts, misgiving, chance,

Fooles talke of dreames, and of the fayryes dance:

Trippings of horses, bleeding at the nose,

Itching of elbowes, and rat eaten hose

Tingling of eares, and crosseing of a Hare,

Sparkling of fire, and changing of the ayre…

~ an unexpected opening. The author is talking about all the things we foolishly attend to instead of hearing the truth. I suppose having your hose eaten by rats was as good a token of misfortune as any, but I’d never heard of it before.

He turns on astrologers:

Fooles cast their figures, and believe that true,

And only that which their lewd schem doth shew…

Andhe moralises about our propensity for false worship:

Nothing in earth so deepe, in heaven so high,

But serves for some kinde of Idolatry…

The central consolatory part of the elegy depends on the bare comforts of a cliché:

Oh learne the best go first, the worse remaine

Here rests that Rare One, whose life and death do show

The truth of this to all, that troth will know

Her yeares so few, her virtues were so many…

Her time was short, the longer is her rest,

God takes them soonest whom he loveth best:

For he that’s borne too day, and dyes to morrow

Looseth some dayes of joy, but yeares of sorrow…

A more interesting passage follows, in which the writer expresses his feeling that more of the good are dyin - ‘good Prince Henry’ initiated this unfortunate trend in 1612:

Aske and observe: observe with admiration,

Since good Prince Henry great hope of our nation:

Chang’d this dull kingdom for a shining crown

How many which then stood, are now falne downe

Observe not that alone but this as most,

What they have beene, which since this land hath lost.

What they were like to prove, what need may be,

Of such, in some points which this land may see…

~ the language falters, the writer hardly seems able to say outright what he really means, but the gist of it is clear enough: God is punishing the nation by taking away those the nation needs. There’s some political point at the back of this, one suspects. He continues - and in the following lines his own consolations, as offered earlier in the elegy, are now rejected

Happy those soules (per’anter some may say)

Whose happy lott was first to flie away:

I say not so, I wish it were not so,

Sorrow and griefe may utter too much woe…

Again, he seems disconcerted to be out on a limb like this, and apologetically offers his theory as to what is going on. The hand of God is in these deaths, and that means the worst, God’s anger (he hopes he is wrong):

But sure I am, Gods scourges there are shaken

Whence in short time so many good are taken

And yet it may be I doe err in this,

I thinke I may and pray my feares may misse…

William Crashaw’s little volume in tribute to his beloved young wife, who so cruelly lost her life in delivering one, ends with words assigned to her from the here-beyond, and a return of the usual consolation. It’s in three distiches:

‘HER Answere to them all.’

It is not I that dye, I doe but leave an Inne,

Where harbored was with me, against my will, much sinne:

It is not I that dye, I doe but now begin,

Into aeternal life by death to enter in.

Why mourne you then for me deere Husband, friends and kin

Lament you when I lose, why weepe you, when I win.

Even so, all was not well with this little community of the godly. James Ussher, soon to be made a bishop by the King, had preached at the funeral taking a text from the first book of Samuel, chapter 4 (his text was verse 20, but the context would have been important and understood):

¹⁷And the messenger answered and said, Israel is fled before the Philistines, and there hath been also a great slaughter among the people, and thy two sons also, Hophni and Phinehas, are dead, and the ark of God is taken.

¹⁸And it came to pass, when he made mention of the ark of God, that he fell from off the seat backward by the side of the gate, and his neck brake, and he died: for he was an old man, and heavy. And he had judged Israel forty years.

¹⁹And his daughter in law, Phinehas' wife, was with child, near to be delivered: and when she heard the tidings that the ark of God was taken, and that her father in law and her husband were dead, she bowed herself and travailed; for her pains came upon her.

²⁰And about the time of her death the women that stood by her said unto her, Fear not; for thou hast born a son. But she answered not, neither did she regard it.

²¹And she named the child Ichabod, saying, The glory is departed from Israel: because the ark of God was taken…

The text chosen was perhaps gloomy enough to have been offensive in anyone else but a revered scholar-cleric, though the godly present in such large numbers at the funeral (“At which Sermon and Funerall was present one of the greatest Assemblies that was ever seene in mans memorie at the burial of any private person. This Text, His Sermon, and that Spectacle, made many a heavy heart, and such a Churchfull of weeping eyes as have beene seldome seen”) would have known their Bibles well enough to understand beyond the text its general context, the lament that ‘the glory is departed’.

I am fairly sure that one could now guess the name of the posthumous child: it would surely have been ‘Ichabod Crashaw’.

By hippopotamus across the Irish sea: Francis Kynaston's 'Leoline and Sydanis'

My tutor back at college was C. F. Williamson, and he has come back into my mind this week, for I recall that Colin wrote his doctoral thesis on Sir Francis Kynaston, whose Leoline and Sydanis, a romance of the amorous adventures of princes (1642) I have been reading at odd moments.

This rather pleasingly silly verse romance was published by Kynaston in the year he died: he half apologises that “being old and stricken in yeares, [he] doth write of love and such idle devices; he entring into his second, and worst childhood may of course be excused.”

What is it like? In the first place, it’s like a daft Caroline theatre romance cast in verse: princes in love, worries about honour and reputation, magic by a ligatory point to make the male prince incapable of sex on his wedding night, nocturnal consultations with druids, girls dressed as page boys, a masque (described at length by someone who had clearly seen them performed), a bed trick, a very creaky dea ex machine.

As a piece of verse writing, it is in places so indebted to Marlowe’s ‘Hero and Leander’ as to suggest an older writer’s affectionate tribute to the poet he had enjoyed most. The manner of narrative is Spenserian, a Spenser without the allegory, but the characters travel from place to place, and spend a lot of time in ‘Erinland’. Kynaston describes his poeticized Ireland with every sign of having read up on the early Irish in commentators like Spenser (?) and Campion.

It is what 19^th century critics would have called a ‘rather warm’ work, with an enthusiastic account of sex, and of sexual impairment miraculously lifted. The narrative leaps into bed with its protagonists, and describes the action. Prince Leoline, his manhood restored after a piece of malificium versus hanc has been lifted, comes nine times aloft on Sydanis, who has bed-tricked her way there. The detail slips over from a satyr in Spenser: something only to be expected in a satyr perhaps looks a little indecorous in the Prince. Nine times is hardly easy nonchalance, is it?

Another nostalgia, alongside that for Elizabethan authors and the desire for former potency, is for Queen Elizabeth herself, whose ‘pacification’ of ‘Erinland’ is brought in as a prophecy: an Irish princess, Mellefant, is all set to marry the British Leoline and be in at the start of Tudor ancestry. She tells her new British suitor that:

it is foretold in prophesies,
Who writ on barkes of trees, a mayden Queene
Hereafter Erinland shall civilize,
And quite suppresse those Salvage rites have beene
Amongst us, as they never had beene seene:
This Queene must of the Brittish bloud descend,
Whose fame unto the worlds poles shall extend...

But Kynaston has to drop this: the match simply cannot go ahead, for the Prince has so resoundingly consummated his previously frustrated marriage to the bed-tricking Princess Sydanis, that he is already married beyond alteration.

Another thing impedes Leoline’s Irish match. At the end of his memorable night with the woman he thinks is Mellefant, he gives her a light-emitting ring, which Sydanis rather thoughtlessly (has she not read this kind of plot?) hands on to her Irish rival. Leoline has seen the ring on Mellefant’s finger, and they are both keen to marry. However, they mistime their request to her father, mistime it in a way that is obviously important to Kynaston:

But their designe they brought to no effect,
Being commenc't in an unlucky houre,
No planet being in his course direct,
And Saturne who his children doth devour
From his Northeast darke Adamantine tower
Beheld the waining Moone and retrograde,
A time unfit for such affaires had made.

They should have made election of a day
Was fortunate, and fit to speake with Kings,
When the Kings planet, Sol's propitious ray,
Who great affaires to a wisht period brings,
And is predominant in all such things;
When Iupiter aspecting with the Trine,
His daughter Venus did benignly shine.

This was the cause proceeding from above,
Which Clerks do call inevitable fate
That was the hindrance of these Princes love,
And made them in their Suit unfortunate…

Poor astrology lets them down. I have never read a verse narrative so insistent upon the role of the planets and the stars. The two are chidden for not having made ‘election’ of a fortunate day. This is astrology urged without hesitation. (I think of Samuel Jeake, who will claim in his diaries not to have made elections of fortunate days when he sets off from Rye on his business ventures. He clearly did make elections, but obviously thought it proper to disavow having done so, even in a private diary.) The ODNB life of Kynaston says that at the academy, the Musaeum Minervae, which he founded at his Covent Garden house, ‘sons of peers and gentlemen’ were to learn, among many other things “law, antiquities, coins and medals, husbandry, anatomy, physiology and ‘physic’, astronomy…” – ‘astronomy’ clearly meant ‘astrology’, if this poem is any index to the priorities of its author.

But here’s some sample passages. Leoline’s wedding night debacle:

… woe is me: the damned hellish spite
Was first discern'd upon the wedding night.

But though the Prince enjoy'd all sweets of sence,
Her rosie lips, which with sweet dew did melt,
And suckt her breath, sweet as their quintessence,
Which like to Aromaticke Incense smelt,
Though he her dainty virgin beauties felt,
Embracing of soft Ivory and warme snow,
Arriv'd at her Hesperides below:

Though Venus in Loves wars hath domination,
Sworne enemy to every Maidenhead,
And Soveraigne of the acts of generation,
Whose skirmishes are fought in the field bed,
Although her sonne a troupe of Cupids led;
Yet thus much had the dismall charme effected,
As Venus standard might not be erected.

Leoline’s apologies are probably the best eloquence ever assigned to a man in such a trying situation:

… you still shall finde,
There is no want of love in me, no more
Than want of beauty in your heavenly minde,
Which I religiously shall still adore:
And though I as a husband lov'd before,
I'le turn Platonick lover, and admire
Your vertues height, to which none can aspire.

With sighes, and such like words, these Princes spent
The wearisome and tedious night away;
Prince Leoline by this his complement,
T'excuse his want of Manhood did assay…

Pretty though this is, it isn’t good enough for the disconcerted Sydanis, who tells her nurse as soon as possible. The nurse is horrified that things have gone wrong. Kynaston explains that back in those days, a full display of the wedding sheets was expected:

… the ancient Brittons then did use,
When any Bridegroome did a maiden wed,
A custome they received from the Jews,
To bring some linnens of the Bridall bed,
To witnesse she had lost her maiden head,
Without which testimony there was none
Beleev'd to be a Virgin, although one.

They are unable to decide what to do. No crisis occurs until the second encounter between the two. The nurse has rushed off to the local druid for a potion to aid potency. But Leoline is a dismal flop again, and his blushing bride doesn’t feel that she can say exactly what kind of remedy she has to hand, but rather more decorously suggests that they commit suicide (and she has just the thing). The prince is too preoccupied to listen properly, but gulps it down anyway because he is in need of a stiff one, and promptly falls down apparently dead. The druid had a long-held grudge against his father, and supplied a potion that’s the very opposite of a pick you up:

‘Here is a drink, which if you please to tast
And drink to me, your pledge shall be my last.’

Prince Leoline with sighs and sorrow dry,
Onely to quench his thirst with it did thinke:
But having drunke it, he immediatly,
(Such was the force of the enchanted drinke)
As one starke dead into his bed did sinke…

So begins their long separation. Here’s the multiple climax of the bed trick, which occurs over in Ireland. By this point, Leoline has found the drowned body of the jealous French courtier who had enchanted him, and retrieved from the corpse his own wedding favour, a ‘point’ which had been tied in the ligatory knot. With this restitution, the charm breaks, and Leoline is full of vim. He thinks he’s in bed with the Irish princess. Sydanis sets all this up (though she is referred to here under the alias she chooses as page boy, Amanthis). When she takes the other woman’s place, she finds Leoline a very different man, disconcertingly so:

… in her smocke and a furr'd-mantle hies
To Leolines bed-chamber, where in sted
Of Mellefant , she goes to him to bed.

No sooner did they touch each others skin,
And she was in his fragrant bosom lay'd,
But that the prince loves on-set did begin,
And in his wars the valiant Champion play'd:
What faint resistance a young silly mayd
Could make, unto his force, did quickly yeeld;
Some bloud was lost, although he won the field.

For no hot French-man, nor high Tuscan bloud,
Whose panting veines do swell with lively heat,
In Venus breach more stoutly ever stood,
Or on her drum did more alarums beat,
But Cupid at the last sounds a retreat:
Amanthis at his mercy now doth ly,
Thinking what kinde of death she was to dy.

But she must now endure no other death,
For standing mute, but either must be prest,
Or smothering kisses so should stop her breath,
As that Loves flames enclos'd within her brest,
Should burne the more, the more they were supprest,
And so she as Loves Martyr should expire,
Or Phoenix -like, consume in her owne fire.

These pleasant kinde of deaths Amanthis oft
And willingly did suffer e're 'twas day,
Nine times the lusty Prince did come aloft …

This must have been rather raunchy for the tastes of 1642. Kynaston was writing to please himself, and recollecting The Faerie Queene, where it is a satyr who can perform like this (to the horror of Malbecco):

At night, when all they went to sleepe, he vewd,
Whereas his lovely wife emongst them lay,
Embraced of a Satyre rough and rude,
Who all the night did minde his joyous play:
Nine times he heard him come aloft ere day…

Kynaston has to work hard to round off his narrative. Sydanis has told so many lies that she finds she can’t proceed without hitting new problems. In a last desperate throw, she appears as a fairy at Leoline’s bedside, and explains that she, a fairy who looks just like Sydanis, spent the night with him, not the Irish princess. He must haste back to England. By other contrivances, Kynaston gets his characters back there, for a magical denouement assisted by both the goddess Cynthia and the druid. It’s all a mess, his relief at reaching the end is obvious.

As for those hippopotami, Sydanis is sent over to 'Erinland' by the druid, who summons up 'Amphitrite the great queen of seas' to do the ferrying: 'her robes were of Sea green / Her coach four Hippopotomi did draw'.

Altogether, a strange piece of work, full of magic, astrology – and sex. (I did mention all the sex, didn’t I?)

Richard Carpenter, Bastille prisoner, apostate, dramatist

I have been reading, with bemused gratification, some of the writings of Richard Carpenter. What a discovery he is! There are, after all, not many 17^th century Englishmen who could publish a book with an image incorporated into their frontispiece of the author being ordained priest by the Pope, but there it is in Carpenter. And the author of the ODNB life says that the other title page illustrated here includes an inset image of Carpenter engaged in a vomiting contest with the devil. (I have waded as far as I can bear in The anabaptist, washt and washt, and shrunk in the washing, or, A scolasticall discussion on the much-agitated controversie concerning infant baptism (1653), and can’t actually confirm that it is meant to be him, though the other writings overflow with images of purging, vomiting and excreting.)

So many of these mid 17^th century men seem deranged, equipped with a learning that gave them no useful purchase upon their experience, rather running them into the confusion of having their convictions founded on ferociously argued interpretations of the Bible, which could so easily collide with contrary fanaticisms based on that same endlessly re-interpretable text. Carpenter swapped sides between Catholic and Protestant over and over again, alternating spells of vitriolic anti-Catholicism with acceptance of Rome and its teachings. He tries to represent his course as having some consistency (“I may have misplac’d and miscenter’d an Action, but in the substance I have been quadrate with Truth”, as he all too typically puts it), while shouting down opponents he had stood shoulder to shoulder with no great time beforehand. He readily associates his enemies with diabolic possession (both his Protestant independent antagonist Tombs, in the preface to The Anabaptist washt and washt, and the Jesuits in his autobiographical play, A new play call'd The Pragmatical Jesuit new-leven'd a comedy, while himself manifesting (at least in his writings) a delirium of pukings, contortions, revilings and glossolalic learning.

Reading him can be astonishing, and it’s all the more interesting because in what is possibly the one sympathetic moment in the writings (at least, as far as I have found), Carpenter gives a remarkable account of what happened to his mind. It’s in his play, where he represents himself as ‘Aristotle Junior’. Carpenter, then Catholic, had fallen out with the English Benedictines and Jesuits in Paris, and they threw him into the Bastille. The first of the paragraphs cited below describes what this did to his body, the second what happened to his mind:

“O Torment! The pangs of Death cannot be more grievous: and my pangs are notoriously more grievous to me than the pangs of Death, because mine are continual. The whole Fabrick of my body is so stifned and benum’d with cold, so bruis’d and sor’d with the hardnesse of the rocky ground, that I cannot use a limb without excessive pain, and shaking of the whole frame. They have detain’d me here in the Bastille the space of fifteen Weeks, without Bed, Covering, Cap, Wastcoate, Shirt, or other Linnen, (the French, my Executioners, rob’d me of all,) without Chair, Stoole, Table, Fire, Candle, Water, Knife, Spoone; without any succour for the necessities of nature, further than the floor of this close and dark Dungeon or Cave where I lye: and by a little peeping-hole I have discover’d a Sentinel continually standing with his Musket, to receive me, if I should appear in the least part of me. Dare these blessed-nam’d Benedictines ever professe, that they are flesh and blood?

O dear England! I have been so long watching and waking, that neither my fancy nor eyes perform faithfull service to my understanding. It seems to me, that I see strange things, Pigmies, Giants, strange Birds, Beasts, Fishes, Serpents, Monsters. All extraordinary stories that I have read or heard of, shew themselves to me, besides portents and prodigies. I hear whatsoever my fancy delivers to be said. I dream that I sleep, sometimes bedded in Snow, sometimes in the Waters, in the Field sometimes, where I am pelted with hail.”

Suffering sensory deprivation, all Carpenter’s prior reading came back to him as hallucinations. This is the writer of his subsequent works, where you never know what will press next into his mind, and seem to it portentous and relevant: how angels teach one another, how to clean pearls by getting a dove to swallow and then void them, the problems of uprooting ‘devil’s bit’ (scabious), a magician who ate (Faustus-like) a cart full of hay, but then the cart, and the horses, how alchemists transform things, all about the cardinal’s parrot which could recite the Latin creed, how Cardinal Borromeo always and only read scripture when kneeling.

All these oddities occur in a context where not longer being a Catholic enables him to say more for the Catholics than he could say when he was one: ‘Rome, I honour thee in thy truths’, ‘Many millions of Papists are saved’ (and, he avers, this is ‘generally believed in England’). ‘I never was a Jesuit’, he interpolates anxiously – a man has to draw a line somewhere, after all.

Carpenter found himself in 1657 giving to the Learned Society of Astrologers their annual sermon. It’s the kind of divide-straddling position Carpenter would end up in (most clergymen opposed astrology). But his rhetoric betrays his radical instability: in a flourish taken from the Song of Songs, and carried away, Carpenter urges the ‘learned Children of Seth’: “Wound ye the heart of Christ day and night, with your excellent works”. Surely they must have heard that with some surprise and uneasiness? (‘Which side is he on?’, they might have whispered to one another).

So, in 1665, Carpenter published an autobiographical play, in the manner of Thomas Killigrew’s Thomaso (with its gallant reminiscences of exiled cavaliers slashing the faces of Spanish prostitutes). Are there any more of these things, I wonder? Closet dramas deployed for autobiography, before autobiography itself came along?

It starts with great promise: an actor enters to speak the Prologue, bearing a urinal:

This I freely say,
The Poet’s Water 'tis that made the Play…

It ends with Lucifer, who has spent most of the play disguised as the ‘pragmatical Jesuit’, vomiting up and voiding a little Jesuit and a little monk: “Noise of straining” says the climatic stage direction. The uneven course it pursues in between sets off as quite like an allegorical play, but it runs increasingly into personal diatribes, and the naming of historically real people as his enemies and tormentors.

Cornelius Agrippa, the mage, opens the play, compelling Lucifer to “Discover here theatrically, the most deepbottom’d and profound contrivances, by which thou dost amuse, imperil, ensnare the world, and involve it in thy dragonish tayl.” At the end of the action, Lucifer fails to claim Agrippa’s soul, but rather inconsistently succumbs to an exorcism which purges him in the dramatic way I have just mentioned.

Carpenter puts his own awful experiences into the play, with a fervent word of warning:

“O ye Scholars of our most renowned Universities, set bounds to your feet, and limits to your Thoughts: I was my Fathers eldest Son, and Heir to a comfortable Estate of Houses and Lands; and I threw all behinde me, to be cheated, most religiously cheated by secular Priests, Jesuites, Monks, Friers…”

He depicts himself as drawn abroad by his early religious convictions, but finding only “the beggery of Spain, the buggery of Italy, Spain, and France”. As for the Catholic faith which drew him abroad, he compulsively picks holes in the miracles to which he is connivingly exposed. A purported feather from an archangel’s wing he confidently identifies as “a Feather from a West-Indian Bird”. An image that speaks to him (“Image. ‘Chrissime fili mi, Crede.’) he discovers to be hollow, this astuteness so impressing the Jesuit operator, that the total falsity of diabolic possessions is willingly laid bare to him (while the higher cause served by these contrivances still remains valid). Later, his particular bête noire is seen coaching two purported diabolics:

“Father Robert. Ye are both apt Scholars. But you, Boy, must learn to open your mouth wider, when the fit's upon you.

Boy. I open it as wide as I can, good Father.

Rob. Take this Apple, and extend your mouth to the wideness of the Apple: 'Tis of a fit bigness. And you, Woman, when you act the possest person, do not stare enough: your eyes must always be rounded into a larger Circle, but then especially. And if any be immodest towards you, you must not take notice of it, at such a time, but rather shew willingness, because the Devil, under whose power you are then conceiv'd to groan and lie gravell'd, is delighted with wantonness.”

Aristotle Junior’s (Carpenter’s) two years in the Bastille are recounted, in full detail: “In two years I had not the benefit of a fresh Shirt …Another French Prisoner wearied me oftentimes, with desiring me that he might use my body Sodomitically.” There follows his escape: he got himself released from the Bastille by seeming to come over to his captors’ way of seeing things, took flight to Dieppe, and just got away across the channel with some timely local assistance:

“I consented in the lip: Afterwards pleading that my Body was greatly disorder’d in respect of health, desir’d a few dayes wherein to physick it (I meant with a better Air;) and in that little Tract of Time wherein it was supposed I took Physick, hasted privately to Diep, a Port-Town in France …the Hugonots of Diep past me over the night following.”

With his dodgy past, Carpenter set out to recommend himself in England with large stories of the fearsome scope of Jesuit activities and resources: he asserts that they have transport, money, and safe houses:

“we of the English Society, have a Ship that trades betwixt London and Flanders; in the which we continually receive and return the best Goods at the best advantage: and we in these parts, receive ten thousand Pounds in ready coyn every year out of England.

Lucifer: In this Tropick of things, I have seated the Provincial of our Society here with his Council, in a Noble House near to London-Wall; whence they dispatch every day the most nimble-witted Members of our Society, into the Conventicles, and Army. When the people are pull'd up by the root from Religion, they must needs fall back upon ours.”

The threat to England, is (of course) urgent: the Jesuits are all here, and hard at work: “In all their Houses in those transmarine parts, there are none left but boyes and old Men; hither they are all come.”

That, despite all this, Anthony Wood reported that Carpenter died apparently reconciled to Rome seems all of a piece: “an impudent, fantastical man that changed his mind with his cloaths” and a “theological mountebank”.