‘Lett none our Lombard author rudely blame for's righteous paine’: An Annotated Copy of Sir William Davenant's Gondibert (1651)
The article focuses on hostile annotations on a copy of the 1651 quarto edition of Sir William Davenant’s epic poem ‘Gondibert’, now held at the National Library of Scotland. It describes the problems of interpreting the annotations; their likely date, social context, and political stance; the secondary reading used alongside ‘Gondibert’; and their literary-critical responses to the text. The annotations can be related to the satires on ‘Gondibert’ written by the circle around Sir John Denham; one of the annotators may indeed have been Denham himself. The annotators were employing traditional humanist collaborative reading practices in a manner designed to make nonsense of Davenant’s poem, objecting to Davenant’s departures from the humanist tradition.
The Insults of Defeat: Royalist Responses to Sir William Davenant's Gondibert (1651)
The nose has a small but special place in the politics of interregnum England. Oliver Cromwell's, bulbous and red, gave royalist polemicists a conspicuous target for their discontent with Republican and Protectoral statecraft. For those satirists and newsbook writers of the period who remained loyal to the Stuart dynasty, Cromwell's nose revealed his manifold failings. Hyperactive and oversized, it indicated a prodigious sexual appetite ill-suited to a Puritan demagogue; as red as the copper used to heat hops in beer making, it revealed a fondness for drink and a family background in brewing, expressive of a conservative fear of social inversion, a terror that 'mechanicks' had finally seized the levers of power.1 Laura Lunger Knoppers has persuasively argued that the royalist satire which constructed Cromwell as 'Snout' or 'his High Nose' is part of a Bakhtinian semiotic system which situates the grotesque body of Cromwell in opposition to the classical, unified corpse of the dead martyr king, 'the ambivalent mirror image of the courtly body'.2 This article considers the direction royalist satire might take when the nose, appetite and politics under scrutiny belonged to a once eminent member of the Caroline court. Through an analysis of poems written in response to the publication of Sir William Davenant's epic poem Gondibert, it suggests that Davenant's nose played an important symbolic part in enabling some royalists to negotiate the realities of political defeat and make sense of the complex realignments and shifts in allegiance following the civil war.Even though the Hertfordshire royalist Lady Hester Pulter never met Davenant, she clearly thought that she knew his face. 'To Sir Wm D: Upon the Unspeakable Loss of the Most Conspicuous and Chief Ornament of his Frontispiece' is a 1650s poem which works through the meanings of William Davenant's nose, lost to venereal disease in the early 1630s.3 Written sometime after Davenant had been released from his imprisonment in the Tower of London as a royalist 'delinquent' in the English civil wars in October 1652, the poem is gently satirical, comparing the malformation of its subject's physiognomy with the corruption of a text or theatrical set. It is, however, acutely aware of Davenant's cultural importance in Cromwellian England - deformity and social standing mean he is 'Prodigious' - and opens with a sympathetic identification of the aristocratic woman writer with the disfigured cavalier:Sr:Extreamly I deplore your lossYou'r like Cheapside without a CrossOr like a Diall and noe GnomanIn pitty (trust mee) I think noe manBut would his Leg or Arm exposeTo cut you out another NoseNor of the Female Sex thers noneBut'd bee one flesh though not one BoneI though unknown would sleight the painThat you might have soe great a gainNay Any Fool did hee know ittWould give his Nose to have yor Wit.And I myself would doe the sameDid I not fear 'twold Blur my Fame.For who but that Bright eye aboveWould know m' twere Charity not Love.Then Sr your Pardon I must BegExcuse my Nose accept my Leg.4Davenant is a shared reference point, albeit a maimed one, amid the ruins of political defeat. Pulter's opening similes give voice to a continued impulse to read the times through him even if vandalism or neglect have rendered such an interpretive act impossible. He is a landmark which endures in the mind despite parliament's attempts at its obliteration, like Cheapside deprived of its cross in one of the most famous instances of parliamentary iconoclasm in the recent conflict.5As much as Pulter's poem values Davenant and his wit it is also wary of his disruptive potential. At first glance this appears to be a fairly straightforward denunciation of the moral laxity which led Davenant, a married man when he contracted venereal disease, to lose his nose in the first place. …
‘Sing old Noll the Brewer’: Royalist Satire and Social Inversion, 1648–64
One month after the trial and execution of Charles I, a royalist newsbook, Mercurius Elencticus, reported on the activities of the man widely thought most responsible. Having murdered his king and destroyed his country, Oliver Cromwell now, according to this account, intended to 'set up his Trade of Brewing againe'. Indeed, he apparently planned to apprentice the king's young son:For the other day, being in the presence of the Duke of Glocester, he stroak'd him on the head and like a mercifull Protector and faithfull Guardian, saith, Sirrah, what trade doe you like best? would not a Shooe-maker be a good trade for you? Shooe-makers are Gentlemen, I can assure you and so are Brewers too; and if you like either of those Trades, I will provide you a good master ... and move the Parliament to give you something (if you prove a good boy and please your Master) to set up your Trade.1When the young duke replied that he 'hop'd the Parliament would allow him some means out of his Father's Revenew to maintain him like a Gentleman and not put him to Prentice like a slave', Cromwell lost his patience: 'Nose Almighty makes answer; Boy, you must to Prentice, for all your Father's Revenue will not make half satisfaction for the wrong he hath done the Kingdom and so Nose went blowing out'.2The explosion of popular print in England in and after the civil war years included not only parliamentarian but royalist propaganda aimed at a broad political audience.3 From the mid-1640s, royalist satire gave Cromwell an increasingly prominent role.4 The events leading up to the regicide and the actual trial and execution of Charles I seemed to signal the disintegration of order in church, state and society. Royalist newsbooks and other popular printed texts not only disseminated accounts of disorder, but actively produced images of social inversion, reducing ideological opposition to mere class aspiration.5Recent historical work downplays the extent of class upheaval - in least in England - during the civil wars.6 Yet the image of social inversion, of rule by 'Mechanicks', loomed large in printed discourse. Satire on Cromwell as brewer uniquely evoked social disorder and disruption while at the same time exposing the hypocrisy of the publicly pious Lord General and (later) the Lord Protector. Yet while the brewer image evoked fears of class inversion among contemporaries, it appealed to a wide public in the unpredictable form of popular print. As such, it could also have more complex, even ambivalent effects.Oliver Cromwell, of course, was not a brewer. He was a gentleman who lived off his lands, except for a tenuous period when he sold his property and became a tenant farmer in St Ives before inheriting a maternal uncle's land in Ely.7 That there may have been brewers in Cromwell's family was convenient. 8 The figure of brewer - as opposed to, say, blacksmith or shoe-maker - was well-suited to stigmatize Oliver's morality as well as his social status. Satire on Oliver as brewer placed a prominent Puritan in the alehouses and popular festivities which, as David Underdown has argued, were a prime target of Puritan moral reformation.9 But the dominant emphasis was on class. In this satire, the rather nebulous category of 'brewer' was downscaled socially - to the rank of yeoman or 'mechanick', one who labours for day wages with his hands.10 Above all, the brewer image highlighted the fact that Cromwell was not the hereditary, royal heir to the throne.Cromwell the brewer was thus a comic inversion of Charles the tragic martyr- king and of the high aesthetics of the courtly beautiful.11 Such satire shows links with what Bakhtin has termed the aesthetic of grotesque realism, produced appropriately not in court masques and baroque art collections but in newsbooks, doggerel verse, playlets and ballads.12 This was royalist, rather than republican or radical satire; the image of Cromwell as brewer implicitly reaffirmed single-person rule by stressing how unfit Cromwell was to be that single person. …