Poetry And Allegiance In The English Civil Wars

This book explores the things which united, rather than divided, poets during the English Civil Wars, focusing less on conflicts between 'Cavaliers' and 'Roundheads' than on the friendships and shared literary enthusiasms of men of various political allegiance. Includes new readings of the early verse of John Milton and Andrew Marvell.

English literary history has long incorporated the category of 'Cavalier' verse, and the critical presuppositions that have shaped such a category continue, even now, to determine the ways in which much civil war writing is read. Through a detailed study of both manuscript and printed texts, James Loxley arrives at an account of the interaction between poetry and royalist political activity which for the first time presents a sustained and coherent challenge to such presuppositions.

This book is about the things which could unite, rather than divide, poets during the English Civil Wars: friendship, patronage relations, literary admiration, and anti-clericalism. The central figure is Andrew Marvell, renowned for his 'ambivalent' allegiance in the late 1640s. Little is known about Marvell's associations in this period, when many of his best-known lyrics were composed. The London literary circle which formed in 1647 under the patronage of the wealthy royalist Thomas Stanley included 'Cavalier' friends of Marvell such as Richard Lovelace but also John Hall, a Parliamentarian propagandist inspired by reading Milton. Marvell is placed in the context of Stanley's impressive circle of friends and their efforts to develop English lyric capability in the absence of traditional court patronage. By recovering the cultural values that were shared by Marvell and the like-minded men with whom he moved in the literary circles of post-war London, we are more likely to find the reasons for their decisions about political allegiance. By focusing on a circle of friends and associates we can also get a sense of how they communicated with and influenced one another through their verse. There are innovative readings of Milton's sonnets and Lovelace's lyric verse, while new light is shed on the origins and audience not only of Marvell's early political poems, including the 'Horatian Ode', but lyrics such as 'To His Coy Mistress'.

English literary history has long incorporated the category of Cavalier verse, and the critical presuppositions that have shaped such a category continue, even now, to determine the ways in which much civil war writing is read. Through a detailed study of both manuscript and printed texts, James Loxley arrives at an account of the interaction between poetry and royalist political activity which for the first time presents a sustained and coherent challenge to such presuppositions.

Poetry and Sovereignty in the English Revolution presents a new interpretation of the poetry of the English revolution. It focuses on royalist poets who left their cause behind following the abolition of the monarchy, exploring how they re-imagined the traditional language of allegiance in newly secular, artificial, and absolutist ways. Following the execution of Charles I in 1649 royalists who had sided with the King were left with a significant vacuum to fill. Poetry and Sovereignty in the English Revolution charts the poetry of Andrew Marvell, Edmund Waller, John Dryden, William Davenant, Abraham Cowley, and Margaret Cavendish amongst others in this period. It examines the poets' close acquaintance with Thomas Hobbes, offering new readings of the reception and adaptation of Hobbes's ideas in contemporary poetry. A final chapter traces how the poets survived the restoration of the Stuart monarchy, showing how they continued to apply their ideas in the heroic drama of the 1660s. Poetry and Sovereigniy in the English Revolution builds on recent work in both literary criticism and the history of political thought to contextualize royalist poets within a distinctive strain of absolutism inflected by reason of state, neostoicism, scepticism, and anticlericalism. It demonstrates a vivid poetic effort to imagine the expanded state delivered by the English Revolution.

Much ink has been spent on accounts of the English Civil Wars of the mid-seventeenth century, yet royalism has been largely neglected. This volume of essays by leading scholars in the field seeks to fill that significant gap in our understanding by focusing on those who took up arms for the king. The royalists described were not reactionary, absolutist extremists but pragmatic, moderate men who were not so different in temperament or background from the vast majority of those who decided to side with, or were forced by circumstances to side with, Parliament and its army. The essays force us to think beyond the simplistic dichotomy between royalist 'absolutists' and 'constitutionalists' and suggest instead that allegiances were much more fluid and contingent than has hitherto been recognized. This is a major contribution to the political and intellectual history of the Civil Wars and of early modern England more generally.

This study analyzes a series of complex, ambivalent literary responses to the decades of civil turmoil in seventeenth-century England that simultaneously demanded public commitment and prompted private withdrawal. From their various perspectives the Royalist writers raised in the humanist tradition are shown to appreciate anew the value of patient fortitude.