Liberty, absolutism and the ancient constitution

When the philosopher Thomas Hobbes (1588-1679) published The Questions concerning Liberty, Necessity, and Chance in 1656, he was attempting to close the debate on human freedom in which he had been engaged with Bishop John Bramhall (1594-1663) since 1645 when they were both exiles in France. As a materialist and determinist (that is, as one who believed that the universe consists of nothing but matter in motion, and that all movements are caused by the impact of other moving bodies, and so on in a sequence that leads back ultimately to a first cause or unmoved mover, namely God) Hobbes could not subscribe to orthodox notions of free will; for him, human mental processes were physically caused, just like everything else. Indeed, the ‘occasion’ of his debate on free will with Bramhall is itself wittily posited as the outcome of a causal sequence which began when the ‘doctors of the Roman Church’ first

When war broke out in 1642, British women's place was clearly defined in both ideology and law as subordinate to men's. Their central concern was supposed to be their reputation for chastity, and their goal, marriage and motherhood. In a culture where existing hierarchies were supposedly the will of God, and so beyond question, key Bible texts were cited to reinforce the status quo: since Eve's rebellion had resulted in the Fall, women were divinely commanded to obey their husbands (Gen. 3:16). The New Testament expands this subordination into a requirement that women not even speak on matters of public concern: 'Let your women keep silence in the churches: for it is not permitted unto them to speak; but they are commanded to be under obedience, as also saith the law. And if they will learn any thing, let them ask their husbands at home: for it is a shame for women to speak in the church' (1 Cor. 14:34-5).

In 1648, the Duke of York, second son of Charles I, made a dramatic escape from St James' Palace in London to the safety of the Low Countries. This successful Royalist intrigue was partly made possible by the assistance of one Anne Murray - later Anne, Lady Halkett - whose knowledge of women's clothing was particularly helpful in constructing the Duke's cross-dressed disguise. The record of her involvement in this exciting but dangerous escapade - history in the making - is not to be found in the formal histories of the period of the English Revolution, but in her own autobiographical memoir, an apparently private text which remained in manuscript until 1875.

Anne Halkett’s experience, unusual though it may seem, is nonetheless illustrative of what we might call women’s relationship to history in midseventeenth-century England. The startling and unprecedented turmoil of the 1640s and 1650s brought events of public historical importance to the domestic doorstep and led many women to undertake hitherto ‘masculine’ activities: the sole running of households, the management of goods and finances, the writing of Parliamentary petitions, and the judging of events for posterity. In other words, women made history in this period. ‘Women’s histories’, the title of this chapter, is a term which not only encompasses the historical lives and interventions of women during this period, but also reminds us that these were inscribed in the women’s own texts. As a consequence, our notion of ‘history’ itself may need adjusting, not only from male to female but also from public to private (if such a divide can ever be upheld), and from interpreted past to immediate present.

Women writing poetry during the English Civil Wars did not think of women, or of poetry, in the ways which are familiar to us. The idea of the 'woman poet', if it can be said to have existed at all, would have had little resemblance to the way in which we understand those words today. The frames of interpretation brought to poetry, and more specifically to poetry by women, were very different. What we have come to think of as 'selfexpression' was not important until after the Romantic era; the poets examined in this chapter (with the possible exception of Margaret Cavendish) wrote in a world where poetic skill was measured by emulation of Classical and other texts, by use of form, by elaboration of image. Women's poetry, however, was also interpreted in terms of what made a good or bad woman, so frames of interpretation linked women's poetry to feminized standards of intellectual achievement and to assumptions about the place of women in the public eye - in short, to what Jonathan Goldberg calls the legend of good (or bad) women. While women were not necessarily discouraged from writing by their families they certainly were not expected to participate in public literary culture; women's poetry had to make difficult negotiations amongst institutions, audiences and texts.

In the years from the Long Parliament to the Restoration, the Church of England underwent an extraordinary and violent series of changes. As a result of legislation - Parliamentary ordinances in the 1640s, reinforced by Parliamentary acts and the Protector's declarations in the 1650s - the government, liturgy, ceremonies and fabric of the reformed Church of England, established by law in the reigns of Edward VI and Elizabeth I, were all transformed. Archbishops, bishops and cathedral deans and chapters were abolished; the Book of Common Prayer was suppressed, its place offi- cially taken by the Directory for Public Worship, and its use made a crime; the ancient pattern of the Christian year and the Church festivals of Christmas, Easter and Whitsun were eliminated; many of the surviving medieval crucifixes and images of the persons of the Trinity and of angels and saints in stone, wood, paint and glass were destroyed or defaced, as were organs, fonts and priests' vestments; rails in front of altars were removed and raised chancels levelled; cathedrals were damaged and used for secular purposes, and their complete demolition was considered, though not carried out.

Epic and romance

This chapter deals with the least read and, in some cases, least studied writing of the period of the English Revolution. In recent years, literary scholars have been drawn towards radical writing of all kinds, in part following on from historians and in part due to a salutary change in political and cultural sympathy. The two obviously canonized writers of the period, Milton and Marvell, are readily accommodated to this radical bias. Their dominance is hardly challenged by the Royalist sentiments of the 'B' list of 'cavalier lyricists' (Herrick, Lovelace, Suckling, Waller) and Anglican religious poets (Vaughan, Traherne), still less by two other kinds of Royalist writing which have been all but invisible in literary discussion of the period: epic poetry, although this has at least never been entirely invisible, and romance, which has pretty much vanished from the sight of all but a handful of scholars. Recently Timothy Raylor has pointed to the limitations of our understanding of cavalier culture, in comparison to 'the sophisticated appreciation we now have of the ideological complexities of those traditionally labelled “Puritans”'.

On 18 April 1638 John Lilburne, future Leveller, future Quaker, was whipped at the cart's tail from the Fleet prison to Westminster, where he was pilloried; he was afterwards imprisoned in dire circumstances. His offence was to arrange for the production in the Netherlands of a radical Puritan tract by John Bastwick, and its subsequent importation and distribution. While resisting the particular charge, he made in a moment of great extremity an endorsement of the place of radical oppositional writing in the process of reformation he believed he served. In the pillory he advised the largely sympathetic crowd on appropriate reading: 'If you lease to reade the second and third parts of Doctor Bastwicks Letany . . .' Gagged by his tormentors, he reached into the pockets of his breeches where, showing a wise anticipation, he had concealed copies of tracts by Bastwick which he threw into the crowd.

For nearly twenty years of his career, during the 'tumultuous times' of the English Revolution (CPW, I:807), Milton invested his exceptional literary talents in polemical prose as he struggled with urgent issues of ecclesiastical, civic and domestic liberty. Scholars have sometimes divorced the writer of occasional, fiercely polemical tracts during the Revolution from the visionary author of sublime, lofty poetry. The two, poet and revolutionary polemicist, were, however, closely connected. Milton contributed actively - and imaginatively - to the vital textual dimension of the English Revolution and its crises: as he put it in his Defensio Secunda (Second Defence of the English People; 1654), at the beginning of a retrospective account of his revolutionary writings, he would 'devote to this conflict all [his] talents and all [his] active powers' (iv:622).

Antiprelatical polemic and religious conflict

Milton’s zealous prose in the early 1640s was stimulated by the collapse of the Church of England. Religious and political tensions were fuelled during this period by a series of major religious factors and events: these included godly fears of increased popery within the established episcopal church and at court; the Root and Branch Petition to abolish episcopacy (supported by 15,000 citizens); the assault on the ecclesiastical order and Archbishop Laud (impeached in December 1640); the outbreak of the Irish Rebellion in October 1641; the Grand Remonstrance (an apocalyptic manifesto defining Parliament’s grievances against King Charles I and his ministers); debates about matters of church government and liturgy; the increase of Puritan militancy and the desire for godly reformation; and the escalation of apocalyptic rhetoric stimulated by the political/religious crisis. In the midst of these heated developments, and on the threshold of civil war, Milton produced his combative antiprelatical tracts (1641–2), culminating with The Reason of Church-Government and An Apology against a Pamphlet.

Epics and history

Of all the great literary works produced during the Interregnum and the Restoration, Paradise Lost - unquestionably the greatest work of literature in the entire century - is the hardest for us to understand as a product of its political and religious context. This is in part because of its very greatness: after its first printed publication in 1667, Milton's epic quickly became the most imitated poem in the English language, and this remained the case until the end of the nineteenth century. That Milton's subject was ostensibly Biblical and hence 'timeless', especially with regard to the local events of mid seventeenth-century England, helped to form a dominant view that the poet gave up politics with the return of the monarchy, and the failure of Puritan and Republican experiments. Through its popularity, Paradise Lost slipped the lease that initially shackled it to history.

The degree to which Milton became a quietist after 1660 is now a matter of dispute among critics, as much as they also debate the extent to which Paradise Lost was complete before the same date. What is beyond dispute, however, is that no contemporary of Milton’s would have read the poem as unrelated to the events of its own time. This is not least because heroic verse – verse written, like Paradise Lost, in conscious and artful imitation of the tradition that stemmed from the ancient epicists of Greece and Rome – was widely understood to address public issues.

Writing in November 1648, the Puritan minister Richard Baxter exclaimed in dismay that 'Every ignorant, empty braine (which usually hath the highest esteem of it selfe) hath the liberty of the Presse . . . whereby the number of bookes is grown so great that they begin with many to grow contemptible'. By 1653, he had come to fear the 'Luxuriant Fertility, or Licentiousness of the Press of late' as 'a design of the Enemy to bury and overwhelm in a croud . . . Judicious, Pious, Excellent Writings'. Baxter's disquiet was fuelled by his recent experiences as a chaplain to a regiment of the New Model Army. Like the vast majority of those Presbyterian Puritans who sided with Parliament, he was 'unfeignedly for King and Parliament', and was committed to the Civil War aim of bringing the King to a reconciliation with Parliament.

When, in 1645, he joined the Army, he was appalled to find the mood of Cromwell’s forces far more extreme. To him it appeared that those he described as ‘hot-headed Sectaries’ intended no less than ‘to subvert both Church and State’: ‘they took the King for a Tyrant and an Enemy, and really intended absolutely to master him, or ruine him’.3 Baxter’s Puritanism valued order, tradition and authority; the revolutionary and radical wing of the movement, as represented by Levellers, Anabaptists, Ranters and, later, Quakers, disclosed to him a prospect of anarchy. Within the Army itself, these anarchic ideas were spread by word of mouth, through preaching, oral discussion and disputation; but it was the prolific output of the press which spread them through the country at large.

In this chapter I consider only work which responded to the Civil War itself. Those 'Cavalier poets', 'the Mob of Gentlemen who wrote with Ease' (and published) in the 1630s before armed conflict arose, are excluded, as are minor figures, such as Rowland Watkyns, whose poems had a local manuscript circulation but were not published until 1662, by which time they had merely sycophantic point. A more significant omission is Alexander Brome, whose love lyrics and drinking songs circulated in the 1640s but were not collected into a book until after the Restoration. Each of the five poets who are considered participated or suffered in the conflict. Robert Herrick lost his living as a clergyman; John Cleveland was a notable figure in the Royalist camp as the war began; Richard Lovelace lost his fortune in the Royalist cause and was twice imprisoned; Abraham Cowley was a Royalist agent of some importance; Henry Vaughan fought in the war and was part of a conspicuously Royalist circle in his native Breconshire.

The Restoration and nonconformity

The Republic's collapse in 1660 had more to do with disintegration than with the strength of Royalist and episcopalian forces. Unable to agree among themselves on the appropriate form of government or religious expression, and unable to win broad public support, the disparate and often feuding Republicans and sectaries watched almost helplessly as one of their own number, General George Monck, engineered the restoration of monarchy. In its train came the re-establishment of episcopacy, the ousting of Dissenters from the state church and universities, and efforts to curb nonconformity. The Restoration did not mean the loss of an earthly paradise, for the 1650s had fallen far short of the reformers' dreams, but it sharply curtailed opportunities to build a godly society, stopping a work in progress and compelling reform's proponents to shape strategies for survival. In formulating such strategies, the greatest Nonconformist writers, Milton and Bunyan, transcended their individual experiences and the revolutionary heritage in which they were rooted.

In 1640, the bookseller George Thomason purchased 22 printed titles; in 1642, he purchased well over 2,000. To him, something new and extraordinary was happening in the press no less than in politics or on the battlefield. With a passion that was historical and not strictly bibliographical, Thomason collected as many specimens as was possible of each publication emerging in the volatile Civil War period. Thomason, a Presbyterian and friend of the poet and polemicist John Milton, was a leading stationer who sympathized with Parliament during the Civil War. Though Thomason was rewarded by Parliament for his importation of foreign books, he became increasingly royalist from 1647 onwards, as did many Presbyterians in the wake of the King's surrender. Arrested in 1651, he was imprisoned for seven weeks in connection with a Presbyterian plot to bring in Charles II; after 1651 he played no role in politics. With the coming of the Restoration, Thomason pledged his oath of allegiance to the monarchy. Thomason ended his collection of pamphlets soon after the coronation of Charles II, 23 April 1661, with a few pamphlets dribbling in until the last in December of that year, as if Thomason was recognizing, or hoping, that an era had come to an end.