Abigail Williams - Poetry and The Creation of A Whig Literary Culture, 1681-1714 (2005)

Poetry and the Creation of a
Whig Literary Culture 1681–1714

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Poetry and the Creation
of a Whig Literary
Culture 1681–1714
ABIGAIL WILLIAMS
1
3
Great Clarendon Street, Oxford ox2 6dp
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British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
Data available
Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data
Williams, Abigail.
Poetry and the creation of a Whig literary culture, 1681–1714 / Abigail Williams.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
1. English poetry–18th century–History and criticism. 2. Politics and literature–Great Britain
–History–18th century. 3. English poetry–Early modern, 1500–1700–History and criticism.
4. Whig Party (Great Britain)–History–18th century.
5. Great Britain–Intellectual life–18th century. I. Title.
PR555.P6W55 2005 821’.509921342–dc22 2004026057
ISBN 0-19-925520-2
1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2
Typeset by Kolam Information Services Pvt. Ltd, Pondicherry, India
Printed in Great Britain
on acid-free paper by
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King’s Lynn, Norfolk
In memory of my
father, Shaun Williams
Acknowledgements
I began this project with the assistance of a grant from the AHRB, and
I could not have finished it without the time and money given to me by
the Oxford English Faculty and St Peter’s College. Beyond this generous
institutional support, I have personal debts of thanks. At the various
stages of the book’s development I have been encouraged and guided by
Christine Gerrard, Isabel Rivers, and David Womersley. I am also very
grateful to all the other friends and colleagues who have read sections
and drafts of the book: Sharon Achinstein, Matthew Beaumont, Jennie
Barbour, Eleanor Collins, Brean Hammond, Mark Knights, Myfanwy
Lloyd, Steve Pincus, Adam Rounce, Blair Worden, and Brian Young.
I hope I have done some justice to their astute and constructive
comments.
Thanks are also due to those who have shared their unpublished
research with me, in particular Ros Ballaster, Emma Jay, Nick von
Maltzahn, Hannah Smith, and all the participants in the ‘Cultures of
Whiggism’ seminar held in Oxford in April 2001. This is undoubtedly a
better book for the numerous discussions at conferences and seminars
that have prompted me to rethink various aspects of my arguments.
And finally, to my friends and family, and especially Giles—thank
you for your support and companionship.
Contents
List of abbreviations viii
Introduction: Rereading Whig poetry 1
1. The Tory critique of Whig literature 22
2. Moderation, fanaticism, and ‘the people’ 1681–1688 56
3. Legitimacy and the warrior king 1688–1702 93
4. Poetic warfare 1702–1714 135
5. The sublime and the liberty of writing 173
6. Patronage and the public writer in Whig literary

culture 204
Conclusion: Whig afterlives 241
Biographical appendix 247
Bibliography 258
Index 296
Abbreviations
Dennis, Critical Works The Critical Works of John Dennis, ed. E. N. Hooker, 2
vols. (Baltimore, Md.: Johns Hopkins University Press,
1939–43).
Dryden, Works The Works of John Dryden, ed. E. N. Hooker et al., 20
vols. (Berkeley and Los Angeles, Calif.: University of
California Press, 1965–2000).
POAS George deF. Lord et al., (eds.), 7 vols. (New Haven,
Conn.: Yale University Press, 1963–75). Poems on AVairs
of State: Augustan Satirical Verse 1660–1714.
Shadwell, Works The Complete Works of Thomas Shadwell, ed. Montague
Summers, 5 vols. (London: Fortune, 1927).
TE The Twickenham Edition of the Poems of Alexander
Pope, ed. John Butt et al., 11 vols. (London: Methuen,
1939–69).
Introduction:
Rereading Whig poetry
In 1694 Joseph Addison, a young scholar at Magdalen College, Oxford,

published a history of English poetry, An Account of the Greatest English
Poets. Having progressed through Chaucer, Spenser, Cowley, Milton,
Waller, Dryden, and Congreve, Addison arrives at the present day, and
his Wnal verse paragraph proclaims the latest successor to the tradition:
I’m tir’d with rhiming, and wou’d fain give o’er,
But justice still demands one labour more:
The noble Montague remains unnam’d,
For wit, for humour, and for judgment fam’d.1
For a twenty-Wrst-century reader this is a surprising moment. Addison’s
‘greatest English poets’ are the same as those found in countless other
canonical histories of English poetry, until we reach the last named
author. After all the familiar praise of Spenser and Dryden, Addison
presents a poet that we have never read, or even heard of. The unlikely
Wgure of Charles Montagu, later Earl of Halifax, is hailed as the culmin-
ation of the nation’s literary achievement. Montagu was the author of a
recent panegyric on William III’s victory over James II at the Battle of
the Boyne entitled An Epistle to the Right Honourable Charles, Earl of
Dorset and Middlesex (1690). Addison does not seem to anticipate our
ignorance of his last ‘great English poet’, indeed he describes him as
‘fam’d’ for wit, humour, and judgement. Nor does Addison present his
admiration of Montagu as purely personal or idiosyncratic. A little
research into the reception of the Epistle reveals that he was expressing
an opinion that was widely held in the 1690s. The Epistle became
something of an ars poetica for a generation of writers in the post-
Revolution period. It was widely praised as embodying the ‘wonderful
Wre’ and ‘Raptures’ that were the very essence of poetic genius, and was
1 Joseph Addison, An Account of the Greatest English Poets (1694), in The Miscellaneous
Works of Joseph Addison, ed. A. C. Guthkelch, 3 vols. (London: Bell, 1914), i.34–5. Further
line references in the text are to this edition.
2 Introduction: Rereading Whig poetry
republished numerous times over the next two decades, continuing to

circulate both in separate editions and poetic miscellanies long after its
initial publication.2 Reading Addison’s Account of the Greatest English
Poets, then, exposes a curious and problematic discrepancy between his
era’s familiarity with and enthusiasm for Montagu’s poetry and our
utter ignorance of it. It is the task of this book to address this discrep-
ancy. In situating Montagu’s verse within the evolution of a tradition of
Whig poetry I hope to reconstruct some of the perceived literary and
political values that lay behind the popularity of this verse, and to
recover an important, but forgotten, historical aesthetic.
Montagu’s Epistle to Dorset is more than a panegyric on a single
military event. In his depiction of William III as the Achillean hero of
the battle at the River Boyne, near Drogheda, Montagu celebrated the
new Protestant king’s victory over the French and Jacobite troops led by
the recently exiled James II. But he was also proclaiming the glories of a
new political era for Britain that William III had ushered in with the
Revolution of 1688. In the poem Montagu declares that he is ‘trans-
ported’ and ‘amaz’d’ at the imaginary scenes before him, struggling to
Wnd words with which to express the enormity of his vision of the king
in battle. In its attempts to Wnd a Wt form with which to celebrate the
triumphs of post-Revolution England the Epistle resembled a whole
body of verse by Whig authors. Although these works were met with
considerable excitement and enthusiasm in their own time, they consti-
tute a poetic tradition that has been largely occluded in existing literary
histories of the period. Thomas Tickell, Richard Blackmore, and Joseph
Addison himself all wrote poetry valorizing the political and military
achievements of William III’s Britain. They, and others like Thomas
Shadwell, John Dennis, and Ambrose Philips, saw themselves and were
seen in their own time as part of an ambitious project to remodel and
reform English literary culture alongside the contemporary transform-
ation of political and social life. Whig authors responded to the
2 See John Dennis, Remarks on a Book Entituled, Prince Arthur, An Heroick Poem (1696),
in Dennis, Critical Works, i. 47; George Sewell, ‘An Epistle to Joseph Addison Esq.
Occasion’d by the Death of the Right Honourable Charles, late Earl of Halifax’ (1715) in
The Posthumous Works of Dr George Sewell (London, 1728), 37. There were two editions of
the Epistle in 1690, then again in 1702, and 1716, a Latin translation by Laurence Eusden,
and circulation in the printed poetic miscellanies of the period. It was reprinted in the
popular miscellany A Collection of Poems: Viz, The Temple of Death: by the Marquess of
Normanby. An Epistle to the Earl of Dorset: By Charles Montague . . . (London, 1701), with
further editions in 1701, 1702, and 1716, and in the collection An Essay on Poetry; written by
the Marquis of Normanby [ . . . ] with several other poems, viz . . . (London, 1697).
imaginative challenges of post-Revolution England with enthusiasm

and conWdence, convinced that the political liberties established at the
Revolution oVered the opportunity to create a new native literary
culture that was distinctively Whiggish. The funding and distribution
of their poetry was secured through substantial patronage from the
Whig aristocracy, who collaborated with Whig publishers such as
Jacob Tonson to produce prestigious editions of poems that were
promoted as a new English literature, to rival that of classical Greece
and Rome.
I am using the label ‘Whig’ here to group together a loose and varied
collection of writers. To do so clearly disguises a signiWcant diversity of
ideology both at any one moment and over the decades between 1680
and 1715. It also glosses over the diVerences that existed between the
general political rhetoric of practical Whig politics and the speciWc
rhetorical tradition of this poetry. However, as we shall see, there were
political emphases that remained constant in Whig ideology through-
out the period, emphases that were frequently deWned in opposition to
the principles and opinions espoused by Tory writers. In the poetry that
forms the subject of this study we will see Whig poets writing in support
of the Exclusion movement, the Revolution of 1688, and the Hanoverian
succession, matters on which many of their Tory and Jacobite contem-
poraries took a rather diVerent stance. Through an analysis of the
dialectical relationship between the two parties and their literature I
hope to illuminate the cultural politics of early eighteenth-century
poetry. It is undoubtedly the voices of the Tory poets of the period
that are more familiar to readers today. John Dryden, and the members
of the Scriblerus Club, such as Alexander Pope, Jonathan Swift, and
John Gay, dominate literary histories of the late seventeenth and early
eighteenth centuries. Much of their poetry engaged in direct and open
conXict with Whigs and Whig literature, and their satiric dismissals of
their opponents as ‘dunces’ and ‘hacks’ are now better known than the
opponents themselves, or their poetry. It has become a literary-
historical cliché to observe that the political victors of the eighteenth
century have been its literary losers. The Whig parliamentary party
secured a political hegemony during the century, but the poets that
shared these politics are marginal Wgures in existing accounts of the
period. Not one edition of the collected poetical works of a Whig writer
has been published since 1937, and the most substantial account of early
eighteenth-century Whig verse is still W. J. Courthope’s chapter on
Whig panegyric in his History of English Poetry, which was published a
century ago.3 It is Tory and Jacobite authors whose works now consti-
tute the literary canon. Thus we have an inverse relationship between
political and cultural authority in our historical accounts of this period.
The political Wgures who sponsored, wrote, and were celebrated in
Whig poetry were a powerful elite who were to dominate political life
throughout the century, while the authors who wrote about them were
mere hacks, known nowadays largely for their roles as Pope’s dunces.
This book represents an attempt to re-examine this version of eight-
eenth-century literary history. It will question the binarism of political
victory and literary failure that has been so central to the literary
historiography of the period, showing that things must have looked
rather diVerent in the early eighteenth century. The major Whig poets
were not losers in their own time: while they were perceived or depicted
as such by later literary historians, this was in many respects a retrospect-
ive classiWcation. Whig poems were successful in their day: Addison’s
verses on the Battle of Blenheim, The Campaign, were hugely popular,
with three editions within the Wrst three months of their publication, and
further editions in London, Edinburgh, and Dublin in 1708, 1710, 1713,
and 1715, while Richard Blackmore’s Prince Arthur went into two folio
editions in 1695, then again in 1696, 1697, 1714, and a Latin translation in
1700. Such poems frequently outsold the works of the Tory authors with
which we are more familiar today. For example, Thomas Tickell’s poem
The Prospect of Peace (1712), a celebration of the Peace of Utrecht (1713),
went into Wve editions in the Wrst year after its publication, whereas
Alexander Pope’s more famous Windsor Forest (1713) saw only two. Of
course, not all early eighteenth-century Whig writers have been con-
demned to obscurity: part of the aim of this book is to oVer new
perspectives on the writing of more familiar authors, such as Joseph
Addison and the third Earl of Shaftesbury, whose works are best under-
stood in the context of a speciWcally Whiggish literary culture.
3 The most recent existing collected editions of the major Whig poets are as follows:
Samuel Garth, The Poetical Works of Samuel Garth (Glasgow, 1771); Charles Montagu, The
Works of Celebrated Authors (London, 1750); George Stepney, The Works of Celebrated
Authors (London, 1750); Laurence Eusden, Original Poems and Translations by Mr Hill, Mr
Eusden and Others (London, 1714); Ambrose Philips, The Poems of Ambrose Philips, ed.
M. G. Segar (Oxford: Blackwell, 1937); Thomas Tickell, The Poetical Works of Thomas
Tickell (London, 1796); Joseph Addison, The Miscellaneous Works, ed. Guthkelch (London,
1914); Leonard Welsted, The Works in Verse and Prose of Leonard Welsted, ed. J. Nichols
(London, 1787); William Congreve, The Complete Works of William Congreve, ed. Monta-
gue Summers (London, 1923). For W. J. Courthope’s chapter on Whig panegyric see his
History of English Poetry, 6 vols. (London, 1895–1910), v. 20–43.
A reappraisal of this poetic tradition oVers a more balanced literary-

historical context within which to read the period as a whole. The
neglect of the Whig poetic tradition has undoubtedly distorted our
understanding of many of the acclaimed poets of the early eighteenth
century, and it is important to reread Whig poetry not only on its own
terms but alongside contemporary Tory verse. My analysis of individual
poems demonstrates some of the speciWc ways in which the writing of
the Tory Augustans was a response to that of an evolving Whig oppos-
ition. This restores some of the contours of topical debate to a polem-
ical literary culture. Familiar works such as Dryden’s Absalom and
Achitophel and Pope’s Dunciad read very diVerently in the context of
their Whig contemporaries, revealing what Stephen Zwicker has aptly
termed the ‘rhetorics, structures, and poetics of contest’ in this period.4
The examination of the discrepancy between the political and literary
fortunes of the Wrst Whigs also raises much broader questions about the
historical contingency of literary evaluation, the deWnition of ‘litera-
ture’, and the forces inXuencing the formation of the literary canon. In
focusing on the particular fortunes of a group of Whig writers and their
critics, this book explores the complexities of canon formation at a
particular historical moment, revealing the interplay of aesthetic and
political considerations in the representation of a literary tradition.
Moreover, in reconsidering contemporary responses to the Whig sub-
lime, it oVers an attempt to imagine a historical aesthetic speciWc to its
own time and place. In reappraising the nature of the literary taste that
ensured the popularity of Whig verse at its initial publication we will
confront the post-Romantic separation between art and aesthetics and
political ideology. Not only does politics provide the subject matter of
Whig verse, but, as we shall see, political and aesthetic concerns were
inextricably linked in both the positive and negative evaluation of
literature in this period.
Joseph Addison, the Account of the Greatest English Poets, and

literary history
As a way of introducing some of the consequences of a reappraisal of the

Whig poetic tradition I shall return to the Account of the Greatest English
4 Steven Zwicker, Lines of Authority: Politics and Literary Culture, 1649–1689 (Ithaca,
NY: Cornell University Press, 1993), 7.

Poets, where Addison expands upon the merits of Charles Montagu’s

verse:
The noble Montague remains unnam’d,
For wit, for humour, and for judgment fam’d;
To Dorset he directs his artful Muse,
In numbers such as Dorset’s self might use.
How negligently graceful he unreins
His verse, and writes in loose familiar strains;
How Nassau’s godlike acts adorn his lines,
And all the Heroe in full glory shines.
We see his army set in just array,
And Boin’s dy’d waves run purple to the sea.
Nor Simois choak’d with men, and arms, and blood:
Nor rapid Xanthus’ celebrated Xood,
Shall longer be the poet’s highest themes,
Though gods and heroes fought promiscuous in their streams.
But now, to Nassau’s secret councils rais’d,
He aids the Heroe, whom before he prais’d. (ll. 134–49)
Many of the characteristics of early Whig poetry and the implications of

its analysis that I expand upon in the following chapters are encapsu-
lated in the passage above. As we have established, it is a tribute to
Montagu’s poem on the Battle of the Boyne, written four years before.
Like many other Whig poems of this period, Montagu’s elevated verse
took as its subject the military victories of the Nine Years’ War, and here
Addison celebrates the writer’s ability to evoke the bloodshed and
martial heroism of conXict, when ‘Boin’s dy’d waves run purple to the
sea’. However alien to modern sensibilities, this enthusiasm for gory
bellicosity was central to the popularity of poetry of the period. Yet
while the Account praises such descriptive qualities in Montagu’s
verse, it is of course also a tribute to William’s, or Nassau’s, ‘godlike
acts’ which lie behind them. As Addison tells it, the excellence of
Montagu’s verse is inseparable from the excellence of its subject matter:
moreover, the praise of the literary merits of the poem displays Addi-
son’s own commitment to the Williamite regime. Aesthetic and evalu-
ative judgements cannot be separated here from political concerns,
since the appraisal of Montagu’s Epistle conXates literary form and
political content. Addison’s lines on William demonstrate in particular
the belief that the king’s deeds will inspire future poets, providing
the basis for a new era of elevated heroic verse. They reXect a wider
expectation that the Revolution will usher in an era of unprecedented
literary achievement, establishing both the conditions and the

subject matter for a revival of native literature. We might consider the
claims made here for Williamite literature alongside another, more
familiar, account of the development of English letters published in
the same year. John Dryden’s poem ‘To my Dear Friend Mr. Congreve’
oVers an account of dramatic tradition that describes the post-
Revolutionary age as one when ‘Poetry is curs’d’.5 Dryden’s implicit
criticism of Williamite literary culture is of course a statement of his
own political allegiances. Juxtaposing these two poems underlines the
vast diVerences that exist in contemporary interpretations of the state of
literature—or politics—at any immediate historical moment. These
diVerences are all too easily obscured in later accounts, and this
study aims to restore a sense of early eighteenth-century literature’s
oppositional dynamics.
Addison’s Account of the Greatest English Poets foregrounds questions
of canon formation.6 It seeks to identify a native poetic tradition, and to
relate contemporary English verse to this narrative. The Account pro-
vides a prehistory of ‘muse-possest’ Englishmen, who have ‘spent their
noble rage in British rhimes’ (l. 4). The references here to both ‘English’
and ‘British’ demonstrate the importance of national identity in the
evaluation of poetic tradition, yet also a blurring of the distinction
between British and English that is characteristic of much verse of the
period. The Act of Union of 1707 loomed large in Whig political debate,
yet, as Richard Terry has shown, in many accounts of native poetic
tradition the terms ‘British’ and ‘English’ were frequently used inter-
changeably.7 Addison’s Account also reveals a dualist and sometimes
contradictory perspective on the relation of past and present literary
culture. The native past is evidently important as a pedigree for modern
poets: yet the poem’s teleology also suggests that modern achievements
are an improvement on what has gone before. This complex relation-
ship with native poetic tradition reverberates throughout Whig verse,
particularly during the War of the Spanish Succession, when poets
5 John Dryden, ‘To my Dear Friend Mr. Congreve, On His Comedy, call’d, The Double–
Dealer’ (1694), in Dryden, Works, iv. 433.

6 In a recent study Richard Terry has claimed that the poem marks the stabilization and
consecration of the canon of English literature (Terry, Poetry and the Making of the English
Literary Past 1660–1781 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), 51). Terry’s reading of this
poem seems rather selective, in that he ignores the Wnal section on Charles Montagu and
asserts that Dryden is presented as the apogee of poetic achievement (pp. 6, 50).
7 Terry, Poetry and the Making of the English Literary Past, 9.
debated the relevance and authority of pre-existing literary forms in

relation to the celebration of contemporary aVairs of state. Contempor-
ary poetry and its subject matter were seen as adding to a distinguished
lineage of English literature, but also as surpassing it. We Wnd a similar
ambiguity about the relationship between past and present cultures in
Addison’s discussion of classical literature. His boast that ‘Nor Simois
choak’d with men, and arms, and blood: | Nor rapid Xanthus’ celebrated
Xood, | Shall longer be the poet’s highest themes’ has been read as
signalling a rejection of classical models for modern Whig literature.8
But in fact it is a statement less about native literary originality than
about the subject matter of heroic verse: it is the scale of contemporary
military victories that renders classical comparison redundant. The
introduction of the epic comparison works in two ways. It suggests
that modern verse can now rival the Aeneid and the Iliad because of the
magniWcence of its subjects, but in evoking classical comparison it also
establishes the framework of literary achievement against which we
should measure Montagu’s verse. This dualism, within which classical
and earlier native literature are a source of authority, yet also an
authority to be rendered redundant by the events of modern life,
reverberates throughout the verse of the period, complicating notions
of poetic ‘originality’.
Addison’s tribute to Montagu does not, of course, focus only on the
subject matter of his verse. Its excellence, as he sees it, is also a matter of
style. Montagu’s stylistic virtues seem to be related to his birth: ‘noble’
and ‘graceful’ Montagu with his artful strains connotes an aristocratic
hauteur. Yet alongside this there is a suggestion of informality, and in
the reference to ‘loose familiar strains’ Addison presents an image of
sociable conversation. These models of literary debate, the aristocratic
and the sociable, were to be embodied in the Whig Kit-Cat Club, of
which Addison and Montagu were both members. The Club, with its
famous dinners, provided a focus for many of the cultural activities
sponsored by the new Whig elite. In combining writers, soldiers, states-
men, and Wnanciers it was a very public manifestation of the happy
marriage of political and artistic life that was central to the new Whig
literary culture. This symbiotic relationship between public and literary
worlds is made manifest in Addison’s Account. We have seen that the
poem praises William III as well as Montagu. It also includes a third
8 See David Womersley, introd. to Womersley (ed.), Augustan Critical Writing (Har-
mondsworth: Penguin: 1997), p. xviii.

Wgure: ‘To Dorset he directs his artful Muse, | In numbers such as

Dorset’s self might use’. Charles Sackville, Earl of Dorset, was one of
the signatories of the invitation to William III, and a prominent
member of the king’s household. He had met Montagu while the poet
was still a Cambridge undergraduate, and introduced him to the king
shortly after the Revolution. With Dorset’s support Montagu was fast
becoming an inXuential member of the powerful group of Whig states-
men and Wnanciers known as the Junto. In the Wnal lines of the passage
Addison remarks on Montagu’s recent transition from poet to states-
man, drawing attention again to the connections between literary and
political culture: ‘He aids the Heroe, whom before he prais’d’. This
symbiotic relationship between poetry and politics was evident in the
networks of patronage that sustained Whig verse at this time. Addison
reads the Epistle as a paradigm of poetry generated by the productive
interchange between one poet-statesman and another. Yet what the
Account does not explicitly say is that Montagu was Addison’s patron,
and that Dorset was Montagu’s patron. Once privy to this information
one might argue that Addison’s praise of Montagu’s ‘judgment’ oVers a
self-serving reXection on his patron’s discernment, or that Montagu’s
tribute to Dorset is merely due payment for his political advancement.
These are contexts which make it hard to interpret Addison’s literary
evaluation of the Epistle to Dorset, since such patronage relations, here
as elsewhere, clearly conXate issues of literary and political inXuence.
One of the aims of this study is to balance later suspicion of literary
patronage with a more detailed examination of how contemporaries
perceived the relationship between patron and writer, and the Wnal
chapter oVers an examination of literary patronage and its role in the
evolution of Whig culture.
Montagu’s afterlife: Pope, patronage, and the formation of

the canon
Charles Montagu’s heroic verse provided evidence to his peers of the

post-Revolution rebirth of letters. As statesman, patron, and poet he
seemed to embody the marriage of political and literary culture that was
so central to Whig visions of the modern nation. So what happened to
these verses of Montagu’s, once seen as the vanguard of the nation’s
brilliant poetic future? By the mid-eighteenth century Montagu’s works,
along with those of his contemporaries Samuel Garth, George Stepney,
and Thomas Tickell, were being published only in collections such as

The Works of the Most Celebrated Minor Poets (1749), and a quarter of a
century later when Samuel Johnson published his Lives of the English
Poets (1777–80) he faced criticism for his decision to include such minor
Wgures in his account of English poetry.9 If we trace Montagu’s critical
fortunes through the biographical dictionaries of the eighteenth and
nineteenth centuries we can see that his reputation changes signiW-
cantly. From the 1750s there is a shift of emphasis Wrst of all away
from his poetry to his patronage, and then later the accounts are
marked by an increasingly hostile perspective on his role as a patron.10
Over and over again biographers quote the same phrase, Pope’s lines
from the Epistle to Arbuthnot, where Montagu is described as ‘full-
blown Bufo, puV’d by ev’ry quill’.11 This brief satirical portrait of literary
narcissism became the only lens through which the poet-statesman
was seen. By the time of Alexander Chalmers’s canon-deWning General
Biographical Dictionary (1812–17) it was noted of Montagu merely
that ‘as he was a patron of poets, his own works did not miss of
celebration’. His patronage was viewed as the pursuit of a rich man
concerned to secure his reputation, and contemporary praise of his
poetry was therefore construed as merely the eager Xattery of potential
recipients.
This brief survey of Montagu’s reception reveals two factors that
inXuenced the later critical fortunes of many Whig poets and the
literary culture that they embodied. The Wrst of these is the role of
Pope and the Scriblerians in determining the reputations of Whig
writers. Texts such as Swift’s Tale of a Tub (1704), Gay’s Trivia (1716),
and Pope’s Peri Bathous (1727) reiterated associations between Whig-
gism and bad writing, enthusiasm, illiteracy, and poverty, and verse like
9 The Works of the Most Celebrated Minor Poets (London, 1749). See also The Works of
Celebrated Authors, of whose Writings there are but Small Remains (London, 1750). On this
criticism of Johnson’s Lives see Terry, Poetry and the Making of the English Literary Past,
245–6.
10 See Giles Jacob, The Poetical Register, 2 vols. (London, 1719–20); Theophilus Cibber
[Robert Shiels], The Lives of the Poets of Great Britain and Ireland to the Time of Dean Swift,
5 vols. (London, 1753); The British Biography; or an Accurate and Impartial Account of the
Lives and Writings of Eminent Persons (London, 1773–80); John Aiken, The General
Biographical Dictionary; or Lives, Critical and Historical, of the most Eminent Persons
(London, 1799–1815); A. Chalmers, The General Biographical Dictionary: Containing
an Historical and Critical Account (London, 1812–17); R. A. Davenport, A Dictionary
of Biography (London, 1831).
11 Alexander Pope, An Epistle from Mr. Pope, to Dr. Arbuthnot (1735), in TE, vol. iv,
p. 112, l. 232.
Montagu’s was relentlessly mocked for its aspirations to the sublime.12

The derision of Whig poetry reached its peak with Pope’s Dunciad,
which parodied the Whig vision of the progress of contemporary
literature with the progress of Dulness, heralding in an age of lead,
when ‘Universal Darkness buries All’ (IV. 656).13 While The Dunciad
levels its satire at a range of targets, its literary victims are predomin-
antly Whig writers, and their Whig patrons. Pope’s inXuence on the
shaping of early eighteenth-century literary history was enormous. As a
brilliant, but profoundly partial, literary history of its time, The Dun-
ciad damned many of Pope’s contemporaries to eternal mediocrity.
The second inXuential factor that Montagu’s story reveals in the
evolution of critical responses to Whig poetry is a changing attitude
towards the economics of print culture, and an increasing suspicion of
the patronage system underlying the production of Whig poetry.
Samuel Johnson’s famous letter to the Earl of ChesterWeld (1755) was
the crystallization of a growing conviction that the patronage system
entailed servility and political compromise.14 This notion that patron-
age was somehow distasteful, and that the only proper condition for the
man of letters was one of Wnancial independence, was perpetuated
through to the twentieth century. In Authorship in the Days of Johnson
(1927) A. S. Collins concluded that patronage ‘was enervating; it was
unbecoming the dignity of the profession of letters; in politics it was
open to abuse, and harmed the writer and the public’.15 And, as Dustin
GriYn has argued, a distaste for the notion of patronage has perpetu-
ated to the present day in literary criticism that tends to emphasize the
adversarial relationship between authors and the hegemonic authority
of their time.16 From the mid-eighteenth century onwards, then, pat-
ronage was seen as hindering poetic independence, creating relation-
ships of debt and interest within which literary works and reputations
are shaped by the needs of the patron. Such a view could only have a
negative eVect on the later reception of the Whig poets who proudly
proclaimed their own and other writers’ dependence on powerful
statesmen. Charles Montagu was not remembered as a benevolent
12 On the cultural politics of the Scriblerus Club see Brean Hammond, Professional
Imaginative Writing in England 1670–1740: ‘Hackney for Bread’ (Oxford: Clarendon, 1997),
238–90.
13 Alexander Pope, The Dunciad in Four Books (1742–3), in TE v. 409.
14 On Johnson’s complex attitudes towards patronage see Dustin GriYn, Literary
Patronage in England 1650–1800 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 220–45.

15 A. S. Collins, Authorship in the Days of Johnson (London: Robert Holden, 1927), 213.
16 GriYn, Literary Patronage in England, 3.
man of letters, but as a narcissistic potentate surrounded by a bevy of

hired pens. The networks of inXuence described in Addison’s Account
have had no place in models of literary production which insist upon
the Wnancial and ideological independence of the poet.
Whigs and Whiggism
The interdependence of political and literary concerns at the heart of

the Whig poetic tradition is nowhere more evident than in early eight-
eenth-century arguments for the revival of English letters. We can start
to glimpse some of the excitement felt about the future of English
literature in a letter written in 1706 from the third Earl of Shaftesbury
to Jean le Clerc:
There is a mighty light which spreads itself over the world, especially in those
two free nations of England and Holland, on whom the aVairs of all Europe
now turn [ . . . ] it is impossible but letters and knowledge must advance in
greater proportion than ever17
Shaftesbury’s emphatic linking of political liberty and literary culture
echoes arguments found elsewhere in his writing, and in the works of
Whig ideologues such as John Dennis and Richard Blackmore, all of
whom articulated a theory of politico-cultural development that is
rarely recognized in existing accounts of the period. In what amounted
to a manifesto for the revival of modern English literary culture, they
claimed that the constitutional liberty oVered by the Revolution of 1688,
combined with the patronage oVered by a committed Whig aristocracy,
presented the opportunity to forge a distinct and self-consciously
modern cultural identity for Whiggism. As Shaftesbury and others
saw it, the Revolution was a major and transformative intervention
between the past and the present. It prompted a reconsideration of
sources of cultural inXuence, forms of literature, and of the role and
responsibility of the modern writer in public life.
These writers saw the establishment of a Whig political culture as the
primary factor in the promotion of literary excellence. But, beyond the
enthusiastic endorsement of the Revolution, and its perceived political
liberties, what did it mean in particular to be a Whig writer? As H. T.
17 Shaftesbury to Jean Le Clerc, 6 March 1706, in The Life, Unpublished Letters, and
Philosophical Regimen of Anthony, Earl of Shaftesbury, ed. Benjamin Rand (1st pub. 1900 by
Swan Sonnenschein; repr. London: Routledge, 1992), 353.
Dickinson has asserted, there were core policies that remained constant.
The commitment to a balance between liberty and political order,
freedom of conscience, government by consent, and a mixed and
balanced Constitution can be identiWed in Whig writing across the
period. In the decades covered here these principles took the form of
support for the Revolution of 1688, the Hanoverian succession, the
sovereignty of king-in-Parliament, and freedom of worship for Protest-
ant Dissenters.18 Yet any attempt to describe Whiggism in this period is
complicated by the diversity of early Whig ideology. The evolution of the
name ‘Whig’ in itself reveals the diverse development of Whiggism.
‘Whig’ originates from ‘Whiggamore’, a term for Scottish Presbyterians,
and it continued to be used in this context until the end of the nineteenth
century at the same time that Whiggism was becoming associated with
the Exclusion movement and the predominantly English, London-based
high-political grouping that grew out of it, and that forms the focus of
this study.19 Over the course of the decades between 1678 and 1715 the
Whig political party gradually shifted away from its roots in traditions of
popular urban Dissent towards the establishment of a far more socially
and ideologically conservative power base with the Junto Whigs of Wil-
liam and Anne’s reign. In many ways the Whig verse produced during the
1680s is shaped by the need to Wnd ways of articulating opposition within
the constraints of censorship, concerns which were no longer important
after the Revolution. By 1710 the interest in the depiction of the city and
‘the people’ that marked earlier verse was no longer germane in a culture
of Whiggism built around the elite Kit-Cat Club. Moreover, after the
Revolution Whigs were frequently divided between those who were
prepared to compromise their principles in order to secure power and
18 H. T. Dickinson, ‘Whiggism in the Eighteenth Century’, in John Cannon (ed.), The
Whig Ascendancy: Colloquies on Hanoverian England (London: Edward Arnold, 1981),

28–44 (42). This essay provides a basic overview of the nature of Whig ideology in the
period. For another survey of the development of Whig argument see J. G. A. Pocock, ‘The
Varieties of Whiggism from Exclusion to Reform: A History of Ideology and Discourse’, in
Pocock, Virtue, Commerce, and History: Essays on Political Thought and History, ChieXy in
the Eighteenth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), 215–310.
19 See R. Willman, ‘The Origins of ‘‘Whig’’ and ‘‘Tory’’ in English Political Language’,
Historical Journal, 17 (1974), 247–64. I have focused this study on English, metropolitan
Whiggism because the writers and the literary debates I describe were rooted in a London-
based literary culture, albeit one whose publications circulated in a wider provincial
readership. On Whiggism in its Scottish and Irish contexts see P. W. J. Riley, King William
and the Scottish Politicians (Edinburgh: John Donald, 1979); Jonathan I. Israel (ed.), The
Anglo-Dutch Moment: Essays on the Glorious Revolution and its World Impact (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1991); W. A. Maguire (ed.), Kings in ConXict: The Revolution-
ary War in Ireland and its Aftermath 1689–1750 (Belfast: BlackstaV, 1990).
those who would rather be in opposition than be accused of having

sacriWced their political integrity. Thus alongside the development of
what we might call mainstream Whig political thought there persisted a
more radical Whiggism, whether in the form of the conspiratorial
plotting of the 1680s or the aristocratic republicanism of the 1690s and
1700s.20 The coexistence of these varied interests has generated an on-
going historiographical controversy over the conservatism or radicalism
of early Whiggism. Revisionists such as J. C. D. Clark have argued that
the Revolution was essentially conservative. Far from signifying the birth
of a modern state founded on contractual government, 1688 represented
no more than a change in the king and a continuation of the ancien
régime.21 Yet other historians have emphasized the continuing signiW-
cance of a republican tradition within early Whiggism, and have argued
that the outcome, and implications, of the Revolution seemed far from
certain to many contemporaries.22 While my reconsideration of early
Whig political poetry undoubtedly oVers new perspectives on these
debates, the function of this study is not primarily to use Whig verse to
reconstruct a dominant political ideology. In emphasizing the vitality
and sophistication of the Whig cultural programme, the study will
certainly counter some of the popular preconceptions that have accu-
mulated around eighteenth-century Whiggism. These have tended to be
dominated by the image of corruption and inertia associated with the
Whig ascendancy, or by the intellectual fallacies of ‘the whig interpret-
ation of history’.23 Yet, as we shall see, early Whiggism might also be
20 On the radical plotters of the 1680s see Melinda Zook, Radical Whigs and Conspira-
torial Politics in Late Stuart England (Pennsylvania, Pa.: Pennsylvania State University
Press, 1999). On the country Whigs of the 1690s see Caroline Robbins, The Eighteenth
Century Commonwealthman (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1959); Blair
Worden, introd. to Edmund Ludlow, A Voyce from the Watch Tower, 1660–1662, Camden
4th ser., xxi (London: Royal Historical Society, 1978).
21 J. C. D. Clark, English Society 1688–1832: Ideology, Social Structure and Political
Practice during the Ancien Regime (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), 6–7.
22 Mark Goldie, ‘The Roots of True Whiggism, 1688–94’, History of Political Thought,
1 (1980), 195–236; Craig Rose, England in the 1690s: Revolution, Religion, and War (Oxford:
Blackwell, 1999), pp. xiii–xiv; Pocock, ‘Varieties of Whiggism from Exclusion to Reform’,
215–310. The tercentenary of the Revolution of 1688–9 in particular provided a focal point
for such debate over the conservatism or radicalism of early Whiggism. For a good
discussion of reconsiderations of the status of the Revolution see Lois Schwoerer’s
introduction to Schwoerer (ed.), The Revolution of 1689: Changing Perspectives (Cam-
bridge, Cambridge University Press, 1992), 9–14.
23 On the pervasive and negative inXuence of Herbert ButterWeld’s notion of ‘whig
history’, see Annabel Patterson, introd. to Patterson, Nobody’s Perfect: A New Whig
Interpretation of History (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2002), 1–35.
identiWed with a dynamic and in many ways revolutionary project to

remodel cultural and political life. I will not, however, attempt to con-
struct a narrative of Whig political thought through the poetry of the
period. Whig poetry had an existence of its own, within wider Whig
ideology. It drew on its own political languages and rhetoric and did not
always articulate the same things as contemporary prose propaganda. So,
for example, the Whig poets writing in response to the Revolution of
1688 used an idiom of gloriWed rape and conquest at a time when such
images were unusable in prose. By investigating the literary expression of
the political and cultural agendas of early Whig poets I will explore the
way in which writers constructed a poetic mythology from the divergent
interests and ideologies that made up the wider political spectrum of
early Whiggism. The poetry is read not as part of a generalized or
uniform political programme but as a series of evolving deWnitions of
Whiggism which continued to be shaped by their engagements with
other texts.
Within the body of Whig poetry, too, there exists signiWcant political
diversity. There were, for example, Whigs who were dissatisWed with the
Williamite government, just as there were those who were profoundly
suspicious of the Whig Junto led by Montagu and John Somers. I have
linked Shaftesbury’s philosophies to Montagu’s poetry because they are
both premised on a conviction of the singularity of the post-Revolution
moment. Yet in reality during the 1690s they stood at opposite ends of
the political spectrum: Shaftesbury the Country Whig in opposition
and Montagu the spearhead of William III’s ruling Whig Junto. Writers
such as John Tutchin and Daniel Defoe, both committed Whigs, as-
sumed very diVerent positions on the signiWcance of the Revolution of
1688. As I hope will become apparent, Whiggism embraced a diverse set
of concerns in this period; yet the term carries signiWcant meaning in
reconsidering the literature of the period as a polemical dialogue.
Politics and literature
The reconsideration of the Whig poetic tradition involves the analysis

not only of the speciWc nature of Whig ideology but also of the broader
relationship between politics and literature, and the notion of the public
writer. Many of the terms associated with political writing have come to
assume pejorative associations: ‘propaganda’, ‘polemic’, and ‘partisan-
ship’ all connote tendentious argument, writing that is somehow
cruder, less sophisticated, than that which is less politically explicit. A

reassessment of the Whig tradition demands consideration of the rela-
tionship between political function and aesthetic value, and a re-
appraisal of the role of poetry as propaganda, polemic, and
partisanship.24 Early Whig verse was literally a form of propaganda, as
a ‘systematic scheme, or concerted movement for the propagation of a
particular doctrine or practice’.25 One of the aims of this book is to
demonstrate the role of this poetry within the broader movement
to establish the cultural and political legitimacy of Whig policies, and
to consider the politics of poetry in their broadest sense. The propa-
gandistic function of Whig verse took a number of forms. Most obvi-
ously, poetry presented partisan views of certain policies, Wgures, and
battles. Whig writers used their verse to argue for the Exclusion Bill, for
the land war, for the Hanoverian succession. Yet the promotion of a
body of elevated poetry produced and sponsored by Whigs also had
cultural capital in its own right, demonstrating the revival of native arts
and letters after the Revolution. Like the palaces, plays, and paintings
sponsored by the wealthy Kit-Cats, the signiWcance of literature as a
form of display was as important as its role in topical debate. And on
another level the literary and cultural criticism and philosophy of John
Dennis, Joseph Addison, and Shaftesbury promoted new ways of read-
ing, writing, thinking, and behaving, demonstrating that each was a
natural consequence of Whig ideology. All these aspects of Whig culture
were propagandistic, in that they sought to reinforce the legitimacy of a
particular reading of recent history. In order fully to understand the
culture of this period, we need to be alert to these varied ways in which
artistic forms could articulate political ideology.
A reappraisal of Whig poetry also oVers an opportunity to consider
the nature of political identity. Early Whig verse was recognized to be
explicitly partisan: the poet considered to bear a responsibility for the
celebration and memorializing of aVairs of state. The poetic tradition
described here was party-speciWc both in its responses to topical issues
24 There has of course been much important work on the relationship between politics
and literature in recent studies of the period. To name only a few inXuential studies: Steven
Zwicker, Lines of Authority; David Norbrook, Writing the English Republic: Poetry, Rhetoric
and Politics, 1627–1660 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999); Howard Erskine-
Hill, The Poetry of Opposition and Revolution: Dryden to Wordsworth (Oxford: Clarendon,
1996); Christine Gerrard, The Patriot Opposition to Walpole: Poetry, Politics, and National
Myth, 1725–1742 (Oxford: Clarendon, 1994); Philip Harth, Pen for a Party: Dryden’s Tory
Propaganda in its Contexts (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1993).
25 OED 2nd edn. s.v. ‘propaganda’.
and in its adoption of broader concerns. This book will chart the
development of a number of distinct themes in Whig writing, such as
the emphases on moral reformation and the modernity of the Revolu-
tion. This evidence of speciWcally Whig as opposed to Tory themes runs
counter to claims for the consensual nature of political debate in the
period. It oVers an important corrective to the argument, found in the
work of Lewis Namier, J. H. Plumb, and, more recently, Linda Colley,
that the Augustan age marked a period of political consensus and the
transcendence of party-political division.26 Yet, for all the evidence of
distinctly partisan ideas and themes, we cannot read these debates as
rigidly oppositional. There is much evidence of the Xuidity of party-
political allegiance in contemporary literature. The networks of friend-
ship and inXuence between Whig writers and statesmen seen in Addi-
son’s Account suggest that political aYliation was a prime factor in the
evaluation of literary merit. However, returning to that poem, we can
see that even here the lines of inXuence work in a number of diVerent
ways. Addison’s Account may laud Montagu, but it also hails Tory
Dryden as the ‘great poet’ of the previous age. The bookseller Jacob
Tonson, who played such an important role in the creation of Whig
literary culture, published both the Account and Dryden’s poem ‘To
Congreve’. And in the latter poem, for all the attack on William III,
Dryden presents as his own successor William Congreve, a prominent
Whig rising through the ranks of diplomatic service. Moreover, a
broader examination of the evolution of political poetry in this period
reveals that, despite a strong sense of ideological opposition, there
were important crossovers between Whig and Tory rhetoric. My
accounts of the language of anti-enthusiasm in both Whig and Tory
writing and of the competing claims on discourses of sociability dem-
onstrate a level of Xuidity in party-political debate that is central to the
understanding of both the Whig and the Tory traditions.
My sense of the complex relations between political and literary
discourse owes much to recent studies of poetry and politics in the
late seventeenth and early eighteenth century. The reconstruction of
Whig literary culture is a revisionist history in that it attempts to give a
sense of alternative possibilities: to tell a story that has been written out
of literary history. In this it bears comparison with the work of critics
26 Sir Lewis Namier, The Structure of Politics at the Accession of George III (London:
Macmillan, 1929); J. H. Plumb, The Growth of Political Stability in England 1675–1725

(London: Macmillan, 1967); Linda Colley, Britons: Forging the Nation 1707–1837 (New
Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1992).
who have sought to map other traditions of political writing that have
been marginalized in the literary canon. David Norbrook’s and Nigel
Smith’s work on radical and republican writing in the 1640s and 1650s
and Murray Pittock’s and Howard Erskine-Hill’s recovery of Jacobite
literature have in their very diVerent ways drawn attention to the
politicized nature of canon formation and to the existence of poets’
voices which have been suppressed by their political opponents.27 Yet
while these studies oVer important models for the reappraisal of alter-
native traditions within seventeenth- and eighteenth-century literature,
they also emphasize the singularity of the conundrum examined here.
Most revisionist histories seek to emphasize the existence of a political
tradition that has been marginalized or under-represented. The politics
of Whiggism, on the other hand, unlike those of republicanism or
Jacobitism, have never been ignored. Part of my study involves an
investigation into the development of this historiographical asymmetry.
As will become clear, the value judgements around which we have built
our modern literary canon are inextricable from the cultural politics of
the period. In particular, we will see the way in which the inXuential
satires of John Dryden and the Tory Scriblerians eVectively aestheticized
a political attack on Whig writers. This book thus pursues some of the
implications of recent critical work on Pope and the Scriblerians: Brean
Hammond, Carole Fabricant, and others have stressed that the poetry
of Pope and Swift is less a profound moral vision than a form of
‘cultural combat’ in the face of threat to them.28 In an introductory
essay on eighteenth-century literary criticism David Womersley has
oVered a more speciWcally political perspective on the nature of this
cultural threat, arguing that Tory poetry and criticism existed in a
dialectical relationship with a Whiggish vision of literary aesthetics
and literary history.29 The potential of a reappraisal of such a Whig
tradition has started to become evident in studies of the literary culture
of the 1720s and 1730s, in Hannah Smith’s research into Hanoverian
court culture, Christine Gerrard’s work on the patriot opposition to
27 Norbrook, Writing the English Republic ; Nigel Smith, Literature and Revolution
in England, 1640–1660 (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1994); Murray
Pittock, Poetry and Jacobite Politics in Eighteenth-Century Britain and Ireland (Cam-
bridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994); Erskine-Hill, The Poetry of Opposition and
Revolution.
28 Brean Hammond, Pope (Brighton: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1986); Carole Fabricant,
‘Pope’s Moral, Political, and Cultural Combat’, The Eighteenth Century: Theory and
Interpretation, 29 (1988), 165–87.
29 Womersley, introd. to Augustan Critical Writing, pp. xi–xliv.
Walpole, and Tone Sundt Urstad’s re-examination of Walpolian propa-

ganda.30 It is my aim to take all these new approaches as a starting point
and, in analysing Whig poetry in its fullest context, to oVer a signiWcant
re-evaluation of the politics of literary culture in the late seventeenth
and early eighteenth century.
The chapters
It is a central argument of this book that we cannot understand early

Whig poetry without Wrst exploring the relationship between political
and aesthetic judgements in the early eighteenth century. By way of
introducing this relationship, and the cultural politics of literary debate,
the study begins with an account of what I have termed the ‘Tory
critique’. Dryden, Pope, and Swift lampooned their Whig adversaries
as talentless hacks and dunces, images which have exerted a huge
inXuence over their later critical reception. Rereading a satirical trad-
ition from MacFlecknoe to The Dunciad we shall see that the developing
Tory argument about bad poetry has an inherently political basis. The
notion of the ‘dunce’ was intimately connected with a set of associations
between enthusiasm, commercialism, and populism. All these concepts
were central to earlier Royalist attacks on Puritans, and it is within this
polemical tradition that we need to address Tory satire. As this sum-
mary suggests, a reappraisal of the negative associations clustered
around Whig writing provides an important framework for under-
standing how issues of literary merit were inextricable from those of
political aYliation. It is also essential for understanding the way in
which Whig literature shaped and was shaped by the attacks of its
opposition.
Chapters 2–4 will look at the dialogue between Whig and Tory
writing from another perspective, demonstrating the way in which
Whig writers used public poetry to develop a distinct set of myths
and arguments about contemporary events between 1678 and 1714. In
Chapter 2 I shall explore the verse produced between 1681 and 1688 by
the ‘First Whigs’, and examine the ways in which the diverse and
disparate emergent Whig party attempted to deWne itself in opposition.
30 Hannah Smith, ‘Georgian Monarchical Culture in England, 1714–60’, Ph.D. thesis
(Cambridge University, 2001); Gerrard, The Patriot Opposition to Walpole ; Tone Sundt
Urstad, Sir Robert Walpole’s Poets: The Use of Literature as Pro-Government Propaganda,
1721–1742 (Newark, Del.: University of Delaware Press, 1999).
As writers from both sides oVered their respective representations of the

political will of ‘the people’, they drew on competing discourses of
radicalism and rationality in an attempt to secure the authority of
their description of recent history. This chapter illustrates the ways in
which early Whig public poetry participated in this debate about the
nature of popular politics and of political rhetoric in the period.
Chapter 3 pursues the story of Whig verse during the reign of William
III (1688–1702), and examines the way in which Whig writers responded
to the Revolution, and the militarism of William’s reign. From 1688
onwards the nature of party-political discourse changed signiWcantly:
the accession of William III brought many Whigs back into public life,
and Whig poets became, largely, the defenders of the regime, rather
than its critics. This chapter will explore some of the implications of the
Revolution and the wars which followed, arguing that the Revolution
presented two major new challenges for Whig writers: Wrst, to legitimate
the unconstitutional and unprecedented events of 1688–9, and, sec-
ondly, to celebrate William’s military campaign on the Continent. In
Chapter 4 we shall see the ways in which these concerns had developed a
decade after the Revolution. By the end of the 1690s it was possible to
write simultaneously of the Revolution as a return to earlier historical
paradigms and as the beginning of a new era: to claim both historical
precedent and inaugural status for 1688. On the one hand William’s wars
had brought conXict, and victories against France that were comparable
with legendary triumphs at Crécy and Agincourt. Yet the funding and
organization of the war had brought huge economic and social change.
This included a system of public-deWcit Wnance with its attendant urban
culture; a class of Whig statesmen, Wnanciers, and clergymen all in-
debted to the new regime; and a religious settlement. The dual perspec-
tive was to reverberate throughout the public poetry of the 1700s, as
writers debated the relevance and authority of pre-existing literary
forms in relation to the celebration of contemporary aVairs of state,
and in particular the celebration of the victories of the War of the
Spanish Succession.
Chapter 5 develops some of the ideas introduced in this thematic-
chronological narrative, and also returns to the theoretical concerns
with historical aesthetics established in Chapter 1. It looks more closely
at Whig poetics, and in particular at the evolution of the Whig sublime.
It will approach the question of the literary merit of Whig poetry by
considering what it was that contemporaries liked about the verse.
I shall attempt to recover a historical aesthetic that will enable us to
understand how a now-forgotten poetic tradition could have enjoyed

such popularity in its own time. Many believed that the rapturous
excursions associated with sublime verse suited the elevated nature of
the new poetry and its triumphant subject matter. The long-standing
association between sublimity and political liberty prompted writers to
believe that the Revolution and its consequent freedoms would inaugur-
ate a new age of great writing. It will become clear that in much early
eighteenth-century verse the concept of the sublime was intrinsically
linked to the issues of authority, modernity, and liberty found more
widely in Whig poetry.
The book concludes by once again returning to the wider connections
between literary and political culture in the period. Previous chapters
have shown how aesthetic and political concerns were inseparable in
early Whig literary culture. Now we will see how the connection be-
tween the two took material form in contemporary support for the arts.
Chapter 6 provides a counterpoint to Chapter 1 by showing that, far
from being the penniless hacks described in contemporary Tory satire,
many Whig poets were the beneWciaries of a sophisticated system of
patronage. An examination of the nature of this patronage reveals the
economic and political networks behind Whig verse, and it also dem-
onstrates the important ideological commitment to the systematic
promotion of a Whig literary culture. The intention behind the exten-
sive support of Whig poetry in this period was not just to secure the
services of political propagandists but to support a distinctively Whig-
gish cultural arena. The new Whig elite would become the guardians of
a revitalized artistic culture whose grandeur would reXect their author-
ity and largesse, and the modern writer would play a vital part in the
remodelling of cultural, political, and social spheres in the early eight-
eenth century.
1
The Tory critique of Whig literature
Twenty-Wrst-century readers of literature are unlikely to be familiar

with Charles Montagu’s Epistle to Dorset. If they know of Montagu at
all, it will most likely be through Pope’s attack on ‘full-blown Bufo’ in
his Epistle to Arbuthnot (1735). Pope’s version of literary history has been
enormously inXuential in determining later perspectives on early eight-
eenth-century poetry, and partly as a result of this Montagu’s poetry has
vanished into apparently deserved obscurity. In this respect, Montagu
and Pope can stand as a metonymic example of the interconnected
fortunes of Whig poetry and Tory literary criticism. The critical fates of
the majority of the poets that form the subject of this book were shaped
by the attacks of their political adversaries. My revisionist study of Whig
literature will begin with a re-examination of this Tory critique. In
reading a series of familiar Tory works from Dryden’s MacFlecknoe
(1682) to Pope’s Dunciad (1728–44) as a chronology of anti-Whig satire,
I hope to show the ways in which these poems eVectively aestheticized
issues of political diVerence. By connecting a series of texts from the
1660s through to the 1740s, we can chart the development of a satiric
vocabulary about ‘bad’ poetry, and the continuity of a set of associ-
ations between enthusiasm, commercialism, and populism which are
ultimately derived from Royalist ideology. These associations generated
a circular argument about contemporary literary culture, within which
bad poetry was equated with ‘bad’ or opposing politics, and those
politics in turn equated with bad poetry. Of course, an assertion of
the political concerns underwriting the attack on ‘bad’ poetry is not in
itself evidence of the literary merit of Whig verse. But it does open up
the authority of Tory critical dismissals to questioning. Our post-Ro-
mantic tendency to regard the aesthetic and the political as distinct,
separate, even oppositional categories serves us poorly for comprehend-
ing a historical period in which aesthetics were understood to be
inherently political.
Charting the evolution of anti-Whig satire reveals much about both
the Whig and the Tory traditions in this period. The relation between
The Tory critique of Whig literature 23
Tory critique and Whig poetry was involved and dynamic. Whig poetry
developed in response to the points of Tory attack, and this attack also
adapted, sometimes belatedly, to changes in Whig writing and the
circumstances of its production. For example, the emphasis on polite-
ness and on sociability in Whig writing cannot be understood without
recognizing that Whig writers were traditionally depicted by their
opponents as mad, illiterate, and antisocial zealots. Nor can we under-
stand the import of Whig hopes for a post-Revolution cultural revival
without Wrst recognizing the Tory emphasis on the signiWcance of the
Restoration in 1660. Moreover, mapping the long inheritance of anti-
Whig rhetoric reveals it to be in many respects anachronistic by the
1720s, when it was being deployed by Pope, Jonathan Swift, and John
Gay. These Scriblerians were drawing on a set of pre-existing arguments
found in the work of Restoration writers such as Dryden, John Oldham,
and Wentworth Dillon, Earl of Roscommon, and adapting them for a
very diVerent political era. Acknowledging the historical debts of Scrib-
lerian satire undermines recent readings that construct it as an analysis
of modernity. In many ways, its cultural critique was retrospective. Most
importantly here, recognizing the political dimensions of Scriblerian
satire troubles our customary acceptance of its evaluations of Whig
literature.
The Royalist inheritance
The tradition of literary criticism which Tory writers inherited and

perpetuated was founded on Royalist attacks on Puritan culture. As
Lucy Hutchinson observed, Royalists commonly claimed that their
opponents were ‘an illiterate, morose, melancholly, discontented,
craz’d sort of men, not Wtt for humane conversation’.1 All these charac-
teristics were typical attributes of the religious ‘enthusiast’. This deroga-
tory label, meaning those claiming false inspiration, had long been used
to attack various Protestant groups, zealous sectarians, millenarians,
prophesiers, and others who opposed the existing Church order, and
it was particularly aimed at those who claimed that they received
inner revelation.2 Enthusiastic writers were commonly lampooned as
1 Lucy Hutchinson, Memoirs of the Life of Colonel Hutchinson, ed. James Sutherland
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1973), 44.

2 See J. G. A. Pocock’s deWnition: enthusiasm was considered to be ‘the essential
characteristic of Puritanism: the claim to personal inspiration by an indwelling spirit,

24 The Tory critique of Whig literature
ill-educated and dangerously populist, while their style, as Michael

Heyd has described, was associated with a predilection for a confused,
ornamental idiom and high-Xown language.3 Those accused of enthusi-
asm were not always the illiterate and the uneducated, but enthusiastic
writers were frequently attacked for inciting the popular classes with
appeals to their passions, and for using the powerful Dissenting press to
disseminate their radical politics.4 Thus from the beginning religious
Dissent was linked to commercial authorship and low culture.
After 1660 the Anglican Church, anxious to shore up its restored
authority, continued to draw on the existing tradition of anti-enthusiastic
discourse to attack all those who seemed to represent a threat to either
Church or State. Although religious enthusiasm had originally signiWed
those who believed themselves to be privy to divine inspiration, its
application was soon extended to cover any form of religious or polit-
ical dissent. Thus by the time of the Exclusion Crisis it had come to be
synonymous with early Whiggism.5 As in the Civil War period, the
attack on enthusiasm had a powerful cultural dimension. The celebra-
tion of the regeneration of art and literature after the Restoration was
premised on a polemical rejection of Puritan culture. Tory writers
constructed an account of national decline and revival according to
which Restoration culture rose up gloriously from the ruins of Puritan
with all its chiliastic and antinomian capacity to turn the social as well as the metaphysical
world upside down’. (Pocock, ‘The Varieties of Whiggism from Exclusion to Reform: A
History of Ideology and Discourse’, in Pocock, Virtue, Commerce, and History: Essays on
Political Thought and History, ChieXy in the Eighteenth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1985), 215–310 (219). Classic attacks on enthusiasm in this period are
Meric Casaubon, A Treatise Concerning Enthusiasme (London, 1655) and Henry More,
Enthusiasmus Triumphatus (London, 1656).
3 N. H. Keeble, The Literary Culture of Nonconformity in Later Seventeenth-Century
England (Leicester: Leicester University Press, 1987), 156–86; Michael Heyd, ‘Be Sober and
Reasonable’: The Critique of Enthusiasm in the Seventeenth and Early Eighteenth Centuries
(Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1995), 5. The idea of poetic enthusiasm as signifying uncontrolled frenzy
dated back to attacks on the Dionysiac movement in ancient Greece (see E. R. Dodds, The
Greeks and the Irrational (Berkeley, Calif.: University of California Press, 1951), 82). On the
complex politics of plain style at the Restoration see Roger Pooley, ‘Language and Loyalty:
Plain Style at the Restoration’, Literature and History, 6 (1980), 2–18.
4 Heyd, ‘Be Sober and Reasonable’, 7.
5 T. N. Corns, W. A. Speck, and J. A. Downie, ‘Archetypal MystiWcation: Polemic and
Reality in England 1640–1750’, Eighteenth-Century Life, 7 (1982), 7–11. During the early
1660s the Clarendon Code, a series of pieces of punitive legislation against all those who
were not a part of the established Church, had widened the Anglican critique of Dissent by
blurring the categories between Presbyterians, Quakers and Baptists, Behmenists, and
Anabaptists (see Sharon Achinstein, ‘Milton’s Spectre in the Restoration: Marvell, Dryden
and Literary Enthusiasm’, Huntington Library Quarterly, 59 (1997), 1–29).
barbarism. In the essay Of Dramatick Poesie (1668) Dryden famously

stated that:
the fury of a Civil War, and Power, for twenty years together, abandon’d to a
barbarous race of men, Enemies of all good Learning, had buried the Muses
under the ruines of Monarchy; yet with the restoration of our happiness, we
see reviv’d Poesie lifting up its head, & already shaking oV the rubbish which
lay so heavy on it.6
Other Tory poets corroborated this story. Dryden’s friend and fellow
translator Wentworth Dillon, Earl of Roscommon, announced in his
Essay on Translated Verse (1685) that at last ‘Phoebus and the sacred Nine,
| With all their Beams on our blest Island shine’ (ll. 372–3), while Aphra
Behn lamented the previous period as one in which the world was
‘grown to that low Ebb of Sense, | To disesteem the noblest Excellence’.7
The brilliance, vitality, and exuberance of the Restoration cultural scene
was established in stark contrast to its other—the Puritan literary
tradition. This ‘other’ tradition is the heritage that Tory writers associ-
ated with the writing of the First Whigs.
Thus the Tory critique of early Whig poetry was based on many
elements of the anti-enthusiastic discourse that had characterized Cava-
lier attacks on Puritan writers. The attack on enthusiasm worked by an
analogy between the debasement of literary and of religious forms.
Poetic enthusiasm was a threat because it represented an anarchy in
the realm of literature that was parallel to the threat posed by religious
enthusiasm in the context of the established Church. Dryden asserts
that ‘A Dissenter in Poetry from Sense and English, will make as good a
Protestant Rhymer, as a Dissenter from the Church of England a
Protestant Parson’.8 Enthusiastic discourse, like enthusiastic religion,
was characterized as vulgar, indulgent, and idiosyncratic, in contrast
with conformist plainness, rationality, and civility.9 In this polemical
6 John Dryden, Of Dramatic Poesy, An Essay (1668), in Dryden, Works, xvii. 63. Robert
D. Hume argues that the most prominent feature of Dryden’s literary criticism is his belief
in a radical split between the Renaissance and the Restoration: this notion Wts well with the
story of cultural decline that we see articulated in the Essay and elsewhere (Hume, Dryden’s
Criticism (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1970), 90).
7 Wentworth Dillon, Earl of Roscommon, An Essay on Translated Verse (1685) in David
Womersley (ed.) Augustan Critical Writing (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1997), 108–20 (119).
Further line references in the text are to this edition. Aphra Behn, ‘On the Death of
E. Waller Esq.’ (1688), in The Works of Aphra Behn, ed. Janet Todd, 7 vols. (London:
William Pickering, 1992–6), i. 290.
8 John Dryden, preface to The Medall (1682), in Works, ii. 42.
9 Keeble, The Literary Culture of Nonconformity, 82–8.
Wguration of the contemporary literary scene conformist or Tory poetry

was what was to become known as ‘literature’: classic texts designed for
an elite, whose production was independent of the populist presses, and
the market forces of Grub Street.10 These sets of binaries were to form
an important part of the developing Tory poetics: Gay’s Trivia, Swift’s
Battle of the Books and Tale of a Tub, and Pope’s Dunciad all perpetuate
the oppositional myth inaugurated in Tory Restoration texts.
The link between religious enthusiasm and bad poetry is made
manifest in a range of writings of the 1670s and 1680s. In Roscommon’s
Essay on Translated Verse false inspiration in poetry is conXated with
false inspiration in religion. Roscommon dictates that
Abstruse and Mystick thoughts you must express,
With painful Care but seeming easiness,
For truth shines brightest through the plainest dress. (ll. 217–19)
and cautions:
Beware what Spirit rages in your breast.
For ten inspir’d ten thousand are Possest. (ll. 298–9)
He alludes not only to the suspicion of confused language and inspir-
ation found in earlier attacks on Puritan writers but also to the fear of the
link between enthusiasm and popular extremism, the threat of the ‘ten
thousand’ who are encouraged by such poetry. We Wnd the same com-
parisons between stylistic harmony and the ‘fanatick’ abuse of poetry in
John Oldham’s work. His poem ‘Upon the Works of Ben Johnson’ (1678)
establishes a series of oppositions between good and bad writers, order
and confusion, and true art and hack writing that form the basis of the
Tory status quo. The political implications of these oppositions become
explicit when he contrasts the harmony and proportion of Jonson’s
writing with the eVorts of ‘dull and ignorant Pretenders’ (1.52):
The meer Fanaticks and Enthusiasts in Poetry
(For Schismaticks in that, as in Religion be)
Who make ’t all Revelation, Trance and Dream,
Let them despise her laws, and think
That Rules and Forms the Spirit stint. (ll. 54–8)11
10 The extent to which polemical Tory texts were presented as literary classics is already
evident in the Dryden–Tonson Miscellany Poems of 1684, in which Dryden’s MacFlecknoe

and Absalom and Achitophel were published alongside a series of classical translations, and
were praised for ‘a Style so keen, as ev’n from Faction draws | The vital Poyson’ (‘Upon the
Author of the Following Poem’, in Miscellany Poems (1684), 85).
11 John Oldham, ‘Upon the Works of Ben Johnson’ (1678), in The Poems of John
Literary ammunition
The force of this implied correlation between the abuse of religious and
of literary forms was to ensure that the charge of ‘enthusiasm’ acquired
a polemical agency in discussions of literary merit. Tory writers de-
veloped a circular argument within which all Puritans/Nonconformists
were bad poets, so all bad poets must be Nonconformists and enthusi-
asts. This inverted logic retained credence despite the fact that images of
impoverished religious fanatics were to become ever less appropriate
to Whig literary culture as the decades went on. In Tory satire
aesthetic evaluation was predicated on political considerations, and
political evaluation was also determined by aesthetic judgements. An
early and inXuential example of the use of anti-enthusiasm to discredit
an opponent is found in Dryden’s famous attack on Thomas Shadwell in
MacFlecknoe (1682).12 The original context of the satire was a literary
one, concerning diVerences between the two poets over the relative
merits of the comedy of repartee and the comedy of humours, and over
the reputation of Ben Jonson.13 Yet, although the debate was about
dramatic theory, and although, as Steven Pincus has shown, Shadwell
was by no means sympathetic to Dissent,14 Dryden’s attack clearly asso-
ciates the writer and his work with religious enthusiasm and the political
radicalism that accompanies it. Shadwell’s hymn, the references to the
nurseries at Bunhill and the Barbican, Flecknoe’s role as an inspired
prophet, and the imagery of darkness and melancholy all link
Shadwell and his ancestors to the cultural proWle assigned to enthusiastic
writers.15 Moreover, Dryden also draws on links between religious
radicalism and the populist press to present Shadwell as participant in
Oldham, ed. Harold F. Brooks and Raman Selden (Oxford: Clarendon, 1987), 195–6.
Further line references in the text are to this edition.
12 Yet, as James Winn observes, Dryden’s response to this tradition is complex—on the
one hand he attacks Nonconformist style, yet on the other his strong prose style clearly
comes out of his background in a Dissenting family (Winn, John Dryden and his World
(New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1987), 26).
13 For a fuller account of the debate see R. Jack Smith, ‘Shadwell’s Impact upon John
Dryden’, Review of English Studies, 20 (1944), 29–44.

14 Steven Pincus, ‘Shadwell’s Dramatic Trimming’, in Donna B. Hamilton and Richard
Strier (eds.), Religion, Literature and Politics in Post-Reformation England (Cambridge:

Cambridge University Press, 1996), 253–74 (260–1).
15 See Ken Robinson and Clare Wenley, ‘MacFlecknoe the Enthusiast’, Durham Univer-
sity Journal, 75 (1983), 25–30.

a degraded literary market place. In this world avaricious booksellers

and craven authors generate reams of worthless paper, ‘Martyrs of Pies,
and Reliques of the Bum’ (l. 101), images which were to reverberate
throughout later Scriblerian satire.16
Dryden’s quarrel with Elkanah Settle over Settle’s production of
the Empress of Morocco (1673) reveals a similar politicizing of the
literary agenda. Here again, literary judgements are given political
inXection. When Settle published his tragedy in a de luxe edition in
1674, Dryden joined forces with two other playwrights, Crowne and
Shadwell (at this point an ally), to respond to his audacity. His angry
response, which took the form of the Notes and Observations upon
the ‘Empress of Morocco’ (1674) was partly provoked by Settle’s open
attack on the Laureate in the dedicatory epistle to the play. It was
also generated by resentment of the patronage that Settle had secured
from the court wits, two of whom, Rochester and Mulgrave, had
contributed prologues to the Empress.17 Thus the controversy was
essentially a question of economic and artistic rivalry, as the leading
playwrights of the day jostled for pre-eminence in the court and in the
theatre. However, Dryden’s ‘literary’ attack on Settle was loaded with
political and religious implications. He refers to Settle as an ‘upstart
illiterate Scribler’ who produces ‘unintelligible Poetical Cant’ and
continues:
He himselfe declares he neither reads, nor cares for Conversation, so that he
would perswade us he is a kind of Phanatick in Poetry, and has a light within
him; and writes by an inspiration which (like that of the Heathen Prophets) a
man must have no sense of his own when he receives18
Dryden draws on all the associations established in caricatures of

Puritan writers to attack his rival: Settle is unsociable, incapable of
conversation, mad, and crazed with the belief that he receives direct
inspiration. His threat to the Laureate’s professional standing is thus
presented as no less than a threat to the political settlement.
16 John Dryden, Mac Flecknoe (1682), in Works, ii. 56.

17 On the background to the quarrel see Maximilian E. Novak, introd. to The Empress
of Morocco and its Critics: Settle, Dryden, Shadwell, Crowne and DuVet (Los Angeles, Calif.:
William Andrews Clark Memorial Library, 1968).
18 John Dryden, postscript to Notes and Observations on the ‘Empress of Morocco’
(1674), in Works, xvii. 182.

Yet Dryden’s charge of illiteracy had no actual basis. Settle’s creden-

tials as a scholar were solid: he went to Westminster School as a King’s
Scholar, and spent a year at Trinity College, Oxford. There is no
evidence of his having radical religious beliefs. His only fault was to
have been an ‘upstart’, descended from a family of barbers, a fact which
his critics seized upon time and time again.19 The attack on Settle’s
lowly origins represents an important part of the developing Tory
critique of opposition writers. Dryden, Roscommon, Oldham, and
others commonly present the realm of poetry as the preserve of an
elite, of those who are born to be poets. Social and literary hierarchies
are conXated so that writers who threaten to intrude are seen as a
disruption to the natural order, and are condemned for their aspiration
and usurpation. As a number of critics have observed, Dryden fre-
quently used the idiom of succession, true or thwarted, to describe his
own position in relation to other writers.20 However, this emphasis is
not unique to the Laureate—it was shared by a number of contempor-
ary Tory authors, and would continue to be developed by Pope in Peri
Bathous and The Dunciad. Roscommon is insistent that ‘Degenerate
lines degrade th’attainted Race’ (l. 287), excluding both those who
‘Prostitute their Pen’ and ‘Rich Ill Poets’ from this race of true poets
(ll. 277, 283). Oldham describes a similar literary aristocracy in his
fragment ‘In Praise of Poetry’:
Stand oV unhallow’d Rabble! these high Misteries
Are seen only by clear enlighten’d Eys:
All rude unknowing Readers they disdain (ll. 11–13)21
This Tory polemic was based on the idea that not only should the
authorship of poetry be conWned to a natural elite, but it should also
be addressed to an exclusively elite audience. Writers rehearsing earlier
anti-Puritan attacks continued to claim that opposition writing was
19 See A Character of the True Blue Protestant Poet: Or the Pretended Author of the
Character of a Popish Successor (London, 1682), 1.

20 On the importance of this idiom of succession see Jennifer Brady, ‘Dryden and
Negotiations of Succession and Precession’, in Earl Miner and Jennifer Brady (eds.),
Literary Transmission and Authority: Dryden and other Writers (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1993), 27–54. Yet the coterie of aristocrats implied in Dryden’s work was
often an illusory one. As Stuart Gillespie has shown, Dryden’s Tonson miscellanies, which
were presented as the work of the ‘nobly born’, were in fact largely translated by a
backbone of ‘professional’ authors and scholars (Gillespie, ‘The Early Years of the Dry-
den–Tonson Partnership: The Background to their Composite Translations and Miscel-
lanies of the 1680s’, Restoration, 12 (1988), 10–19).
21 Oldham, ‘In Praise of Poetry’, in Poems, 333.
irredeemably rabble-rousing. In the anonymous The Character of a

Whig, Under Several Denominations (1700) the Whig writer is deWned
as one who:
is so fond of being Publick, that he will rather be a Blasphemous or a
Rediculous Incendiary, than not be taken Notice of as a Whiggish Author
[ . . . ] What a Fury will he raise about Nothing, and counterfeit a Foolish
Melancholly upon improbable dangers, to excite the brutish passions of the
Rabble, upon every slight and frivolous suggestion.22
For John Oldham, too, bad poetry is by deWnition populist. Emphasiz-
ing Ben Jonson’s elevation above other playwrights, he declares: ‘Let
meaner Spirits stoop to low precarious fame, | Content on gross and
coarse applause to live’ (ll. 260–1).23 Once again, this attack on the
popular is linked to an assault on professional authorship: Oldham’s
lines on the starving Whig poets anticipate Pope’s and Swift’s later
images of impoverished Grub Street hacks:
Settle, and the Rest, that write for Pence,
Whose whole Estate’s an ounce, or two of Brains,
Should a thin House on the third day appear,
Must starve, or live in Tatters all the year.
And what can we expect that’s brave and great,
From a poor needy Wretch, that writes to eat?24 (ll. 203–8)
City drama
This link between opposition poetry and populism, commercial author-

ship, and low culture was commonly emphasized by associating Whig
writing with a tradition of city drama and spectacle. Tory writers shored
up their own claim to represent high culture by claiming that the work
of their opponents was comparable with fairground entertainment and
pageantry—a comparison that would resurface most famously in Pope’s
Dunciad. For Oldham, Thomas Jordan the City poet was representative
of a whole tribe of dunces:
Ev’n that vile Wretch, who in lewd Verse each year
Describes the Pageants, and my good Lord May’r,
22 The Character of a Whig, Under Several Denominations . . . (London, 1700), 95–6.

23 Oldham, ‘Upon the Works of Ben Johnson’, in Poems, 202.
24 Oldham, ‘Spencer’s Ghost’ (? 1683), in Poems, 244.
Whose Works must serve the next Election-day

For making Squibs, and under Pies to lay,
Yet counts himself of the inspired Train,
And dares in thought the sacred Name profane. (ll. 63–8)25
The City tradition is also central to Dryden’s attack on Shadwell in
MacFlecknoe.26 The satire itself describes a mock pageant, with its
introductory oration, mock investiture, and Thames procession, and
Shadwell is aligned with a series of populist dramatists. Where Dryden
identiWes himself with Jonson, Fletcher, Etherege, and Sedley, he pre-
sents Shadwell’s literary forebears as Thomas Heywood, Thomas Dek-
ker, James Shirley, and John Ogilby. These four writers are all linked by
their connections to Christopher Beeston’s theatrical company, whose
main theatre before 1642, the Red Bull, specialized in rowdy, Xamboy-
ant, populist drama.27 Dekker and Heywood are also linked by the fact
that both of them wrote pageants for the Lord Mayor’s Show held every
year on 29 October.28 Dryden’s decision to locate Shadwell within this
theatrical tradition serves a number of functions. One is that it supports
Dryden’s deWnition of his own work as high art: while the Laureate’s
satire was circulating in manuscript amongst an aristocratic elite at
Oxford and Cambridge, Shadwell, Dryden claims, was turning out
humours comedy to please the lowest common denominator. More-
over, the association with Dekker and the pageant tradition also works
to suggest that Shadwell’s drama is crudely didactic, in the tradition of
the Lord Mayor’s processions.29
25 Ibid. 240. On Oldham’s inXuence on Scriblerian satire see Emrys Jones, ‘Pope and
Dulness’, Proceedings of the British Academy, 54 (1968), 231–63.

26 Tom H. Towers, ‘The Lineage of Shadwell: An Approach to MacFlecknoe’, Studies in
English Literature, 3 (1963), 323–34.

27 See Towers, ‘The Lineage of Shadwell’. Dryden clearly deWned his own art in
opposition to the populist drama typiWed by the oVerings at the Red Bull: in ‘Of Heroique
Playes’ he argued that dramatists ought to rely on dramatic eVects, and states that the fact
that ‘the Red Bull has formerly done the same, is no more an Argument against our
practice, than it would be for a Physician to forbear an approv’d medicine because a
Mountebank has us’d it with success’ (Works, xi. 14).
28 Towers, ‘The Lineage of Shadwell’, 331.
29 Dryden’s alignment of himself with Jonson, and Shadwell with Dekker may
well allude to the quarrel between Jonson and Dekker over the nature of city drama,
in which Jonson attacked Dekker for his populist and didactic pageants (see Muriel
Clara Bradbrook, ‘The Politics of Pageantry: Social Implications in Jacobean London’,
in Harold Fletcher Brooks, Antony Coleman, and Antony Hammond (eds.), Poetry
and Drama 1570–1700: Essays in Honour of Harold F. Brooks (London: Methuen, 1981),
60–75).
Yet although both Dryden and Oldham are anxious to emphasize the
gap between true poetry and city entertainment, there were in fact many
forms of contact between these two spheres of literary activity. Estab-
lished dramatists—for example, Thomas Heywood and Ben Jonson—
had written pageants for Lord Mayor’s Shows in the past. There was also
an increasing exchange of actors and plays between the booths of
Bartholomew Fair and the theatres, partly because the fair provided
work for actors when the theatres were closed.30 Thus the distinctions
between high and low culture that are so central to the construction of
the Tory myth are far less stable than they seem: Dryden’s and Oldham’s
texts, like later Scriblerian satire, wage their cultural warfare by erecting
boundaries where few exist.31
Sir Richard Blackmore and the Wits
The literary quarrel of 1699–1700 between Sir Richard Blackmore and

the Wits at Will’s CoVee House represents a signiWcant stage in the
evolution of anti-Whig discourse. This infamous literary skirmish was
parodied by a range of writers, most notably by Swift in The Battle of the
Books (1704) and Defoe in The PaciWcator (1700).32 While the contro-
versy did not develop along exclusively Whig/Tory lines, it reveals the
consolidation of a satiric vocabulary about ‘bad poetry’ that was clearly
derived from earlier attacks. The emergent Tory critique was structured
around an inXuential set of oppositions between wit and sense (or
didacticism), gentlemanly sociability and city prudery, and literary
ease and prosaic hack work.
Blackmore’s Satyr Against Wit (1699) was intended to provide a
defensive response to Samuel Garth’s The Dispensary (1699). Thus it
was generated by the ongoing debate between apothecaries and phys-
icians over the opening of a free out-patients’ clinic in the College of
Physicians.33 However, the Satyr and the quarrel that followed it were
30 S. Rosenfeld, The Theatre of the London Fairs in the Eighteenth Century (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1960), 9.

31 See Peter Stallybrass and Allon White, ‘The Grotesque Body and the SmithWeld
Muse: Authorship in the Eighteenth Century’, in Stallybrass and White, The Politics and
Poetics of Transgression (London: Methuen, 1985), 80–118.
32 For a comparison of the responses to The Satyr against Wit see D. N. DeLuna,
‘Modern Panegyrick and Defoe’s ‘‘Dunciad’’ ’, Studies in English Literature, 35 (1995), 419–35.
33 For a full account of the politics of The Dispensary see Gregory C. Columb, Designs
on Truth: The Poetics of the Augustan Mock-Epic (University Park, Pa.: Pennsylvania State
University Press, 1992), 157–61.
more directly concerned with the status and function of the man of
letters than the role of the physician. In The Dispensary Garth had
mocked Blackmore’s verse, quoting sections of his epics, recommending
that he ‘learn to rise in Sense, and sink in Sound’.34 In the Satyr Black-
more claimed that his writing was a ‘poetry of sense’ and was far
superior to the insubstantiality and immorality of the works of the
‘men of wit’, as Garth and his companions at Will’s had styled them-
selves. Picking up on arguments that he had made in his prefaces to
Prince Arthur and King Arthur, Blackmore reiterated the importance of
the moral reformation of the national literature. To correct the modern
depreciation of letters, he proposed that a group of prominent Whig
magnates—Baron Somers, Charles, Earl of Dorset, and Charles Mon-
tagu—underwrite a ‘bank of wit’ to reform the currency of poetry.
Under this scheme Dryden, Garth, William Congreve, Thomas South-
erne, and William Wycherley would all be purged of their licentious-
ness, and would learn to value ‘Virtue and [ . . . ] Merit’.35 Interestingly,
Blackmore’s attack on wit returned many of the charges that earlier Tory
writers had used against Whig and Dissenting poets. Drawing on anti-
enthusiastic discourse, Blackmore claimed that wit was a form of
insanity: ‘It takes Men in the Head, and in the Fit | They lose their
Senses, and are gone in Wit’ (ll. 34–5). He also suggested that the
depravity of enthusiastic wit posed a threat to the nation’s political
stability, asking: ‘What well-form’d Government or State can last, |
When Wit has laid the Peoples Virtue wast?’ (ll. 79–80).36 However,
for all his attempts to oVer his own cultural critique, Blackmore’s poem
was hardly oV the presses before it met with outraged responses from
the Wits. The main counter-attack came in the form of Commendatory
Verses, on the Author of the Two Arthurs’ and the Satyr against Wit; By
Some of his particular Friends (1700), a series of squibs composed by
Tom Brown, Charles Boyle, Sir Christopher Codrington, and other
members of Will’s, including John Dennis, Addison, and Garth.37
34 Samuel Garth, The Dispensary (1699), in POAS vi. 102.

35 Richard Blackmore, A Satyr against Wit (1699), in POAS vi. 149. Further line
references in the text are to this edition.
36 On changing deWnitions of wit in this period, as exempliWed in contemporary
drama, see Richard Braverman, Plots and Counterplots: Sexual Politics and the Body Politic
in English Literature, 1660–1730 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 220–5.
37 For an extensive account of the authorship and publication of the Commendatory
Verses see Richard C. Boys, Sir Richard Blackmore and the Wits: A Study of Commendatory
Verses on the Author of the two Arthurs and the Satyr against Wit, 1700 (Michigan, Mich.:
University of Michigan Press, 1949).
While the poems are clearly not driven solely by party-political diVer-
ence, they derive many of their criticisms of Blackmore from earlier
images of Whig writers, as Charles Boyle’s lampoon suggests: ‘Let
Bl—re still, in good King Arthur’s Vein, | To Fleckno’s Empire his just
Right maintain’.38
One of the most frequently repeated charges made against Blackmore
was based on his associations with the City. The preface to the Commen-
datory Verses suggests that Blackmore take control of City entertain-
ments, and that the authorities should ‘put the entire Management of
SmithWeld into his Hands, and make him absolute Monarch of all the
Booths and Poppet-shews’.39 Thus Blackmore was swiftly connected
with the moralistic pageants and popular entertainments that Restor-
ation writers had used as the epitome of the didacticism and rampant
commercialism associated with Whig writing. Blackmore was also ac-
cused, like Settle, of being ill-educated, though, like Settle, he in fact had
a perfectly respectable academic background, having been educated at
Westminster, Oxford, and Padua. In his prologue to Vanbrugh’s version
of Fletcher’s The Pilgrim Dryden refers to him as ‘Quack Ma[u]rus’ who
‘never took Degrees | In either of our Universities’. Also reminiscent of
Restoration rhetoric were the disparaging and unfounded insinuations
of a connection between Blackmore and religious enthusiasm. Dryden
suggests that the physician’s reformist ideals conceal a more sinister
political agenda:
But what if, after all, this Godly Geer,
Is not so Senceless as it wou’d appear?
Our Mountebank has laid a deeper Train,
His Cant, like Merry Andrew’s Noble Vein,
Cat-Call’s the Sects, to draw ’em in again.40
Blackmore was to continue to be lampooned as an enthusiast by other

writers for years to come, and the extent to which he recognized the
importance of this rhetoric in attacks on himself and other Whig writers
is demonstrated in The Kit-Cats, in which he parodies anti-Whig rhet-
oric.41 Imitating a Tory vocabulary of aspiration, sectarianism, and
38 Charles Boyle, ‘The Quack Corrected’, in Commendatory Verses, 73.

39 The ‘Epistle Dedicatory’ to Commendatory Verses, n.p.
40 John Dryden, prologue to The Pilgrim (1700), in The Prologues and Epilogues of John
Dryden, ed. William Bradford Gardner (New York: Columbia University Press, 1951), 180–1.
41 An interesting later attack on Blackmore as enthusiast is The Flight of the Pretender,
with Advice to the Poets (London, 1708), sig. a3v. The author of this poem—rather
enthusiasm, he writes of his friends in the Kit-Cat Club as a malevolent

force:
Who wou’d with Arts the British Heads reWne,
And the Subversion of thy Throne design.
The Kingdom into Parties they have split,
Enthusiasts of Sense, and Schismaticks of Wit.
In Strength the restless Sectaries encrease,
And interrupt thy quiet Subjects Peace.42
However, the main emphasis in the Wits’ attacks on Blackmore was not
so much his religious heterodoxy as his transgression of social norms.
The distinctions between Blackmore and the Wits at Will’s were distinc-
tions of class: his parochial civic morality was set up in opposition to
their aristocratic gentlemanly sprezzatura.43 As we shall see, this stereo-
type of the antisocial, zealous Whig writer was to inform the develop-
ment of Whig literary culture: attempts by writers such as Joseph
Addison and the Earl of Shaftesbury to create the polite face of modern
Whiggism were in part determined by their opponents’ attacks.44 These
Whig ideologues would promote sociable discourse that was ostensibly
beyond diVerences in rank; the Tory attacks on unsociable Whig writers
are, however, insistent on class distinctions. The Christ Church wit Tom
Brown (1663–1704) emphasizes Blackmore’s disregard for the ‘good
Manners’ that characterize the conduct of the Wits, and asserts:
he tells the World, that ’tis impossible for a Man to be a Wit, and not a Rake;
this I suppose he calculated for the Meridian of Cheapside, and for the
Consolation of his City-Friends, whom all the World will clear from the
Imputation of being Wits45
inappropriately—uses the idea of Blackmore’s illegitimacy in the realm of poetry to make

him the panegyrist of the politically illegitimate Pretender.
42 Richard Blackmore, The Kit-Cats: A Poem (London, 1708), 14.
43 See Robert M. Krapp, ‘Class Analysis of a Literary Controversy: Wit and Sense in
Seventeenth-Century English Literature’, Science and Society, 10 (1946), 80–92.
44 On discourses of enthusiasm and sociability see Lawrence E. Klein, ‘Sociability,
Solitude, and Enthusiasm’, Huntington Library Quarterly, 60 (1997), 153–78. For fuller
accounts of the importance of sociability in late seventeenth- and eighteenth-century
culture see John Mullan, Sentiment and Sociability: The Language of Feeling in the Eight-
eenth Century (Oxford: Clarendon, 1988); Dena Goodman, The Republic of Letters (Ithaca,
NY: Cornell University Press, 1994).
45 Thomas Brown, ‘To Sir W. S——Upon the two incomparable Poems, the Satyr
Against Wit, and the Poetae Britannici’, in Familiar and Courtly Letters, to Persons of
Honour and Quality, by Mons. Voiture (London, 1701), 131.
Implicit in his attack is a set of judgements about the relationship

between class and sociability. Blackmore’s lack of manners is attributed
to his City connections, despite the fact that he was very far from the
rude tradesman described in these satires. Other contributors were not
so reserved in their condemnations of Blackmore’s engagement with the
Wits. The Countess of Sandwich demands: ‘Thou fund of Nonsence,
was it not enough | That Cits and pious Ladies lik’d thy StuV [ . . . ]?.’46
Her lines suggest something of the perceived readership of Whig poetry:
urban tradespeople and ‘pious ladies’. With this focus on social distinc-
tion she once again emphasizes that literature should be the preserve of
a select few, that genuine poetry and criticism remain exclusive to those
born to it.
It was because of these aspects of Blackmore’s engagement with the
Wits that his name was frequently linked with that of Richard Bentley
(1662–1742), the scholar who had recently come into conXict with
Charles Boyle, William Temple, and the group of ‘ancients’ over the
authenticity of the Phalaris epistles.47 As Joseph Levine observes, at the
root of the ancients and moderns controversy lay a clash of cultural
mores, between the classical paideia of the amateur gentleman and the
humanistic scholarship of the professional philologist. Again, the par-
ticipants in the debate over the Battle of the Books did not divide along
party-political lines, but it is clear that the nature of the ancients’ attacks
on Bentley and William Wotton rested on the same distinctions of class
and style that characterized attacks on Whig writers.48 Bentley’s profes-
sional classical scholarship presented a threat to the integrity of the
classical ideal that was so important to gentleman scholars such as
Temple.49 When the young Christ Church scholar Charles Boyle
(1676–1731) went to the defence of Temple and the Epistles in Mr
Bentley’s Dissertations . . . Examin’d it emerged that what was really at
46 Countess of Sandwich, ‘To a Thrice Illustrious Quack, Pedant, and Bard’, in Com-
mendatory Verses, 7. See also Charles Sedley’s poem, ‘Upon the Author of the Satyr against
Wit’, in Commendatory Verses, 2.
47 A number of the Commendatory Verses link the two authors: see e.g. ‘The Noble
Corrected, or Advice to a Quality Commentator’; ‘An Equal Match: Or a Drawn Battle’; ‘A

Modest Request to the Poetical Knight’.
48 On the diYculties of reading party-political allegiances in the battle see Joseph M.
Levine, The Battle of the Books: History and Literature in the Augustan Age (Ithaca, NY:
Cornell University Press, 1991), 6. On Wotton and Bentley’s roles in the establishment of a
new ‘Whig Cambridge’ in the post-Revolution period see John Gascoigne, Cambridge in
the Age of the Enlightenment: Science, Religion and Politics from the Restoration to the French
Revolution (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 67, 142–55.
49 Levine, The Battle of the Books, 49.
issue was a question of cultural authority, as Tom Brown’s account

reveals:
Never did Wit and Learning Triumph so gloriously over Dullness and Ped-
antry, as in that noble Book [ . . . ] all the Polite Judges in Europe were pleased
to see an Arrogant Pedant, that had been crouding his Head twenty Years
together with the Spoils of Lexicons and Dictionaries, worsted and foiled by a
Young Gentleman, upon his own Dunghil, and by his own Criticisms.50
Both the Wits at Christ Church and those at Will’s drew on an estab-
lished critical tradition in which scholars were represented as ill-
mannered, bookish, didactic, vulgar pedants.51 In their attacks on
Bentley they oVset this stereotype against their own worldly and gra-
cious sphere of littérateurs.52 Like the Tory critique, the Christ Church
wits’ attack was essentially ad hominem, and focused on matters of style
rather than content: in concentrating on the inelegance of Bentley’s
prose, and the arrogance of his assertions, they obscured the intellectual
issue underlying the debate—the authenticity of the Epistles—over
which their opponent clearly had the upper hand. In the eyes of their
Tory critics, both Blackmore and Bentley, the aspiring poet and the
scholar, shared an earnestness about their work, a disregard for fash-
ionable savoir-faire, relatively humble social origins, and committed
Whiggism. Their association marked the beginning of the twin focus
on the Wgures of the pedant and the poet that was to form the basis of
Scriblerian satire.
Pope’s Essay on Criticism
One of the most important texts for understanding the evolution of the
Scriblerian project in the early eighteenth century is Pope’s Essay on
Criticism (1711). In the Essay Pope explicitly identiWes himself with a
tradition of Royalist and Tory writers, and articulates many of the
50 Thomas Brown, ‘To Sir W. S——’, in Familiar and Courtly Letters, 133–4.
51 These stereotypes were originally premised on the socio-economic diVerences be-
tween clerks and gentlemen; see Steven Shapin, ‘ ‘‘A Scholar and a Gentleman’’: The
Problematic Identity of the ScientiWc Practitioner in Early Modern England’, History of
Science, 29 (1991), 279–327. Shapin argues that although the Royal Society was intended to
encourage the gentleman-scholar, tracts on education and practical courtesy literature
continued to characterize pedantry as a major disqualiWcation for genteel society (p. 295).
52 Yet the delineation of this satire of pedantry was complex, since the pedant was also,
paradoxically, linked to the worldliness of rampant commercialism. For a fuller discussion

arguments that we have seen in earlier attacks on Whig writers. Like

Roscommon and Oldham, he emphasizes the literary values of harmony
and moderation, which are linked to a political agenda. His emphasis
on clarity and his suspicion of ornate literary style reiterates earlier
distinctions between conformist and Nonconformist discourse. Yet we
also see signs of engagement with modern Whig culture, in the Essay’s
promotion of ease and gentlemanly conversation in literary criticism.53
Central to the cultural politics of Pope’s Essay was the recent publi-
cation of John Dennis’s The Grounds of Criticism in Poetry (1704).54 In
this essay Dennis oVered a series of arguments about poetry and
criticism that ran counter to the tradition of Tory criticism that had
developed through Dryden, Roscommon, and the Wits at Will’s.55 The
crystallization of a set of distinctively Whiggish ideas about poetry in
The Grounds of Criticism undoubtedly sharpened Pope’s agenda in the
Essay on Criticism, and Pope’s self-deWnition in the Essay is formed in
reaction to the developing Whig tradition exempliWed by Dennis.
In the Grounds of Criticism Dennis elevated Milton’s poetry as the
high point of native tradition. In contrast, Pope’s mentors in the Essay,
as in his pastorals and very early pieces, are Royalist and Tory writers
whose work exempliWed a poetry which was regular, stylish, and occa-
sional, and bound into the culture of the Stuart court. In the Essay Pope
praises
the Easie Vigor of a Line,
Where Denham’s Strength, and Waller’s Sweetness join.
True Ease in Writing comes from Art, not Chance,
As those move easiest who have learn’d to dance. (ll. 360–3)56
The much-discussed aesthetics of moderation found in the Essay can be

more fully understood when seen as arising out of this tradition. Many
of commercialism and pedantry see Jonathan Brody Kramnick, Making the English Canon:
Print Capitalism and the Cultural Past, 1700–1770 (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1998), 84–90.
53 These qualities are, of course, not speciWc to the Essay. In his essay on ‘The Politics of
Style’ Pat Rogers argues that the wider implications of Pope’s technique are that his poetic
style ‘shuns obscurity’, ‘asserts the intelligibility and connectedness of things in a genteel,
elegant idiom’, and constantly ‘compares, contrasts, judges’ (Rogers, ‘The Politics of Style’,
in Essays on Pope (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 27–36 (34)).
54 For a summary of theories about Pope’s motives for the attack see E. Audra and A.
Williams, introd. to An Essay on Criticism, in TE i. 207.

55 On Dennis’s alienation from the Wits see Dennis, Critical Works, ii. xxv–xxvi.
56 Alexander Pope, An Essay on Criticism (1711), in TE i. 280–1. Further line references in
the text are to this edition.

critics have read Pope’s concern to ‘Avoid Extreams’ as an essentially

unpartisan position, oVering a middle way between critical polarities.57
Yet his emphasis on moderation is also a reiteration of the stress on
balance that is found in Royalist verse. Poets such as Waller and Den-
ham used the concept of poetic harmony to articulate a political and
cultural agenda, constructing analogies between poetic propriety and
political harmony so that, as in Denham’s Cooper’s Hill, an aesthetics of
moderation came to represent the divinely ordained order found under
the Stuart monarchy.58 The rhetoric of moderation, as we shall see in
the following chapter, had also acquired a range of political inXections
over the course of the later seventeenth century.
For Pope, Tory poets such as Roscommon were the natural heirs to
the Royalist tradition. Roscommon’s Essay, in which he urged writers to
‘make the proper use of each Extream, | And write with fury but correct
with Phleam’ (ll. 300–1), perpetuated earlier Royalist aesthetics. The
court wits also shared the mannered occasional style of Waller and
Denham, and Pope’s attraction to the Restoration lyricists is demon-
strated by his early imitations of the Earl of Rochester and the Earl of
Dorset.59 His friendship with Wycherley and his monumentalizing of
Dryden’s achievement in the Essay conWrmed his role as self-appointed
heir to this Royalist/Tory tradition. The politics underlying these stylis-
tic preferences are obvious. Pope’s account of Roscommon’s revival of
literary criticism perpetuates the Tory myth of the Restoration that we
have seen inaugurated in the 1660s:
But we, brave Britons, Foreign Laws despis’d,
And kept unconquer’d, and unciviliz’d,
Fierce for the Liberties of Wit, and bold,
We still defy’d the Romans, as of old.
Yet some there were, among the sounder Few
Of those who less presum’d, and better knew,
Who durst assert the juster Ancient Cause,
And here restor’d Wit’s Fundamental Laws. (ll. 715–22)
57 Pope’s editors Audra and Williams claim that in the Essay, Pope endeavours ‘to bring
about a literary peace in his own time [ . . . ] by providing his age with a broad and Xexible
critical position on which all can in some measure agree’ (TE i. 226).
58 See Paul J. Korshin, ‘The Evolution of Neo-Classical Poetics: Cleveland, Denham,
and Waller as Poetic Theorists’, Eighteenth-Century Studies, 2 (1968–9), 102–37.

59 James Grantham Turner, ‘Pope’s Libertine Self-Fashioning’, The Eighteenth Century:
Theory and Interpretation, 29 (1988), 123–44.

Pope’s description of restoration and revival echoes Dryden’s lines on

Roscommon: in ‘To the Earl of Roscommon’ he proclaimed that ‘The
Muses Empire is restor’d agen, | In Charles his Reign, and by Roscomon’s
Pen’ (ll. 28–9).60 His rejection of ‘the Liberties of Wit’ is also a challenge
to Dennis’s and other Whig writers’ theories of cultural development. In
the Grounds of Criticism Dennis had linked the revival of native litera-
ture to the re-establishment of political liberty at the Revolution, prais-
ing Milton for ‘daring to break a little loose’ from the rules of the
ancients.61
The Essay hinges on distinctions between plain style and ornament
which, again, are adapted from Roscommon’s criticism.62 Where Den-
nis claimed that ‘the frequent Use of Methaphors, Dialects, Epithets’
was necessary to poetry ‘because they are the Language of Passion’,63
Pope’s emphasis on clarity and the avoidance of metaphor looks back to
earlier anti-enthusiastic rhetoric:
But true Expression, like th’unchanging Sun,
Clears, and improves whate’er it shines upon,
It gilds all Objects, but it alters none
. . . . . . .
A vile Conceit in pompous Words exprest,
Is like a Clown in regal Purple drest (ll. 315–17, 320–1)
However, although the literary historiography and political idiom of the
Essay clearly align it with a tradition of Tory criticism, Pope is also
careful to claim his account of English poetry as a politically neutral
one, presenting partisanship as the preserve of the opposition:
Parties in Wit attend on those of State,
And publick Faction doubles private Hate.
Pride, Malice, Folly, against Dryden rose,
In various Shapes of Parsons, Criticks, Beaus. (ll. 456–9)
60 John Dryden, ‘To the Earl of Roscommon, on his Excellent Essay on Translated
Verse’ (1684), in Works, ii. 172–3.

61 Dennis, Grounds of Criticism (1704), in Critical Works, i. 331.
62 Pope’s debt to Roscommon’s and Buckingham’s criticism was immediately recog-
nized by contemporaries: Addison wrote that ‘we have three Poems in our Tongue, which
are of the same Nature, and each of them a Master-piece in its kind; the Essay on
Translated Verse, the Essay on the Art of Poetry, and the Essay upon Criticism’ (Addison,
Spectator 253, 20 December 1711, in The Spectator, ed. Donald F. Bond, 5 vols. (Oxford:
Clarendon, 1965), ii. 485–6).
63 Dennis, The Grounds of Criticism, in Critical Works, i. 340.
As he was to insist in his later poetry, only his enemies’ writing

was marred by petty factionalism. According to Pope’s Essay, Dryden
was not a political writer, but the Colliers, Shadwells, Langbaines,
and Blackmores were.64 This qualitative distinction between
political and non-political poetry—even within the context of
profoundly partisan texts—was to be central to the critique of the
Whig tradition.
Pope’s Essay and Dennis’s Grounds of Criticism were very diVerent
stylistically. The Grounds of Criticism was formal and prescriptive, and
Dennis made no attempt to disguise the fact that what he was oVering
was a series of rules and stipulations for the reformation of English
poetry which were ‘eternal and unalterable’.65 The piece was structured
formally, like Le Bossu’s strictures on epic, divided into sections and
subsections, proposals and specimens. Pope’s Essay, in contrast, al-
though equally prescriptive, was familiar and conversational. In the
Essay he describes this style as based upon the principle that ‘Men
must be taught as if you taught them not’ (l. 574), and he clearly follows
a Horatian model: ‘like a Friend familiarly convey | The truest Notions in
the easiest way’ (ll. 655–6). This familiar style again focused attention on
the man of letters in a social context. According to Pope, what deWnes
good criticism is social ease, the conWdence and judgement of the man
of the world:
Tho’ Learn’d, well-bred; and tho’ well-bred, sincere;
Modestly bold, and Humanly severe?
Who to a Friend his Faults can freely show,
And gladly praise the Merit of a Foe?
Bless’d with a Taste exact, yet unconWn’d;
A Knowledge both of Books and Humankind;
Gen’rous Converse; a Soul exempt from Pride;
And Love to Praise, with Reason on his Side? (ll. 635–42)
While Pope’s notions of ‘generous converse’ oVered a contrast to Den-
nis’s critical model, they closely resembled the arguments of a later
Whig theorist. In his Spectator essays Joseph Addison discussed the
nature of literary criticism, using the conversational format of his essays
64 Yet at other times Pope seems to be critical of Dryden’s partisanship—see his
comment that ‘the Aeneid was evidently a party piece, as much as Absalom and Achitophel ’
(Joseph Spence, Observations, Anecdotes, and Characters of Books and Men, ed. James M.
Osborn, 2 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon, 1966), i. 229).
65 Dennis, The Grounds of Criticism, in Critical Works, i. 331.
to oVer examples of both how to read and how to develop critical skills.
Addison eVectively demystiWes the evaluative process, suggesting that
anyone can develop sound opinions with the appropriate reading in
French, Italian, and classical authors.66 Yet, for all the apparent similar-
ities in approach between Addison and Pope, we can discern certain
essential diVerences between the two critical models. While the conver-
sational, familiar tone and style of the Essay, like Addison’s criticism,
seems to oVer the reader inclusion into the arena of literary criticism,
the boundaries between those who are qualiWed to write as critics and
those who are not are very clearly demarcated in Pope’s poem.67 As J.
Paul Hunter observes, ‘the learning it argues is necessary is easy neither
to acquire nor to apply’.68 Not only does Pope oVer a series of impos-
sibly contradictory rules that the critic must obey,69 but he also con-
Xates social and literary status to suggest, like Oldham, that only those
born to criticism or poetry may practise it:
In Poets as true Genius is but rare,
True Taste as seldom is the Critick’s Share;
Both must alike from Heav’n derive their Light,
These born to Judge, as well as those to Write. (ll. 11–14)
Thus Roscommon’s skill as a critic is linked to his ‘Manners gen’rous
as his Noble Blood’ (l. 726). Those who fail to qualify as critics are
those marked by their lack of social Wnesse. They are the socially
aspiring, ‘The Vulgar’, that ‘thus through Imitation err’ (l. 424), and
the writer
That in proud Dulness joins with Quality,
A constant Critick at the Great-man’s Board,
To fetch and carry Nonsense for my Lord. (ll. 415–17)
Bad critics lack the conversational grace and manners that mark the
work of Roscommon or Walsh. The Essay revealed Dennis, Pope’s
inXuential Whig rival, as exactly this type, who
66 See e.g. the discussion of literary criticism in Spectator 291.

67 See Womersley, introd. to Augustan Critical Writing, pp. xxxv–xxxviii.
68 J. Paul Hunter, ‘Sleeping Beauties: Are Historical Aesthetics Worth Recovering?’,
Eighteenth-Century Studies, 34 (2000), 1–20.

69 David Morris argues that what unites the contradictory deWnitions of the Essay is
Pope’s emphasis on the values of propriety and generosity, which are, again, social rather
than literary skills (Morris, ‘Civilized Reading: The Act of Judgment in An Essay on
Criticism’, in Howard Erskine-Hill and Anne Smith (eds.), The Art of Alexander Pope
(London: Vision, 1979), 15–39 (26) ).
reddens at each Word you speak,

And stares, Tremendous! With a threatning Eye,
Like some Werce Tyrant in Old Tapestry! (ll. 585–7)70
Pope’s description of his opponent reveals an appropriation and rever-

sal of his opponents’ arguments. As later chapters elaborate, the rhetoric
of liberty prevails in Whig criticism of this period: Dennis and others
argued that they were freeing English literature from the tyranny of the
past. Here, however, it is Dennis with his minatory critical prescriptions
who is the tyrant. Moreover, at a time when emergent Whig ideologues
were promoting conversational models of cultural debate, it is Dennis
who is too unsociable to countenance an exchange of opposing view-
points. The uptake of such arguments about sociability in Tory satire
reveals the double-edged nature of its cultural critique. As Brean Ham-
mond has argued, Scriblerian satire is frequently strengthened by its
selective appropriation of the cultural traditions it purports to reject.71
The Scriblerians
John Sitter has described Pope’s Essay on Criticism as ‘an elaborate, if

subdued conjunction of cultural history and Bildungsroman’.72 As such,
it reveals much about Pope’s self-deWnition as a poet and critic, and
about the way in which he reinforced his own centrality within a
speciWcally Tory tradition. Many of the critical positions developed in
the Essay were to feed into the various literary projects generated by the
Scriblerus Club.
Although recent criticism has tended towards a diVerentiation be-
tween the individual members of the Scriblerus Club, it is clear that in
many ways the work of writers such as Pope, Swift, Gay, and John
70 Pope was to continue to portray Dennis as rough and argumentative for the rest of
his career. In Peri Bathous he appears as one of the ‘Porpoises’ who are ‘unweildy and big;
they put all their Numbers into a great Turmoil and Tempest, but whenever they appear in
plain Light, (which is seldom) they are only shapeless and ugly Monsters’. (Pope, Peri
Bathous: or the Art of Sinking in Poetry (1728), ed. Edna Steeves (New York: Russell and
Russell, 1952), 27).
71 Brean Hammond, Professional Imaginative Writing in England 1670–1740: ‘Hackney
for Bread’ (Oxford: Clarendon, 1997), 214. On Pope’s borrowings see Roger D. Lund, ‘From
Oblivion to Dulness: Pope and the Poetics of Appropriation’, British Journal for Eighteenth-
Century Studies, 14 (1991), 171–91.
72 John Sitter, Arguments of Augustan Wit (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
1991), 87.
Arbuthnot is best understood by considering their shared cultural

agenda.73 The Club was, from the beginning, a speciWcally Tory
grouping, founded as a literary adjunct to the Brothers Club, a Tory
version of the Whig Kit-Cat Club.74 Thus it was from its inception a
group which was deWned in response to the cultural and social group-
ings of contemporary Whig writers. The Scriblerians’ interests were
initially focused on satires on pedantry, in the form of publications
such as the Memoirs of Martinus Scriblerus (1741) and Three Hours after
Marriage (1717). However, their obsession with delineating the diVer-
ences between true and false intellectual pursuits was soon extended to
contemporary literature, and satire on contemporary poetic culture is
central to works as chronologically and generically diverse as the Dun-
ciad, the Tale of a Tub, and Trivia. As I argued at the beginning of this
chapter, Scriblerian satire is founded on many of the qualitative distinc-
tions used by earlier Tory writers. Although Pope, Swift, and Gay often
link the degeneration of literature to the speciWc circumstances of the
Hanoverian/Walpolean regime, they draw on a set of assumptions about
good and bad poetry that are part of a pre-existing myth about politics,
religion, and literature. Thus the images of writing and writers they
employed were in many ways out of step with the nature of contempor-
ary Whig literary culture they wished to condemn, complicating their
claim to chronicle the modern.
There are numerous elements of Scriblerian satire that are inherited
from earlier Royalist and Tory writers. True poets are, as ever, independ-
ent of the sordid economics of the market place, and the demonization
of Grub Street dominates the work of Pope, Swift, and Gay. From the
parodies of publishers’ puVs at the beginning of Tale of a Tub to Gay’s
lines in Trivia on Gildon’s works ‘at Chelsea under Custards read’ and,
Wnally, Pope’s Dunciad, individual Whig authors are subsumed in the
bigger picture of a grasping and talentless literary underworld. Despite
the fact that, as the Miscellanies demonstrated, both Swift and Pope
drew on ‘low’ and popular genres in their own work, they continued to
make distinctions between the high literary status of their poetry and
the ephemeral and lowbrow nature of that of their opponents.75 And if
73 For a fuller version of this argument see Hammond, Professional Imaginative
Writing, 239–86.
74 George Sherburn, The Early Career of Alexander Pope (Oxford: Clarendon, 1934),
73–4.
75 On Swift’s embrace of popular forms see Ann Cline Kelly, Jonathan Swift and Popular
Culture: Myth, Media, and the Man (New York and Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2002), 13–104.
Whig writers were a lowly group, so were their readers. The Scriblerian
attack continued a tradition of anti-populist writing, as demonstrated
in the references to City poetry and drama found in Swift’s ‘On Poetry:
A Rapsody’ (1733):
In ev’ry Street a City-bard
Rules, like an Alderman his Ward.
His indisputed Rights extend
Thro’ all the Lane, from End to End.
The Neighbours round admire his Shrewdness,
For songs of Loyalty and Lewdness.
Out-done by none in Rhyming well,
Altho’ he never learnt to spell. (ll. 285–92)76
The commercialism of contemporary writers was also deWned in rela-
tion to an increasingly nostalgic sense of the Restoration court as a
golden age of royal patronage. The claim that under the late Stuarts, and
especially Charles II, the best writers and artists enjoyed a quality and
quantity of patronage never to be seen again after 1688 dates from the
1690s, where it is found in the poetry of the Jacobite poet and dramatist
George Granville. Granville’s longing for the bright days of the Stuart
court and the artistic life that it funded and inspired is the subject of a
number of his poems. He identiWes the culture of the Restoration court
in Edmund Waller’s love lyrics, which for him ‘proclaims | The shining
Court, and all the glittering Dames’—the very embodiment of the
Stuart cultural myth.77 Through his imitations of Waller, Granville
constructed himself as a latter-day Cavalier, a man out of his time,
bereft of the court life and the monarchy that had sustained Waller’s
poetic output. Such a nostalgia for an age of royal patronage and court
culture clearly inXuenced later Scriblerian verse. Although, as the Wnal
chapter will demonstrate, it was the Whig writers of the post-
Revolution period who enjoyed the real golden age of patronage, in
the works of Pope and Gay the era of the Stuart court is fondly
remembered as all that the debased contemporary market place is not.
On Pope’s authorship of anonymous lampoons see Claudia Thomas, ‘Pope and His
Dunciad Adversaries: Skirmishes on the Borders of Gentility’, in James Gill (ed.), Cutting
Edges: Postmodern Critical Essays on Eighteenth-Century Satire (Knoxville, Tenn.: Univer-
sity of Tennessee Press, 1995), 275–300 (280).
76 Swift, ‘On Poetry: a Rapsody’, in The Poems of Jonathan Swift, ed. Harold Williams, 3
vols. (Oxford: Clarendon, 1958), ii. 649–50.

77 George Granville, ‘The Progress of Beauty’, in The Genuine Works in Verse and Prose
Of the Right Honorable George Granville, Lord Lansdowne, 2 vols. (London, 1732), i. 79.
In An Essay upon Criticism Pope writes that under Charles II ‘Wits had
Pensions, and young Lords had Wit ’.78 Similarly, in Trivia Gay laments a
lost age of past brilliance:
Here Arundell ’s fam’d Structure rear’d its Frame,
The Street alone retains an empty Name:
Where Titian’s glowing Paint the Canvas warm’d,
And Raphael’s fair Design, with Judgment, charm’d,
Now hangs the Bell-man’s Song, and pasted here,
The colour’d Prints of Overton appear. (ll. 483–8)79
For the Scriblerians the commercialism and populism of the modern

writer was once more connected to enthusiasm. From the academic
virtuoso of the Memoirs of Martinus Scriblerus, to the Aeolists in Swift’s
Tale of a Tub, and The Mechanical Operation of the Spirit, the Scribler-
ians mocked the confusions and pretensions of the committed enthusi-
ast, whose claims to divine inspiration were so often used to trope failed
poetic aspiration.80 In Peri Bathous Pope sharpened this satire by par-
odying the increasingly Whiggish interest in the poetic sublime, revers-
ing the images of elevation and transcendence that were so central to the
sublime aesthetic. He writes of the ‘Love of the Bathos’ which is
sacriWced to ‘all other transitory Regards’, and declares that ‘nothing is
so great which a marvellous Genius, prompted by this laudable Zeal, is
not able to lessen’.81 The political resonances of enthusiasm were also
not forgotten.82 In ‘On Poetry, A Rapsody’ Swift links religious zeal and
republicanism to the low sublime, writing of ‘a thousand Bards’ (l. 378)
that:
78 Alexander Pope, An Essay on Criticism, in TE i. 298.

79 John Gay, Trivia: or, the Art of Walking the Streets of London (1716), in John Gay:
Poetry and Prose, ed. Vinton A. Dearing and Charles E. Beckwith, 2 vols. (Oxford:
Clarendon, 1974), i. 157.
80 On Swift and enthusiasm see C. M. Webster, ‘Swift and Some Earlier Satirists of
Puritan Enthusiasm’, PMLA 48 (1933), 1141–53, and ‘The Satiric Background of the Attack
on Puritans in Swift’s Tale of a Tub’, PMLA 50 (1935), 210–23; Philip Harth, Swift and
Anglican Rationalism (Chicago, Ill.: University of Chicago Press, 1961), 105–16; M. V.
DePorte, Nightmares and Hobbyhorses: Swift, Sterne, and Augustan Ideas of Madness (San
Marino, Calif.: Huntington Library, 1974).
81 Pope, The Art of Sinking in Poetry, 21–2.
82 The Scriblerians’ insistent reinforcing of the links between poetic and religious or
political enthusiasm complicates the popular critical view, upheld in Shaun Irlam’s recent
work, that the eighteenth century saw the ‘softening’ of enthusiasm into a purely aesthetic
concept (Irlam, Elations: The Poetics of Enthusiasm in Eighteenth-Century Britain (Stan-
ford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1999), 57).
plot to turn in factious Zeal,

Duncenia to a Common-weal;
And with rebellious Arms pretend
An equal Priv’lege to descend. (ll. 379–82)83
As before, Nonconformity was seen to come hand in hand with crude
moralism. Whig writers were busy transforming issues of moral and
literary reformation into notions of politeness, yet their opponents
continued to represent them as antisocial and humourless didacts.
The Scriblerian scorn for ‘bourgeois’ didacticism is partly manifested
in an aristocratic use of the demotic and the sexually explicit.84 But
it is also evident at a more obvious level, as in John Gay’s prologue to
The Captives: ‘What gain we by this solemn way of teaching? | Our
precepts mend your lives no more than preaching’.85 Similarly, morality
and, in particular, popular instruction are central to Pope’s deWnition of
low poetry in Peri Bathous: ‘if the Intent of all Poetry be to divert and
instruct, certainly that Kind which diverts and instructs the greatest
Number, is to be preferr’d’.86 In the ‘Couplets on Wit’ he claims that:
‘Some who grow dull religious strait commence | And gain in morals
what they lose in sence’, and argues that it is the overearnest zealots who
are rewarded with positions: ‘Wits starve as useless to a Common weal |
While Fools have places purely for their Zeal’.87
However, by the 1720s this depiction of Whig writers as fanatical
radicals was strangely old-fashioned. It was out of keeping with the
realities of contemporary political culture: by the time Pope published
Peri Bathous, in 1727, the Whigs had not only secured a powerful
political hegemony but they had also distanced themselves from the
alliance with Dissent which had been forged in their years in oppos-
ition. Moreover, as we shall see, many Whig writers enjoyed a measure
of Wnancial independence thanks to the pensions and places granted by
members of the Kit-Cat Club, and were far removed from the seedy
83 Swift, ‘On Poetry: A Rapsody’, in Poems, ii. 653. In his account of Mania and Literary
Style Clement Hawes seems unable to explain Swift’s conXation of enthusiasm and literary
style precisely because he does not contextualize Swift within this tradition (Hawes, Mania
and Literary Style: The Rhetoric of Enthusiasm from the Ranters to Christopher Smart
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 101–25).
84 See Claude Rawson, Order from Confusion Sprung: Studies in Eighteenth-Century
Literature from Swift to Cowper (London: Allen and Unwin, 1985), 287.
85 John Gay, prologue to The Captives (1724), in John Gay: Dramatic Works, ed. John
Fuller, 2 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon, 1983), i. 345.

86 Pope, The Art of Sinking in Poetry, 10.
87 Pope, ‘Couplets on Wit’, in TE vi. 234–5.
poverty depicted by their satirists. Tory writers might have drawn on

traditional associations between Whiggism and enthusiasm to discredit
their opponents, but this was clearly a rearguard action. It should be
read as an attempt to discredit a status-quo position, not as a serious
indication of the political or cultural marginalization of Whiggism. The
accession of 1714 had left the ‘men of sense’ writing the public poetry,
and it is perhaps a more signiWcant indicator of the state of cultural
politics under the Wrst Hanoverians that while Whig poets were produ-
cing oYcial poems to celebrate the glories of the new regime many of
their Tory counterparts turned to alternative themes, much as Dryden
and other Jacobites had rejected public poetry in the 1690s.88 In Swift’s
‘On Poetry: a Rapsody’ it is the Whig poet who ‘for Epicks claims the
Bays’ while the Tory writes ‘Elegiack Lays’ (ll. 295–6).89 A nostalgia for
the occasional verse of earlier Royalist and Restoration poets charac-
terizes much Tory poetry of this period, from George Granville’s imita-
tions of Waller’s lyrics to Prior’s graceful epigrams and songs.90 Pope’s
attitude towards this tradition is clearly complex. While, as we have
seen, his early poetry is indebted to Restoration verse, there is an
increasing emphasis on the public role of the poet in his later work.91
Yet he and his allies preserve the stress on aristocratic ease. The Scrib-
lerians’ assault on contemporary scholarship invoked the same class
distinctions that the Christ Church Wits had applied to Bentley.92 In
texts such as Swift’s Battle of the Books, and the Memoirs of Martinus
88 Matthew Prior’s shift from the elevated public verse of Carmen Seculare (1700) to the
light lyrics and lampoons of his later poetry oVers some evidence of this trend.
89 Swift, ‘On Poetry: A Rapsody’, in Poems, ii. 650.
90 Thomas Woodman argues that Pope, Swift, Gay, Parnell, and Prior all deWne
themselves in relation to a courtly amateur tradition, which enables them to distance

themselves from the solemnities of oYcial Whig verse and to make a virtue of their
alienation from traditional sources of patronage (Woodman, Politeness and Poetry in the
Age of Pope (London and Toronto: Associated University Presses, 1989), 43–54).
91 On Pope as court poet manqué see Ian Jack, ‘Pope and his Audience from the
Pastorals to the Dunciad Variorum’, in R. F. Brissenden and J. C. Eade (eds.), Studies in

the Eighteenth Century (Canberra: University of Canberra Press, 1979), 1–30. Yet Pope also
writes, for example, that Crashaw: ‘writ like a Gentleman, that is, at leisure hours, and
more to keep out of idleness, than to establish a reputation [ . . . ] no man can be a true
Poet, who writes for diversion only’, Pope to Henry Cromwell, 17 December 1710, in The
Correspondence of Alexander Pope, ed. George Sherburn, 5 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon, 1956),
i. 109–10.
92 Brean Hammond, Pope (Brighton: Harvester, 1986), 100–7. As Valerie Rumbold
observes in her introduction to The Dunciad in Four Books, it is easy to forget just how
outmoded the Scriblerians’ allegiances to the ‘ancients’ were (Rumbold, introd. to Alex-
ander Pope: The Dunciad in Four Books (Harlow: Longman, 1999), 3, 8).
Scriblerus, scholarly practices such as obtrusive annotation and exten-

sive prefatory material were parodied in order to show up the parochial
vocation of scholars, one which fell far short of polite conversation and
genteel disinterest. A narrowly deWned sociability also continued to
mark poetic style. As we have seen, Pope used the Essay on Criticism
to shape a literary criticism based on social Xuency and gentlemanly
conversation.93 In the later poetry this emphasis is perpetuated in the
epistles and the imitations. Pope celebrates the stability and taste of
the natural aristocracy such as Burlington and Bathurst, and through
the genre of epistles to friends he mimics the aristocratic tradition of
manuscript circulation.94
The Dunciad
Pope’s Dunciad is the epitome of this Scriblerian obsession with the

demarcation and deWnition of culture. It establishes the heroes and the
villains of the literary scene more exhaustively than any other contem-
porary text, and locates Pope as the supreme arbiter of poetic merit.95
The poem clearly has a dual focus: Pope opens his account of the
apocalyptic condition of modern culture in the Dunciad Variorum
with the assertion that ‘This happened in the Year 1725, and continued
to the Year 1728’.96 The contemporary speciWcity of his cultural critique
becomes even more heightened in the four-book version of 1743. Yet at
the same time as Pope claims to be performing a dissection of his own
historical moment he also plots his analysis of duncehood on to a pre-
existing tradition of bad writing:
93 In the light of this emphasis, both in the Essay and in later poetry, it must have been
particularly galling for Pope when Hervey criticized him for lacking the sociability and
ease that Colley Cibber possessed (see Hervey’s Letter to Mr Cibber (1743) and Dustin
GriYn, Alexander Pope: The Poet in the Poems (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press,
1978), 239).
94 On Pope’s attraction to the culture of manuscript circulation see Margaret Ezell,
Social Authorship and the Advent of Print (Baltimore, Md.: Johns Hopkins University Press,
1999).
95 On Pope’s poem as ‘an alternative literary history’ see James McLaverty, ‘Pope and
Giles Jacob’s Lives of the Poets: The Dunciad as Alternative Literary History’, Modern
Philology, 83 (1985), 22–32.
96 Pope, Dunciad Variorum (1729) bk. I, l. 2 n. in TE v. 60.
She saw old Pryn in restless Daniel shine,

And Eusden eke out Blackmore’s endless line;
She saw slow Philips creep like Tate’s poor page,
And all the Mighty Mad in Dennis rage.97
While critics have recognized Pope’s debt to Oldham’s Grub Street
satires, or Dryden’s MacFlecknoe, they have rarely acknowledged the
extent to which The Dunciad is also informed by the same cultural
agenda that underwrites those earlier works. Pope’s portrait of the
dunces is characterized by an emphasis on unsuccessful aspiration
that Tory writers had always levelled at their opponents. In The Dun-
ciad, as in Peri Bathous, the dunces cannot succeed in what they do, but
only move erratically, or resolutely, downwards. Bad poetry is once
more linked to populism, particularly through the series of references
to City pageantry and fairs: the poem is set on the day of Sir George
Thorold’s Lord Mayor’s Procession; the four Guardian Virtues sur-
rounding Dulness are recurrent features of Lord Mayor’s Day pageants;
and the progress of the dunces through the City and its environs
mirrors the route taken by the Procession.98 Pat Rogers has shown the
way in which Pope transformed Grub Street itself into a metaphor
linking his enemies’ artistic failures with the poverty, madness, and
crime associated with local landmarks.99 These allusions to the City of
London have been read as an attack on the stockjobbing and proWteer-
ing encouraged by the Walpole government, but, as we have seen, by the
time Pope was writing The Dunciad City entertainments had become
Wrmly linked to a set of associations with bad poetry and heavy didacti-
cism.100
The epic also satirizes poetic enthusiasm, as Dulness replicates the
images of anarchy and confusion that were associated with false inspir-
97 Dunciad Variorum, bk. I, ll.101–4, in TE v. 71–2; Dunciad in Four Books, bk. I, ll.103–
6, in TE v. 276–7. Hereafter book and line references to the two versions will be referred to
in the text as ‘A’ and ‘B’. Quotations are taken from the Twickenham edition.
98 For a more detailed account of correspondences between the Lord Mayor’s Proces-
sion and The Dunciad see Aubrey Williams, Pope’s Dunciad: A Study of its Meaning
(London: Methuen, 1955), 29–41.
99 Pat Rogers, Grub Street: Studies in a Subculture (London: Methuen, 1972). In Grub
Street Rogers does much to investigate the historical basis of the Scriblerian myth, but his
careful research into the geography of duncehood ultimately reinforces the divide between
the world of the poets and that of the dunces.
100 cf. David Fairer: ‘The Lord Mayor’s Day itself is not the focus for attack. It is seen as
a symptom of something greater. The ‘City’ was where, as now, the real powers in society
lay, among the proWteers, stock jobbers and middle-men’ (Fairer, The Poetry of Alexander
Pope: Penguin Critical Studies (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1989), 140).
ation.101 The level of frantic activity which characterizes the actions of

the dunces may seem out of keeping with the heaviness of Dulness, but
as Pope explains in a footnote:
Dulness here is not to be taken contractedly for mere Stupidity, but in the
enlarged sense of the word [ . . . ] It includes [ . . . ] a ruling principle not inert,
but turning topsy-turvy the Understanding, and inducing an Anarchy or con-
fused State of Mind. (B. I. 15 n.)
The frenzy of the dunces, as they ‘gaze, turn giddy, rave’ (A. III. 354)
resembles images of fanatic Wts, while the phantom poet—‘A shapeless
shade! it melted from his sight, | Like forms in clouds, or visions of
the night!’ (A. II. 103–4; B. II. 111–12)—is a parody of the visions of the
enthusiast. It is a commonplace that Swift’s Tale of a Tub and ‘The
Mechanical Operation of the Spirit’ satirize religious enthusiasm, and
there are a number of points of contact between the depiction of
enthusiasm in Pope and Swift’s work. According to Swift’s deWnition
in ‘Mechanical Operation of the Spirit’ the enthusiast begins by ‘lifting
up of the Soul or its Faculties above Matter’ but always ends up com-
pletely immersed in matter.102 Other anti-enthusiasts believed that what
an enthusiast took to be religious zeal could always be traced to his
bowel movements.103 This confusion between the imagination and the
basest corporeality is, of course, central in The Dunciad, as when Curll
rises:
Renew’d by ordure’s sympathetic force,
As oil’d with magic juices for the course,
Vig’rous he rises; from th’eZuvia strong
Imbibes new life, and scours and stinks along (A. II. 95–8; B. II. 103–6)104
Moreover, Pope’s emphasis on descent and the false sublime in both The
Dunciad and the Art of Sinking in Poetry mirrors Swift’s account of the
enthusiast whose Xight of fancy ‘having soared out of his own Reach
101 See Dennis Todd, Imagining Monsters: Miscreations of the Self in Eighteenth-Century
England (Chicago, Ill.: University of Chicago Press, 1995), 197–216.

102 Jonathan Swift, ‘A Discourse Concerning the Mechanical Operation of the Spirit’
(1704), in A Tale of a Tub, ed. A. C. Guthkelch and D. Nichol Smith (Oxford: Clarendon,
1958), 266.
103 See Henry More in Enthusiasmus Triumphatus (London, 1656): ‘The Spirit then that
wings the Enthusiast in such a wonderful manner, is nothing else but that Xatulency which
is the melancholy complexion, & rises out of the Hypochondriacal humour upon some
occasionall heat, as winde out of an Aeolipila applied to the Wre’ (p. 17).
104 Emrys Jones expresses this point well in his famous essay on ‘Pope and Dulness’:
‘What the Grub-Street setting does is to force into violent antithesis the notions of body
and Sight, not well perceiving how near the Frontiers of Height and
Depth, border upon each other; With the same Course and Wing, he
falls down plum into the lowest Bottom of Things’.105 The Dunciad
works on the basis of the same logic as Dryden’s satires: all enthusiasts
were bad poets, so all bad poets must be enthusiasts. Pope draws on the
cultural mythology that had developed around Dissent, so that by
placing the dunces within a set of references to enthusiasm their associ-
ation with populism, illiteracy, and commercialism is axiomatic. We
might compare this with Pope’s treatment of social class in the poem.
Claudia Thomas has shown that within the logic of The Dunciad all bad
poets are of low social origins, so many of the dunces are assigned a
social status signiWcantly lower than that to which they are entitled.106
Although many of the contemporary writers featured in the poem were
from origins similar to Pope’s, or slightly better, Thomas argues that in
order to assert his own position Pope ‘derived his representations of
enemies from seventeenth-century caricatures of paid writers as lower-
middle class artisans’.107 So, for example, Leonard Welsted, the son of a
clergyman, who had been educated at Westminster and Trinity, Cam-
bridge, and who had enjoyed a successful career in government service,
is associated with low-life tavern culture and the excessive consumption
of beer.
One of the great advantages of the Tory myth was that it enabled
Pope to create a satire that was at once particular and general. On the
one hand the list of ‘friends and enemies’ that he oVered in The Dunciad
was founded on local and personal likes and dislikes. Writers became
dunces because of some particular slight or insult.108 Yet on the other
hand the poem also attempted to translate these local issues into a more
universal story about the decline of culture, as Pope suggested in a note
to the 1743 edition:
the Action of the Dunciad is the Removal of the Imperial seat of Dulness from
the City to the polite world; as that of the Æneid is the Removal of the empire
of Troy to Latium.109
and mind by showing the ethereally spirited poet of tradition yoked to a clumsy machine
of a body which constantly craves to be fed, clothed, warmed and cleaned’ (‘Pope and
Dulness’, 247).
105 Swift, Sect. VIII, of A Tale of a Tub, 157–8.
106 See Thomas, ‘Pope and His Dunciad Adversaries’, 275–300.
107 Ibid. 280.
108 e.g. Pope’s resentment of Giles Jacob, as revealed by James McLaverty in ‘The
Dunciad as Alternative Literary History’.

109 ‘Martinus Scriblerus of the Poem’, in TE v. 51.
It is clear that Pope’s use of an extended set of parallels with the Aeneid
and the Odyssey in addition to verbal echoes of Horace and allusions to
Paradise Lost all locate the concerns of the poem within a wider literary
culture.110 The Tory tradition facilitated this dual perspective because it
provided a model of literary criticism that was both a highly politicized
attack on individual authors and a series of qualitative judgements
appealing to ideals of literary merit that transcended contemporary
controversy.
However, although the Tory myth apparently oVered Pope a model
for cultural critique that was simultaneously of its time and timeless, he
could not escape the problems of anachronism. Dryden’s and Roscom-
mon’s criticism of their contemporaries had in many ways represented
the particular realities of Whiggism in the 1680s: an opposition group
linked strongly to urban Dissenters, that drew on a rhetoric of popu-
lism, and circulated printed material through the extensive under-
ground Nonconformist press. But Whig literary culture had evolved
in subsequent decades. By the late 1720s Whiggism was more likely to be
associated with the Hanoverian court and the Walpole regime, with the
largesse of the Whig magnates and the artistic patronage that they could
aVord. Pope goes some way towards acknowledging the changing socio-
economic basis of Whig literary culture. His detailing of the activities of
low-life dunces is balanced by a recurring interest in the powerful
patrons who supported them.111 The eVect of this is that Dulness is
linked to both high culture and low culture, wealth and poverty. Pope
accounts for these paradoxes in a note to the 1729 Dunciad Variorum, in
which he writes:
SmithWeld is the place where Bartholomew Fair was kept, whose Shews,
Machines, and Dramatical Entertainments, formerly agreeable only to the
Taste of the Rabble, were, by the Hero of this Poem and others of equal Genius,
brought to the Theatres of Covent-Garden, Lincolns-inn-Fields, and the Hay-
Market, to be the reigning Pleasures of the Court and Town. This happened in
the Year 1725, and continued to the Year 1728. (A. I. 2 n.; B. I. 2 n.)
What has changed about contemporary literature, he suggests, is that

the rightful equation of high social status with high art has been
undermined. The lines between high and low are now not so clearly
110 For a fuller account of the parallels with the Aeneid see Williams, Pope’s Dunciad, 17–
29. For a summary of other classical allusions see Howard Erskine-Hill, Pope: The Dunciad
(London: Edward Arnold, 1972).
111 Rumbold, introd. to The Dunciad in Four Books, 4–5.
deWned, and low art threatens the preserves of real literature. Yet, as we
have seen, Dryden’s attacks on his contemporaries reveal that far from
beginning ‘in the year 1725’, the mixing of the popular and the polite had
been a source of criticism since the Restoration. Like other Scriblerian
satires, The Dunciad presents an old-fashioned attack on Whig litera-
ture, while masquerading as an analysis of modern literary culture. The
presence of the Tory myth in The Dunciad creates contradictions in
Pope’s portrayal of the economics of the literary scene. On the one hand
‘bad’ Whig writers are poor, starving in garrets because they are no
good. This is a stereotype clearly inherited from an earlier tradition of
aristocratic amateurism, exempliWed by Roscommon’s disdainful refer-
ence to ‘Unhappy men, | Compell’d by want to Prostitute their Pen’ (ll.
276–7). Yet on the other hand in the brave new world of Hanoverian
Britain it is these poets who receive the Wnancial rewards from the royal
and aristocratic patrons that Pope, Swift, and Gay are excluded from, as
Pope laments in Book 3:
Gay dies un-pension’d with a hundred Friends,
Hibernian Politicks, O Swift, thy doom,
And Pope’s translating three whole years with Broome. (A. III. 326–8)112
Thus money and Wnancial stability is and is not an index of merit,
leading Pope into the position whereby he ‘appears to have abandoned
every conceivable model of literary production’, insisting upon his
independence from the taint of both commercial authorship and pat-
ronage.113
Situating Scriblerian writing within a lineage of Tory satire oVers a
fresh perspective on the nature of literary evaluation in this period. It
becomes evident that the Scriblerian depiction of the degeneration of
modern culture was founded on a long-standing equation of bad poetry
with bad politics. The adjudications of literary quality that have served
to condemn Whig poets to obscurity represent one side of a battle for
cultural authority in the period. The Tory accusations described above
read rather diVerently once we recognize that their assertions about a
‘dunce’s’ education or religious aYliation may be rooted in rhetorical
habit rather than biographical fact; or that they may simply represent a
return of Whig accusations. It is certainly clear from this survey of the
112 In the four-book Dunciad the line on Pope reads: ‘And Pope’s, ten years to comment
and translate’ (B. III. 332).

113 Brean Hammond, ‘ ‘‘And Hate for Arts that caus’d himself to rise’’: The Epistle to Dr
Arbuthnot’ (1st pub. 1986), repr. in Hammond (ed.), Pope, 143–63 (158).
Tory tradition that ideas of literary merit had become inseparable from
those of political opinion. We can also gain new insight into the nature
of Scriblerian satire. In constructing their critique of duncehood, Pope,
Swift, and Gay drew on a set of pre-existing arguments found in the
work of writers such as Dryden, Oldham, and Roscommon, who had
also presented Whig poets as populist, illiterate, mercenary, unman-
nerly, and mad. The notion of Scriblerian satire as an analysis of
modernity is thus profoundly problematic, since in many ways it was
retrospective, a form of satirical shorthand tailored to an opponent that
no longer existed.
As we have seen, this complex polemical tradition was based around
the assertion of fundamental social and literary distinctions, in which
Tory writers represented themselves as gentlemen, and their poetry as
high culture; that is, as ‘literature’. In this they have been more success-
ful in posterity than they were in their own time: the Tory poetry that
forms the subject of this chapter has continued to be published and
read, as ‘literature’ should be, whereas Whig poetry has faded from
sight, like the ephemeral pulp it was accused of being. Yet Tory writing
was not read or written in isolation in its own time, and the dialectical
nature of early eighteenth-century literary culture becomes immediately
evident if we start to examine the alternative Whig tradition that has
been written out of literary history. The following chapters will retrieve
the targets of Tory satire from the shadow of their opponents’ criticism,
revealing the evolution of a distinct and vital poetic tradition whose
perceived threat was seen to justify the sustained critical onslaught
described above.
2
Moderation, fanaticism, and
‘the people’ 1681–1688
This history of Whig poetry begins with the muddled origins of party-
political debate in the Exclusion Crisis. The use of ‘Whig’ and ‘Tory’ as
concrete badges of political identity was not as clear-cut to contempor-
aries as it has become with hindsight. From our own retrospective
position it is tempting to identify discrete political groups and prin-
ciples that were far from distinct in the confusion of contemporary
debate. Moreover, very few of those writing in the 1680s actually de-
scribed themselves as Whig or Tory, although they were happy to label
their opponents as such as a form of abuse. Consequently, some recent
historians have cautioned against applying a traditional Whig–Tory
analysis to the unrest of 1679–81.1 Yet rereading the poetry of the period
as a dialogue between competing political positions reveals emerging
points of diVerence in the representation and articulation of contem-
porary politics. These diVerences are evident not only in the treatment
of the topical issues of the Crisis but also in the Wguration of political
writing in general. The Whig poetry of the 1680s frames a series of
questions about the role of the political writer that reverberate through-
out later periods: What was the relationship between political and
literary discourse? What did it mean to lay claim to the voice of the
people? This chapter shows the ways in which Whig writers attempted
to answer these questions, drawing on notions of popular appeal
and, later on, of country retreat to secure political legitimacy, and
attacking their adversaries through a discourse of moral and literary
reformation. A closer analysis of the dialectic between Whig and
Tory poetry reinforces the argument established in the previous chapter,
that many of the key terms of the Tory critique were polemically
inXected: the emphasis on moderation, and the attacks on Whigs as
1 For a survey of historiographical debate over the nature of party-political identity in
this period see Gary Stuart De Krey, Jonathan Scott, et al., ‘Order and Authority: Creating
Party in Restoration England’, Albion, 25 (1993), 565–651.
Moderation, fanaticism, and ‘the people’ 1681–1688 57
‘cits’ and enthusiasts had very speciWc political origins in the debates of
the 1680s.
The Popish Plot and the Exclusion Crisis that followed it began with
the allegations of Titus Oates, a discredited Jesuit novice, who claimed
that he knew of a popish plot to assassinate the king. This largely
Wctional tale rapidly gained in credibility on the discovery of the murder
of the judge to whom Oates had made his depositions, coupled with the
revelation of a treasonable correspondence between the Duke of York’s
former secretary and Louis XIV’s confessors concerning a plot to over-
throw the Church of England.2 The apparent conWrmation of the
existence of a Catholic conspiracy aroused long-standing fears of threats
to the Protestant religion and the Englishman’s liberties that had been
developing over the course of the 1670s.3 It focused attention and
concern on the political and religious implications of the eventual
succession of the Duke of York, whose conversion to catholicism had
been suspected since his refusal to comply with the Test Act of 1673, and
whose second marriage in the same year had been to a Catholic Italian
princess, Mary of Modena. Out of the hysteria over the implications of
the plot a pressure group emerged, who believed that the only way to
safeguard the national religion was to pass a Bill of Exclusion to prevent
James from ever acceding to the throne, replacing the Catholic heir with
Charles II’s illegitimate son James, Duke of Monmouth. This group
was soon to be known as the Whigs, from the term ‘Whiggamore’ used
for Scottish Presbyterians, while those who opposed them became
known as the Tories, from a name for Irish brigands.4 Between 1679
and 1681 three Parliaments were called, in May 1679, October 1680,
and March 1681, in each one of which the opposition introduced Bills
of Exclusion against James. The battle over Exclusion soon extended
far beyond Westminster, as it was fought out in provincial elections
across the country. The press, newly released by the lapse of the Licens-
ing Act in 1679, pumped out thousands of pamphlets, poems, and
newspapers, as both Whigs and Tories tried to justify their political
positions.
2 For more detail on the development of the plot see John Spurr, England in the 1670s:
‘This Masquerading Age’ (Oxford: Blackwell, 2000), 260–73; J. R. Jones, The First Whigs:
The Politics of the Exclusion Crisis 1678–1683 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1961); J. P.
Kenyon, The Popish Plot (London: Heinemann, 1972).
3 The best account of the years preceding the crisis is found in Spurr, England in the
1670s.
4 See R. Willman, ‘The Origins of ‘‘Whig’’ and ‘‘Tory’’ in English Political Language’,
Historical Journal, 17 (1974), 247–64.

58 Moderation, fanaticism, and ‘the people’ 1681–1688
Absalom and Achitophel and the voice of moderation
The most famous poetic response to the Crisis is undoubtedly John

Dryden’s Absalom and Achitophel, a mock-biblical satire which allegor-
ized the Duke of Monmouth’s aspirations to the throne through the
story of the temptation of Absalom by his wily counsellor Achitophel.5
By the summer of 1681, when Absalom and Achitophel was published, the
political tide had began to turn in favour of the Tories and Charles II,
and the imprisonment of the Whig leader the Earl of Shaftesbury on the
charge of treason on 2 July marked the beginnings of a widespread
reassertion of royal authority. Dryden’s poem was written in the weeks
before the trial, and was clearly designed to inXuence public opinion at
a critical moment in the Crisis. Yet while Absalom and Achitophel oVers
a highly partial retrospective on the plot and its aftermath, and was
consequently met with replies from a number of prominent Whig
writers, it has rarely been considered in the context of other poetic
responses to the Crisis.6 Re-evaluating the satire alongside some of these
poems illustrates the ways in which contemporaries read Dryden’s
poem, countering his story of seduction and deliverance with very
diVerent narratives of the past two years. The Duke of Buckingham’s
Poetical ReXections on a Late Poem Entituled Absalom and Achitophel
(December 1681), Samuel Pordage’s Azaria and Hushai (January 1682),
and Elkanah Settle’s Absalom Senior: or, Achitophel Transpros’d (April
1682) reveal a profound divergence between Whig and Tory writers on
the concept of populism in the period, exposing the polemical nature of
Dryden’s apparently even-handed treatment of recent history.
5 For discussions of Dryden’s use of biblical imagery see Earl Miner, Dryden’s Poetry
(Bloomington, Ind.: University of Indiana Press, 1967), 106–43; Steven Zwicker, Dryden’s
Political Poetry: The Typology of King and Nation (Providence, NJ: Brown University Press,
1972), 83–101.
6 While critics have been ready to trace Dryden’s debts to classical and earlier English
canonical writers, they have neglected the work of other contemporary writers. The most
detailed study of the satire in the context of other political writing is Philip Harth’s
extensive examination of Dryden’s Tory propaganda in Pen for a Party: Dryden’s Tory
Propaganda in its Contexts (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1993). However,
although Harth’s meticulous research has done much to link Dryden’s presentation of the
Exclusion controversy to existing Tory arguments, it does not address the poem in relation
to competing Whig accounts of the crisis. On Dryden and other writers see Kathryn Walls,
‘To ‘‘Prosecute the Plot’’: A Spenser allusion in Absalom and Achitophel ’, ANQ 4 (1991),
122–4; Albert Poyet, ‘Echoes of Ovid in Dryden’s Absalom and Achitophel ’, Notes and
Queries, 28 (1981), 52–3; Reginald Berry, ‘Chaucer and Absalom and Achitophel ’, Notes and
Queries, 26 (1979), 522–3; A. D. Ferry, Milton and the Miltonic Dryden (Cambridge, Mass.:
Harvard University Press, 1968).
Absalom and Achitophel presents itself as a moderate intervention in a

debate otherwise characterized by extremism and political spin,
seeming to oVer a normative model of political rhetoric and action
that is contrasted with the fanaticism and deviancy of the opposition. It
advertises its claims to moderation and impartiality from its title pages,
with a foreword which claims that great poetry can transcend party
faction and ‘if a Poem have a Genius ’ it will force its own reception in the
World. For there’s a sweetness in good Verse, which Tickles even while it
Hurts’ (ll. 13–15).7 The Laureate stresses that he hopes to ‘Extenuate,
Palliate and Indulge’ (l. 14). This profession of moderation has been
seen as Dryden’s attempt to assert ‘Christian’ values which would
transcend the partisanship of contemporary debate: James Winn, the
Laureate’s most recent biographer, asserts that ‘In Absalom and Achito-
phel [ . . . ] Dryden found a way to make lasting art out of this apparent
contradiction between the Christian ideal of moderation and the polit-
ical necessity for vengeance’.8 However, as Philip Harth has shown,
Dryden’s emphasis on moderation was clearly derived from contempor-
ary court rhetoric, where it served a speciWc political function.9 Charles
II had used his Declaration of April 1681 to stress the unreasonable
conduct of the House of Commons in the last two Parliaments, but
he had not launched a direct attack on the Dissenters. Without
threatening retribution, the Declaration had promised that the king
would rule by law, and would summon parliaments frequently. It also
claimed that while Parliament had acted ‘arbitrarily’, the king had acted
for the security of the nation. In adopting this nominally moderate
stance, Charles was eVectively occupying his critics’ moral high ground:
where previously the opposition had claimed that the court had acted
7 John Dryden, Absalom and Achitophel (1681), in Works, ii. 3. Further page and line
references in the main are to this edition. As Michael McKeon observes, the aestheticizing
of the poem is partly a product of Dryden’s presentation of his material: the tendentious
nature of the political and religious arguments the poem contains is occluded by the
Wction created by the biblical parallel (McKeon, ‘Historicizing Absalom and Achitophel ’,
in Felicity Laura and Nussbaum Brown (eds.), The New Eighteenth Century: Theory,
Politics, English Literature (London: Methuen, 1987), 23–40.
8 James Winn, John Dryden and His World (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press,
1987), 345. See also Bruce King: ‘if Dryden’s achievement has not been fully appreciated, it
is because our knowledge of the poem’s political occasion misdirects our response away
from its imaginative patterns’ (King, ‘Absalom and Achitophel: A Reevaluation’, in Bruce
King (ed.), Dryden’s Mind and Art (Edinburgh: Oliver and Boyd, 1969), 65–83).
9 Steven Zwicker and Derek Hirst have also emphasized the need to consider Dryden’s
apparent moderation as a form of political rhetoric (see Zwicker and Hirst, ‘Rhetoric and
Disguise: Political Language and Political Argument in Absalom and Achitophel’, Journal of
British Studies, 21 (1981), 39–55).
arbitrarily, his claim is that the court is the party of moderation, the
opposition that of fanaticism.
This rhetorical strategy was characteristic of the polemic produced by
the Exclusion Crisis, which was dominated by an ongoing debate over
the twin concerns of moderation and fanaticism as writers from both
sides oVered their respective representations of the political will of ‘the
people’. Dryden’s poem is essentially structured through a rhetorical
balancing of the rational norm and the deviant other. In Absalom and
Achitophel the court and the king are presented as the party of reason
and moderation, while the Whig exclusionists are linked with excess and
fanaticism. In the Wrst Wfteen lines of the poem Dryden describes
Charles’s promiscuity as an act of generosity, and abundance, in
which the king imparts ‘His vigorous warmth’ (l. 8) to willing recipi-
ents. Opposition writers had long attacked the king’s sexual and Wnan-
cial proXigacy: Andrew Marvell’s Last Instructions to a Painter (1667)
had famously linked the king’s unbridled sexual indulgence to political
ruin. It has often been noted that in eVectively acknowledging such
contemporary criticism of the king’s sexual promiscuity Dryden
revealed the even-handed nature of his satire.10 Yet what has not been
recognized is that Dryden also reverses the terms of that criticism to
attack the king’s subjects. As part of their assault on the king opposition
critics had depicted Charles as a debauched and pampered monarch
unable to see beyond the gratiWcation of his own desires: in Absalom
and Achitophel the king is presented as generous in his lust, while it is
the king’s subjects, the ‘factious Jews’, who are spoilt and debauched:
‘God’s pamper’d people, whom, debauch’d with ease, | No King could
govern, nor no God could please’ (ll.47–8). This underscores one of the
central arguments of the poem, which is that it is an ignorant and self-
seeking crowd that is responsible for the escalation of recent political
hysteria. The Whig and Tory polemic of the previous two years had been
characterized by an increasingly Werce battle over the representation of
‘the people’. Whig mass petitions were answered by a series of loyal Tory
addresses and ‘abhorrences’, signed by corporations, JPs, grand juries,
and oYcers of the militia, which sought to demonstrate that the real
voice of the people lay on the side of the supporters of king and court.11
As the anonymous author of A Letter from Scotland (1681) asked: ‘I
10 See e.g. Steven Zwicker, Lines of Authority: Politics and Literary Culture, 1649–1689
(Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1993), 132; Winn, John Dryden and his World, 351–2.
11 For a full discussion of this debate, see Mark Knights, Politics and Opinion in Crisis,
1678–1681 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994).

would fain understand what is meant by the People? For now every man
calls himself the People’.12 This contest over what ‘the people’ actually
signiWed is central to the dynamics of Dryden’s poem. Michael Conlon
has asserted that the Laureate depicted the crisis as ‘a radical attempt by
the Whig party to subvert the established government and to impose
the will of the few upon the many’.13 But this is in fact the reverse of the
truth, for the Laureate’s assault on populism oVsets the vulgar many
against the noble few. The latter, the statesmen who defend the monarch
and the Constitution, are contrasted with the ‘Factious Croud’ (l. 68),
the ‘Solymæan Rout’ (l. 513), the ‘Rascall Rabble’ (l. 579). In Dryden’s
account the Whig leaders manipulate not only the crowd itself but the
rhetoric of the people: thus Achitophel bribes Absalom with a spurious
rhetoric of nationhood: ‘Thy longing Countries Darling and Desire; |
Their cloudy Pillar, and their guardian Fire’ (ll. 232–3), and we are told
that ‘pity never Ceases to be shown | To him, who makes the peoples
wrongs his own’ (ll. 725–6). Yet, as the quotations above demonstrate,
Dryden was himself playing with the rhetoric of ‘the people’. His attack
on popular politics involves a lack of distinction between legitimate
public sentiment—the voice of ‘the people’—and the ignorant inter-
vention of the masses—‘the crowd’. In a subtle shift in emphasis, the
two become synonymous:
What shall we think! can People give away
Both for themselves and Sons, their Native sway?
Then they are left Defensless, to the Sword
Of each unbounded Arbitrary Lord:
And Laws are vain, by which we Right enjoy,
If Kings unquestion’d can those laws destroy.
Yet, if the Crowd be Judge of Wt and Just,
And Kings are onely OYcers in trust,
Then this resuming Cov’nant was declar’d
When Kings were made, or is for ever bar’d (ll. 759–68)
Absalom and Achitophel is an attack on popular politics as much as an

assault on Shaftesbury and the Whig leaders. As the lines quoted above
demonstrate, the people become synonymous with the crowd, who are
the source of the conXict. The aristocrats and inXuential Nonconformist
12 A Letter from Scotland: Written Occasionally upon the Speech made by a Noble Peer
(London, 1681), 1.
13 Michael J. Conlon, ‘The Passage on Government in Dryden’s Absalom and Achito-
phel ’, Journal of English and Germanic Philology, 78 (1979), 17–32 (19).

merchants, who represented to many Tories the real threat amongst the
Whigs, are occluded in Dryden’s portrayal of an opposition with an
overwhelmingly populist power base.14 In Absalom and Achitophel it is
the ‘small but faithful Band’ of Tories who ‘tempt th’united Fury of the
Land’ (ll. 914–16) that represents the true voice of the nation. David’s
Wnal speech makes his attack on his subjects explicit: ‘But Save me most
from my Petitioners. | Unsatiate as the barren Womb or Grave; | God
cannot Grant so much as they can Crave’ (ll. 986–8).
The Whig writers responding to Dryden focused their criticism on
his representation of populism, and his negative deWnition of public
opinion.15 The anonymous author of Satyr to His Muse (1682) (possibly
Thomas Shadwell) did not miss the laureate’s rhetorical conXation of
crowd with people, and declared that
The peoples voice, of old, the voice of God,
Thou call’st the voice of an unruly Crowd;
Crowds are the Fools,—
That Flock to thine, and Durfeys Loyal Plays,
And give Implicite Claps on your Third Days;
About the Stage of Mountebanck they Wait,
And Whoop at Cudgels, or a broken Pate,
But have like thee, no Interest in the State.16
In this poem there is a signiWcantly diVerent sense of ‘the people’ to that
found in Dryden’s satire: here, the people are the political nation, who
have, and should have, a role in public debate, as opposed to the ‘crowd’,
who have no interest in aVairs of state and are associated instead with a
mindless consumption of popular entertainment. We Wnd a similar
emphasis in Samuel Pordage’s mock-biblical poem Azaria and Hushai
(1682). Here Monmouth is the virtuous young prince Azaria and Shaf-
tesbury is Hushai, the wise counsellor urging caution. Pordage’s poem
concludes with a lengthy passage on the relationship between king and
people, in which the deWnition of the people is one that grants them
political agency, should their king transgress:
14 On the perceived threat posed by aristocratic and wealthy Whigs see Richard L.
Greaves, Secrets of the Kingdom: British Radicals from the Popish Plot to the Revolution of
1688–9 (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1992), 13.
15 Although see Buckingham’s Poetical ReXections, published by Richard Janeway in
1682, which announced itself on its title page to be the work of ‘a Person of Honour’. The
poem focuses on the personal aVront given to the individuals of quality lampooned in
Dryden’s satire.
16 [Thomas Shadwell], Satyr to His Muse (1682), in Works, v. 268.
But if that Kings the tyes of Laws do break,

The People, without fault, have leave to speak;
To shew their Grievances, and seek redress
By lawful means, when Kings and Lords oppress.17
This series of poems of 1681–2 seems to suggest that for a Tory writer
like Dryden ‘the people’ meant something very diVerent from that
which it signiWed for contemporary opposition writers. Absalom and
Achitophel is a poem designed to win popular support for the loyalist
cause. Yet at the same time it denounces the notion of ‘popularity’ as an
index of political merit or success. Mark Knights has persuasively
portrayed the Exclusion Crisis as a polemical contest to represent
the will of the people. He argues that shifts in party allegiance after
1682 stem not from a transformation of the Whigs of 1678 into the
Tories of 1681 but rather a struggle among ideologically committed
men to represent their will as the will of the nation.18 However, what
the texts discussed above indicate is that beneath an apparently shared
appeal to popular support there lay radically diVerent interpretations
of what exactly ‘the people’ meant. They also reveal that a debate
about the role and nature of the public writer was intrinsic to the
polemic of the Exclusion Crisis. And, Wnally, they show that all Exclu-
sion Crisis literature was partisan: none of these poems has a claim to
disinterest or moderation that is anything other than a rhetorical
strategy.
The Medall
We can see these arguments about the agency of popular opinion

developing through Dryden’s later, and more vitriolic, satire on the
crisis. The Medall, A Satyre Against Sedition was published three months
later than Absalom and Achitophel and in its stridency it reveals the
changing polemical landscape of the Exclusion debate. As we have seen,
in the earlier poem Dryden used his preface and the rhetorical balancing
of reason and excess to suggest an authorial impartiality in his presen-
tation of the Crisis. However, in The Medall the tone is no longer
moderate: a rational norm is only implicit, and visible merely as a
contrast with the demonization of the opposition as crazed Dissenters.
17 Samuel Pordage, Azaria and Hushai (London, 1682), 31.

18 Knights, Politics and Opinion in Crisis, 346.
‘The people’ have become a rabid group of religious zealots, whose

meaningless cant is an index of their lack of political legitimacy.
The Medall ’s ostensible subject is the outcome of the Earl of Shaftes-
bury’s trial for high treason at the Old Bailey, in November 1681. The
jury famously returned the bill marked ‘ignoramus’, and, to celebrate, a
medal was struck, which depicted Shaftesbury on one side and a view of
London Bridge and the Tower with the inscription Laetamur (we
rejoice) beneath it. This emblematic coupling of the opposition cause
and the City of London illustrates the increasing signiWcance of the
representation of the London crowds. Dryden’s poem uses the trope of
the medal to attack Shaftesbury, and emphasizes his connections with the
City of London and its Nonconformists, so that the City becomes the
embodiment of the popular Dissent that Dryden satirizes. Where the
foreword to Absalom and Achitophel had begun with Dryden’s professed
desire to appeal to moderates on both sides, The Medall is unashamedly
partisan in its approach to political diVerence. The satire is prefaced by an
‘Epistle to the Whigs’ in which the Laureate mounts an attack on Whig
politics, Whig writers, and Nonconformists. Throughout The Medall
Dryden oVers an immoderate attack on Nonconformity as a way of
establishing the moderate status of his own position. Nonconformity is
linked with the City, and with republicanism, madness, chaos, and bad
writing. The Medall provoked a series of poetic responses from Whig
authors which countered Dryden’s images of chaotic and powerless
speech by reasserting the validity of popular protest, and drawing on
the rhetoric of ‘plain speech’ to authorize their oppositional critique.
As Tim Harris and other historians of the period have emphasized,
the relationship between the Anglican Church and Dissent was perhaps
the greatest problem in late Stuart domestic policy.19 The Act of Uni-
formity of 1662 had eVectively drawn an arbitrary line across English
religious life. After 1662 all Puritans, Presbyterians, Baptists, Quakers,
and other Protestant groups outside the Anglican Church were desig-
nated Dissenters. The sporadic enactment of a severe penal code against
Protestant Nonconformity inevitably alienated Dissenters subject to
heavy Wnes and imprisonment. The relationship between Nonconform-
ists and the established Church was fraught: some Puritans and Non-
conformists attended their parish church whilst also going to their own
19 For fuller accounts of the religious disputes of the period see John Spurr, The
Restoration Church of England 1646–1689 (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press,
1991) and Tim Harris, Paul Seaward and Mark Goldie (eds.), The Politics of Religion in
Restoration England (Oxford: Blackwell, 1990).
meetings; others never attended Anglican services. In addition, the

spectrum of religious diVerence included within the category of Dissent
created problems: many Presbyterians did not like being grouped to-
gether with Baptists or Quakers. And although Dissenters claimed to
want religious toleration, the very notion of what they understood by
toleration was divided: some wanted to rejoin a more loosely organized
national Church; others wanted to set up their own Churches under the
national protection of the monarch. However, beyond all these diVer-
ences, many Dissenters were increasingly united and vocal in their
suspicions of the political aspirations of the Anglican Church, and its
iure divino churchmen. They claimed that the Church of England had
betrayed its principles, and was hopelessly entangled with its popish
past. As the Exclusion debate progressed, this religious conXict in-
creased. Many of the pamphlets produced during the 1680–1 Parliament
discussed the status of Dissenters, while MPs debated the merits of
comprehension versus indulgence.20 Tory propaganda became increas-
ingly hostile towards Dissent, and as the loyalists began to gain ground
following the dissolution of the Oxford Parliament, the attack on
Dissent intensiWed further.21 Conformists argued that Dissenters were
dividing Protestantism and thus weakening it in the face of popery, and
they began to appropriate the rhetoric of Protestant unity that had
characterized earlier Whig polemic. A spate of pamphlets urged Non-
conformists to join the Church of England as it stood, arguing that
Dissenters were in league with the papists.
The Medall was conceived amid this debate about Dissent. In the
poem Dryden reduces the whole of the exclusionist cause to the ques-
tion of Dissent and, like many other contemporary Tory pamphlets, he
asserts that the real threat to political and religious liberties comes from
radicals and republicans designing their own form of godly hegemony.
He foretells a future under Whig rule in which the competing sects will
vie with one another to assert their own forms of arbitrary power:
The Presbyter, puft up with spiritual Pride,
Shall on the Necks of the lewd Nobles ride:
His Brethren damn, the Civil Pow’r defy;
20 See Knights, Politics and Opinion in Crisis, 288.

21 To the extent that in April 1680 a moderate Anglican clergyman such as Bishop
Tillotson—formerly an ally of Shaftesbury and Exclusion—preached a sermon arguing
that no one should aVront an established religion (see Knights, Politics and Opinion in
Crisis, 262).
And parcel out Republique Prelacy.

But short shall be his Reign; his rigid Yoke
And Tyrant Pow’r will puny Sects provoke;
And Frogs and Toads’ and all the Tadpole Train
Will croak to Heav’n for help, from this devouring Crane.22 (ll. 298–305)
For many of the poets responding to The Medall, this attack re-
inforced fears of retribution and of the persecution of Dissenters
under a newly restored government authority. Samuel Pordage’s reply,
The Medal Revers’d, is subtitled A Satyre against Persecution (1682). In
the ‘Epistle to the Tories’ which prefaces the poem he asks ‘what means
this new Persecution of Dissentors, in the midst of peace and quiet,
but another irritation if possible, to some insurrection?’.23 Parodying
Dryden’s lines on the tadpole sects, he voices Dissenting suspicions
of episcopal power and the designs of the Anglican Church, and
declares that
Oppression will grow bold, the Tadpole-Priests,
Shall lift above the Lords, their Priestly Crests.
T’attempt or struggle then will be in vain,
For Persecution will a Tyrant Reign;
Her fatal pow’r will then be understood,
And she will glut her self with Martyrs Blood.24
Where Dryden had depicted a popular insurgency by the Dissenting

masses as the main threat to national stability, Pordage presents the
Anglican clerisy as the real enemies of state and religion, and the
tyranny of their political ambition as the central threat to the status quo.
Dryden’s attack on Dissent in The Medall was not conWned to wor-
ship alone: both poem and preface suggest that abuses in religious
practice are paralleled in abuses in literature. The Medall, and the
Whig responses to it highlight the overlap between political and literary
discourse in this period, since the argument about political authority is
bound up with an argument about linguistic authority. In the ‘Epistle to
the Whigs’ Dryden makes a clear identiWcation between Dissent and
Whig writers, proclaiming, as we have seen, that: ‘A Dissenter in Poetry
from Sense and English, will make as good a Protestant Rhymer, as a
22 John Dryden, The Medall. A Satyre Against Sedition (1682), in Works, ii. 52. Further
line references in the text are to this edition.

23 Samuel Pordage, The Medal Revers’d: A Satyre Against Persecution (London, 1682), 6.
24 Pordage, The Medal Revers’d, 30.
Dissenter from the Church of England a Protestant Parson’.25 Further

on in the poem Dryden again draws on the rhetoric of anti-enthusiasm
that was so fundamental to attacks on Whig writing. In his depiction
of the debate, the Earl of Shaftesbury’s political hypocrisy is made
manifest in his attempts to mimic Puritan enthusiasts: he is seen
as doubly false, as he attempts to feign inspiration that is in itself
inauthentic:
He cast himself into the Saint-like mould;
Groan’d, sigh’d and pray’d, while Godliness was gain;
The lowdest Bagpipe of the squeaking Train. (ll. 33–5)
Shaftesbury is not the only enthusiast. Dryden resumes his attack on the
crowd, claiming that ‘Nor Faith nor Reason make thee at a stay, | Thou
leapst o’r all eternal truths, in thy Pindarique way!’ (ll. 93–4). Here the
correlation between literary and religious forms is made explicit. Dry-
den makes a link between Whig popular politics and the poems of
Pindar, whose complex versiWcation and arguments were long seen as
exemplifying poetic inspiration unmodiWed by reason. The crowd is as
ungoverned and Xighty as a Pindaric ode, and Whig rhetoric and
polemic are inseparable from Whig politics. In fact, Dryden goes as
far as to claim that rhetoric is all there is to Whig argument: ‘faith and
reason’ are the preserve of the loyalists alone, he maintains, employing
again the opposition between rationalism and fanaticism that we have
seen in Absalom and Achitophel. He echoes charges made by other Tory
satirists: the author of A Loyal Satyr Against Whiggism (1682), possibly
Thomas Sprat, claims that
As we’re in truth, they’re positive in lies;
What one but says, the other straight will swear,
Let it be right or wrong, or foul or fair,
It is all one, since they the Godly are.26
These Tory satirists were asserting the truth claims of their own
polemic by undermining the signifying power of the speech of their
opponents. In their responses to such attacks Whig poets sought to Wnd
a language of opposition that would counter their images of hypocrisy,
empty rhetoric, and false inspiration. In Absalom Senior, of April 1682,
Elkanah Settle links the notion of false inspiration and eloquence not to
25 Dryden, preface to The Medall, in Works, ii. 42.

26 A Loyal Satyr against Whiggism (London, 1682), 2.
Dissent but to Jesuit casuistry.27 Achitophel, here representing the Earl

of Halifax, believes himself to be ‘more than half inspir’d’ (l. 1013)
following a visitation from the spirit of Edward Coleman, the Duke
of York’s confessor, and dreams of priestly grandeur, ‘an ephod, miter,
and a cope’ (l.1002)28 Retiring with his books to his closet, we are told
that
There, for all needful arts in this extreme,
For knotty sophistry t’ a limber theme,
Long brooding ere the mass to shape was brought,
And after many a tugging, heaving thought,
Together a well-order’d speech he draws
. . . . . . . .
Wondrous the champion, glorious the success.
So powerful eloquence, so strong was wit;
And with such force the easy windfalls hit. (ll. 1015–19, 1024–6)
In these lines ‘eloquence’ and ‘wit’ are seen as a form of sophistry, as a
linguistic strategy with which to legitimate dubious political argument.
Other Whig writers oVered a similar critique of their Tory opponents’
style. In The Medal Revers’d, Samuel Pordage counters Dryden’s
‘Epistle to the Whigs’ with his own ‘Epistle to the Tories’ in which he
argues:
you Tories think you now have the better end of the staV, you have the Law,
you have the great ones, you have Power, on your side; & therefore may do
what you will, and abuse whom you please, the Whiggs must not open their
mouths, and let them speak never so reverently of the King, all is blasphemy
and canting in your Ears. You brag of your Poets and your Orators, and that
all the witt lies on your side; be it so, we will not strive with you about it, we
pretend to honesty and justice, that shall make amends for our ill Language
and Verses.29
This passage and the lines from Absalom Senior illuminate contempor-
ary debate over the political implications of literary discourse. It has
become a critical commonplace that the Restoration was the ‘age of wit’,
the triumph of an Augustan poetics that privileged form, eloquence,
27 On the existing critique of casuistry see Lowell Gallagher, Medusa’s Gaze: Casuistry
and Conscience in the Renaissance (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1991); Albert
R. Jonsen, The Abuse of Casuistry: A History of Moral Reasoning (Berkeley, Calif.: Univer-
sity of California Press, 1988).
28 Elkanah Settle, Absalom Senior (London, 1682), in POAS iii. 151. Further line refer-
ences are to this edition.

29 Pordage, preface to The Medal Revers’d, 7.
and verbal ease. Steven Zwicker has demonstrated the political dimen-
sions of this aesthetic, arguing that Dryden inherited from Davenant
and Hobbes an emphasis on wit as an alternative to the politics and
poetics of inspiration that they saw as characterizing Nonconformist
and republican writing. For these writers wit combined reason, instinct,
and design, in opposition to the political and social radicalism associ-
ated with revelation and visionary poetics.30 What the Whig poems of
the 1680s show is that this conWguration of wit and socio-political
authority that is so familiar to us now as the style of the age was
contested by contemporaries who privileged other discursive qualities.
For both Pordage and Settle wit has become a term of abuse, a stylish
froth above a moral void. In Pordage’s satire Dryden’s wit is no match
for ‘honesty and justice’, and where the Laureate had attacked the
writing of his opposition as false inspiration and empty rhetoric, Por-
dage lays claim to the topos of plain speech in preference to the empty
Xourishes of the Laureate’s wit. Moreover, where Dryden had linked
popular opposition to the untrammelled excesses of Pindaric style,
Pordage envisions his side of the political discourse entirely diVerently.
He represents the attack on Whig writing as an attempt to silence all
opposition: for him, the voicing of political dissent is not specious ‘cant’
but political agency, and for the people to speak is for them to exercise
their constitutional liberties. In the poem itself he goes on to make the
ringing accusation that
Power serves for Law, the wrong too oft’s made right;
And they are damn’d, who against power dare Wght.
Wit rides triumphant in Power’s Chariot born,
And deprest Opposites beholds with scorn.31
London’s people
Pordage’s defence of opposition discourse, with its emphasis on the

rights of ‘th’opprest’, picks up on the debate about who ‘the people’
really are that we have seen in Absalom and Achitophel and its responses.
However, in The Medall, as I have suggested, Dryden’s attack on popular
politics is more speciWcally focused on London as the site of civil unrest.
The city of London was the home of one-tenth of the national popula-
30 Zwicker, Lines of Authority, 21–5. 31 Pordage, The Medal Revers’d, 1.

tion. It was here that the Whigs applied pressure for Exclusion by
mobilizing mass support in the form of petitioning campaigns and
the pope-burning rituals held on 17 November.32 In London the Tories
saw the most visible signs of the populist politics they feared. Much of
the debate about the status of Whig popular support inevitably involved
competing images of the city itself. Was it, as Tory propagandists
suggested, a hotbed of unruly radicalism, or, as Whig writers claimed,
the loyal capital of Protestantism?
As the Exclusion Crisis progressed, the focus on the city grew more
and more intense, reaching a head during the shrieval elections of the
summer of 1682, when Charles, realizing that control of the city’s legal
and political machinery was vital to his reassertion of authority, used
his newly elected Tory Lord Mayor to nullify the election of two Whig
candidates to shrieval posts.33 The Medall was written in the midst of
debate about Charles’s decision to begin quo warranto proceedings
limiting the city’s charter and its right to self-governance. Thus a large
part of Dryden’s criticism is levelled at the disloyalty of the London
citizens that the king was in the process of suppressing. He asks of the
people of London: ‘what vengeance will they urge, | Whose Ordures
neither Plague nor Fire can purge’? (ll. 187–8). For Whig writers, on the
other hand, the city represented far more than a site of popular unrest.
It had an emblematic signiWcance as an embodiment of many of the
political freedoms associated with the ancient Constitution, a historical
construct centring on the immemorial, timeless existence of king, lords,
and commons that together governed England, which was believed to
guarantee the fundamental political liberty of the people. To many
Whigs the assault on the city and its charters seemed an ominous sign
of things to come. Thomas Shadwell’s reply to The Medall, The Medal of
John Bayes (1682), takes the form of a defence of London’s political
heritage:
But some foul Monsters thy rich womb does bear,
That, like base Vipers, would thy bowels tear;
Who would thy ancient Charters give away,
And all thy stronger Liberties betray:
Those Elder Customs our great Ancestors
32 On the Whig petitioning campaigns see Mark Knights, ‘London Petitions and
Parliamentary Politics in 1679’, Parliamentary History, 12 (1993), 29–46; ‘London’s ‘‘Mon-

ster’’ Petition of 1680’, Historical Journal, 36 (1993), 39–67.
33 For more detail on the elections see Howard Schless, POAS iii. 207–16.
Have from the Saxon times convey’d to ours,

Of which no Pers’nal Crimes a loss can cause,
By Magna Charta backt, and by succeeding Laws.34
With its references to customs, Saxon times, and Magna Carta, Shad-
well’s poem frames its support of the city in the language of the ancient
Constitution, and London is Wgured as a bulwark of liberty.35 The
debate over the city was also characterized by competing representa-
tions of trade, and of the economic practices which sustained so many
of London’s Whig inhabitants. The links between trade and early Whig-
gism were strong: a considerable section of Whig support in the city
came from its mercantile population, who had long been hostile to
Charles II’s foreign policies. Their opposition was partly based on
economic and partly on ideological grounds.36 Since the early 1670s
there had been a transition in popular opinion from anti-Dutch to anti-
French sentiment among many English merchants and opposition MPs,
who complained that the French represented the real threat to English
trade. They argued that Charles’s Dutch wars left the French free to
usurp the trade of both England and Holland, and prevented English
merchants from dealing with the Dutch. During the Restoration period
Nonconformity became ever more associated with the manufacturing
and trading part of the nation, and the urban middling classes increas-
ingly succeeded the Puritan gentry as the chief sponsors of Dissent.37
There were a signiWcant number of Nonconformists who felt that
England should not wage war against the Dutch, who, unlike the
French, were fellow-Protestants. In addition, many of the most inXuen-
tial merchants, like Thomas Papillon and John Dubois, were French
Huguenots, who were Wercely anticatholic and increasingly worried
about the treatment of the Huguenot population in France.
34 Thomas Shadwell, The Medal of John Bayes (1682), in Works, v. 259.

35 On the use of the concept of ancient constitutionalism in the seventeenth century see
J. G. A. Pocock, The Ancient Constitution and the Feudal Law: A Study of English Historical
Thought in the Seventeenth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1957);
Janelle Greenberg, The Radical Face of the Ancient Constitution: St Edward’s ‘Laws’ in
Early Modern Political Thought (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press,
2001).
36 On the gradual alienation of London merchants from Charles’s policies see Margaret
Priestley, ‘London Merchants and Opposition Politics in Charles II’s Reign’, Bulletin of the
Institute of Historical Research, 29 (1956), 205–20. See also Steven Pincus, ‘From Butter-
boxes to Wooden Shoes: The Shift in English Popular Sentiment from Hatred of Holland
to Hatred of France’, Historical Journal, 38 (1995), 333–62.
37 See John Spurr, English Puritanism 1603–1689 (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1998), 144.
The events of late 1681 and 1682 magniWed these tensions. Out of the
turmoil of municipal politics came a spate of Tory comedies, such as
John Crowne’s City Politiques (1683), Aphra Behn’s The City Heiress
(1682), and Tom D’Urfey’s Sir Barnaby Whigg (1681), all of which
parodied the archetypal prosperous City Whig. Elsewhere, Tory writers
presented trade as both ungentlemanly and un-English. In The Interest
of the Three Kingdoms (1680) Roger L’Estrange invoked ‘the public Spirit’
(p.10) and stated that the English were a nation fundamentally unlike
the Dutch, who were ‘addicted only to TraYc, Navigation, Handicrafts,
and sordid Thrift’ (p. 14).38 In The Medall Dryden’s attack on the City
Dissenters is closely linked to their commercial activities:
In Gospel phrase their Chapmen they betray:
Their Shops are Dens, the Buyer is their Prey.
The Knack of Trades is living on the Spoyl;
They boast, e’vn when each other they beguile. (ll. 191–4)
He also presents the aZuence brought by the port of London as a
corrupting evil:
I call’d thee [the Thames] Nile; the parallel will stand:
Thy tydes of Wealth o’rXow the fattend Land;
Yet Monsters from thy Large increase we Wnd;
Engender’d on the Slyme thou leav’st behind. (ll. 171–4)
The cyclical Xoods and retreats of the Nile had long been associated
with the excess and corruption of Egypt itself, a civilization brought low
by its self-consuming luxury.39 Dryden’s description of the Thames
oVers an image of London’s great river very far from that at the end
of Annus Mirabilis (1667), where he had described London with her
‘silver Thames, her own domestick Floud’ who ‘Shall bear her Vessels,
like a sweeping Train’ (ll. 1189–90).40
These images of London’s gains as a corrupting form of excess echo
contemporary criticism of the city’s role in trade. Some saw the capital’s
apparently unbounded import and consumption of luxury goods as a
disproportionate squandering of the nation’s wealth, which was not
balanced by similar levels of export of native produce.41 However, it
38 Roger L’Estrange, The Interest of the Three Kingdoms (London, 1680), 10, 14.
39 In the Metamorphoses (1. 422–9) Ovid claims that monstrous half-live forms of men
had been discovered in the slime left by the receding Nile.
40 John Dryden, Annus Mirabilis: The Year of Wonders (1667), in Works, i. 104.
41 Carew Reynell complained that ‘the trade doth much exhaust our money’, since the
nation was being swamped by quantities of French luxuries or German linen without
was equally possible to view the capital’s role in the circulation of trade
as a route to national prosperity. The Navigation Acts of 1651, 1660, 1663,
and 1673 had created a body of legislation that ensured that all goods
destined for and coming from English plantations had to be shipped in
English vessels and had to travel via England, where they generated large
amounts of revenue from taxation. Thus London was the centre for the
re-export of goods and materials brought from east to west, its role in
the Atlantic trade making it a prominent supplier as well as a consumer
of imported goods.42 In the polemic generated by the shrieval elections,
and the debate over the status of the capital, Whig writers emphasized
precisely this sense of the city as the centre of supply which linked the
nations of the world through its river commerce. In The Medal of John
Bayes Shadwell proVers an encomium to the city as trading centre:
In spight of lawless men and Popish Xames,
(Inrich’d by thy much lov’d and bounteous Thames)
May into thee the Wealth of Nations Xow,
And to thy height all Europes Cities bow.43
Similarly, in his long poem on the shrieval elections, Midsummer Moon:

Or the Liveryman’s Complaint (1682), the opposition poet Thomas
Thompson describes how
The stately Nereids, with the swelling tide,
Rich freights from all the universe provide;
Whate’er of rarities the East can shew,
With all the glittering entrails of Peru,
Cargoes of myrrh and frankincense they bring,
And pearls and diamonds for an oVering.44
Thompson’s passage, with its full complement of nereids, naiads, and
Thames mythology, signals backwards to earlier poetic models, not only
to Dryden’s London of Annus Mirabilis but also to Denham’s Cooper’s
making any money from its own goods (Reynell, The True English Interest (1674), quoted
by Spurr in England in the 1670s, 131).
42 One contemporary commentator argued: ‘this trade of our plantations doth not only
increase both [our shipping and our treasure] equally, but with the increase of itself
increaseth also the limits of our dwelling; adding as it increaseth not only the trade of one
climate after another to us, but joining the countries themselves and the inheritance of
them as well as their trades to these his Majesty’s territories and dominions’ (Bodleian
Library, Oxford, MS Rawlinson, in Seventeenth-Century Economic Documents, ed. Joan
Thursk and J. P. Cooper (Oxford: Clarendon, 1972), 536).
43 Shadwell, Medal of John Bayes, in Works, v. 260.
44 Thomas Thompson, Midsummer Moon: Or the Liveryman’s Complaint (London,
1682), in POAS iii. 259.

Hill (1642) and Waller’s To My Lord Protector (1655). By the time of the
Exclusion Crisis Whig writers had appropriated this tradition of imper-
ial poetry. Through it they represented London’s people not just as the
centre of the nation, but the centre of the whole world.45
Country and city
So far the representations of the political nation and its people found in
the poems described above have polarized into Tory attacks on the city of
London, and Whig defences of the city and its trading interests. Attacks
on cits clearly became part of the satiric vocabulary of Tory loyalists in the
early 1680s, and Whig writers in turn defended the liberties and voices of
London’s people. Yet London was complex enough to sustain multiple
deWnitions, and from an alternate Whig perspective it could be repre-
sented negatively as a place of display and consumption, characterized by
the high life of rakes and beaus. As time passed, opposition writers
increasingly associated London with this alternative set of political and
cultural identities, drawing on the critique of vice and proXigacy in the
Stuart court associated with the ‘country’ opposition of the early 1670s.46
Historians of the seventeenth century have long sought to root the
origins of the Whig party in the country opposition.47 Central to its
ideology was a politics of virtue: an emphasis on the excess and corrup-
tion of court life, and on the corresponding independence and political
integrity of those outside it—that is, in the country. Over the course of
the 1660s the notion of ‘the country’ had gradually acquired a partisan
force, coming to represent an alliance of land-based gentry against newly
monied upstarts, of open political debate against cabals, and of English
patriots against foreign intruders.48
45 On this imperial tradition see Karen O’Brien, ‘Protestantism and the Poetry of
Empire’, in Jeremy Black (ed.), Culture and Society in Britain 1660–1800 (Manchester:
Manchester University Press, 1997), 46–62.
46 The question of whether or not this country opposition formed a distinct ‘party’ is a
vexed one. In 1673 William Temple described as many as four separate groups within the
opposition to the court, whose demands ranged from those who wanted to bring down
Charles’s cabal, Buckingham, Lauderdale, and Arlington, to those who wanted to persuade
Charles to divorce Catherine of Braganza. For a summary of this debate see Tim Harris,
Politics under the Later Stuarts: Party ConXict in a Divided Society 1660–1715 (London:
Longman, 1993), 63.
47 On the development of the country opposition see Spurr, England in the 1670s, 77–9.
48 Sir Robert Howard’s banned play The Country Gentleman (1676) illustrates the ways
in which country ideology was articulated in dramatic form: the play centres around a
For many Whig poets writing during the early 1680s country rhetoric
became increasingly useful as a way of articulating their opposition to
the government. At the same time that they were being pilloried by their
opponents as City tradesmen and urban low-lifes they were busy
forging political and rhetorical links with the country. This new em-
phasis was related to the political circumstances of the Tory reaction,
and its implications for print culture. From 1681 onwards the govern-
ment initiated a harsh campaign to reassert royal authority and many
exclusionists began to lose conWdence in the prospect of immediate
action. Some of the moderate Whig activists responded to the political
situation by making peace with Charles II and retreating from the
public arena.49 Others resolved to use violent intervention to change
the succession. Groups of activists began the conspiratorial plotting that
was to culminate in the Rye House Plot and, later, the Monmouth
Rebellion.50 However, regardless of the extent of their commitment to
active resistance, Whig writers had little room to articulate their polit-
ical agenda in print in this period. After 1682 the government drew on
all its legal machinery to silence the network of publishers and printers
that had circulated so much exclusionist propaganda.51 Because of the
suppression of the Whig publishers, and the imposition of heavy gov-
ernment censorship, far less Whig verse and drama was published
between 1682 and 1687 than at the height of the Exclusion Crisis. Not
only had the opposition lost their electoral grip on London, but they
were also losing the public discursive spaces of the playhouse and the
group of ‘good’ country gentry, who are oVset by Wgures representing FrenchiWed Restor-
ation courtiers, and scheming politicians (see Annabel Patterson, ‘The Country Gentleman:
Howard, Marvell, Dryden in the Theater of Politics’, SEL 25 (1985), 491–509). However,
country rhetoric was not exclusively employed by a single group of political opponents to
the court. A whole range of pamphleteers were eager to associate their message with the
sturdy political independence of the country gentry, and the pamphlet genres of letters to
friends in the country or appeals to or from the country were all employed to evoke a
certain set of convictions and attitudes. Despite the fact that the lives and fortunes of most
of the gentry and aristocracy revolved around both city and country, the polemical agency
of the provinces outside London had an appeal for groups across the political spectrum
(see Spurr, England in the 1670s, 161–5).
49 On those who did not retreat see Melinda Zook, Radical Whigs and Conspiratorial
Politics in Late Stuart England (Pennsylvania, Pa.: Pennsylvania State University Press,
1999).
50 For a full narrative of the plotting of this decade see Greaves, Secrets of the Kingdom.
51 In April 1682 the Council interrogated the Whig booksellers Langley Curtis and
Richard Janeway for having allegedly printed false and seditious news. In the winter of the
same year Henry Care, Richard Baldwin, and Jane Curtis were prosecuted, while Eleanor
and Francis Smith were Wned in April 1683 for continuing to publish radical works (see
Greaves, Secrets of the Kingdom, 15–20, 40–9).
pamphlet. Occasions that might be expected to prompt poetic outpour-

ings, such as the deaths of Russell and Sidney, were mourned largely in
manuscript verse.52 Blair Worden emphasizes the extent to which
mainstream Whigs were anxious to distance themselves from the so-
called ‘Whig martyrs’ Sidney and William Russell, who feature very
little in late seventeenth-century Whig propaganda.53 The public
printed dialogue between Whig and Tory poets that we have seen in
the early 1680s was no longer possible.
The idiom of country retirement and retreat oVered many writers a
way of articulating their opposition without seeming to do so. Conse-
quently, it became the dominant motif of Whig poetry during the later
1680s. The voice of opposition changes after 1682 from representing the
will of the people of the city towards the notion of retreat. This shift is
exempliWed in Shadwell’s 1682 satire on Dryden’s The Tory-Poets:
My Muse the Court will leave, contemn the Stage,
A long Farewell to so prophane an Age:
Debaucht to Lust, to Avarice and Pride,
Who’de be condemn’d to Court or City Pews,
Be damn’d to nonsence and the stink of Stews;
To wait for Pensions who would take delight,
And be at last but a sham’d Favourite,
Who’de purchase Favour by perWdious Oaths,
Or pawn his Conscience for to buy him cloaths.54
Like other Whig writers of the period, Shadwell forges an association
between the city and moral and political corruption, in contrast with
which the country becomes the source of virtue and disinterested
52 Although Lois Schwoerer has argued that there were ‘compelling reasons for me-
morializing William Russell’, her evidence of poetic tributes produced immediately after
his execution is conWned to only one anonymous ode, in manuscript (Schwoerer, Lady
Rachel Russell: ‘One of the Best of Women’ (Baltimore, Md.: Johns Hopkins University
Press, 1988), 141–2). Margaret Crum’s index of manuscript poetry in the Bodleian Library
lists only two manuscript elegies, one on Sidney and one on Russell (Crum, First Line
Index of English Poetry 1500–1800 in the Manuscripts of the Bodleian Library, 2 vols.
(Oxford: Clarendon, 1969) ). There were, however, several printed satires on the execu-
tions, such as Algernon Sidney’s Farewell (London, 1683) and An Elegy on the Earl of Essex
(London, 1683).
53 Worden observes that while he has for convenience termed Sidney a ‘Whig martyr’,
the Whig leadership was ‘embarrassed’ by Sidney’s radical statements quoted from his
papers at his trial, and by the more moderate William Russell’s refusal to disavow, before
his execution, his belief in the subject’s right to resist a tyrant (see Worden, ‘The
Commonwealth Kidney of Algernon Sidney’, Journal of British Studies, 24 (1985), 1–40).
54 Thomas Shadwell, The Tory-Poets: A Satyr (London, 1682), in Works, v. 286.
action. He advocates neither submission to the current regime nor

direct political action, but instead a life of moderate ease beyond the
temptations of the court and the city. We should however be circum-
spect in taking this and similar declarations at face value. In the context
of extensive censorship and suspicion it is hard to gauge what lies
behind the professions of retreat that we Wnd in Whig writing that did
get past the censors. Many central opposition Wgures declared their
intention to retire from public life: in The Protestants’ Remonstrance
against Pope and Presbyter (1681) the Quaker MP William Penn writes a
‘plea for moderation’ explaining why the ‘private concerns of family and
Estate’ ought to take precedence over eVorts to ‘send to market for
troubles’ in political aVairs; while Gilbert Burnet says in his History that
he ‘went into a closer retirement’ from politics after the dissolution of
the Oxford Parliament.55 The Baptist poet and journalist John Tutchin,
like the author of The Tory-Poets, imagines the retreat from political life
in terms of literal retirement to the country. In doing so he draws on the
same tradition of the Horatian beatus vir retirement poem to character-
ize opposition exile during the 1680s that Royalist poets such as Love-
lace, Herrick, and Cowley had used to describe their responses to the
events of the 1640s (and that Jacobite poets such as Dryden would use in
the 1690s). In her account of the development of the retirement poem
Maren-SoWe Røstvig has claimed that John Tutchin was ‘the Wrst excep-
tion to the rule that only Tories and Anglicans would write about the
happiness of rural retreat’ and that he adopted the tradition to further
his project of moral reformation. However, as this account reveals, the
beatus ille topos was useful to a number of Whig poets of the 1680s for
more speciWcally political reasons.56 Tutchin’s ‘Discourse of Life’ was, in
eVect, a summary of the contents of Cowley’s essays, and it Wnishes with
55 William Penn, The Protestants Remonstrance against Pope and Presbyter (London,
1681), 34; Gilbert Burnet, History of My Own Time: The Reign of Charles II, ed. Osmund
Airy, 2 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon, 1897–1900), ii. 288. For a more detailed account of the
declining fortunes of the Whig party, see Richard Ashcraft, Revolutionary Politics and
Locke’s Two Treatises of Government (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1986), 313,
and K. H. D. Haley, The First Earl of Shaftesbury (Oxford: Clarendon, 1968), 724.
56 Maren-SoWe Røstvig, The Happy Man: Studies in the Metamorphosis of a Classical
Ideal, 2 vols. (Oslo: Norwegian Universities Press, 1954–8), i. 290. On the symbolism of
retreat for Jacobite writers of the following decade see Murray Pittock, Poetry and Jacobite
Politics in Eighteenth-Century Britain and Ireland (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1994); Jay Arnold Levine, ‘John Dryden’s Epistle to John Driden’, in Bruce King
(ed.), Dryden’s Mind and Art (London: Oliver and Boyd, 1969), 114–42.
a paean to an idealized life of gentle retreat that typiWes the retirement

poetry of the 1640s and the 1680s:
Grant me, good God! a Melancholy Seat,
Free from the Noise and Tumults of the Great:
Like some Blest Man, who his Retinue sees
A tall and sprightly Grove of servile Trees.57
Yet Tutchin was no political moderate. In the same year that this poem
was published he took part in the Duke of Monmouth’s rising, and was
subsequently tried before Judge JeVreys at the Bloody Assizes. Immedi-
ately after the Revolution he published his A New Martyrology, a
collection of death speeches and sermons from the radical uprisings of
the 1680s. Others also preached a moderation which belied their con-
tinuing radicalism: in a pamphlet of 1681 the Independent minister John
Owen (1616–1683) advocated ‘repentence and universal reformation’ as
the only way for the country to avoid destruction, but went on to
publish a pamphlet in the following year in which he enunciated a
doctrine of active resistance in circumstances in which religious and
civil rights were threatened.58 In 1683 he was implicated by Monmouth
in the Rye House plotting, and he was interrogated about the proposed
rebellion prior to his death later that year.
One of the further implications of the Whig adoption of country
rhetoric was that it involved a thorough rethinking of the relationship
between the opposition poet and the people. Shadwell’s 1684 manu-
script poem ‘The Protestant Satire’, not published until 1747, reveals
how far things had changed by the mid-1680s. In the poem Shadwell
attacks Dryden and his protected position at the heart of the regime. He
compares the Laureate’s self-serving actions with an idealized deWnition
of the opposition which clearly presents Whig politics in terms of
independent ‘country’ virtue:59
57 John Tutchin, ‘A Discourse of Life’, in Poems on Several Occasions (London, 1685),

147.
58 John Owen, preface to An Humble Testimony unto the Goodness and Severity of God
in His Dealing with Sinful Churches and Nations (London, 1681) and A Brief and
Impartial Account of the Nature of the Protestant Religion (London, 1682). On Owen’s
views on active resistance, and his role in the plotting, see Greaves, Secrets of the Kingdom,
93–4, 121–2.
59 Howard H. Schless, the editor of the third volume of Poems on AVairs of State, has
attributed the poem to Shadwell on the basis of internal evidence. Schless’s argument for
Shadwell’s authorship of the poem is partly based on the references within the poem to the
contemporary playhouse. In addition to the references to The Rehearsal, the poet also
All sense of freedom and our country’s laws,

All dang’rous daring to assert her cause,
All love to truth in a degenerate time,
All suV’ring virtue’s a reproach to him. (ll. 201–4)60
While earlier Whig verse had also, as we have seen, laid claim to the
rhetoric of liberty and virtue, the diVerence in this later period lies in
the poet’s relationship to the nation. Shadwell writes of ‘our country’s
laws’, yet it is no longer clear where he stands in relation to the subjects
that constitute that nation. As he depicts it, the poet is no longer the
mouthpiece of the people, but is isolated and impotent, as the nation
acts against its own best interests:
Since guides who must mislead have best esteem,
And those who should corrupted crowds redeem
From the lov’d yoke of their own passions’ sway
To the far worse of other men’s betray (ll. 28–31)
In the early 1680s Dryden had characterized popular opinion as
misguided enthusiasm exploited by unscrupulous politicians: by 1684
it is the Whig opposition who despair of the nation’s ‘lov’d yoke of
their own passions’ sway’. This sense of alienation from popular politics
mirrors contemporary shifts in popular opinion since the heady days
at the height of the Exclusion Crisis. The years following the Oxford
Parliament had seen many subjects retracting their support for the
Whigs, in favour of the king.61 The threat of punishments inXicted by
the Tory reaction undoubtedly inXuenced many: but others had seen
in the escalation of partisan debate the spectre of civil war, in contrast
to which the monarch symbolized political and social stability. This
leaching of popular support away from the Whig cause leads the
author of The Protestant Satire to deWne his cause as one of the few
‘left as thin as Gideon’s little band’ (l. 450). Those who do resist are
those ‘patriots, whom he [L’Estrange] calls a trait’rous gang’ and
whom the government will ‘Seize without proof, and without trial,
hang’ (ll. 76–7).62
accuses Dryden of copying the empty oratory of Sir Formal TriXe, the comic butt of
Shadwell’s play The Virtuoso.
60 Thomas Shadwell, The Protestant Satire (1684), in POAS iii. 525. Further line refer-
ences in the text are to this edition.

61 See Tim Harris, ‘Was the Tory Reaction Popular? Attitudes of Londoners Towards
the Persecution of Dissent, 1681–86’, London Journal, 13 (1987–8), 106–20.

62 The speciWc reference here seems to be to Sir Thomas Armstrong, hung for his part
in the Rye House plot.

The ideal of retreat had clearly generated a Xexible body of rhetoric

for Whig writers in this period. The idyll of the man of virtue, distant
from the corruption and chaos of town, became a way of articulating a
critique of the government whilst maintaining an appearance of polit-
ical impartiality. The strength of Tory reaction against Whiggism and
Dissent can be measured by the increasing use of the word ‘moderate’ as
a term of abuse for those advocating religious toleration. As we have
seen, Dryden captured the rhetoric of moderation for the Tory court
party during the Exclusion Crisis. It was an idiom, though, which was to
prove very Xexible in its connotations. As the Tory reaction developed,
Tory churchmen turned their attack from Whigs to moderates and
‘trimmers’.63 Any minister who was soft on Dissent was lambasted as
a trimmer, a group of ‘ambiguous men, that are listed under our
banner, and receive the Church’s pay, but serve our dangerous enemy,
the fanatic and Dissenter’. For John Evans, the author of Moderation
Stated (1682), a moderate was ‘One who will frequent the Publick
Churches, and Conventicles too; one who will seem devout at
Divine Service, and appear for the Church of England on a Sunday,
and the other six Days work, hard against it’.64 By refusing to discrimin-
ate between radicals and trimmers, Tory polemicists ensured that the
term ‘moderate’ was freighted with a range of ideological resonances.
The poetics and politics of reformation
The Whig poetry produced after the Tory reaction is marked by its
apparent aspiration towards a moral perspective on contemporary
public life, which was used as a coded form of political opposition.
Yet we should recognize that reformation had both a topical and a
broader cultural signiWcance. Whig writers also emphasized the moral
function of literature in their attempts to discredit the wit and style of
court poetry. An interest in the role of literature as an agent of moral
reform, rather than of pure entertainment, can be found in earlier
Restoration writing. Debates between Dryden and Shadwell over the
merits of humours comedy framed similar concerns. In the preface to
the Humorists (1671) Shadwell had argued that:
63 See Mark Goldie and John Spurr, ‘Politics and the Restoration Parish: Edward Fowler
and the Struggle for St Giles Cripplegate’, English Historical Review, 109 (1994), 572–96.
64 John Evans, Moderation Stated: In a Sermon preached before the Right Honourable the
Lord Mayor (London, 1682), 36.

I must take leave to dissent from those, who seem to insinuate that the
ultimate end of a Poet is to delight, without correction or instruction:
Methinks a Poet should never acknowledge this, for it makes him of as little
use to Mankind as a Fidler, or Dancing-Master, who delights the fancy onely,
without improving the Judgement [ . . . ] I confess, a Poet ought to do all that
he can, decently to please, that so he may instruct.65
The party divisions of the late 1670s and 1680s undoubtedly sharpened
such arguments into more speciWc party-political diVerences between
Whig and Tory writers.66 Whig writers used the argument about moral
reformation as a way of criticizing the achievements of their Tory
contemporaries, arguing that recent years, far from being a time of
restoration and revival, had seen the moral decline of the national
literature. In The Tory-Poets (1682) Shadwell suggests that contemporary
Tory poetry would make an entire canon of English poets turn in their
graves:
Spencers old bones about do toss and turn
With Indignation kicks his rusty Urn.
When great Cowly’s Tomb the Ladies walk
And of the modern Poesie do talk,
His stately Urn doth bow its drooping Head,
And modest blushes ore the Marble spread,
As if asham’d of his Posterity,
A base, degenerate, sottish Progeny.67
As the reference above to contemporary poetry as ‘A base, degenerate,

sottish Progeny’ suggests, in this period Whig poetry could be deWned in
opposition to the foppishness, immorality, and insubstantiality of Tory
writing. The attack on wit became part of a wider critique of the post-
Restoration literary scene. Where Tory critics such as the Earl of Ros-
common had traced the progress of poesy through from classical Rome
to a new golden age in Restoration England, Whig writers presented a
very diVerent history. In ‘A Satire against Vice’ John Tutchin questions
the celebration of England’s new Augustan age:
65 Thomas Shadwell, preface to The Humorists (1671), in Works, i. 183–4.

66 Shadwell was immediately answered by Dryden, who invoked classical authority in
the preface to An Evening’s Love, or the Mock Astrologer (1671) to prove that ‘the chief end
of it [comedy] is divertisement and delight’. Shadwell’s argument with Dryden is con-
tinued in the dedication, prologue, and epilogue to The Virtuoso (1676). For a fuller
account of the debate between the two authors see R. Jack Smith, ‘Shadwell’s Impact
upon John Dryden’, Review of English Studies, 20 (1944), 29–44.
67 Shadwell, The Tory-Poets, in Works, v. 285–6.
Our fair Augusta, once the Nations pride,

To whom new honours brought each Xowing Tide;
Now, by its peoples crimes, a Desart made,
And though a well built Town, a very shade.68
John Cutts, the future Williamite war hero, produced a progress of
poesy, ‘Musarum Origo: or the Original and Excellence of the Muses’,
in which he described the sacred origins of poetry and its current
downward trajectory:
In dissolute, and undiscerning times,
When Vice unmasks, and Vertues pass for Crimes,
The sacred Gift of charming-Poetry,
Is look’d on with a slight, and scornful Eye;
But if we trace the steps of former Years,
It’s high Descent, and Dignity appears.69
Cutts traces his muses not through the classics and France, as Roscom-
mon and Dryden had done, but through David and Solomon and the
sacred origins of poetry in the Bible. He implies that until contempor-
ary poetry regains its moral and Christian function, English literature is
destined to languish.
The argument that poetry should be used as a medium for
religious instruction, and that the Bible contained the Wrst poetry
known to mankind, was, of course, not new. It was a commonplace of
Renaissance criticism. Sidney had claimed in his Defence of Poetry
(1595) that:
The chief, [poets] both in antiquity and excellency, were they that did imitate
the unconceivable excellencies of God. Such were David in his Psalms;
Solomon in his Song of Songs, in his Ecclesiastes, and Proverbs; Moses and
Deborah in their Hymns; and the writer of Job.70
Later seventeenth-century poets had shared his emphasis on the divine
origins and nature of poetry. Cowley claimed in the preface to his Poems
(1656) that ‘It is time to recover it [poetry] out of the Tyrants hands, and
68 Tutchin, ‘A Satire against Vice’, in Poems on Several Occasions, 9. Compare this with
his later celebration of Augustan revival in his panegyric on the Revolution, An Heroick
Poem upon the Expedition of His Majesty (London, 1689).
69 John Cutts, ‘Musarum Origo: or the Original and Excellence of the Muses’, in Poetical
Exercises Written Upon Several Occasions (London, 1687), 18.

70 Sir Philip Sidney, A Defence of Poetry (1595), in Miscellaneous Prose of Sir Philip
Sidney, ed. Katherine Duncan-Jones and Jan van Dorsten (Oxford: Clarendon, 1973), 80.
to restore it to the Kingdom of God, who is the Father of it’.71 Whig poets
from the 1680s onwards identiWed their own arguments for religious
poetry within this tradition of poetic reformation. When Tutchin
argued that ‘the Abuse of Poetry has been very great in these latter
Ages’ he went on to observe that ‘since Mr. Cowley, there has been none
that has endeavoured to RectiWe it’.72 The important distinction be-
tween Tutchin’s and Shadwell’s arguments and those of earlier writers
was that they used this well-developed strain of seventeenth-century
literary criticism as part of a speciWcally Whiggish literary agenda,
which was premised on the perceived failings of contemporary Tory
writers. Tutchin parodies the fop or rake culture in opposition to which
the poetry of reformation is deWned:
To the Play-House we descended,
For to get a grain of Wit,
Our own with Wine was so defended.
We sate spuing in the Pit,
’Mongst Drunken Lords and Whoring Ladies,
To see such sights whose only Trade is.73
The critique of ‘Wit’ here once again reveals the extent to which the
dialogue between Whig and Tory emerged in debates about literary
style, as well as political principle. This particular attack on rake culture
in Tutchin’s poem has its origins in earlier seventeenth-century literary
debate, and in particular in Puritan anti-Cavalier rhetoric. The Whig
attacks on Tory writers, such as the description of Dryden in the Tory-
Poets as ‘by lewd lascivious Verses, bawdy Rhymes, | Dubb’d the sweet
singing Poet of the times’, mirror the caricatures of libertine Cavaliers
developed by the Parliamentary press of the Civil War period.74 Lucy
Hutchinson’s deWnition of the Cavalier who revels in ‘blasphemous
oathes, ribald conversation, prophane scoVes, sabbath breach, derision
71 Abraham Cowley, preface to Poems (1656), in J. E. Spingarn (ed.), Critical Essays of
the Seventeenth Century, 3 vols. (Bloomington, Ind.: Indiana University Press, 1963), ii. 88;
see also William Davenant, preface to Gondibert (1651), also repr. in Spingarn (ed.), Critical
Essays of the Seventeenth Century.
72 Tutchin, preface to Poems on Several Occasions, sig. a4r.
73 Tutchin, ‘The Tory Catch’, in Poems on Several Occasions, 23.
74 Shadwell, The Tory-Poets, 279. As Thomas Corns explains, this stereotype bore little
relation to fact, but came instead from an established pejorative image of the professional
soldiery, and an older tradition of anti-court writing, which presented the monarch’s
courtiers as ruthless, foppish, and lecherous (Corns, Uncloistered Virtue: English Political
Literature 1640–1660 (Oxford: Clarendon, 1992), 3–6).
of the word of God, and the like’ is representative of many such

attacks.75 By yoking together a Renaissance belief in the superiority of
divine poetry with mid-seventeenth-century anti-Cavalier rhetoric,
early Whig writers mounted a powerful defence for their literary cul-
ture. Such rhetoric also distanced the Whigs from the inspired ‘ejacula-
tions’ of religious enthusiasts, by locating their arguments for sacred
poetry within a tradition of respectable Protestant piety.76
However, while the arguments outlined above demonstrate the
development of a Whiggish emphasis on poetic reformation in response
to Tory lewdness, the political alignments within Restoration literary
culture were more complex than this identiWcation between Toryism
and libertinism, and Whiggism and Puritan propriety suggests. The
Whig appropriation of the literature of moral virtue was clearly com-
promised by the fact that many of the early opposition leaders, such as
the Earl of Rochester and the Duke of Buckingham, were renowned
rakes. It is presumably as an attempt to distance himself from such
excesses that John Tutchin’s poetic tribute to Rochester constructs the
earl as a pastoral poet, and makes the extraordinary claim that:
The Bawdy Flashes of thy Muse.
This to the Publishers was due,
Not Licens’d and Allow’d by you.77
As the years passed, the Restoration wits seem increasingly to have been
read as part of a Whiggish history of opposition.78 Anti-court satires
attributed to Rochester and Buckingham played a large part in the
75 Lucy Hutchinson, Memoirs of the Life of Colonel Hutchinson, ed. James Sutherland
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1973), 44. See other attacks such as Englands Wolfe with
Eagles Clawes: The Cruell Impieties of Bloud-Thirsty Royalists, and blasphemous Anti-
Parliamentarians (London, 1646).
76 The Whig emphasis on ‘divine’ poetry seems to be a return to the late sixteenth-
century movement towards divine subject matter that Lily B. Campbell describes in Divine
Poetry and Drama in Sixteenth-Century England (Berkeley, Calif.: University of California
Press, 1959). On Puritan attacks on poetry and drama see Russell Fraser, The War against
Poetry (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1970). On the problematization of the
notion of divine poetry for early to mid-seventeenth-century Calvinist writers, see Eliza-
beth Clarke, introd. to Theory and Theology in George Herbert’s Poetry: ‘Divinitie, and
Poesie, Met’ (Oxford: Clarendon, 1997).
77 Tutchin, ‘To Rochester’, in Poems on Several Occasions, 19.
78 For a full history of the complex intersection of political radicalism and libertinism
in this period see James Grantham Turner, Libertines and Radicals in Early Modern London:
Sexuality, Politics, and Literary Culture, 1630–1685 (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 2002).
popular Whig miscellany Poems on AVairs of State reprinted between

1697 and 1715. The 1707 republication of Sedley’s works stressed the
playwright’s oppositional political identity, boasting of his ‘untainted
Love to his Country’ and placing his lyrics alongside transcripts of
speeches by Algernon Sidney on the scaVold, Waller against ship
money, and at the trial of the Earl of Argyll in 1681.79 The Restoration
libertines demonstrated that the man of wit could also be the man
of political virtue, creating tensions within Whig ideology which
were to resonate in later attitudes towards wit and politeness, as we
shall see.
James II and reformation
With the accession of James II the whole notion of moral reformation

acquired a new and topical signiWcance. Although James began his reign
with the goodwill of his subjects, it was not long before he began to
alienate growing numbers, including many Tories. As he started to
appoint Catholic peers as Privy Councillors, and staV his army with
Catholic oYcers, the Anglican majority began to resent having to share
power with the king’s Catholic confederates. James soon abandoned
eVorts to achieve a parliamentary repeal of the Test Act and Penal Laws
because of the opposition of Church of England MPs and Anglican
bishops. Instead, in April 1687 he issued a Declaration of Indulgence
which suspended the penal code for both Catholics and Dissenters. His
strategy seems to have been to forge an unlikely alliance of Catholics
and Dissenters to challenge the hegemony of the Anglicans in Parlia-
ment.80 The Declaration of Indulgence, not surprisingly, drove many
Anglicans into active opposition to their king. It also split the basis of
Whig support.81 Shortly after the Declaration the king received a letter
of ‘thankful acceptance’ on behalf of the Dissenters, which was made up
of eighty addresses of thanks. Presbyterian ministers such as Vincent
79 The Poetical Works of the Honourable Sir Charles Sedley Baronet, and his Speeches in
Parliament (London, 1707), sig: a3r.

80 J. R. Jones, Country and Court: England 1658–1714 (London: Edward Arnold, 1978),
242; James Miller, ‘The Later Stuart Monarchy’, in J. R. Jones (ed.), The Restored Monarchy,
1660–1688 (London: Macmillan, 1979).
81 James’s willingness to tolerate both Catholics and Dissenters meant that a sizeable
proportion of his supporters were, paradoxically, the same Whig Dissenters that had
sought to exclude him from the throne at the time of the Exclusion Crisis (see Mark
Goldie, ‘John Locke’s Circle and James II’, Historical Journal, 35 (1992), 557–86).
Alsop, Joseph Reed, and Daniel Burgess all put their names to the
document. But there was no consensus among Nonconformists: many
moderates, such as Richard Baxter, refused to oVer their thanks, saying
that they did not want to oVend conforming members of the Church of
England. Thus Nonconformity occupied an increasingly pivotal pos-
ition in the shifting political climate of 1687–8. Dissenters were courted
on all sides: by James; by the Anglican Church; and also by the Prince of
Orange.82
In the context of this battle for Nonconformist support, writers from
both political sides had to Wnd ways of establishing a position that could
comprehend religious Dissent. The rhetoric of moral reform was clearly
one way of appealing to the godly. The political and moral corruption of
the nation was a complaint of many Dissenters during the 1680s: the
diaries of the Presbyterian minister Oliver Heywood chronicle the
perception of a decline in public morality during the decade. In August
1682 he writes: ‘J. P. [John Priestley] having been in the country told me
of the very outragious sinning there is in all places, even little children
will curse, damne, in a very horrid manner’, and in October of the same
year he writes ‘It seemes still the world is mad on wickednes’.83 How-
ever, the appeal to moral reformation was not exclusively aimed at
Dissenters. The complex negotiation of James’s domestic policies of
indulgence ensured that Catholics and Anglican Churchmen were also
striving to outdo one another in their personal religiosity. As Mark
Knights has argued, the precarious position of the Church of England
under James led Anglicans to adopt a rhetoric of private morality.84
Following James’s declaration of indulgence, the Church began to draw
on the notion of individual conscience as a justiWcation of resistance to
civil authority, and consequently Anglican churchmen encouraged their
parishioners to practise an active religiosity. Meanwhile, the king also
urged the godly life, and in June 1688 issued a proclamation against
debauchery, drunkenness, and swearing.85 Reformation consequently
82 e.g. the Earl of Halifax’s Letter to a Dissenter warned Nonconformists that they were
in danger of being used as stepping stones for the political ambitions of the Roman
Catholic Church (see Spurr, English Puritanism 1603–1689, (147–8)).
83 Oliver Heywood, The Reverend Oliver Heywood BA 1630–1702. His Autobiography,
Diaries, Anecdote and Event Books, ed. J. H. Turner, 4 vols. (London: Brighouse, 1881–5), ii. 295.
84 Mark Knights, ‘ ‘‘Meer Religion’’ and the ‘‘Church-State’’ of Restoration England:
The Impact and Ideology of James II’s Declarations of Indulgence’, in Alan Houston and
Steve Pincus (eds.), A Nation Transformed: England after the Restoration (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2001), 41–70 (61–6).
85 Knights, ‘Meer Religion’, 66.
came to play an increasingly central role in the political and religious

debates of the late 1680s.
The development of this diverse emphasis on reformation oVers an
interesting corrective to existing accounts of the period. It has become a
historiographical commonplace that the Revolution of 1688 inaugurated
a reformation of manners, identiWed largely with the Williamite court.
Tony Claydon describes the growth of a biblically based discourse which
presented William as a providential ruler who had a divine commission
to protect the Protestant Church in England, and to return the nation to
its pristine faith, piety, and virtue. He argues that the need for such a
discourse arose from a desire to assuage contemporary doubts about the
new king’s legitimacy, to promote his anti-French war, and to enable the
king to govern through Parliament.86 However, the evidence of the pre-
existence of a discourse of reformation in a range of texts produced in
the late 1680s suggests that this moral project cannot be identiWed
exclusively with the Williamite propaganda machine.
Competing claims to the moral life were played out in the poetry
produced under James II. For the new Catholic convert John Dryden
the idea of reform was a useful way of linking Dissent with Catholicism,
against Anglicanism. The Hind and the Panther (1687), the Laureate’s
beast fable justifying his conversion and celebrating the spiritual mys-
teries of the milk-white hind of Catholicism, came out shortly after
James’s Declaration. In the poem Dryden was faced with the diYcult
task of renegotiating the anti-Nonconformist polemic that had marked
his Exclusion Crisis satires and his defence of Anglicanism in Religio
Laici. One way he did this was to draw on a rhetoric of moral reforma-
tion to attack the Church of England, and this no doubt served his own
ecclesiastical ambitions as well.87 In The Hind and the Panther Dryden
presents the piety of the Catholic Church in contrast to the vice and
luxury of the Church of England:
God’s and kings rebels have the same good cause,
To trample down divine and humane laws:
Both wou’d be call’d Reformers, and their hate,
Alike destructive both to church and state:
86 Tony Claydon, William III and the Godly Revolution (Cambridge: Cambridge Uni-
versity Press, 1996).

87 Roger Morrice reports: ‘Some say that Mr Dreyden if he takes Holly Orders is like to
(be Provost of the Colledge in Dublin) have considerable preferment’ (Morrice, Entring
Book, Dr Williams’s Library, i, Saturday, 17, July 1686). Other rumours circulated of
The fruit proclaims the plant; a lawless Prince

By luxury reform’d incontinence,
By ruins, charity; by riots, abstinence.
Confessions, fasts and penance set aside;
Oh with what ease we follow such a guide!
Where souls are starv’d, and senses gratify’d.
Where marr’age pleasures, midnight pray’r supply,
And mattin bells (a melancholy cry)
Are tun’d to merrier notes, encrease and multiply.
Religion shows a Rosie colour’d face;
Not hatter’d out with drudging works of grace;
A down-hill Reformation rolls apace. (pt. I, ll. 357–72)88
Protestant reformation is here linked to moral reformation, both of
which are shown to foster no more than lawlessness and luxury. The
speciWc targets of this attack are revealed in Dryden’s lines on Gilbert
Burnet, the cleric who was to continue to drive the reformation move-
ment under William and Mary, described here as King Buzzard, ‘Broad-
back’d, and Brawny built for Loves delight, | A prophet form’d, to make
a female Proselyte’ (pt. III, ll. 1145–6).
The Hind and the Panther earned its author a number of hostile
responses, the most successful of which was produced by two Cam-
bridge undergraduates, Matthew Prior and Charles Montagu, whose
satirical eVorts were to earn them the patronage of William III. Their
burlesque, entitled The Hind and the Panther Transvers’d to the Story of
the Country Mouse and the City Mouse, appeared three months after
Dryden’s poem. The two authors ridiculed the use of the beast fable to
communicate the mysteries of the spiritual life, and drew on the Duke
of Buckingham’s The Rehearsal (1671) in their parody. The Rehearsal, a
burlesque of Dryden’s The Conquest of Granada (1670), had ridiculed
the Laureate’s heroic style as overblown fustian. Montagu and Prior’s
burlesque of Dryden’s poem worked by adapting Buckingham’s play to
the very changed contexts of James’s reign. In The Rehearsal Bucking-
ham had mocked Dryden’s aspirations to play the rake and man about
town: like many other satires on the Laureate, it had exposed his
Dryden’s election as head of house of All Souls, Oxford (see Mark Goldie, ‘John Locke,
Jonas Proast, and Religious Toleration, 1688–1692’, in John Walsh, Colin Haydon, and
Stephen Taylor (eds.), The Church of England, c.1689–c.1833: From Toleration to Tractarian-
ism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 143–71).
88 John Dryden, The Hind and the Panther (1687), in Works, iii. 133. Further line

attempts to participate in the witty bawdy banter of court wits such as

Rochester and Sedley. But by 1687 Dryden was the aspirant churchman,
no longer the kind of writer who, in Rochester’s words, ‘To frisk his
frolick fancy hee’d cry Cunt’.89 Montagu and Prior mocked the Laure-
ate’s new self-fashioning in The Hind and the Panther Transvers’d,
parodying his eVorts to become the man of virtue who ‘cannot bear
this loose talk now’.90 The insubstantiality of Dryden’s reformation
becomes evident in his disproportionate detailing of the fashionable
London haunts. There is a dig at Dryden’s old social aspirations, as
Bayes comments after having given a catalogue of public houses:
Do you mark me now? I would by this represent the vanity of a town fop, who
pretends to be acquainted at all those good houses, though perhaps he ne’er
was in ’em. (p. 136)
As its title suggests, Montagu and Prior’s burlesque also drew on

Andrew Marvell’s The Rehearsal Transpros’d, both in speciWc allusion
and through the general thrust of its argument. The great joke in the
title of The Hind and the Panther Tranvers’d was, of course, that The
Hind and the Panther was already in verse, poetry which its author had
described as ‘the Majestic Turn of Heroick Poesie’.91 In The Rehearsal
Transpros’d Marvell had reworked Buckingham’s burlesque as an attack
on the high-Xying Anglican Samuel Parker. He had levelled Bucking-
ham’s attacks on extravagance and fancy at Parker, making parallels
between artistic solecism and ecclesiastical absurdity, stagecraft and
priestcraft. The High Church was associated with drama, romance,
Wction, and rhetoric, in contrast with which Marvell’s plain prose style
was linked to integrity and reason.92 In The Hind and the Panther
Transvers’d, as in Marvell’s satire, folly, confusion, and empty rhetoric
are oVset against sense and reason. Once again, political-religious argu-
ment was articulated in a contest over literary discourse, in which
reason and truth were oVset against wit and rhetoric. However, whereas
Marvell’s target had been Samuel Parker’s high-Xying Anglicanism,
89 John Wilmot, Earl of Rochester, ‘An Allusion to Horace 10’, in The Works of John
Wilmot Earl of Rochester, ed. Harold Love (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), 73, l. 74.
90 Charles Montagu and Matthew Prior, The Hind and the Panther Transvers’d to the
Story of the Country Mouse and the City Mouse (1687), in POAS iv. 123. Further page
91 Dryden, preface to The Hind and the Panther, in Works, iii. 122.
92 See N. H. Keeble, ‘Why Transprose The Rehearsal?’, in Warren Chernaik and Martin
Dzelzainis (eds.), Marvell and Liberty (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1999), 249–68.

Prior and Montagu link the same qualities to Dryden and the Catholic
Church. The rhetoric and Wction that Marvell associated with the
Church of England are now more appropriately identiWed with Dry-
den’s fables of transubstantiation, as the Laureate himself boasts:
Indeed, your knotty reasonings with a long train of majors and minors, and
the Devil and all, are too barbarous for my style, but, egad, I can Xourish
better with one of these twinkling arguments, than the best of ’em can Wght
with t’other. (p. 135)
As before, the Laureate is seen to privilege wit and style over the knotty
reasonings of theological truth, further compounding the Whiggish
critique of Restoration poetics that we have seen developing over the
course of the 1680s. And, by drawing on a Nonconformist text in
support of their assault on the Laureate and his Catholicism, they
again appealed to both Anglicans and Dissenters.
These texts all oVered claims and counter-claims to the moral and
spiritual high ground, frequently combining issues of literary and moral
reformation. Montagu and Prior’s allusive satire on Dryden and his self-
deWned role as reformer was to be matched by increasingly scurrilous
attacks on the king and his court. Early in 1688 the former Restoration
rake Charles Sackville, Earl of Dorset, began to circulate his scathing A
Faithful Catalogue of Our Most Eminent Ninnies. In this lengthy verse
satire James and his courtiers were reduced to crudely sexualized cari-
catures, as Dorset mounted a Juvenalian attack on
The vicious lives and long detested fame
Of scoundrel lords, and their lewd wives’ amours,
Pimp-statesmen, bugg’ring priests, court bawds, and whores.93
Like Marvell in his Last Instructions to a Painter (1667), written two

decades before, Dorset conXated sexual vice and political corruption to
present an image of a court incapable of seeing beyond its own desires.
However, unlike his brother, James II was not to outweather this
political storm. Few Anglican bishops had supported the Declaration
of Indulgence, and many had encouraged their clergy to disobey the
king’s instructions. They were supported by leading moderate Dissent-
ers. When James issued a second Declaration in April 1688, and in-
structed the bishops to order their clergy to read the declaration from
the pulpit, the crisis came to a head. Seven Anglican bishops signed a
93 Charles Sackville, Earl of Dorset, A Faithful Catalogue of Our Most Eminent Ninnies
(1688), in POAS iv. 191.

petition to explain their refusal to obey the king’s order, and were
subsequently taken to trial in June 1688, when James made a criminal
complaint of seditious libel against them. Shortly after the trial of the
seven bishops began Mary of Modena gave birth to a son, apparently
consigning the nation to a Catholic succession. Opponents of the
regime in England and Holland were stung into action, and by the
autumn of 1688 Thomas Wharton’s ballad ‘Lilli Burlero’ was widely
circulating, prophesying the now inevitable invasion of the Dutch
stadthouder.
In the 1680s we can see the emergence of two opposing political and
rhetorical traditions. In their struggle to secure discursive authority
Whigs and Tories developed distinct arguments about contemporary
political and literary culture. Some of these ceased to be relevant in later
decades. The representation of ‘the people’ became less important after
1688, as popular urban support moved away from the Whig party
towards the Tories.94 And the Revolution of 1688–9 would see many
Whig poets emerging from their posture of retreat in opposition to take
a place at the heart of the political establishment. Yet there were also
continuities, and we can see some of the ideological and thematic
concerns of Whig writing outlined here developing in subsequent
decades. In particular, the emphasis on moral and literary reformation
that we have seen emerging over the course of the 1680s was to reverber-
ate throughout Whig writing under William, and continued to have
both a topical and a broader cultural signiWcance. Moreover, for all the
complexities of the legacy of the 1680s, it was clearly important to many
late seventeenth- and early eighteenth-century writers to identify the
events of 1680–8 within a pre-history of Whig and proto-Whig oppos-
ition. Whig poets writing immediately after the Revolution constructed
narratives that presented the previous decades as an ongoing struggle to
assert the liberties enshrined in the ancient Constitution. Looking back
on recent political history, they identiWed the country opposition of the
early 1670s, the Exclusion movement, and the plots of the 1680s as part
of a teleological progression towards the Revolution. As Nicholas von
94 Gary Stuart de Krey’s study of London politics in this period demonstrates that by
1690 City Whig leaders had misgivings about the encouragement of popular involvement
in Corporation politics, and that the 1690s saw a growing ‘ideological apostasy’ among the
Whig leaders, who retreated from the populism of the 1680s, an emphasis which was to
culminate in the anti-libertarian City Elections Act of 1725. Accordingly, support moved
towards the Tories, taking the form of the London protests in favour of Sacheverell, and
popular urban Jacobitism (Krey, A Fractured Society: The Politics of London in the First Age
of Party, 1688–1715 (Oxford: Clarendon, 1985), 177–212).
Maltzahn has shown, Andrew Marvell’s speeches and prose writings

were appropriated as part of the pre-history of Whiggism.95 The popu-
lar poetic miscellany Poems on AVairs of State: from the Time of Oliver
Cromwell to the Abdication of King James the Second (1697, 1699, 1702,
1703, 1710, 1716) oVered a poetic history of the times through the
opposition satires of the 1660s, 1670s, and 1680s, and panegyrics on
the Revolution of 1688. While modern historians are rightly cautious of
constructing early Whiggism as a continuous struggle from Exclusion to
Revolution, contemporaries had no such qualms. In the alternative
political history presented in the diverse and topical texts described
above we can see the emergence of a narrative of political virtue,
opposition, and persecution that would gain in authority over the
following century. ‘Whig history’ in its most teleological and determin-
istic form begins in the late 1680s.
95 Nicholas von Maltzahn, ‘Andrew Marvell and the Prehistory of Whiggism’, in David
Womersley (ed.), Cultures of Whiggism: New Essays on Literature and History in the Long
Eighteenth Century (Newark, NJ, and London: University of Delaware Press, forthcoming).
3
Legitimacy and the warrior king
1688–1702
The 1680s saw the emergence of oppositional language and arguments

within Whig poetry. Writers drew on a rhetoric of popular opinion, of
literary and political reformation, and of plain speech to authorize their
critique of the Tory establishment. From 1688 onwards, however, the
nature of party-political discourse changed signiWcantly: the accession
of William III brought many Whigs back into public life, and Whig
poets by and large became the defenders of the regime, rather than its
critics. This chapter will explore some of the implications of this shift,
arguing that the Revolution presented two major new challenges for
Whig writers: Wrst, to legitimate the unconstitutional and unpreced-
ented events of 1688–9, and, secondly, to celebrate William’s military
campaign on the Continent. The implications of these changes continue
to reverberate through Whig verse throughout the decade, prompting
reconsideration of where the nation stood in relation to its past, and
questions of how the new circumstances of public life could be accom-
modated within existing traditions.
Revolution: restoration and innovation
One of the ‘facts’ most frequently rehearsed in the poems on the

Revolution was that the Prince of Orange had come to England to
restore the nation’s liberties after having received a letter of invitation
signed by seven prominent peers.1 However, this appealing image of a
deliverer prince responding to a desperate nation’s cries has long ob-
scured the European and strategic contexts for William of Orange’s
invasion in November 1688. As France’s territorial ambitions appeared
1 On the appeal, and the role of the letter of invitation, see Jonathan I. Israel, gen.
introd. to The Anglo-Dutch Moment: Essays on the Glorious Revolution and its World Impact
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 1–43 (12–13).
94 Legitimacy and the warrior king 1688–1702
ever more aggressive, William sought to counter the increasing power of

Louis XIV by forming a grand coalition with the King of Spain, the
Emperor Leopold, and the German princes. England’s membership of
this alliance was central, but James II’s handsome French subsidies
ensured that he had no desire to join the coalition. So it was that
early in 1688 William approached sympathizers in England, who put
together an invitation that would enable the prince to invade under the
Wction that he was simply responding to a request from the beleaguered
nation. During the summer and autumn of 1688 William began assem-
bling a massive force to support his prospective invasion, and on 5
November he landed unopposed with his army at Brixham in Devon. As
he made his way up through the West Country and towards London he
was joined by James’s deserting forces and supporters, and it became
increasingly clear that the Dutch prince might be able to go as far as
securing the crown itself. The Wrst, ignominious Xight of the king on 11
December created a vacuum in the government that William saw he
could Wll, and when James Xed from his guard at Rochester on 23
December the way was clear to the throne. By the end of January a
convention Parliament had declared that King James had ‘abdicated the
government’ and that the throne was thus vacant. It was at this point
that the proposal to make William regent started to Wnd opposition
among members of the House of Lords, who argued that if the throne
were indeed vacant then Mary, rather than William, was next in line to
the succession. William responded by threatening to return to the
Netherlands, and Mary expressed her desire not to take precedence
over her husband. Faced with the prospect of the return of the exiled
Stuart king, supported by Louis XIV, the Lords agreed to a consti-
tutional compromise, in which William and Mary would rule as joint
sovereigns but William would have sole charge of the government. In
April 1689 the Dutch prince and the Stuart princess were crowned king
and queen of England.
One seventeenth-century historian has recently claimed that the
period immediately before and after the Revolution was ‘arguably the
most intensely ideological and philosophical of all major episodes in
English history’.2 The invasion of a Dutch prince, the Xight of the Stuart
2 Jonathan I. Israel, gen. introd. to The Anglo-Dutch Moment, 6. There is, however, little
agreement over the nature of the ideology underlying the Revolution. Israel himself
emphasizes the nature of the Revolution as a Dutch invasion, rather than as a domestic
rearrangement of the Constitution; Jonathan Clark maintains that the Revolution changed
only the king, and not the fundamental nature of kingship; while J. R. Western has argued
Legitimacy and the warrior king 1688–1702 95
king, and the constitutional compromise of the Revolution settlement

were all events that demanded debate, explanation, and justiWcation in
print. Mark Goldie’s extensive analysis of the pamphlet literature sur-
rounding the Revolution has revealed the vigour and complexity of
contemporary responses to the remarkable events of 1688–9, a printed
controversy on a scale to rival that of the Exclusion Crisis. It is clear
from his survey that contemporaries did not reach a single explanation,
but drew on a range of theses to justify what had happened. Goldie’s
survey of the political pamphlets produced in 1689 reveals that printed
debates about the Revolution featured one or a combination of some of
six theories: that the people had a right of resistance when King James
broke the contract; that William had a superior claim de facto over
James’s claim de jure; that the king had deserted, thereby leaving Wil-
liam to enjoy right by possession; that the Revolution was a military
contest between two independent sovereigns, in which William’s con-
quest of James was held to legitimate his title; that William was king by
the divine right of providence; or—the concept of resistance in ex-
tremis—that necessity had created an exception to passive obedience.3
The Whig poetry published on the Revolution reXects these diverse
responses, and oVers alternative explanations and narratives in an
attempt to give representational and political stability to an event
whose implications and ramiWcations were far from clear. Steven
Zwicker has argued that one of the major problems facing writers
responding to the events of 1688–9 was that of ‘claiming an English
identity both for the Revolution and its resistance’.4 However, there
were, in fact, a number of ways in which Whig writers located the
that 1688 was in fact a counter-revolution. W. R. Speck has claimed that it was an
aristocratic coup, and Steven Pincus asserts that 1688–9 represented England’s Wrst na-
tionalist revolution (Israel, ‘Of Providence and Protestant Winds’, The Anglo-Dutch
Moment, 105–62; J. C. D. Clark, Revolution and Rebellion: State and Society in England in
the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986);
J. R. Western, Monarchy and Revolution: The English State in the 1680s (London: Blandford,
1972); W. A. Speck, Reluctant Revolutionaries: Englishmen and the Revolution of 1688
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988), 6–7; Steven Pincus, ‘To Protect English Liberties:
The English Nationalist Revolution of 1688–9’, in Tony Claydon and Ian McBride, (eds.),
Protestantism and National Identity, Britain and Ireland, c.1650–c.1850 (Cambridge: Cam-
bridge University Press, 1998), 75–104).
3 Mark Goldie, ‘The Revolution of 1689 and the Structure of Political Argument: An
Essay and an Annotated Bibliography of Pamphlets’, Bulletin of Research in the Humanities,

83 (1980), 573–664.
4 Steven Zwicker, ‘Representing the Revolution’, in Lines of Authority: Politics and
English Literary Culture, 1649–1689 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1993), 173–99
(180–1).
Revolution within earlier English history, and the legal and constitu-
tional justiWcations of the change of monarch were frequently grounded
in historical argument. This perspective is most evident in the invoca-
tion of the ‘ancient Constitution’. Claiming that the new regime repre-
sented a return to the political liberties enshrined in the ancient
Constitution, James Tyrrell and other Whig apologists undertook
detailed reviews of earlier English history to demonstrate precedents
for parliamentary intervention in the defence of liberty.5 The panegyrics
on the Revolution also draw on the myth and the language of the
ancient Constitution, to situate recent events within a pre-existing
narrative. The recently established political regime was both a conWrma-
tion and a consolidation of rights the English people had always had.
Thus the new Whig Laureate Thomas Shadwell looked back to an earlier
age of political freedoms in his Congratulatory Poem on His Highness
(1689):
The great Prerogative was understood
A vast unbounded Pow’r of doing Good:
From doing Ill, by Laws it was conWn’d,
If Sanctions, Pacts or Oaths cou’d Princes bind.
By Ancient Usages and Laws they sway’d,
Which both were by the choice of Subjects made.
Old Customs grew to Laws by long Consent,
And to each Written Law of Parliament;
Freedom in Boroughs, and in Land Freehold,
Gave all, who had them, Voices, uncontroul’d.6
From this perspective the Revolution could be seen not as a frightening
and unpredictable imposition from outside, but as a return to an older
model which derived its authority from time immemorial. The inter-
vening period between ‘ancient usage’ and modern times was, as Shad-
well and others saw it, one of increasing deviation from an original
model of political freedom, in which the Stuart monarchs had marked
the high-water point of royal tyranny. Thus in the Congratulatory Poem
quoted above Shadwell describes the history of the English monarchy
between Elizabeth’s reign and William’s accession as one which ‘Turn’d
5 See J. P. Kenyon, Revolution Principles: The Politics of Party 1688–1702 (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1977), 35–7.

6 Thomas Shadwell, A Congratulatory Poem On His Highness the Prince of Orange His
Coming into England (1689), in Works, v. 337. Further page references in the text are to this
edition.
Kings to Tyrants, and to Slaves the free’ (p. 338). His history of the
seventeenth century oVers a narrative of political decline, in sharp
contrast to Tory accounts of the period. Reversing Royalist images of
the interregnum as a period of chaos and disorder, he writes of the
collapse of religion and government under the later Stuarts: ‘Ruin and
Rubbish cover’d all the Ground, | And no remains were of the buildings
found’ (ibid.).
In this polemical Wguration of recent history William III’s reign could
be seen as a return not only to the distant past of Saxon custom but also
to the days of Elizabeth I, the last monarch who had upheld the rights of
the Protestant nation. The two monarchs were also connected through
the narrative of the papist threat that had developed over the course of
the intervening period. For those keen to read recent history in these
terms, the fact that the landing at Torbay took place on November the
Wfth, and that 1688 was the hundredth anniversary of the English
triumph over international catholicism, was, literally, a godsend.7 In
numerous poems and pamphlets Whig writers presented the Dutch
king as the natural heir to Gloriana, airbrushing William’s more recent
Stuart forebears from the national history. Furthermore, William’s
identiWcation with Elizabeth provided a good precedent for an Anglo-
Dutch alliance, as William Temple realized: in his observations on
English foreign policy in the Memoirs and Letters he characterized
previous hostility to the Dutch as a series of mistaken vacillations
from Elizabeth’s earlier cooperation with the Netherlands. In 1585 Eliza-
beth had backed an expedition to the Netherlands which was intended
to help protect the Dutch from the encroachments of Spanish Habsburg
military power.8 The parallels with 1688 were obvious: once again
English and Dutch forces were combining to defend reformed religion
in Europe from the threat of catholicism. Elizabeth’s expedition, led by
7 The republications of 1688 include: A Speech made . . . in Parliament, anno
1593 . . . concerning the Spanish Invasion . . . (London, 1688) and Queen Elizabeth’s Opinion
concerning Transubstantiation, with some Prayers and Thanksgivings composed by her
Imminent Dangers (London, 1688). Yet, as Jonathan Israel and GeoVrey Parker have
recently shown, the most obvious parallel lay in the similarities between the Spanish
Armada and the Dutch armada—a parallel William’s propagandists were keen to play
down (Israel and Parker, ‘Of Providence and Protestant Winds’, in The Anglo-Dutch
Moment, 335–63).
8 Dutch poems on the Revolution characterized the expedition to England as an
acknowledgement of English assistance in the past (see J. V. M. de Vet, ‘The Image of

William and Mary in Dutch Poetry’, in Robert Maccubin and Martha Hamilton-Philips
(eds.), The Age of William III and Mary II: Power, Politics and Patronage (Williamsburg,
Va.: College of William and Mary, 1989), 352–7 (355)).
the Earl of Leicester, had even drawn on the same rhetoric used at the
time of the Revolution, for her Protestant crusade was greeted in
Holland by pageants hailing Leicester as the nation’s deliverer, and
likening him to King Arthur.9 Thus Shadwell declares that
We from the Mighty States have now gain’d more
Than by our Aid they ever got before,
When the Great Vere’s and Sidney’s won such Fame,
That each of them immortaliz’d his Name.10
It is clear that late seventeenth-century observers found historical pre-
cedent a useful way of understanding the bewildering pace of recent
events. Earlier English history could be used to show patterns of return,
continuity, and even restoration. Yet alongside this use of historical
perspective we also Wnd apparently contradictory arguments stressing
the radically innovative nature of the Revolution. This sense of novelty
is evident in the Presbyterian Oliver Heywood’s jubilant account of the
events of 1688, where he speaks of ‘the whole face of things changed next
to a miracle once in 3 months time, so the managem[en]t of all things is
put into other hands and the scene of things so altered as if it were a new
world’.11 Contemporaries seem to have maintained a dual perspective in
their understanding of the Revolution, seeing it as both a continuation
and a radical break from past history. Thomas Shadwell’s Congratu-
latory Poem on His Highness moves from the invocation of custom and
time immemorial to images of creation and birth:
When undistinguish’d in the mighty Mass,
And in Stagnation Universal Matter was,
Huddled in heaps the diV ’ring attoms lay
Quiet, and had no Laws of Motion to obey:
Th’ Eternal Mover threw the ferment in,
The solid Attoms did their Course begin:
The quickning Mass moves now in ev’ry part,
And does its Plastick Faculties exert.
The jarring Attomes move into a peace,
9 David Norbrook, Poetry and Politics in the English Renaissance (London: Routledge,
1984), ch. 5.
10 Thomas Shadwell, A Congratulatory Poem To the Most Illustrious Queen Mary Upon
Her Arrival in England (1689), in Works, v. 343. Further page references in the text are to
this edition.
11 Oliver Heywood, The Reverend Oliver Heywood BA 1630–1702. His Autobiography,
Diaries, Anecdote and Event Books, ed. J. H. Turner, 4 vols. (London: Brighouse, 1881–5), iii. 235.
And all Confusion and Disorders cease:

The ugly undigested Lump became
The perfect, glorious, and well order’d Frame.
Let there be Light, th’ Almighty Fiat run;
No sooner ’twas pronounc’d, but it was done. (pp. 339–40)
Drawing on Newtonian and Lucretian models of origin, Shadwell’s
account of the Revolution presents the event as comparable with Cre-
ation itself: the ‘undigested Lump’ of the English polity transformed
into the ‘well-order’d Frame’ of a modern Constitution. There could be
no continuity between past and present if before creation there was
only disorder and confusion. The implications of this complex under-
standing of the historical moment were to reverberate throughout the
Whig poetry of the following decades. In political terms, the Revolution
was seen as at once the perfection of a past policy and a decisive
intervention between past and present. As we shall see, its cultural
signiWcance was similar: post-Revolution literature was both a continu-
ation of past models and a rejection of the past in favour of a modern
originality.
Romance seduction
In the Whig panegyric published on the Revolution we Wnd some of

these apparent contradictions of perspective resolved through the use of
romance narratives. If recent history were told in the form of feudal
romance, William could be portrayed as a heroic knight arriving in an
hour of need. Romance conveyed the reassurance of old conventions,
yet it was also a form that could accommodate the unexpected. In
Jonathan Swift’s early ode on William’s Irish expedition the king’s
vanquishing of the French and Jacobite threat is described in terms of
a romance rescue:
He did the Airy Goddess Court,

He sought Her out in Fight,
And like a Bold Romantick Knight
Rescu’d Her from the Giant’s Fort.12
12 Jonathan Swift, ‘Ode to the King on His Irish Expedition’ (1691), in The Poems of
Jonathan Swift, ed. Harold Williams, 3 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon, 1958), i. 7.

Likewise the author of An Ode upon the Glorious and Successful

Expedition of his Highness (1689) praises William as ‘a truly loving
Enemy’
Who by relieving the opprest,
And helping the distrest,
Has realliz’d the old Knight Errantry.13
Romance oVered a narrative whose closure was at once astonishing and

conventional, a testament to both the surprising nature of recent events
and the legitimacy of their resolution. Paul Salzman has recently argued
that romance became a Royalist genre by the 1660s because it oVered a
form that could encompass the extraordinary and unimaginable turns
of events in recent public life.14 The seventeenth-century writer Sir
Percy Herbert aYrms this view: ‘since by no other way almost, could
the Multiplicity of strange Actions of the Times be exprest, that
exceeded all belief, and went beyond every example in the doing’.15
But, as the poems on the Revolution reveal, for many later writers
1688 represented a similarly extraordinary moment.16 The romance
topos enabled writers to express the sense of the marvellous but to
locate that within a normative model of romance, within which the
entry of the ‘Romantick Knight’ was both expected and desired. It
also, of course, allowed them to emphasize that William, like any
good knight, had acted not for his own political ambitions but on
behalf of the beleaguered victim, thus dispelling suspicions that the
Revolution was part of a wider strategy in the Dutch stadthouder’s
plan for Europe.
In celebrating recent history as a romance—the story of a gallant
soldier knight arriving at the eleventh hour to save a damsel in dis-
tress—poets eroticized the story of the Revolution. The accession
13 An Ode Upon the Glorious and Successful Expedition (London, 1689), 4.

14 Paul Salzman, ‘Royalist Epic and Romance’, N. H. Keeble (ed.), in The Cambridge
Companion to Writing of the English Revolution (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
2001), 215–30 (220–8).
15 Sir Percy Herbert, preface to The Princess Cloria (1661), sig. Aiv, quoted by Salzman
in ‘Royalist Epic and Romance’, 225.

16 On this sense of astonishment see Burnet’s sermon preached before the king in
December 1688. Burnet had described recent events as a Wction realized: ‘We have before us
a Work that seems to ourselves a Dream, and that will appear to Posterity a Fiction’
(Burnet, A Sermon Preached in the Chapel of St James’s, Before His Highness the Prince of
Orange, 23rd of December, 1688 (Edinburgh, 1689), 1).
could be read as the nation’s joyful subjection to her heroic rescuer, as in

the anonymous An Ode upon the Glorious and Successful Expedition
(1689):
Gain’d did I say? It was an Easie gain;
England was glad to lose herself to Him,
Who came her Laws and Just Rights to maintain
. . . . . . . .
Sure such a Conquest never was before,
That made the Conquered rejoice more than the Conqueror.17
Here William III’s accession is described in terms of a seduction in

which the nation is complicit in its overthrow. In trying to Wnd ways of
reconciling invasion with consent, poets conjured visions of a sexual
conquest, in which an essentially passive nation is overpowered by
heroic intervention.18
This notion of the invasion as a form of conquest, rather than as an
act of providential right, or the manifestation of the will of the people, is
found in many of the poems of the period, but rarely in the prose
defences. One of the interesting aspects of the poems on the Revolution
is that while they drew on many of the arguments found in contempor-
ary pamphlet debate, such as the notion of a right by providence, or
through popular election, they also articulated ideas that were rarely
aired in pamphlet debate. This suggests poetry could be used to gener-
ate arguments not found in prose writing. It has become a historio-
graphical orthodoxy that the pamphlet defences of the Revolution did
not portray William’s accession as a conquest, or an invasion, despite
the fact that the army he brought with him was four times the size of the
Spanish Armada, incorporating at least 21,000 men, 5,000 horses, and a
Xeet of 500 vessels.19 According to M. P. Thompson and others, con-
temporary writers would not argue for the accession by right of con-
quest because that meant that it could not be an act of succession by a
lawful claimant. Thompson asserts that the notion of conquest not only
undermined the conventional thesis of the Revolution, that of abdica-
tion, but it was essentially an appeal to the sword which implied that
17 An Ode Upon the Glorious and Successful Expedition, 3.

18 On the image of rape in Jacobite writing on the Revolution see Howard Erskine-Hill,
‘Literature and the Jacobite Cause’, in Eveline Cruickshanks (ed.), Ideology and Conspiracy:
Aspects of Jacobitism, 1689–1789 (London: J. Donald, 1982), 49–69.
19 Israel and Parker, ‘Of Providence and Protestant Winds’, 106.
God’s judgement was expressed in success.20 An appeal to the sword

would, theoretically, confer as good a right on Cromwell, or any future
usurper, as on William. A right derived from the outcome of war could
be seen as impermanent and subject to fortune, which would be un-
helpful for writers attempting to stress the solidity and stability of the
new regime and its foundation.21 Thompson’s assessment is supported
by Mark Goldie’s survey of the pamphlet responses to the Revolution,
which shows that only a few writers used the argument from conquest
alone to justify William’s accession.22 However, in the poems celebrating
William and Mary’s arrival the image of the ‘glorious conquest’ recurs
again and again. Many Whig writers, rejoicing in what they saw as their
release from the shackles of Stuart tyranny, must have been profoundly
uncomfortable with the notion of being conquered by a foreign power.
M. S., the author of a poem addressed ‘To His Highness’, acknowledges
the diYculty of reconciling the idiom of military conquest with the
accession of a king who had supposedly come to grant his subjects
liberty. Attempting to distinguish between William’s heroic conquests in
the Dutch republic and his successes in England, he observes that ‘the
Former Attempt was to Regain His own, and the Rights of the States; in
the Latter He was Invited as a Gen’rous Friend’.23 Yet, despite this
caution, the oxymoronic allure of the happy victim and the generous
conqueror was elsewhere to prove irresistible to poets seeking a heroic
idiom with which to celebrate England’s grateful deliverance. William
was the marvellous invader ‘who only Conquer’st to preserve’; who
leads a nation ‘Rap’t and Enamour’d of its vassallage’.24 While the
image of vanquished vassals and passive subjects is elsewhere associated
with the tyranny of Stuart rule, in these poems it becomes a form of
tribute to the heroic nature of recent history.
The Whig appropriation of conventions of romance and their images
of conquest did not go unchallenged by Tory writers. Reading Aphra
20 M. P. Thompson, ‘The Idea of Conquest in Controversies over the 1688 Revolution’,
Journal of the History of Ideas, 38 (1977), 33–46.

21 These pitfalls of conquest theory were already fairly familiar ground in constitutional
debate, as shown by J. G. A. Pocock’s work on the problematic status of the Norman

Conquest for writers earlier in the century (Pocock, The Ancient Constitution and the
Feudal Law: A Study of English Historical Thought in the Seventeenth Century (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1987), 150–1).
22 Goldie, ‘The Revolution of 1689 and the Structure of Political Argument’, 489.
23 M. S., To His Highness the Prince of Orange. A Poem (London, 1689), A1r.
24 John Herbert, ‘To the King’, in Musae Cantabrigienses (Cambridge, 1689), sig. b3v;
Henry Beeston, ‘The Queens Arrivall’, Vota Oxoniensia pro . . . Guilhelmo Rege et Maria
Regina (Oxford, 1689), sig. x1r.
Behn’s A Pindaric Poem to the Reverend Doctor Burnet (1689) in the

context of these panegyrics reveals the extent to which the tropes of
Whig verse could be recognized and appropriated in a political dialogue
about the legitimacy of William’s accession. Tory poetry of the 1690s was
deWned by its engagement with the emergent myths and images of the
Whig Revolution, as will be conWrmed by my discussion of John
Dryden’s work later in this chapter. Behn’s Pindaric Poem is ostensibly
a verse epistle responding to a request from Bishop Gilbert Burnet that
she write in celebration of the accession. In the poem Behn is refusing to
write, yet nonetheless paying a double-edged tribute to Burnet’s role in
the revolution. She rejects Burnet’s invitation politely on the grounds of
her pious loyalty to the Stuart king, but, as Virginia Crompton and
others have noted,25 the poem contains within it a veiled criticism of
Burnet’s role as propagandist:
Oh Strange eVect of a Seraphick Quill!
That can by unperceptable degrees
Change every Notion, every Principle
To any Form, its Great Dictator please.26
As we have seen, many of the Whig responses to the Revolution were

marked by their emphasis on the indescribable nature of what had
happened. The strange reversal of fortune was best encapsulated in a
romance paradox, in which the nation was the grateful victim of her
oppressor. Yet in To Burnet the emphasis is rather diVerent. Rather than
portraying recent history as defying adequate textualization, Behn pre-
sents the Revolution as a product of the pen alone: as events that have
been written into existence. Behn’s engagement with the propaganda
supporting William is a testament to the perceived signiWcance of
contemporary celebrations of the Revolution. As she tells it, the
poems and pamphlets relating to William’s arrival are the Trojan
horse in which the Whigs have acceded to power. She compares Eng-
land’s fate with that of the Greeks, since in both cases ‘’Twas Nobler
Stratagem that let the Conquerour in’ (l. 85). She suggests that it has all
25 For a good discussion of the poem’s strategies see Virginia Crompton, ‘ ‘‘For when
the act is done and Wnish’t cleane, what should the poet doe, but shift the scene?’’:
Propaganda, Professionalism, and Aphra Behn’, in Janet Todd (ed.), Aphra Behn Studies
(Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1996), 130–53.
26 Aphra Behn, A Pindaric Poem to the Reverend Doctor Burnet on the Honour he did me
of Enquiring after me and my Muse (1689), in The Works of Aphra Behn, ed. Janet Todd, 7
vols. (London: William Pickering, 1992–6), i. 309, ll. 70–3. Further line references in the
text are to this edition.
come about through a combination of rhetoric and strategy; thus

Burnet is praised for his wit and eloquence, his ‘Reasoning’ (l. 16), his
use of ‘Strategem’ (l. 85), that ultimately brings about ‘the great Design’
(l. 88). Drawing on the idiom of contemporary panegyric, Behn writes
of invasion and seduction, but in this case it is merely a rhetorical
usurpation:
With Pow’rful Reasoning drest in Wnest Sence,
A thousand ways my Soul you can Invade,
And spight of my Opinions weak Defence,
Against my Will, you Conquer and Perswade. (ll. 16–19)
As elsewhere in Behn’s prose Wction and poetry, the adoption of a

female passivity or weakness is more complex than it seems.27 Even as
she says that she ‘never durst, like Cowly, tune her Strings, | To sing of
Heroes and of Kings’ (ll. 37–8), Behn is addressing Burnet in Cowley’s
heroic Pindaric form, and with the Bishop’s full knowledge that she has
previously written reams of court poetry in celebration of the Stuart
kings. Moreover, in emphatically representing herself as the subject of
the successful conquest, Behn avoids the seduction that ought to be the
subject of the poem, William’s conquest of his subjects’ hearts, his
masterful invasion of a grateful nation. It is signiWcant that Behn’s
susceptibility is to eloquence, not to genuine force or authority: Gilbert
Burnet’s wondrous pen is said to carry a commanding force, ‘like that of
Writ Divine’ (l. 15), and ‘an Authority Divine’ (l. 39). In the context of
contemporary debates about the legitimacy of the new monarch’s claim
to power, it is notable here that Burnet’s ‘Writ Divine’ is a poor
substitute for the higher forms of authority that have been displaced.
The moral and political absolutes of the Church, liberty, and property
celebrated elsewhere in Revolution panegyric are absent from Behn’s
depiction of the Revolution. Instead, it is the exiled Stuart king that is
associated with piety and loyalty, concepts which are alleged to have no
place in Burnet’s new world.28
Although To Burnet masquerades as a muted tribute to the Revolu-
tion, it is notable that its hero is absent from the poem. Unlike the
27 Compare e.g. the signiWcance of the ‘powerlessness’ of the narrator in Behn’s
Oroonoko (see Jane Spencer, Aphra Behn’s Afterlife (Oxford: Oxford University Press,
2000), 229–32).
28 Behn echoes criticism of Burnet’s casuistry that is found elsewhere in contemporary
Jacobite satires. In Arthur Mainwaring’s Tarquin and Tullia (1689) it is said of the Bishop
that ‘To serve all times, he could distinctions coin, | And with great ease Xat contradictions
join’ (Mainwaring, Tarquin and Tullia (1689), in POAS v. 48).
countless panegyrics devoted to the heroism of the deliverer king, Wil-

liam III does not Wgure at all here. Behn refers to ‘a Man so Great, so
Learn’d, so Wise, | The Brave Atchievement Owns and nobly JustiWes’
(ll. 94–5), lines which might appropriately be used of the new monarch,
but it soon becomes clear that this man is Burnet, and that the ‘JustiWes’
here refers to his casuistical forms of persuasion rather than William’s
Wtness for the throne. Moreover, although Behn invokes arguments used
to justify William’s accession, it is not to praise the king. At the
beginning of the ode Behn refers to Caesar’s accession through popular
suVrage, but whereas in a Whig poem this might be an image of
William’s claims through popular election, here Behn uses the analogy
in relation to her own selection by Burnet. Similarly, she introduces the
Wgure of Moses, who sees the ‘Chosen Seed possess the Promis’d Land’
(l. 61). But again this is not an image of William as deliverer but instead
another representation of the poet. Behn’s appropriation of these rather
unlikely role models testiWes to her recognition of their rhetorical
agency in contemporary panegyric: the poem continually invites com-
parison with Whig panegyric, only to underline its author’s refusal to
participate in the genre.
Militarism
One of the reasons why it must have seemed appropriate to celebrate

William of Orange’s arrival in 1688 as a military invasion and conquest
was that contemporaries were well aware of William’s history of martial
prowess in defence of the Dutch Republic. They knew he had spent
most of the past twenty years on the battleWeld Wghting Louis XIV, and
they also recognized that he intended to pursue the Wght against France
once he was settled on the English throne.29 The king’s new aggressive
anti-French foreign policy was a radical departure from the policies of
the previous two Stuart monarchs, whose close relationship with France
had been the subject of much suspicion during the 1670s and 1680s.30
29 William had been appointed Captain General of the Dutch army at the unpreced-
ented age of twenty-two. He began his career with the campaign against the French
invasion of the Dutch republic of 1672, and spent most of the 1680s Wghting against
French dominance in Europe (Stephen Baxter, William III (London: Longman, 1966),
135–288).
30 John Brewer, The Sinews of Power: War, Money and the English State 1688–1783
(London: Unwin Hyman, 1989), 140.

William was seen by many as inheriting an earlier tradition of English

warrior kingship, a man who would revitalize England’s identity as a
martial nation: the newspaper Mercurius Reformatus announced that
‘Nothing but a William III can be able to rouze up the martial Genius of
England, which the soft reign of a Charles II had laid asleep’.31 Else-
where, the king’s prospective feats were compared with the victories of
the Hundred Years War:
Then our lov’d Edward ’s and Wft Henry’s Fame,
In France shall yield to Nassau’s conquering Fame,
Cressey and Agen-Court new dy’d in Blood,
Shall make his Title to the Lillies good.32
Tremble ye Walls of Conquest at the sound,
A Henry ’twas Wrst raz’d you to the Ground.
How will that Monarch’s Ghost be joy’d to see
The Ball young Henry lost, rebound to Thee!33
Edward III and Henry V here form a populist history of early English
warrior kingship, oVering historical perspectives on William’s militar-
ism within which the Dutch king almost appeared more English than
the Englishmen he replaced. Yet, for all the evocation of earlier conXicts,
the nation’s new commitment to a European alliance designed to
combat the power of France was to bring profound and controversial
internal change, and to transform the monarch into a military leader.
The Nine Years’ War, in which English forces, as part of William’s
European coalition, fought in Italy, the Dutch Republic, and the Medi-
terranean to weaken French potential for further expansion in Europe,
inaugurated the longest period of Britain’s engagement in warfare since
the Middle Ages. In doing so, it not only changed William’s identity but,
as John Brewer observes, it transformed the whole nation:
Britain emerged in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries as the
military Wunderkind of the age [ . . . ] Under the early Stuarts Britain had cut a
puny military Wgure; by the reign of George III Britain had become one of the
heaviest weights in the balance of power in Europe.34
31 Mercurius Reformatus, or The New Observator, 9 July 1690.

32 An Essay in Verse On the Fourth Day of November, Signaliz’d by the Birth of William
Henry, Late Prince of Orange (London, 1690), 4.
33 A Congratulary Poem on the Most Illustrious William Henry, Prince of Orange
(London, 1689), 2.
34 Brewer, Sinews of Power, p. xiii.
During the 1690s the conduct, the policies, and the funding of warfare
were changed radically: abandoning the trading interests which had
characterized Stuart policy, William acquired a standing army and
reworked the systems of national administration around the ever
more pressing weight of military commitments. This involved a huge
increase in taxation and a new system of public-deWcit Wnance.35 The
king remained at the centre of these developments: he assumed and
maintained complete administrative and strategic control over military
activity throughout his reign, and even insisted on leading his troops
into battle throughout the campaigns of the 1690s. Michael Roberts’s
account of military development in the seventeenth century has shown
that such a warrior king was a particular product of the late seventeenth
century, a period in which the new scale of the waging of war made it
necessary that the monarch ‘take over the business of supplying mater-
ial and supervising war industries’, and, as a result, ‘the ruler was
increasingly identiWed with the commander-in-chief ’.36
The king’s military might became the central theme of Whig pan-
egyric, and the main target of those writing in opposition. And because
of the nation’s enlarged role in the European arena, the celebration of
William’s military prowess was not just intended for domestic con-
sumption. Over the course of the decade the battle for Europe was
extended by both William and Louis to literary propaganda, as English
and French poets competed in their claims for their leader’s heroism.37
Williamite poets, from Elizabeth Rowe to Matthew Prior, shared a
commitment to the celebration of the king as warrior hero, and a
consensus that his feats oVered the only subject for contemporary
poetry.
However, the representation of the king as a warrior hero was com-
plex. While William’s apparently limitless power in the European con-
Xict was a source of national pride and wonder, it had also to be
35 The standard account of the Wnancial innovations of the reign is P. G. M. Dickinson,
The Financial Revolution in England: A Study of the Development of Public Credit, 1688–1756
(London: Macmillan, 1967). Interesting accounts of the impact of these developments on
contemporary literature can be found in Colin Nicholson, Writing and the Rise of Finance:
Capital Satires of the Eighteenth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994);
Catherine Ingrassia, Authorship, Commerce, and Gender in Early Eighteenth-Century Eng-
land: A Culture of Paper Credit (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998).
36 Michael Roberts, quoted by Manuel Schonhorn in Defoe’s Politics: Parliament, Power
and Kingship (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 54.

37 Arthur S. Williams, ‘Panegyric Decorum in the Reigns of William and Anne’, Journal
of British Studies, 21 (1981), 56–67.

reconciled with an emphasis on the circumscription of his authority in

domestic aVairs. The author of ˇ ´`¸˚ˇ . . . An Her-
oick Poem Humbly OVer’d to His most Sacred Majesty (1696) suggests the
tension between the two aspects of the king’s governance: ‘Bounded are
monarchs in their Soveraign Rule; | Yet Nassaw seems wide Europe to
Controul’.38 Thus Richard Steele’s portrait of the king in The Christian
Hero emphasizes the self-denying nature of William’s heroism, which is
dedicated to preserving liberty rather than aggrandizing monarchical
authority. Comparing the French and English kings, the ‘two great
Rivals’ of the age, Steele declares that:
Both [are] animated with a restless Desire of Glory, but pursue it by diVerent
Means, and with diVerent Motives: To one it consists in an extensive undis-
puted Empire over his Subjects, to the other in their rational and voluntary
Obedience: One’s Happiness is founded in their want of Power, the others in
their want of Desire to oppose him: [ . . . ] one is made to Oppress, the other
to relieve the Oppressed: The one is satisWed with the Pomp and Ostentation
of Power to prefer and debase his Inferiors, the other delighted only with the
Cause and Foundation of it, to cherish and protect ’em.39
The complex intermixture of power and liberty represented by the
panegyrics was also evident in negative images of the king. French
writers attacked William III as a great usurper and tyrant, and as a
republican devil, ‘le nouveau Cromwell’, whose defence of liberty would
ultimately destroy all monarchies, while Tory opponents of the war saw
his conquests of the French as a reXection of his vanquishing of English
liberties.40
A further complication in the presentation of William as a military
king was the religious dimension of the conXict, which was widely
represented as a battle for the defence of Protestantism in Europe.
From the Revolution onwards Whig writers drew on the extensive
body of anti-papist rhetoric that had developed over the previous
century. Four separate collections of the popular miscellany A Collection
of the Newest and most Ingenious Poems against Popery and Tyranny were
38 ˇ ´`¸˚ˇ . . . An Heroick Poem Humbly OVer’d to His Majesty
(London 1696), 8.
39 Richard Steele, The Christian Hero (London, 1701), ed. Rae Blanchard (Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 1932), 83.

40 For more detail on criticism of the king see Israel, gen. introd. to The Anglo-Dutch
Moment, 42–3. For contemporary satire on William’s absolutist tendencies see Advice to a
Painter (1697), in POAS, vol. vi.
published in 1689 alone, containing many recycled anti-papist satires

from the Exclusion Crisis.41 Poems such as ‘A Dialogue between father
Petres and the devil’ and ‘Popery Pickled, or the Jesuits Shoes made of
Running Leather’ reworked old anticatholic and anti-Jesuit material in
the light of the Revolution. And in panegyrics William was the defender
of the Protestant Church, driving out the whore of Rome: a poem,
addressed to the ‘Protector of the Protestant Religion Throughout the
World’ proclaims him
Not of Baal ’s Legions, but Protestancie.
Accelerate your Gideonick Force;
Steer to the Kingdom void of all Remorse:
Secure under Heav’ns Banner You shall Fight.42
However, while the Prince’s new subjects were initially keen to cham-
pion the war of true religion, William’s foreign policy was dependent on
close ties with Catholic Austria and Spain. Thomas Shadwell pro-
claimed in his congratulatory poem to Mary that the king’s sword
‘shall keep the Papal World in awe’ (p. 343), but the new alliance in
fact had the backing of the Pope, and served the papacy’s strategic
interests in Europe. The alliance was primarily devoted to curbing the
power of France, rather than banishing popery from Protestant Europe.
So, not surprisingly, the oYcial Williamite iconography avoided
the anticatholic rhetoric that marked so many other contemporary
publications. Catholic allegiances presented no obstacle for the im-
aginative J. D., author of A Poem upon His Highness the Prince of
Orange’s Expedition into England (1689), who reads William’s relations
with Spain as the preliminary step to a successful Spanish counter-
reformation:
Empires true ends by him are understood,
Not the Wild Lust and Pleasure of the Prince;
But pure Religion and the Peoples good.
Spain his Old Enemy does now confess,
To him she ill-deserved safety ows;
41 On anticatholicism in the period see Raymond D. Tumbleson, Catholicism in the
English Protestant Imagination: Nationalism, Religion, and Literature, 1660–1745 (Cam-

bridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998); Alison Shell, Catholicism, Controversy, and
the English Literary Imagination (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999).
42 To the Most Illustrious and Serene Prince . . . Protector of the Protestant Religion
Throughout the World (London, 1688), 1.

Sings unfeign’d Praises for his Arms Success,

And Zealous for the Reformation grows.43
However, William’s confederacy with his Catholic allies clearly compli-
cated his image as Europe’s Protestant crusader, and poets were more
likely to sidestep the concept of a holy war.44 It was hard to sustain the
rhetoric of pan-Protestant empire when the Pope was a prominent
supporter of the campaign. One other way in which contemporary
writers forged a political unity between the diverse national groups
making up the coalition was by linking France and French absolutism
to oriental despotism. Louis XIV’s alliance with the Ottoman court gave
poets ample opportunity to play out the battle for Europe as one
between vigorous European liberty and tyrannical eastern despotism.45
The polemical use of the eastern other to emphasize William’s benign
rule is evident from 1689:
Graecian and Roman Grandeur in Him meet,
He scorns Barbarian Asiatick State:
Chuses to be so, rather than look Great,
Virtue within, than Princes at His Gate.46
Here classical models of enlightened leadership are contrasted with the
primitive despotism associated with oriental monarchies. This oppos-
ition is found elsewhere in comparisons of William and Louis XIV: in
The Christian Hero Steele observes that ‘The one enjoys the Summet of
Fortune with the Luxury of a Persian, the other with the Moderation of
a Spartan’.47 And in Shadwell’s Ode to the King on His Return from
Ireland (1690) the French king is tainted with the worst of eastern
eVeminacy: he is marked by ‘the most Barbarous, and Abject ways; |
Such as the Turk, or Tartar scorns to use’ and ‘in his mean, and Savage
Joys must Wnd | More of a Woman, than a Hero’s Mind’.48 In Nicholas
Rowe’s Tamerlane William III is identiWed with the martial prowess of
the eponymous hero, while his French counterpart is assigned all the
43 J. D., A Poem upon His Highness the Prince of Orange’s Expedition into England
(London, 1689), 3–4.

44 Steven Pincus has recently argued that ‘few in England thought wars of religion
legitimate; and they were consequently reluctant to interpret 1688 as part of an evangelical
drive to promote a true faith’ (Pincus, ‘To Protect English Liberties’ 93).
45 On French relations with Suleiman II see Israel, gen. introd. to The Anglo-Dutch
Moment, 36–7.
46 J. D., A Poem Upon His Highness the Prince of Orange’s Expedition, 2.
47 Steele, The Christian Hero, 83.
48 Thomas Shadwell, Ode to the King On His Return from Ireland, in Works, v. 361.
tyrannous megalomania associated with the Ottoman Sultan Bayazit,

who is
Fond of false Glory, of the Salvage Pow’r
Of ruling without Reason, of confounding
Just, and Unjust, by an Unbounded Will49
As Ros Ballaster’s study of oriental scandal Wctions demonstrates, the

analogy with the Ottoman dynasty had long proved fruitful for English
writers seeking to attack their political opponents.50 In the prose Wction
of the 1670s and 1680s the covert pursuit of absolutism, eVeminacy and
decadence in a court, the decline of empire through luxury, were trends
that could be located in Turkish contexts to suggest the weakness of
Charles II’s reign, and his subservience to his scheming mistresses. After
the Revolution both the exiled James II and Louis XIV were represented
as oriental despots in the roman-à-clef. Peter Bellon’s The Court Secret of
1689 oVered a parallel between Persian–Turkish relations in the sixteenth
century and French–English relations in the seventeenth, presenting
Roman Catholicism as the minority Shiite sect in Sunni Turkey (Protest-
ant England), and the established Islamic sect in Persia (France). Louis
XIV Wgures in the person of the great Safavid Persian emperor Abbas the
Great (1588–1629) who expelled the Ottomans and Usbeks from Persia
and presided over an eZorescence in art and culture. The two parts
conclude with a promise of a third part (which does not appear to have
been produced) ‘under the Title of, The prodigious Birth and Life,
Tyrannical Government, and miserable Fall of the Christian Turk,
Lewis the Fourteenth’. As these examples demonstrate, the eastern
‘other’ oVered a way of creating profound ideological and political
diVerences between two monarchs who were in many ways very similar.
Christianity, masculinity, and classical republicanism were oVset against
the luxury, eVeminacy, and despotism of the East.51
Williamite heroism and Montagu’s Epistle to Dorset
For all these tensions in the depiction of the Williamite campaign, the
king and his military feats were to dominate Whig poetry throughout
49 Nicholas Rowe, Tamerlane. A Tragedy (1702), 2nd edn. (London, 1703), 3.
50 Ros Ballaster, Fabulous Orients: Fictions of the East in England 1660–1785 (Oxford:
Oxford University Press, forthcoming).
51 On Protestant views of Islam in the period see Ahmad Gunny, Images of Islam in
Eighteenth-Century Writings (London: Grey Seal, 1996), 65–83.

the decade. The most celebrated panegyric of the 1690s was undoubt-
edly Charles Montagu’s An Epistle to the Right Honourable Charles, Earl
of Dorset and Middlesex (1690), the poem which, as we have seen,
constituted the summit of native literary achievement in Joseph Addi-
son’s An Account of the Greatest English Poets of 1694. The Epistle is a
poem about the prospect of providing the appropriate response to the
poetic imperative created by William’s reign, and as such it tells us
much about the literary dimensions of Williamite militarism. Montagu
begins his poem with the assertion that the king’s military prowess
dictates a new direction in English poetry:
Poets assume another Tone and Voice,
When Victory’s their Theam, and Arms their Choice;
To follow Heroes, in the Chace of Fame,
Asks Force, and Heat, and Fancy, wing’d with Flame.
What Words can paint the Royal Warrior’s Face?
What Colours can the Figure boldly raise?52
This emphasis is matched in other Whig verse of the period. In a poem

of 1695 Addison calls for
A Muse that in advent’rous numbers sings
The rout of Armies, and the fall of Kings,
Britain Advanc’d and, Europe’s Peace Restor’d,
By s o m e r s ’ Counsels and by Na s s a u ’s Sword.53
Montagu and Addison share a conviction that the king’s actions

demand elevated poetic forms: epic, heroic verse is the only mode
suitable to celebrate recent events. They also suggest that William’s
military victories constitute the main subject for modern poetry. Whilst
the revival of the muses under a new king might be a commonplace of
seventeenth-century panegyric, we Wnd in both Montagu’s poem and
the responses to it an insistence on poetry’s function speciWcally as a
document of the aVairs of state that is particular to the Whig verse
emerging in the 1690s and 1700s. David Womersley has argued that this
Whiggish belief that ‘political and military events create the substantive
content of the poetical agenda [ . . . ] is importantly diVerent from the
52 Charles Montagu, Earl of Halifax, An Epistle to the Right Honourable Charles, Earl of
Dorset and Middlesex (London, 1690), 4. Further page references in the text are to this
edition.
53 Joseph Addison, A Poem to His Majesty (1695), in The Miscellaneous Works of Joseph
Addison, ed. A. C. Guthkelch, 3 vols. (London: Bell, 1914), i. 39.

parallel Tory contention that aVairs of state create the conditions within
which literature either Xourishes or declines’.54 It is certainly clear that
for the many opposition writers of the 1680s who had lamented the
insubstantiality of contemporary poetry the reign of William III seemed
to oVer new hope for English verse. The Revolution and its aftermath
provided many would-be public poets with the truly important subject
matter that they perceived to be the proper realm of poetry. At last
Whig writers had great events in public life to celebrate in the heroic
idiom they aspired to command.
Over the course of the 1690s Montagu’s Epistle became a classic, and
references to it operated as a form of shorthand for precisely the sort of
heroic public poetry that Montagu had identiWed as appropriate to that
warfaring decade.55 By the time of the War of the Spanish Succession
(1702–13) the Epistle had acquired a canonical status, as the paradigm of
Whig heroic poetry. Leonard Welsted’s poem on the Battle of Ouden-
arde begins:
O for that Heavnly Voice, that pierc’d so high,
As bore e l i z a to her Native Sky!
Or that no less renowned Bard’s, whose tongue
With Accents all divine, with Musick hung,
Immortal b o y n e , and n a s s a u ’s Glory sung!
O that my feeble Eccho I could raise,
To the high Pitch of their Eternal Lays!56
Charles Montagu’s fêted celebration of William’s victory at the Boyne,
like many other poems of the period, attempted to convey the mythic
scale of ‘Nassau’s godlike acts’ by comparing his actions with the feats of
classical heroes, or early warrior monarchs. In the Epistle William is
Edward III, Jove, and Mars, and in other poems he is Hercules, Achilles,
or a heaven-sent avenger.57 One of the ironies of Whig panegyric of this
54 David Womersley, introd. to Augustan Critical Writing (Harmondsworth: Penguin,
1997), p. xix.
55 See Samuel Wesley, Epistle to a Friend Concerning Poetry (London, 1700); Joseph
Addison, ‘An Account of the Greatest English Poets’ (1694), in The Miscellaneous Works of
Joseph Addison, ed. A. C. Guthkelch, 3 vols. (London: Bell & Sons, 1914). Arthur Williams
asserts that: ‘The Epistle to Dorset became something of an ars poetica of Whig poetry in the
1690s and beyond’ (‘Panegyric Decorum in the Reigns of William III and Anne’, 56–67 (59) ).
56 Leonard Welsted, A Poem, Occasion’d by the Late Famous Victory of Audenarde
(London, 1709), 1.
57 See Stephen Baxter, ‘William as Hercules: The Implications of Court Culture’, in Lois
Schwoerer (ed.), The Revolution of 1689: Changing Perspectives (Cambridge: Cambridge

period is that the king’s modern bureaucratic warmongering was

imaged through these nostalgic representations of military heroism.
Part of the reason for this choice of typology was that there were no
very recent models of English heroic militarism. In The Birth of the
Muse (1698) William Congreve announces of William: ‘Thou’ from
oblivion shalt the Heroe save; | Shalt raise, revive, and Eternize the
Brave’.58 Whig poets writing after the Revolution had to reinvent a
heroic idiom for the wars of the 1690s, because the models of kingly
virtue inherited from the later Stuarts were no longer appropriate to a
warfaring nation. Images of an aggressive William in battle are in stark
contrast to those of the ‘mild’ hero king, the types of Aeneas or David,
that are found in the panegyrics addressed to the later Stuarts. A
comparison of Montagu’s Epistle to Dorset with his poem ‘On the
Death of His Most Sacred Majesty King Charles II’ of 1685 reveals the
distinction.59 Montagu’s elegy on Charles is, like many other contem-
porary depictions of the king, a product of the Restoration settlement.
When Charles returned in 1660 he was anxious not to alienate those
who had participated in or cooperated with the governments of the
interregnum. The Declaration of Breda had oVered a broad amnesty,
and panegyrists had celebrated Charles’s political toleration, assigning
him the qualities of gentleness, humility, and the ability to forgive. So
the terms ‘meek’ and ‘mild’ feature insistently throughout Montagu’s
poem, as Charles becomes the model of Christian forbearance that had
proved most enabling to the political circumstances of the Restoration:
‘The Woman’s Sweetness, temper’d Manly Wit, | And Loving Power, did
crown’d with Meekness sit’.60 But by 1690 circumstances had changed,
and Montagu was celebrating a diVerent kind of king, as William’s
protracted battle against Louis XIV was translated as the defence of
liberty in Europe:
Born to subdue insulting Tyrants Rage,
The Ornament, and Terrour, of the Age
. . . . . .
Him, their Deliv’rer Europe does confess. (pp. 2–3)
58 William Congreve, The Birth of the Muse (London, 1698), 9.

59 On the depiction of Charles II as a generous and mild hero in Dryden’s drama and
poetry see George McFadden, Dryden the Public Writer, 1660–1685 (Princeton, NJ: Prince-
ton University Press, 1978), 238–53, 290–3.
60 Charles Montagu, ‘On the Death of His Most Sacred Majesty’ (1685), in The Works
and Life of the Right Honourable Charles, Late Earl of Halifax (London, 1715), 2.
In 1685 Montagu had praised Charles for his non-aggressive foreign

policy, suggesting that true glory lay beyond the battleWeld: ‘More Noble
than the Spoils that Battels yield, | Or all the empty Triumphs of the
Field. | ’Tis less to conquer, than to make Wars cease’.61 By 1690
the nature of glory had also changed, and it is the military hero that
is the focus of Montagu’s praise, as he declares his aim ‘To follow
Heroes, in the Chace of Fame’ (p. 4) and describes a warrior king
resplendent in the blood and din of battle:
What Colours can the Figure boldly raise?
When, cover’d o’er with comely Dust and Smoke,
He pierc’d the Foe, and thickest Squadrons broke?
His bleeding Arm, still painful with the Sore,
Which, in his Peoples Cause, the Pious Father bore:
Whom, cleaving through the Troops a Glorious Way,
Not the united Force of France, and Hell, cou’d stay. (p. 4)
Montagu’s depiction of William as warrior, cleaving his bloody way
through the thickest squadrons, constructs a heroic model in which
physical bravery and martial strength are paramount. This type of
kingship is seen in other poems of the period: an anonymous female
poet writing on the death of Queen Mary in 1695 praises William’s virile
manliness over the eVete concerns of other monarchs:
The din of Generous War
Prefer’d by him
To the soft Musick of a shaken String,
And all th’ EVeminate little tender things
Beneath a Mind so Great, Wtting the Luxury of softer Kings.62
The characteristics of a monarch are here explicitly gendered: it is manly
to Wght, eVeminate to display cultural interests. Where Montagu had
once praised Charles for his ‘Woman’s Sweetness’, the verse on William
displays little of this interest in ‘feminine’ virtues.
Such an emphasis on the speciWcally masculine qualities of William-
ite heroism is also reXected in contemporary ideas about the type of
poetry that should celebrate the warrior king.63 Montagu’s Epistle was
61 Montagu, ‘On the Death of His Most Sacred Majesty’, in Works, 7.

62 An Ode Occasion’d by the Death of Her Sacred Majesty (London, 1695), 4.
63 Whig writers were, of course, not alone in their gendering of literary style: the
opposition between the manly and the eVeminate was echoed in the criticism of many
frequently praised for ‘The Heat and Beauty’ of its author’s ‘manly
thought’, and later poets such as Addison, Blackmore, and Dennis all
claimed to be aspiring to a manly idiom.64 At one level the masculine
vigour of elevated Whig poetry could be seen as a corrective to the
feminization and foppery that was perceived by many earlier Whig
writers to lie at the heart of the moral decline of the Restoration
court. But true manliness was not only the ability to draw a hero in
epic mode, but also an unsqueamish ability to celebrate the practical
detail of active heroism. Addison praised in particular Montagu’s ability
to portray ‘Boin’s dy’d waves run purple to the sea’, an observation that
reappears in several later responses to the Epistle, and in his own poem
on the Battle of Namur Addison dictated that
when the forming Muse wou’d copy forth
A perfect Pattern of Heroick worth,
She sets a Man Triumphant in the Weld,
O’er Giants cloven down, and Monsters kill’d,
Reeking in blood, and smeer’d with dust and sweat.65
As this quotation reveals, Williamite panegyric frequently combined
overtly Wctional generic models—here the giants and monsters of ro-
mance—with an enthusiasm for an almost graphic realism in the
description of the physical detail of bloodshed. It was a combination
that was to recur throughout the military poetry of the following
decade, as the next chapter will illustrate.
Montagu, Dorset, and the politics of conversation
Montagu’s Epistle is a panegyric on William III’s victory in Ireland, but

it is also, as we have seen, a tribute to Montagu’s patron, the Earl of
Dorset. The poem foregrounds the relationship between the two men,
and their mutual commitment to the new monarch. In doing so it
reveals some of the social, political, and economic ties underwriting
post-Revolution verse that I shall explore more fully in chapter 6. Both
Montagu and Dorset were ‘literary’ members of the Whig Junto; that is,
contemporary writers (see Laura L. Runge, Gender and Language in British Literary
Criticism 1660–1790 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997) ).
64 George Stepney, An Epistle to Charles Montague, Esq.; on His Majesty’s Voyage to
Holland (London, 1691), 1.

65 Joseph Addison, To the King (1695), in Miscellaneous Works, i. 43.
the court Whigs at the centre of William’s Whig government and later
the powerful Kit-Cat Club. As such they embodied a symbiotic rela-
tionship between the spheres of poetry and public life that was very
often celebrated by Whig writers. They represented the new Whig
potentates, the breed of statesmen-poets that formed the centre of the
patronage system developing under William III. Yet in the Epistle
Montagu plays down the public dimension of his relationship with
Dorset, framing his poem as an informal letter between friends, and
writing of the way in which his Muse
Idly aVects, in this Familiar Way,
In easie Numbers loosely to convey,
What Mutual Friendship wou’d at Distance say. (p. 4)
This informal quality of the Epistle was also praised by its readers.
Addison writes of Montagu: ‘negligently graceful he unreins | His
verse, and writes in loose familiar strains’, and George Sewell’s posthu-
mous tribute to Montagu praises his ‘Excessive Spirit, Fluency, and
Ease’.66 Montagu’s poetics are clearly linked to his social graces, and
we might read the Epistle as a poetic embodiment of the eloquent
conversation privileged elsewhere in Whig culture of this period, espe-
cially in the essay form.67 Montagu’s soaring lines on the majesty of the
battle are punctuated by a reminder that this remains an epistolary
exchange between two men:
Stop! stop! brave Prince!—What does your Muse, Sir, faint?
Proceed, Pursue his Conquests—Faith, I can’t:
My Spirits sink, and will no longer bear;
Rapture and Fury carry’d me thus far
Transported and Amaz’d.
That Rage once spent, I can no more sustain
Your Flights, your Energies, and Tragic Strain,
But fall back to my Nat’ral Pace again;
In humble Verse provoking you to Rhime,
I wish there were more Dorsets at this Time. (p. 8)
66 George Sewell, ‘An Epistle to Joseph Addison Esq; Occasion’d by the Death of the
Right Honourable Charles, late Earl of Halifax’ (1715), in The Posthumous Works of Dr
George Sewell (London, 1728), 38.
67 As numerous critics have observed, the Tatler and the Spectator engaged in a dialogue
with their readers, using their letters and contributions to construct an ongoing debate
over cultural mores. On the visual representation of such ‘performed informality’ and
sociable intimacy see David H. Solkin, Painting for Money: The Visual Arts and the Public
Sphere in Eighteenth-Century England (New Haven, Conn., and London: Yale University
Press, 1993), 36–46.
The insertion of this short dialogue in the Epistle reminds us of

the friendship between Dorset and Montagu, and, beyond that, of the
networks of patronage that link them to one another, and to the king
who is celebrated in the poem.
There are many Whig panegyrics of this period that take the form of a
verse letter from one Whig writer to another, and while the poetic
epistle is a popular convention in this period, Whig panegyric epistles
are distinct in that they very clearly link the friendship between author
and addressee to particular political events: they presume and express
shared political values.68 There was a particular rash of such epistles
published at the accession of George I: 1714 saw the publication of
Ambrose Philips’s An Epistle to . . . Charles Lord Halifax, Leonard Wel-
sted’s An Epistle to Mr Steele, on the King’s accession to the Crown, and
Laurence Eusden’s A Letter to Mr Addison on the King’s Accession to the
Throne.69 All these poems were intended to remind the newly favoured
Addison and Steele of their authors’ loyalty and eagerness to support
the new regime. But by presenting their panegyrics in the form of letters
between friends, Whig epistles gave an idealized poetic form to the
sociable network of inXuence that underwrote Whig literary culture,
and implied a set of shared responses to contemporary aVairs of state.
The soldier king and the opposition
Montagu’s Epistle represented to many the high-water mark of Whig

panegyric in the 1690s; a poem whose elevated depiction of a valiant
warrior king in conXict provided a prototype for hundreds of later
imitators. The inXuence of such images of the soldier king is not only
evident in the Whig poetry of the 1690s: the regime’s critics also focused
on the king’s military prowess, but as the source of their criticism.70
Throughout his late poetry John Dryden reverses the premises of
Williamite panegyric, suggesting that military activity represents a
step backwards for civilization, and for literary culture in particular.
68 On the verse epistle in this period see William C. Dowling, The Epistolary Moment:
The Poetics of the Eighteenth-Century Verse Epistle (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University
Press, 1991).
69 See also George Stepney, An Epistle to Charles Montagu; Ambrose Philips, An Epistle
to the Honourable James Craggs Esq (London, 1717).

70 For a good comparison of Williamite and Jacobite presentations of the king see Craig
Rose, England in the 1690s: Revolution, Religion, and War (Oxford: Blackwell, 1999), 18–62.
While Montagu celebrated the epic dimensions of the king’s exploits, in

‘To Kneller’ (1694) Dryden writes of the decline of the classical world,
when Goths and Vandals
a rude Northern Race,
Did all the matchless Monuments deface.
Then all the Muses in one ruine lye;
And Rhyme began t’ enervate Poetry.
Thus in a stupid Military State,
The Pen and Pencil Wnd an equal Fate. (ll. 47–52)71
Militarism is here associated with the decline of classical culture, rather

than with the heroic battles of Homeric or Vergilian epic, and Dryden’s
reference to the invasion of ‘a rude Northern race’ also suggests a
parallel with the recent arrival of the Dutch king, whom he sees as
bringing a new era of northern barbarism to the republic of letters.
Further on in the poem Dryden returns to the question of the relation-
ship between the age and the art it produces, comparing Kneller’s
inability to complete a large historical painting with his own failure to
write an epic, insisting that there is no place for the celebration of heroic
activity in contemporary society:72
That yet thou hast not reach’d their high Degree
Seems only wanting to this Age, not thee:
Thy Genius bounded by the Times like mine,
Drudges on petty Draughts, nor dare design
A more Exalted Work, and more Divine. (ll. 145–9)
This argument oVers a direct refutation of contemporary Whig claims

that the Williamite victories would produce great works of art. Mon-
tagu’s Epistle to Dorset, for example, had drawn on the ‘advice to a
painter’ tradition in an attempt to express the scale of the victory, and
had proclaimed that ‘Boyne wou’d, for Ages, be the Painter’s Theme’. Yet
in ‘To Kneller’ Dryden suggests that the very achievements which
Montagu and others associated with the king’s triumphs—exalted and
71 John Dryden, ‘To Sir Godfrey Kneller’ (1694), in Works, iv. 462–3.
72 This view of Kneller as purely a portrait painter has been challenged by J. Douglas
Stewart in ‘Sir Godfrey Kneller as Painter of ‘‘Histories’’ and Portraits Histoirés’, in David
Howarth (ed.), Art and Patronage in the Caroline Courts: Essays in Honour of Sir Oliver
Millar (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 243–63. Kneller was to go on to
design and paint a complex historical-allegorical painting of William III at Hampton
Court (see J. Douglas Stewart, ‘William III and Sir Godfrey Kneller’, Journal of the Warburg
and Courtauld Institutes, 33 (1970), 330–6).
divine works of painting and poetry—could not be achieved in these

iron times.
In other poems the former Laureate responds to the premises of
Williamite writing at the level of typology. His series of images of
Alexander and Hannibal is in dialogue with the contemporary iden-
tiWcation of William with the great warrior leaders of western history.73
In Alexander’s Feast (1697) Dryden presents the mighty general as a
‘vanquished Victor’ (l. 115), a puppet controlled by the musician Ti-
motheus.74 In ‘To My Honour’d Kinsman’ the Wgure of Hannibal comes
to signify not the embodiment of military success but the dangers of an
overreaching ambition:
Ev’n Victors are by Victories undone;
Thus Hannibal, with Foreign Laurels won,
To Carthage was recall’d, too late to keep his own. (ll. 164–6)75
Here Hannibal is through his absence and preoccupation with military

glory a greater threat to his country’s stability than the enemy he is
Wghting. This, along with Dryden’s other criticisms of the militarism of
William’s reign, is more than an individual response to Williamite
propaganda: the emphasis on peace, detachment, and moderation
within ‘To My Honour’d Kinsman’ locates it Wrmly within the terms
of the ‘country’ ideology that was appropriated during the 1690s as a
mode of political opposition to William’s government and its policies.76
This loose grouping included Whigs who were concerned about the
escalating costs of what appeared to be an unwinnable war, and about
the presence of the large army required by the heavy commitment on
the Continent. It assumed the same ‘country’ rhetoric that the Whig
opposition had adopted a decade before. The country opposition, keen
to defend the interests of landowners, were critical of the expense of the
war because they felt that they were funding most of its costs by paying
huge amounts of land tax. Convinced that the navy was less expensive
73 William is compared with both Alexander and Hannibal by John Hopkins in The
Triumphs of Peace (London, 1698), and again with Alexander by John Glanvill in ‘Direc-
tions for Lamenting the Death, and Celebrating the Memory of His late Sacred Majesty
King William’, in Glanvill, Poems, Consisting of Originals and Translations (London, 1725).
74 Dryden, Alexander’s Feast (1697), in Works, vii. 6.
75 Dryden, ‘To My Honour’d Kinsman, John Driden’ (1700), in Works, vii. 201.
76 For a fuller account of country ideology in the 1690s see Henry Horwitz, Parliament,
Policy and Politics in the Reign of William III (Manchester: Manchester University Press,
1977).
than the army, they wanted to use the navy to defend trading interests in
Europe, as had been done under Charles II, the Commonwealth, and
the Protectorate. The court Whigs favoured William’s policies, and
wanted to use attacks by a standing army on fortiWed land frontiers to
fulWl strategic objectives in a large Continental war to defend Europe
from French hegemony. So country interests developed into opposition
to the cost of the war on land, and to the constitutional threat posed by
a permanent standing army, while the court Whigs became identiWed as
‘the war party’ or ‘the patriotic party’ and defended both the standing
army and William’s military commitment to his European coalition.77
As we shall see, these divisions over the king’s conduct of his war, and its
implications for domestic policy, were to come to a head during the
standing-army debates of 1697–1700.
The queen of reformation
Both Whig and Tory poetry of the 1690s was dominated by the wide-
spread identiWcation of monarch with soldier. William’s authority was
celebrated in poems that presented rituals of conquest and bloodshed as
the essence of manly heroism. Where, then, did this leave Queen Mary,
with whom he shared the throne? Many writers seeking a model for this
Protestant English queen naturally compared Mary with Elizabeth I. In
Shadwell’s Ode on the Anniversary of the Queen’s Birth (1689) the
Laureate declares of Mary: ‘By beauteous softness mixt with Majesty, |
An Empire over every Heart she gains’, and thus ‘No more shall we the
great Eliza boast, | For her Great Name in Greater Mary’s will be lost’.78
However, there were clearly some diYculties with the analogy with
Gloriana, most notably in that Elizabeth I had ruled at all times.
Mary’s sovereignty, on the other hand, was shared with her warrior
husband. When William returned from his campaigns for the winter the
queen handed over the reins of power. These tensions are evident in the
elegies produced on Mary’s sudden death in December 1694, an event
which produced an outpouring of poetic tributes. Poets sought ways
of negotiating the realities of Mary’s dual roles as dutiful wife and
77 As Kenyon observes, the fortunes of the Whig party slipped noticeably during times
of peace or impending peace, such as in 1696–1702 and after 1710 (Revolution Principles, 3).
78 Thomas Shadwell, Ode on the Anniversary of the Queen’s Birth, in Works, v. 346.
omnicompetent monarch.79 George Stepney Wnds a classical precedent

for the queen’s conduct:
So Pallas from the dusty Field withdrew
And when Imperial Jove appear’d in view,
Resum’d Her Female Arts the Spindle and the Clew.80
It is clear from the analogy with Pallas that the practicalities of the king’s
extended military activity meant that Mary II needed to be presented
both as Wgure of power and as a domestic paragon. One way in which
these two roles were seen to be combined was through the queen’s
participation in the reformation-of-manners movement.81 Mary’s role
as the queen of reformation allowed her panegyrists to depict both
public and private virtues: her moral piety was evident both in her
encouragement of reformist legislation and in her own conduct.82 As we
saw in the previous chapter, in the last years of James’s reign a discourse
of reformation had developed as a form of opposition to the king and
court. Immediately after the Revolution Williamite propagandists
working under Gilbert Burnet began a campaign to present the new
monarchs, and Mary in particular, as the Wgureheads of a reformation
movement, claiming that they had come to save the British people from
themselves, as much as from popery and absolutism.83 This propaganda
was supported by a range of active measures: societies for the reforma-
tion of manners sprang up, and drinking and swearing were banned in
the street by a parliamentary act ‘for the more EVectual suppressing of
79 Carol Barash, English Women’s Poetry, 1649–1714: Politics, Community, and Linguistic
Authority (Oxford: Clarendon, 1996), 215. Tory writers and the queens they celebrated
dominate Barash’s book, and there is only a brief discussion of Mary II. However, as the
account above suggests, further research into the role of Mary II would oVer important
new perspectives on the relationship between gender and political and religious authority
in this period. For an account of the satirical responses to the queen’s death see POAS
v. 439–47. On the wider eVects of the queen’s death, see Jane Garrett, The Triumphs of
Providence: The Assassination Plot 1696 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980),
55–7.
80 George Stepney, A Poem Dedicated to the Blessed Memory of her late Gracious Majesty
Queen Mary (London, 1695), 5. Pierre Motteux uses the same analogy in Maria. A Poem
Occasion’d by the Death of Her Majesty (London, 1695), 10.
81 We can trace this image of the Protestant godly queen in the later representation of
the Hanoverian queens (see Hannah Smith, ‘Georgian Monarchical Culture in England,
1714–60’, Ph.D. thesis (Cambridge University, 2001), 53–8).
82 On Mary’s godliness see Rose, England in the 1690s, 42, 203–4.
83 Tony Claydon, William III and the Godly Revolution (Cambridge: Cambridge Uni-

Blasphemy and Profaneness’.84 The theatres were hardest hit by the

changing moral climate: the two playhouses were presented as a public
nuisance by the grand jury of Middlesex county, actors were Wned £10
for indecent language on stage, and Vanbrugh’s Provoked Wife (1697)
was pronounced as obscene in 1699.
The emphasis on reformation addressed some of the tensions in
William and Mary’s shared rule, and it also enabled Whig writers to
pursue more partisan political agendas. For some Williamite Tories the
legitimacy of the new regime, and therefore their allegiance to it, rested
largely on Mary’s dynastic claims as the daughter of the previous Stuart
king. For example, in Aphra Behn’s Congratulatory Poem to her Sacred
Majesty Queen Mary Upon her Arrival in England (1689) the queen is
consistently described as the daughter, never the wife, of a king: she is
the ‘Illustrious Daughter of a King’ (l. 62) and ‘Great Cesar’s OV-spring’
(l. 107).85 The notion of the ‘queen of reformation’ enabled Whig poets
to counter such claims, and to reiterate their critique of the Restoration
monarchs, by situating Mary within an anti-Stuart history of corrup-
tion and reformation. In ‘T. J’’s poem ‘To the Queen’ the poet an-
nounces:
By the false Light of Courts deceiv’d before
We or their Vices, or their Habits wore;
But now ReWn’d they our Example grow,
Sham’d honourably into Good by You.86
As we can see, the role of the court in relation to reformation had
changed signiWcantly: where Whig poets of the late 1680s lamented the
lack of moral leadership given by a corrupt and luxurious court, under
William and Mary the court had become exemplary in its reformed
piety. Moreover, the focus on the ‘queen of reformation’ also empha-
sized Mary’s particular role as the protector of the Church: although
William had charge of the administration of the government, he left the
Church to the care of his wife, and from early on poets lauded Mary as
‘a true Tender Nursing Mother to the best of Churches’.87 Yet, while the
84 (9 & 10 William III, c. 32.) Claydon, William III and the Godly Revolution, 94–5. On
the formation of the societies for the reformation of manners see Rose, England in the
1690s, 205–9.
85 Aphra Behn, A Congratulatory Poem to Her Sacred Majesty Queen Mary Upon her
Arrival in England (1689), in Works, i. 305, 307.

86 T. J., ‘To the Queen’, in Musae Cantabrigienses, b1r.
87 Mary’s sympathies soon set her in opposition to her sister Princess Anne, who was
associated with Henry Compton, Tory Bishop of London, and so the divisions within the
queen’s guardianship of the Church eased the concerns of some Angli-

cans fearful of the Calvinist monarch’s protection of Dissenters, the
emphasis on reformation could also be used to critique the forms and
‘postures’ of the Anglican High Church. One Revolution panegyric
addressed to the queen declares its author’s hopes for a reformation
of the Church itself:
Religion too become a gaudy Misse
Seldome appear’d but in a foppish dress.
When they saw naught but posture and grimace
Where learning and devotion should take place.88
As this poet sees it, Mary’s reformation of the Church would encompass
not just an increased emphasis on moral piety but a rejection of the
ritual and ceremony, the ‘posture and grimace’, associated with the
high-Xyers of the Anglican Church.
In identifying the regime, and the queen in particular, with the
reformation movement Whig writers of the 1690s were renegotiating
the relationship between the monarchy and contemporary poetry. As
we have seen, under the Stuarts the emphasis in Whig verse had been on
the use of poetry as a corrective to the lewdness encouraged by the
court, drawing on a strain of classical republicanism in which political
and personal virtue were seen as irreconcilable with the corruption of
public life at court. Many opposition writers of the 1680s had deWned
their poetic role as that of the Juvenalian satirist, speaking truths which
would reveal vice and folly to the unseeing fashionable world. John
Cutts had claimed that his ‘unpolish’d Muse’ was ‘stripping Folly of that
gay Attire, | Which Knaves invent, and Fools so much admire, | I shew
her naked to the World’.89 However, from the 1690s onwards the role of
the poet was subtly redeWned, as reformation became a bulwark of
government policy. The poet was no longer a satirical scourge of the
public world but a defender of the new moral regime, and Whig writers
Anglican Church polarized around the two sisters. While Mary sponsored Burnet’s
programme for a Whiggish reform, Anne’s support for the high-Xyers fuelled the hopes
and resentments of High Church Tories. For a more detailed account of Mary’s role in
Church politics see Mark Goldie, ‘John Locke, Jonas Proast, and Religious Toleration,
1688–1692’, in John Walsh, Colin Haydon, and Stephen Taylor (eds.), The Church of
England, c.1689–c.1833: From Toleration to Tractarianism (Cambridge: Cambridge Univer-
sity Press, 1993), 143–71 (163).
88Mr Sparling, ‘Poem to the Queen’, in Vota Oxoniensia, sig. y2v.
89John Cutts, ‘Le Muse Cavalier’, in Poetical Exercises Written Upon Several Occasions
(London, 1687), 31–3.
stressed the public, rather than the private, dimension of moral refor-
mation. In his preface to Prince Arthur Richard Blackmore proposed a
licensing system to ensure that only those writers who were ‘on message’
were entitled to speak: ‘Poets, as Preachers are in some Countries, were
paid and licens’d by the State, and that none were suVer’d to write in
Prejudice of Religion and the Government’.90 The literary critic John
Dennis is equally insistent upon the role of poetry and drama in relation
to the Williamite government. He argues that the most important part
that poetry can play at the present time is to support the State:
since Religion is the only solid Foundation of all Civil Society, it follows, that
whoever endeavours to re-establish Poetry, makes a generous Attempt to
restore an Art, that may be highly advantageous to the Publick, and beneWcial
to Mankind.91
Dennis set out his theories for the reformation of modern poetry in
two long essays, The Advancement and Reformation of Modern Poetry
(1701) and The Grounds of Criticism in Poetry (1704). His theory of
poetry and its function was based on the idea that poetry was ‘an
Art, by which a Poet excites Passion’.92 Rather than viewing poesy as a
mere vehicle for instruction, Dennis argued that the most eVective way
for it to accomplish its ultimate aim, ‘to reform the Manners’, was to
engage the passions of the reader. He claimed that Christianity oVered
the most powerful source of human passion, and therefore the greatest
opportunity for poetic sublimity. Poetry shared many common
bonds with Christianity, in that they both relied upon a combination
of passionate and supra-rational persuasion, and both were designed
to restore an inner harmony that had been disrupted by the Fall.
Dennis argued that sublime poetry could restore man to a pre-lapsarian
state:
Poetry seems to be a noble Attempt of Nature, by which it endeavours to exalt
itself to its happy primitive State; and he who is entertain’d with an accom-
plish’d Poem, is, for a Time, at least, restored to Paradise.93
90 Richard Blackmore preface to Prince Arthur: An Heroick Poem in Ten Books (London,
1695), n.p. As Brean Hammond suggests, these lines might also have been a reminder to
the government that the licensing laws were coming up for renewal (Hammond, Profes-
sional Imaginative Writing in England 1670–1740: ‘Hackney for Bread’ (Oxford: Clarendon,
1997), 90).
91 John Dennis, The Grounds of Criticism in Poetry (1704), in Critical Works, i. 373.
92 Dennis, Grounds of Criticism in Poetry, in Critical Works, i. 336.
93 Dennis, The Advancement and Reformation of Modern Poetry (1701), in Critical
Works, i. 264.
However, while he believed that the Bible was inspired directly by God,
he did not extend this theory of inspiration to modern poets. To do so,
he claims, would be ‘absurd and blasphemous’.94 Instead, he identiWes
natural, rather than supernatural, explanations for the workings of
poetry, explaining that poetry aVected through a combined appeal to
the reason, the passions, and the senses. In Remarks on a Book Entituled,
Prince Arthur (1696) he quotes and modiWes Aristotle, arguing that
although the Greek philosopher’s use of the term entheos has been
taken to mean ‘there is something divine in Poetry’, he is ‘pretty conWdent
that entheos is us’d metaphorically here, and signiWes something ex-
treamly pathetick’. Thus, he argues, ‘Genius is nothing but Passion’.95
In this, as in other arguments, Dennis was clearly distancing himself
from earlier radical writers. One of the potential problems with the
Whig emphasis on moral reformation was that it could be seen as a
throwback to the piety and (perceived) hypocrisy of mid-century Pur-
itanism that was so relentlessly satirized by Tory writers. Dennis’s
arguments about poetry and reformation are shaped by his recognition
of this potential criticism. By stressing the natural sources of poetic
eVect, his new theories about divine poetry were not associated with the
claims to divine inspiration that had made religious enthusiasts such a
target for their Tory and Anglican opponents.96 And in arguing that the
contemporary stage should be reformed, rather than suppressed al-
together, Dennis assumed a relatively moderate position in debates
over the moral laxity of the theatre. The nonjuring cleric Jeremy Collier
had published a series of tracts arguing that the theatre should be
banned outright. In responding to Collier, Dennis emphasized that it
was not moderate Whig reformers, such as himself, who were the heirs
to mid-century political and religious radicalism, but Jacobites such as
Collier. He compared Collier’s attack on the theatre with the furious
zeal for ‘Ruine and Reformation’ evident in the works of the Presbyter-
ian pamphleteer William Prynne.97 By attacking Puritan censorship he
emphasized the moderation of his own moral agenda:
94 Dennis, Critical Works, i. 212.

95 Dennis, Remarks on a Book Entituled, Prince Arthur (1696), in Critical Works, i. 135.
96 For a history of the complex responses to enthusiasm in this period see Jon Mee,
Romanticism, Enthusiasm and Regulation: Poetics and the Policing of Culture in the Roman-
tic Period (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), 37–58.
97 Dennis, The Person of Quality’s Answer to Mr. Collier’s Letter, Being a Disswasive from
the Play-House (1704), in Critical Works, i. 302.

that beastly Reformation, which, in the Time of the late Civil Wars, was begun
at the Tail, instead of the Head and the Heart; and which opprest and
persecuted Mens Inclinations, instead of correcting and converting them,
which afterwards broke out with the same Violence, that a raging Fire does
upon its Wrst getting Vent98
As this controversy between Collier and Dennis suggests, the debate
over literary reform did not follow exclusively party-political lines in the
late 1690s and early 1700s.99 Not only was the reformist platform split
between a Jacobite clergyman and a Williamite Whig but Dennis’s
critical style drew criticism from a number of Whig contemporaries.
For all his revolutionary zeal and critical acumen, Dennis’s prescriptive
criticism and increasingly splenetic attacks on his fellow-writers were
out of keeping with a growing emphasis on the role of the critic as an
even-handed gentleman of the world.100 During the following decade
Dennis’s ideas about moral reformation were to be modiWed in the
politer discourse of the Spectator and the Tatler. Poetic reformation
would become the talk of tea tables and coVee houses as Addison and
Steele brought politeness to the middling classes.
England and England’s people
As we have seen, over the course of the 1690s Whig poetry was domin-
ated by its celebration of the exploits of the warrior king. War panegyric
was characterized by a rhetorical convergence of nation with monarch,
and monarch with soldier.101 These relationships were thrown into
question with the end of the war in 1697. A recoinage crisis in 1696,
coupled with a lack of conWdence in government short-term credit,
98 Dennis, The Usefulness of the Stage, to the Happiness of Mankind, to Government, and
to Religion (1698), in Critical Works, i. 154.

99 The same is true of the wider project of the reformation of manners. As the editor of
POAS vi observes, while the opposition to the institutionalized reformation of manners

came largely from the Tories, eVorts to seize the reform movement for the Whigs were
unsuccessful (POAS vi. 399).
100 On the ambivalence of Dennis’s position in relation to polite literary criticism see
John Morillo, ‘John Dennis: Enthusiastic Passions, Cultural Memory and Literary Theory’,
Eighteenth-Century Studies, 34 (2000), 21–41; Jonathan Brody Kramnick, ‘Literary Criti-
cism Among the Disciplines’, Eighteenth-Century Studies, 35 (2002), 343–60; Hammond,
Professional Imaginative Writing in England, 169–77.
101 On the survival of this heroic, militaristic idiom in the celebration of the Hanover-
ian monarchs see Smith, ‘Georgian Monarchical Culture in England’, 26–52.

spurred William and his ministers to begin peace negotiations with

France early in 1697. The most expensive war in the nation’s history
was Wnally concluded with the Treaty of Ryswick, signed in September
1697.102 The peace brought new challenges for Whig poets: William’s
militarism had dominated the verse of the previous nine years, and
writers now had to address a warrior king who was no longer at war,
and a nation no longer united, even superWcially, by its commitment to
the war eVort. This renegotiation of the relationship between king and
nation was made more complex by political controversy over
William’s insistence on maintaining a substantial peacetime force. Be-
tween 1697 and 1699 the king and his Junto Whigs fought a country
opposition determined to reduce the standing army, and the battle
came to a head with the Commons’ votes of January 1699, in which
Whig and Tory country MPs, defying the king and ministry, elected
to reduce the army to seven thousand men.103 The debate threw up a
whole series of questions about the relationship between England and
its deliverer, and the destiny of the nation as a whole. The time was ripe
for historical reXection, and in the poems of the late 1690s we can see
the beginnings of a debate about the signiWcance of the Revolution
and its modernity that was to reverberate throughout the following
century.
As I have suggested, the standing-army debates directed interest to
matters of nationhood. This interest took the form of a controversy
about the position of foreigners in England. The focus on immigration
was a direct result of parliamentary eVorts to reduce the standing army,
because the bill to limit William’s army contained the proviso that the
forces retained should all be the king’s ‘natural born subjects’, a quali-
Wcation which aVected principally the king’s favourite regiment, the
elite Dutch guards. It was a proviso born out of long-standing suspi-
cions of William’s favouritism towards his Dutch courtiers, and it
unleashed a tide of xenophobia, which peaked with the Act of Resump-
tions of 1699, requiring the king to revoke all the Irish estates given to
102 The seven years of conXict had brought few beneWts for either side, since the treaty
required all parties to surrender the territorial gains they had made since 1688. Arguably
the most signiWcant aspect of the deal from an English perspective was that it required
Louis XIV to promise to give no more assistance to the enemies of William III, and in
eVect to recognize his claim to the throne.
103 For more detail on the debates see Lois Schwoerer, No Standing Armies!: The
Antiarmy Ideology in Seventeenth-Century England (Baltimore, Md.: Johns Hopkins Uni-

Dutch courtiers at the beginning of the reign. Anti-Dutch polemic

challenged the enduring Wction of William as the nation’s liberty-loving
deliverer, as Gloriana’s heir who was more English than his predeces-
sors. It generated a new debate about who the English people really
were, and where they stood in relation to an aging Dutchman and his
compatriot courtiers.
Anti-Dutch sentiment had a long history in English political writing:
the three Anglo-Dutch wars of 1652–4, 1665–7, and 1672–4 had fostered
a series of satirical stereotypes, from Marvell’s The Character of
Holland (1653) to the anonymous The Dutch-mens Pedigree or a Rela-
tion, Shewing how they were Wrst Bred and Descended from a Horse-
Turd . . . (1653).104 Although Steven Pincus has argued that popular
sentiment moved in favour of the Dutch in the 1670s and 1680s, there
was nonetheless a thriving tradition of anti-Dutch satire when William
and Mary arrived in 1688.105 The king’s propagandists recognized the
need for some pro-Dutch publicity, and shortly after the Revolution Sir
William Temple, who was a former ambassador to the Hague, published
his memoirs and letters, all of which stressed that England’s true interest
in foreign policy lay in cooperation with the Dutch, and in helping
them to preserve the Spanish Netherlands from the aggression of
Louis XIV.106 The new king’s dynasty was incorporated into a familiar
Whiggish history of the defence of liberty, despite the fact that the
Orange family had long seemed to many Dutch and English to represent
monarchical tyranny.107 Writers accommodated the aristocratic Nassaus
into the same ongoing narrative of the battle against the encroachment
104 The historiography of the period has traditionally located the source of this hostility
in the commercial rivalry between the two nations over colonial possessions, and in
particular the East Indies. In Protestantism and Patriotism Steven Pincus has challenged
this reading of British foreign policy in the Anglo-Dutch wars, arguing that the wars were
fought for ideological purposes (Pincus, Protestantism and Patriotism: Ideologies and the
Making of English Foreign Policy, 1650–68 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996).
For a fuller history of anti-Dutch abuse see P. G. Rogers, The Dutch in the Medway
(Oxford: Clarendon, 1970), 7–13.
105 Steven Pincus, ‘From Butterboxes to Wooden Shoes: The Shift in English Popular
Sentiment from Hatred of Holland to Hatred of France’, Historical Journal, 38 (1995), 333–
62. For anti-Dutch satires on the Revolution see in particular In DeWance to the Dutch
(1688) and A New Song Upon the Hogen Mogens (1688), in POAS iv. 284–8, 314–15.
106 Sir William Temple, Memoirs of what Past in Christendom, from the War begun 1672
to the Peace concluded 1679 (London, 1691); Letters written by Sir William Temple during
his being Ambassador at the Hague (London, 1699).
107 In the early 1680s Algernon Sidney had warned of the despotic ambitions of the
House of Orange in his unpublished Court Maxims. For more detail on anxieties about the
dynasty see Pincus, Protestantism and Patriotism, 125, 128.
on liberties which had characterized earlier English history. That narra-

tive was aided by Temple, whose ‘Essay on Heroick Virtue’ genealogic-
ally traced the liberty-loving strain of the English to the northern
Goths, who were also the more direct forbears of the barbarian
tribes that had produced the house of Nassau. Thus Richard Steele
(1672–1729) attributes to William the very inheritance that was claimed
to be the preserve of the Englishman: ‘to whom ’tis Haereditary to be
the Guardian and Asserter of the Native Rights and Liberties of Man-
kind’,108 while Addison acclaims the race of Nassaus as ‘The World’s
great Patriots; they for Justice call, | And as they favour, Kingdoms rise
or fall’.109
The king, however, was rather less adept at endearing his subjects to
his countrymen. Although one of the elegies on William’s death was to
commend Albermarle as ‘the Patroclus to our great Achilles’,110 many
more subjects were critical of the king’s marked preference for Dutch
counsellors and generals. The outcry that accompanied the Act of
Resumptions was thus a revival of long-standing criticisms of the
regime, and it gave the king’s opponents a context within which to
vent their suspicions of the Dutch, and their royal patron. The literary
and ideological ramiWcations of the debate can be seen very clearly in
the satiric exchange between a series of Whig writers: John Tutchin,
John Dennis, and Daniel Defoe. John Tutchin’s poem The Foreigners
(1700), a verse satire on the ambitions of Portland and other Dutch
courtiers, was published shortly after the Act of Resumptions. It was
answered by John Dennis in The Reverse (1700) and, more famously, by
Daniel Defoe, who came to the defence of the king and his ministers in
his enormously popular satire The True Born Englishman (1701).111 The
exchange again reveals the lack of consensus among Whigs at this time:
although the Act was mainly backed by Tories, Tutchin, author of the
Whig martyrologies, joined forces with high Tory Edward Seymour to
become the most vocal supporters of the new legislation.
At the centre of the disagreement between the three Whig writers lay
profound diVerences not only over the role of the king’s Dutch allies in
108 Richard Steele, The Christian Hero, 87.

109 Joseph Addison, ‘To his Majesty’, in Works, i. 42.
110 The Weeping Muse: A Poem Sacred to the Memory of his Late Majesty (London, 1702),
r
sig. a2 .
111 All subsequent line references are to POAS vi. Foxon lists thirty editions of The True
Born Englishman before 1750. It was also revised and adapted to the circumstances of
George I’s reign in 1716.
public life, but also over the meaning and signiWcance of the Revolu-
tion, and over the identity of the English nation. All three writers drew
on the mock-biblical allegory made popular by Absalom and Achitophel.
England was Israel, but opinions were divided over what Israel repre-
sented, and who was responsible for her deliverance. Tutchin’s nostalgic
call for a return to the values of an earlier age and for the vigorous
defence of the liberties enshrined in the ancient Constitution was met
by Defoe’s enthusiastic embrace of an England still in the making, of a
mixed race of people committed to the defence of liberties founded only
with the Revolution of 1688.
In The Foreigners Tutchin presented England as an Israel plagued by
ambitious Gibeonites, who had no place enjoying the bounty of the
promised land.112 He traced the nation’s troubles to its history of alien
intervention, seeing William’s Dutch favourites as the natural successors
to the pillaging Scottish Stuarts. For Tutchin, Israel, or England, was a
nation deWned by its exclusion of the alien other, and the Israelite was
Jewish by birth rather than political allegiance. In The Reverse John
Dennis responded with an alternative mock-biblical account, oVering
the counter argument that it was the Dutch who had shown the English
the way to the promised land, delivering the nation from itself: ‘If
Judah’s Sons are false, and Gibeon’s just, | Gibeon has a right to share
in Judah’s Trust.’ (61–2) For Dennis, Israel is a political, not an ethnic,
entity whose real enemies are republicans such as Tutchin who threaten
king and Constitution.
As this summary reveals, the combatants from both sides were using
the promised land to signify two very diVerent polities. In The True
Born Englishman Defoe rejects the Israel analogy precisely because of
the looseness and Xexibility of the allegory:
No Parallel from Hebrew Stories take,
Of God-like Kings my Similies to make:
No borrow’d Names conceal my living Theam;
But Names and Things directly I proclaim. (ll. 921–4)
Defoe observes that the image of the nation as promised land, so long a
dominant motif in English political verse, could be used to cloak
112 In Joshua 9 the Israelites were tricked into dependence on the Gibeonites, neigh-
bours of Israel who had fooled Joshua into making a peace treaty with them by pretending
that they were from a far-oV country, when in fact they dwelt amongst the Israelites in
adjacent lands. On this allusion, and the longer tradition of mock-biblical satire in the
tendentious and dangerous arguments.113 In his satire he demonstrates

the way in which the concept of England-as-Israel collapses because
once the nation is anatomized it becomes clear that the boundaries
between the chosen and the unchosen people are surprisingly hard to
delineate. The English are a mongrel race, bred from centuries of
conquest, invasion, and immigration. Here, moreover, England’s status
as ‘the chosen people’ is a point of reproach rather than of self-
congratulation. The satire alludes to Psalm 137, in which Israelite loyalty
in the midst of adversity brings about the destruction of the nation’s
enemies: conversely, in Defoe’s poem the ingratitude of the English in a
time of national prosperity reveals them to be unworthy of the provi-
dential deliverance they enjoy.114 Thus, where Tutchin’s construction of
national identity is predicated on its hostility to the foreigner, Defoe
reveals that in fact the nation is as foreign as its neighbours. And where
Tutchin reads the nation’s chosen-ness as a justiWcation for its exclusion
of aliens, Defoe sees it as a destiny that needs to be justiWed by the
actions of its subjects. This contest over the motif of England-as-Israel
oVers an important modiWcation of Linda Colley’s inXuential discus-
sion of national identity in Britons, in which she argues that the concept
of the nation as Israel was central to the formation of ‘Britain’ as a
Protestant nation in the eighteenth century.115 It is certainly true that
the concept of the nation as the chosen land recurs throughout the
poetry and prose of the seventeenth and eighteenth century. Yet, as these
poems reveal, contemporaries also recognized that the allegory of Eng-
land-as-Israel was a Xexible and politically enabling form of rhetoric
rather than a single and stable form of self-identiWcation.
If the poems reveal a divergence in their representation of the chosen
land, they also diVer in their readings of the nation’s history. The debate
over the Act of Resumptions became in part a conXict over interpret-
period, see Michael Suarez, ‘The Mock-Biblical: A Study in English Satire from the Popish
Plot to the Pretender Crisis, 1678–1747’, D.Phil. thesis (Oxford University, 1999).
113 For the history of England as Israel see Linda Colley, Britons: Forging the Nation
1707–1837 (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1992), 30–3, 368–9.
114 This point is taken from Michael Suarez’s discussion of the poem in his account of
mock-biblical satire (see Suarez, ‘The Mock-Biblical’, 71–83, and esp. 77).
115 Colley, Britons, 30–3. See also Howard Weinbrot, Britannia’s Issue: The Rise of British
Literature from Dryden to Ossian (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 420.
There is a discussion of the complexities of the relationship between Protestantism and
national identity in the introduction to Tony Claydon and Ian McBride (eds.), Protestant-
ism and National Identity, Britain and Ireland c.1650–c.1850 (Cambridge: Cambridge
ations of the events of 1688–9. While William may have been king de facto
by 1700, the political foundations of the Revolution remained a subject of
continuing debate. In The Foreigners Tutchin attacked one of William’s
favourite Dutch courtiers, William Bentinck, the Earl of Portland, ques-
tioning the source of his authority, and in doing so reminded his readers
that their king acceded through popular election, since ‘Heaven allows
the People sure a Power | To chuse such Kings as shall not them devour’
(180–1). As in the furore over Dryden’s Absalom and Achitophel, the
notion of ‘the people’ was a contested one. For Tutchin the people are
the nation, whose wishes have been overruled by aspiring Dutchmen:
When no Successor to the Crown’s in sight,
The Crown is certainly the Peoples Right.
If Kings are made the People to enthral,
We had much better have no King at all (ll. 174–7)
In his response John Dennis takes issue with this rhetoric of popular
rights in much the same way that the Tory loyalists of 1681 had done.
Here the voice of ‘the people’ is wrong-headed republican doctrine, as
he laments: ‘No God they’d suVer, and no King obey. | But would the
People by the People sway’ (ll. 79–80). Popular opinion is not a reliable
mandate for political authority, since the people can err:
God Wrst appointed Kings, and God ordain’d
That should be Wx’d which He alone sustain’d,
Well knowing from his Providential Mind,
That Israel could not chuse, since she was Blind. (ll. 181–4)
Similarly, for Defoe the people are no more than ‘an Amphibious Ill-
born Mob’ (l. 187), with delusions of grandeur: ‘The Mob are Statesmen,
and their Statesmen Sots’ (l. 665). As this account reveals, the satiric
exchange exposed an uncertainty not only about the racial identity of
the English but also about their political identity. Tutchin’s nationalism
is grounded in a nostalgia for earlier generations of independent liberty-
loving warrior forebears, and his poem Wnishes with the command to
cast oV the ‘slavish Gibeonites’ and reassert an ‘Antient Courage’. His
particular brand of Whig historiography is rooted in a conviction that
Englishness and English liberties need to be recovered, rather than
created. Defoe takes issue with this: his England is ‘Modern to the last
degree’ (l. 404), and, quoting Juvenal’s eighth satire, he urges his readers
to abandon their politics of nostalgia, since ‘Fame of Families is all a
Cheat, | ’Tis Personal Virtue only makes us great’ (ll. 1215–16). As he
rereads the history of the nation he Wnds that the triumphs so central to
Tutchin’s account of the independent nation were all too often won with
the aid of foreign intervention. Thus the Englishmen who secured the
immemorial sovereignty of Parliaments were a motley collection of
‘Roman-Saxon-Danish-Normans’ (l. 194), while Gloriana’s race of heroes
was made up of ‘Dutch, Walloons, Flemings, Irishmen and Scots | Vaudois
and Valtolins, and Hugonots’ (ll. 259–60). The appeal to history which,
as we have seen, was so central to Whig myth-making is exposed as no
more than a selective manipulation of the past.
The divergence here between Tutchin’s retrospective notion of Eng-
land, grounded in a reverence for the ancient Constitution, and Defoe’s
commitment to political modernity represents an important tension in
Whig ideology and Whig culture at this time. By the end of the 1690s it
was possible to write of the Revolution as both a return to earlier
historical paradigms and the beginning of a new era; to claim both
historical precedent and inaugural status for 1688. Such dualist thinking
was extended to the king’s militarism. On the one hand William’s wars
had brought conXict, and victories against France that were comparable
with legendary triumphs at Cressey and Agincourt. Yet the funding and
organization of the war had brought huge economic and social change:
a system of public deWcit Wnance with its attendant urban culture;
a class of Whig statesmen, Wnanciers, and clergymen all indebted to
the new regime; and a religious settlement. The dual perspective was
to reverberate throughout later Whig poetry. What began, initially, as a
way of describing the political implications of the Revolution became
increasingly a way of thinking about the cultural past and future.
Matters of literary form, allusion and imitation, and subject matter
could all be seen as oVering diVerent perspectives on this question, as
Whig writers created verse which was authorized by the past yet em-
phatically insisted on the present as its location and source of legitim-
ation. As we shall see in the following chapter, this paradoxical view of
the nation and its history, and its poetic expression, was to be pursued
in the literary debates of the following decade.
4
Poetic warfare 1702–1714
The political dimensions of literary debate were to gain sharper and

more conXicting deWnition in the ‘rage of party’ that characterized the
reign of Queen Anne. The Whig poetry of the period is informed by
many of the themes and concerns we have seen developing over the
course of the 1690s, though in many cases these were given diVerent
inXection by the changed political circumstances of the decade. The
militarism celebrated in Whig poetry under William III continued after
1702 in response to the victories of the War of the Spanish Succession. In
numerous panegyrics on the battles at Blenheim (1704), Ramillies
(1706), and Oudenarde (1708) we can trace the development and mod-
iWcation of the heroic idiom that had developed in the previous decade.
While this mode was undoubtedly complicated by the replacement of
the warrior William with the invalid Anne, it found full triumphant
voice in the celebration of the successes of John Churchill, the Duke of
Marlborough. As I have suggested, a dual perspective on the past and on
literary tradition is another point of continuity between the Whig
poetry of the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. In this
chapter we will discover the ways in which this produced paradoxes in
the notion of literary tradition. Throughout the reign writers debated
the relevance and authority of pre-existing literary forms in relation
to the celebration of contemporary aVairs of state. Yet in doing so they
argued simultaneously for the legitimation of poetic form through
earlier models and for the rejection of older forms in favour of modern
innovation. The Whig quest for literary and moral reformation con-
tinues, also, Wnding inXuential expression in Addison’s and Steele’s
periodicals, and the philosophies of the third Earl of Shaftesbury. Yet
in reformulating morality as a form of polite sociability, these
texts exposed some of the fundamental discontinuities in early Whig
ideology.
136 Poetic warfare 1702–1714
The queen at war
The start of the War of the Spanish Succession in May 1702, just after the
death of William III, inaugurated a new decade of European warfare, in
which Britain fought as part of the Grand Alliance. The ultimate aim of
the war was the same as that which had underwritten the Nine Years’
War; namely, to prevent French Catholic domination in Europe.1 Part
of the agreement made at the Treaty of Ryswick in 1697 was that when
the childless Charles II of Spain died his territorial possessions would go
to the ‘neutral’ Elector of Bavaria. However, when the king did die, in
the summer of 1700, he left all his territories to Philip of Anjou, the
French claimant, who was a nephew of Louis XIV. This eVectively
created a uniWcation of the French and Spanish thrones, and William
III responded by putting together a Protestant alliance to curb the
inXuence of Louis XIV. England’s objectives in the war were threefold:
to maintain a balance of power in Europe; to protect the nation’s
trading interests; and, lastly, to secure recognition of Queen Anne and
the Hanoverian succession, an issue that had become particularly acute
after Louis XIV’s formal recognition of James III of England in 1702. For
many Whigs, who already suspected that the cause of the Pretender and
Louis XIV were one and the same, the battle on the plains of northern
Europe was a contest for the future of the Protestant succession.2
Perhaps the most obvious obstacle for Whig poets intending to
celebrate a war conceived under William and conducted under Anne
was the question of how to accommodate the new queen within the
idiom of martial panegyric. As we have seen, the Williamite poetry of
the 1690s had created models of English kingship in which royal au-
thority was Wrmly linked to active military leadership and physical
bravery in battle. These images were hard to tally with the debilitated
1 The fullest account of the war is still G. M. Trevelyan’s England under Queen Anne, 3
vols. (London: Longmans, Green, 1930–4). See also Derek McKay, Prince Eugene of Savoy
(London: Thames and Hudson, 1977) for more detail on the allied perspective, and J. B.
Wolf, Louis XIV (London: Victor Gollancz, 1968) for detail of the French involvement.
2 GeoVrey Holmes, British Politics Under Anne, rev. edn., (London: Hambledon, 1987),
83. The two central Whig policies of the reign, the Regency Act of 1706 and the Act of
Union of 1707, were designed to help safeguard a Protestant future. However, as Steven
Pincus observes, the representation of the War of the Spanish Succession as a Protestant
crusade was troubled by the catholicism of the Habsburgs (Pincus’ review of Linda
Colley’s Britons: Forging the Nation (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1992),
Journal of Modern History, 67 (1995), 132–4).
Poetic warfare 1702–1714 137
woman who was already largely chair-bound at the time of her acces-
sion.3 Anne herself cultivated parallels with Elizabeth I, and England’s
last ruling queen clearly oVered a suitable model for a queen committed
to the vigorous defence of Protestantism.4 Writers such as the author of
the anonymous broadside England’s Triumph (1702) proclaimed that
‘Now the Second Elizabeth sits on the Throne, | No Courage is wanting
our Foes to confound’.5 For Whig writers the parallel with Elizabeth
could also be used, as it had been in the 1690s, to support a pro-Dutch
foreign policy and England’s commitment to the Grand Alliance.6
However, once again images of the queen as ‘warrior woman’ had
limited applicability. Carol Barash has argued that at moments of
political conXict Queen Anne was more likely to be portrayed as a
pious, weeping heroine than as a justice-loving Gloriana.7 And where
Gloriana as warrior woman had been surrounded by a court of chival-
rous knights, Anne’s political advisers were a coterie of female friends
far distant from the scenes of battle.8 Moreover, as the reign progressed
3 The queen’s gender was later used as an explanation for the ministerial rout of
1710, and the peace negotiations that followed it. Harley writes of her reluctance to
continue with the war as springing from ‘her sex and Christian horror of bloodshed’
(BM Loan 6/3, cited by A. D. MacLachlan in ‘The Road to Peace 1710–13’, in GeoVrey
Holmes (ed.), Britain after the Glorious Revolution 1689–1714 (London: Macmillan, 1969),
197–215 (201)).
4 Anne herself endorsed the comparison: when she was crowned she took on Elizabeth’s
motto, semper eadem, and in 1713 she had her portrait painted as Elizabeth had done, with
the blue ribbon of the Knights of the Garter around her left arm (C. Barash, English
Women’s Poetry, 1649–1714: Politics, Community, and Linguistic Authority (Oxford: Clar-
endon, 1996), 210). One of the most lengthy treatments of the Elizabeth–Anne parallel was
Richard Blackmore’s poem Eliza: An Epick Poem (London, 1705). For a fuller analysis of
Anne as Elizabeth see Vincent Carretta, The Snarling Muse: Verbal and Visual Political
Satire from Pope to Churchill (Philadelphia, Pa.: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1983),
1–19; for later political Elizabethanism see Isaac Kramnick, Bolingbroke and his Circle: The
Politics of Nostalgia in the Age of Walpole (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press,
1968), 230–3; Christine Gerrard, The Patriot Opposition to Walpole: Poetry, Politics, and
National Myth, 1725–1742 (Oxford: Clarendon, 1994).
5 England’s Triumph (London, 1702), 1.
6 In a letter to a Huguenot friend living in Holland, the third Earl of Shaftesbury
emphasizes that ‘by further search you may Wnd other instances of England’s like conceal-
ment in the Protestant interests abroad, during the reign of Queen Elizabeth especially,
who put herself at the head of the Protestant cause, and whose example may very
becomingly be applied at any time to our good Queen and her present ministry’ (Shaftes-
bury to Mons. Basnage, 21 January 1707, The Life, Unpublished Letters, and Philosophical
Regimen of Anthony, Earl of Shaftesbury, ed. Benjamin Rand (1st pub. 1900 by Swan
Sonnenschein; repr. Routledge, 1992), 377).
7 Barash, English Women’s Poetry, 218.
8 See Frances Harris, ‘ ‘‘The Honourable Sisterhood’’: Queen Anne’s Maids of Honour’,
British Library Journal, 19 (1993), 181–98 (189).

the queen tended to be delineated in maternal terms, far removed from

the male public world with which Elizabeth had been so Wrmly en-
gaged.9
As Carol Barash has shown, many Tory writers reconciled the queen’s
femininity with her commitment to warfare by focusing on her role as
‘mother of the Church of England’. This enabled them to emphasize
both her feminine piety and the fact that she would use whatever force
necessary to protect the Church.10 It was rhetoric which not only tallied
with the queen’s very public and fervent Anglicanism, but also clearly
made her Tory property, an ultimate authority behind the ‘Church in
Danger’ propaganda which they relied on throughout the reign. In
Whig poetry of the same period it is often Anne’s successor who
occupies the imaginative centre of writing about the queen, because
the War of the Spanish Succession was largely seen by the Whigs as a
battle in defence of the Hanoverian succession. William Congreve’s 1708
ballad on the victory at Oudenarde is about the battle not between Anne
and Louis but between the two contenders for the future throne of
England, Prince George, the Elector of Hanover, and James Edward
Stuart. Congreve lauds the ‘Young Hannover Brave’:
Thus Firmly he stood
As became that High Blood,
Which runs in his Veins so Blue;
This Gallant Young Man
Being Kin to Queen Anne,
Did, as were she a Man, she wou’d do.11
However, for Whig poets looking for a male warrior hero the most
popular choice was undoubtedly the Duke of Marlborough. Although
John Churchill had changed political allegiances numerous times over
9 On the problem of Anne’s self-representation as symbolic and literal mother see Toni
Bowers, The Politics of Motherhood: British Writing and Culture, 1680–1760 (Cambridge,
Cambridge University Press, 1996), 37–89. On gender and political argument more broadly
in the period see Rachel Weil, Political Passions: Gender, the Family and Political Argument
in England, 1680–1714 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1999).
10 Barash, English Women’s Poetry, 224–5. Barash observes that images of Anne as
mother of a speciWcally Anglican Church were also used to counter the Mariolatry
developing around Mary of Modena.
11 William Congreve, Jack Frenchman’s Defeat (London, 1708), in POAS vii. 342–3. It is
interesting that again the principles and the rhetoric of dynastic inheritance are employed
to counter Jacobite lineal claims (see also Leonard Welsted’s A Poem, Occasion’d by the Late
Famous Battle of Audenarde (London, 1709): ‘The Princely Youth of Hanoverian line, | In
whom his god-like Father’s virtues shine’ (p. 9).)
the past decade, by the early 1700s he had become a Wgure of heroic
proportions for many Whigs. As Robert D. Horn’s bibliography of
panegyrics on Marlborough shows, the duke’s role in the epic battles
of Blenheim, Ramillies, and Oudenarde spawned hundreds of poems of
praise. At times the emphasis on Marlborough, coupled with the virtual
retreat of the Prince of Denmark from public life, meant that the duke
was portrayed as a royal husband, as in Samuel Cobb’s Poem Occasion’d
by the late Victories obtain’d over the French and Bavarians . . . (1709).12
Marlborough is the hero:
Who Fights abroad, while a n n a Prays at home,
And moves with Passion the Windsorian Dome :
For, if she sighs, the Statues seem to groan;
And, at her Tears hard Marbles sweat their own:
Concern and Greatness in her Looks are seen,
The Loving Mother and Defending q u e e n .13
We can see here the way in which the emphasis on Marlborough as
military leader eVectively relegates the queen to a domestic and mater-
nal role. In other poems he becomes the queen’s surrogate, the William-
ite military hero that she never could be. In countless war panegyrics
not only was he presented as continuing the great king’s legacy, but he
was also compared with many of the same biblical, classical, and
historical heroes. In James Shute’s A Pindarick Ode (1703) he is Moses,
Joshua, and Gideon; in James Smallwood’s Congratulatory Poem on
Blenheim, he, like William, is a ‘True English Hero of the Ancient
Race’ and his victory is ‘As Azencourt: So our Brave Warriours stood, |
When France their Anger Mourn’d in Tears of Blood’.14 In John Dennis’s
poem on Ramillies it is Marlborough who is the natural successor to the
line of royal military heroes, following ‘great Edward ’, ‘Conqu’ring
Henry’, Eliza, and William.15 In other poems he is Caesar, Aeneas,
12 On the limited role of the prince in public life see Bowers, The Politics of Motherhood,
52–3. Yet W. A. Speck has argued that George’s role as patron has been greatly under-
estimated (Speck, The Birth of Britain: A New Nation, 1700–1710 (Oxford: Blackwell, 1994),
11–13).
13 Samuel Cobb, A Poem Occasion’d by the late Victories obtain’d over the French and
Bavarians . . . under the Command of his Grace the Duke of Marlborough (1708), in Poems on
Several Occasions (London, 1709), 247–8.
14 James Smallwood, A Congratulatory Poem to His Grace the Duke of Marlborough, on
His Glorious Success . . . (London, 1704), repr. in Robert D. Horn, ‘The Authorship of the
First Blenheim Panegyric’, Huntington Library Quarterly, 24 (1961), 297–310 (299).
15 John Dennis, The Battle of Ramilla: Or the Power of Union. A Poem in Five Books
(London, 1706), 70.

Hercules, and Joshua.16 Moreover, not only was the duke the type of
William and his warring forebears, but his battles were dramatized with
the same rhetoric that we have seen used to celebrate the wars of the
1690s. Whig poets continued to draw on themes of liberty, martyrdom,
and deliverance throughout the panegyrics of the decade.17
Addison’s The Campaign and John Philips’s Bleinheim
The emphasis on Marlborough’s role became a way of appropriating the

successes of the war as speciWcally Whig victories. By the end of 1702 the
Whigs had developed an attitude towards the conduct of the war that
was a natural correlative of their position during the 1690s. This con-
sisted of an uncompromising commitment to the Grand Alliance and to
Britain’s contribution to the Continental struggle against Louis XIV led
by the Duke of Marlborough. The Tories, as under William III, wanted
to conduct a limited ‘blue-water’ policy, which would pursue the dual
purposes of securing defence against France and safeguarding colonial
possessions. Thus Tory poets praised military heroes such as the Duke
of Ormond and the naval commander Sir George Rooke, rather than
the Whiggishly aligned Marlborough, and they favoured war in Italy or
the Mediterranean rather than in Flanders.18
16 For Marlborough as Hercules see Charles Johnson, The Queen: A Pindarick Ode
(London, 1705); for Caesar see The British Caesar: Or the History of the Glorious Achieve-
ments of John, Duke of Marlborough (London, 1705); for Aeneas, Catherine Trotter, On His
Grace the Duke of Marlborough (London, 1706); for Joshua Joshua: A Poem in Imitation of
Milton (London, 1706).
17 A body of rhetoric that Thomas Harley refers to as ‘a senseless jargon of France,
Jesuits, and an invisible army of 100,000 pilgrims mounted upon elephants’ (Thomas
Harley to Edward Harley, 30 December 1708, HMC Fifteenth Report, Appendix V. The
Manuscripts of his Grace the Duke of Portland (London: HMSO, 1897), iv. 516). John
Dennis’s two lengthy war poems, Britannia Triumphans (1704) and The Battle of Ramillia
(1706), are good examples of the extended use of this rhetoric (see also Nicholas Rowe,
A Poem upon the Late Glorious Successes of Her Majesty’s Arms (London, 1707) and Charles
Johnson, Ramelies, A Poem (London, 1706) ).
18 Robert D. Horn, Marlborough: A Survey. Panegyrics, Satires and Biographical
Writings, 1688–1788 (Kent: Dawson, 1975), 25, 37. For examples of these strategies in Tory
panegyric see Charles Tooke, To the Right Honourable Sir George Rooke (London, 1702);
Samuel Phillips, The German Caesar. A Panegyrick on Prince Eugene . . . (London, 1702).
Whig satirists responded by belittling their opponents’ heroes, as in the anonymous poem
on the Battle of Malaga, On the Sea Fight between Sir G. R. and Tolous (London, 1704).
That the Tories were attempting to represent the drawn battle at Malaga as a victory
comparable with Marlborough’s is evident in a contemporary letter from Defoe to Harley:
‘the High Church party look on [Rooke] as their own. The victory at sea they look upon as
These opposing perspectives on the conduct of the campaign and the

nature of its successes are evident in two of the most famous panegyrics
produced on the war: Joseph Addison’s and John Philips’s rival oVerings
on the Battle of Blenheim. The poems illustrate the ways in which party-
political diVerence could be articulated through the deWnition of Marl-
borough’s role with regard to the Queen: Tory poets explained the
duke’s victories as a result of Anne’s direction of the war, while Whig
poets praised the leader himself. Addison’s The Campaign (1705), com-
missioned by Baron Somers and dedicated to Marlborough, bears a
typically Whiggish emphasis on Marlborough. Although it is the queen
who initially despatches the duke to his Continental warfare, the major
part of the poem is preoccupied with detailing the progress of the battle,
and with celebrating the actions of ‘Our god-like leader’ who is ‘Big
with the fate of Europe’ (ll. 63, 73).19 The geographical and logistical
diYculties of the conXict are all occluded by the grandeur of Marlbor-
ough’s shaping vision, ‘forming the wond’rous year within his thought’
(l. 65) so that the campaign is almost won before it is begun. Samuel
Johnson’s praise of this evocation of Marlborough’s ‘calm command of
his passions, and the power of consulting his own mind in the midst of
danger’ reXects the overwhelming sense of the general’s control that is
created in the poem.20 Yet while Addison omits the messy detail of the
local diYculties of the campaign, his narrative, like the panegyrics of
the previous decade, nonetheless stresses the graphic physical detail of
the conXict. He describes, for example, ‘Thousands of Wery steeds with
wounds transWx’d | Floating in gore, with their dead masters mixt’ (ll.
317–18).21 The details of the account distance the battle from the absent
queen, and at the conclusion of the poem it is clear where Addison’s
praise is really directed. Anne may oversee an explicitly Whiggish
foreign policy:
their victory over the Moderate party . . . I am oblig’d with patience to hear . . . the sea
victory set up against the land victory; Sir George exalted above the Duke of Marlborough’
(HMS Portland MSS), iv. 137).
19 Joseph Addison, The Campaign (1705), in The Miscellaneous Works of Joseph Addison,
ed. A. C. Guthkelch, 3 vols. (London: Bell, 1914), i. 159. All further line references in the text
are to this edition.
20 Samuel Johnson, ‘Life of Addison’, in Lives of the Poets (1779–81), ed. G. Birkbeck Hill,
3 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon, 1935), ii. 129.

21 It is a trait found elsewhere in the poems on the war: Richard Blackmore celebrates
Marlborough’s heroic endeavours on the battleWeld in Instructions to Vander Bank (1709),

describing ‘Warriors quiv’ring in the Pangs of Death, | Rolling their Eyes, and gasping out
their Breath’ (Blackmore, Instructions to Vander Bank: A Sequel to Advice to the Poets
(London, 1709), 5).
By her, Britannia, great in foreign wars,

Ranges through nations, wheresoe’er disjoin’d,
Without the wonted aid of sea and wind.
By her th’ unfetter’d Ister’s states are free,
And taste the sweets of English liberty (ll. 452–6)
but the Wnale of the poem is reserved for the general:

Ma r l b rô’s exploits appear divinely bright,
And proudly shine in their own native light;
Rais’d of themselves, their genuine charms they boast,
And those who paint ’em truest praise ’em most. (ll. 473–6)
There is a deft reversal of the idiom of divine right here: for Addison,
Anna is royal, but Marlborough is ‘god-like’. The queen may be granted
the custodianship of the nation, but it is the duke who comes closest to
divinity, ‘divinely bright’, or, as he is depicted in one of the poem’s most
famous moments, the angel riding the storm.
In John Philips’s Miltonic poem on the battle, Bleinheim (1705),
which is dedicated to Robert Harley, and was commissioned by Harley
and Henry St John, there is less emphasis on the commander than on
the ultimate source of his authority.22 The poem is a loose imitation of
book VI of Paradise Lost, in which Philips relocates the war in heaven to
the battleWelds of northern Europe.23 Bleinheim begins with a corrective
to Whig accounts of the war. Rather than present the battle as a
continuation of Williamite victories, Philips emphasizes the fact that
William III failed to curb French encroachment, which it is left to Anne
to achieve. While the poem clearly exploits popular support for Marl-
borough following the victory at Blenheim, this enthusiasm is again
tempered by the fact that Philips’s ultimate praise is for the queen: ‘in
Thy Realms secure | Of Peace, Thou Reign’st, and Victory attends | Thy
distant Ensigns’ (ll. 456–8).24 It is Anne who takes the credit for the
victory: Marlborough is merely a ‘distant ensign’. Moreover, despite
the fact that Philips is celebrating a victory on land in Flanders,
the Wnal section of the poem is dominated by its emphasis on naval
22 On the circumstances of its publication see M. G. Lloyd Thomas, introd. to The
Poems of John Philips, ed. Lloyd Thomas (Oxford: Blackwell, 1927), pp. xxi–xxii.
23 On Philips’s Miltonic imitations in this and other poems see Dustin GriYn, ‘The
Bard of Cyder-Land: John Philips and Miltonic Imitation’, SEL 24 (1984), 441–60.
24 All references to Bleinheim are taken from The Poems of John Philips, ed. M. G. Lloyd
Thomas (Oxford: Blackwell, 1927), 9–25.

engagements and peace. Rooke appears, and ‘with winged Speed He

rides | Undaunted o’er the lab’ring Main, t’assert | Thy liquid Kingdoms’
(ll. 429–31). Philips declares that for all Marlborough’s heroics the war
has solved nothing, and is mere ‘wasteful strife’, since the Spanish
succession is still undecided (l. 389).25
Blenheim Palace
Although Whigs and Tories were at odds over the representation of

John Churchill’s role in the battle at Blenheim, the victory at the
Danube in August 1704 undoubtedly cemented his military reputation
and his fortune. It was the Wrst time that British troops had defeated a
French army for centuries, and the Wrst time in Wfty years that a French
army had been decisively beaten. In February 1705 Queen Anne made
the duke a grant of the royal manor of Woodstock in Oxfordshire in
recognition of his services to the nation, and shortly afterwards building
work began on Blenheim Palace. The subsequent representation of the
palace in contemporary poetry was to expose diverse perspectives on
the general and the nature of his achievements.
Woodstock Park, within the royal forest of Wychwood, was formerly
the site of a royal manor house, and it had been used as a retreat by
nearly every monarch since Henry I.26 Thus the site connected the duke
to earlier English kings, and to one in particular: the famous military
hero Henry II, who was reputed to have courted Rosamond CliVord at
Woodstock. The popular mythology surrounding this romance was that
Eleanor, Henry’s queen, had been out walking with him in the park,
when she noticed a ‘clew of silk’ clinging to one of his spurs. She picked
it up, and followed it through a labyrinth, at whose centre she found
Rosamond.27 The tale of the warlike Henry’s romance oVered a Wtting
counterpoint to the military achievements of the Duke of Marlborough,
whom poets envisioned returning to his own romantic bliss at Blen-
heim. The story of the labyrinth and Rosamond’s bower continued to
be the main interest of the park while the new palace was being
25 This debate over the emphasis on the respective roles of queen and general also
underlies Matthew Prior’s poem on the victory at Ramillies, An Ode, Humbly Inscrib’d to
the Queen (London, 1706) and William Atwood’s Whig response to it in A Modern
Inscription to the Duke of Marlborough’s Fame (London, 1706).
26 David Green, Blenheim Palace (London: Country Life, 1951), 25–7.
27 Green, Blenheim Palace, 23.
constructed, and it was celebrated in a number of Whig poems and

plays, including Addison’s opera Rosamond (1707).28 The park also had
powerful literary resonances, as the reputed home of Chaucer, an
association that went back at least to Camden’s Britannia (1586).29
Both these connections gave panegyrists access to native literature and
history, providing a mythic backdrop to the contemporary warfaring of
the national hero. Yet at the same time the rising splendours of the new
palace also represented the best aspects of modern Whig culture, in the
form of John Vanbrugh’s architecture and Godfrey Kneller’s paintings.
Despite the fact that for the Wrst Wve years the palace consisted of little
more than mud, stones, and wrangles over the payment of workmen,
poets like Leonard Welsted projected on to the site their hopes for the
nation, envisaging in it ‘Britain’s politeness seen, in Vanbrugh’s art’.30 It
swiftly became, as Robert Cummings has argued, ‘an emblem for the
Whigs of triumphalist aspiration and a hoped-for new order’.31
However, Blenheim could of course also be seen as a symbol of the
ambitions of the Duke and Duchess of Marlborough. From the very
beginning the project was politicized: the early choice of Churchill’s
fellow Kit-Cat member Vanbrugh as architect rather than the royal
Surveyor-General, Christopher Wren, suggested the Whiggish bias of
the nation’s new monument. And contemporaries were quick to note
the correlation between Vanbrugh’s grandiose aesthetics and the preten-
sions of his employers, as Swift’s early satire ‘The History of Vanbrug’s
House’ (1706) reveals. The escalating costs of the project, from an
original estimation of £100,000 to £250,000 and upwards, and the
mounting opulence of its scale and embellishments were seen as a
sign of the cupidity of the duke and duchess.32 When the Whig admin-
istration fell, Blenheim became a focal point for the debate about the
legitimacy of the Churchills’ stranglehold on public life, and was so
much perceived as a symbol of the aspirations of the Whig oligarchy
28 Yet see also the use of Blenheim in the Jacobite George Granville’s The British
Enchanters: Or No Magick Like Love (London, 1706).

29 E. G. Stanley, ‘Chaucer at Woodstock: A Theme in English Verse of the Eighteenth
Century’, Review of English Studies, 190 (1997), 157–67.

30 Leonard Welsted, A Poem, Occasion’d by the Late Famous Victory of Audenarde, in
Works, 13.
31 Robert Cummings, ‘Addison’s ‘‘Inexpressible Chagrin’’ and Pope’s Poem on the
Peace’, Yearbook of English Studies, 18 (1988), 143–58 (149).

32 Pope was to observe in 1717: ‘I never saw so great a thing with so much littleness in it:
I think the Architect built it entirely in compliance to the taste of its Owners: for it is the
most inhospitable thing imaginable, and the most selWsh’ (Pope to Martha Blount[?],
September 1717, in The Correspondence of Alexander Pope, ed. George Sherburn, 5 vols.
(Oxford: Clarendon, 1956), i. 432).
that the Tory ministry ceased to fund building work on it in 1712, shortly
after the dismissal of the general.33 So the rising palace at Woodstock
could be seen both as a sign of the success and optimism of the Whig
administration and as an emblem of its greed and hubris.
The most celebrated example of the Whig topographical poem set at
Woodstock is the young poet William Harrison’s Woodstock Park, which
was published by Jacob Tonson in two folio editions in 1706, while
Harrison was still at Oxford. Heavily inXuenced by Denham’s Cooper’s
Hill, the poem begins with a stag hunt:
So Coward Princes, who at War’s Alarm,
Start from their Greatness, and themselves disarm,
With recollected Forces strive in vain
Their Empire, or their Honour, to regain,
And turn to rally on some distant Plain,
Whilst the Werce Conqu’ror bravely urges on,
Improves th’Advantage, and ascends the Throne.
Forgive, Great Denham, that in abject Verse,
What richly thou adorn’st, I thus rehearse.
Thy noble Chace all others does exceed,
In artful Fury, and well-temper’d Speed.34
Harrison compares his poem with Denham’s because both describe a stag
hunt. Yet, while in Denham’s poem the stag represents Charles I, the king
as the quarry of his political opponents, in Woodstock Park the hunt is
developed as a metaphor for Marlborough’s military successes, with
Marlborough the hunter and the chase the pursuit of the French on the
plains of central Europe. Harrison clearly wants his poem to be compared
with an earlier classic, but in altering the signiWcance of the hunt he
reveals a selective approach to those earlier models. Harrison’s awareness
of poetic tradition is also evident in his references to Chaucer. Having
introduced the theme of Woodstock as Chaucer’s birthplace, he then
attacks John Dryden’s recent imitations of the poet. Dryden, he claims:
Took wond’rous Pains to do the Author Wrong,
And set to modern Tune his ancient Song.
Cadence, and Sound, which we so prize, and use,
Ill suit the Majesty of Chaucer’s Muse;
33 Green, Blenheim Palace, 128. The extent to which the fortunes of the palace were
recognized as tied to the political fate of the Churchills can be seen in the satirical ballad
He’s Wellcome Home: or a Dialogue between John and Sarah (London, 1711).
34 William Harrison, Woodstock Park. A Poem (London, 1706), 3–4.
His Language only can his Thoughts express,

And honest Clytus scorns the Persian Dress.35
Coming at a time when Dryden’s versions of the medieval bard were
universally acclaimed, this criticism is surprising.36 However, Harrison’s
argument makes sense in the context of the heroic myth-making that he
was authorizing with Chaucerian allusion. Where Dryden had trans-
lated Chaucer’s poetry into a graceful modern idiom, for Harrison it is
precisely the crude beauty of Chaucer’s ‘honesty’ that is so prized.
Presented as an eVete neoclassical man of letters Chaucer had little
relevance to Marlborough, but as the voice of ancient majesty he was
an ideal Wgure with whom to link a man whose mythical heroics were
comparable with an earlier phase of English history.
However, for all this evocation of the rugged virtue of earlier native
culture, Harrison ultimately rejects comparisons with previous episodes
of English history. After the allusions to Henry and Chaucer he declares:
Silenc’d be all Antiquity could boast,
And let old Woodstock in the new be lost.
No more her Edwards, or her Henrys please;
Their Spoils of War, or Monuments of Peace.
By c h u r c h i l l ’s Hand so largely is out-done,
What either Prince has built, and both have won.37
The suggestion is that Marlborough has in fact exceeded all previous
history: the actions of earlier military leaders are surpassed by recent
events, and their monuments are overshadowed by the commemoration
of Marlborough’s victories at Woodstock. The remainder of the poem is a
vision of the prospective splendours of the completed palace, and Harri-
son writes of the paintings that Kneller will create to adorn the walls:
No fam’d Exploits, from musty Annals brought,
Shall share his Art, or furnish out the Draught;
No Foreign Heroes in Triumphant Cars,
No Latian Victories, nor Græcian Wars:
Germania’s fruitful Fields alone aVord
Work for the Pencil, Harvest for the Sword.38
35 Harrison, Woodstock Park, 4.

36 Caroline F. E. Spurgeon, Five Hundred Years of Chaucer Criticism and Allusion: 1357–
1900, 3 vols. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1925), vol. i. pp. xxxviii–xxxix.
37 Harrison, Woodstock Park, 8.
38 Ibid. 9.
The mythological and historical iconography that traditionally charac-

terizes historical painting is here rejected in favour of the representation
of exclusively modern native achievement. Yet it is, as we have seen,
more complex than that. Harrison’s poem seems to suggest that histor-
ical comparison both is and is not an appropriate measure of the scale
of current events: earlier ages can oVer types of heroism, but these are
ultimately rendered redundant by the pace of recent history.39 This is
the same split perspective on historicity and modernity that character-
ized responses to the Revolution, and it was to recur throughout the
period.40
The war and the canon
It is clear there were a number of Whig and Tory writers who drew on
the poetry, or the reputations, of Chaucer, Milton, and Spenser for the
same reasons that Harrison favours Chaucer.41 The renewed interest in
home-grown poetic forebears was a patriotic way of emphasizing the
status of the victories, which were praised as comparable with those
described by Homer or Vergil, but which clearly demanded a native epic
voice. In addition, the unpolished vigour of Spenser, Milton, and
Chaucer made them poetic models more appropriate to the heroics of
Blenheim and Oudenarde than the reWned lyrics of Stuart court poetry.
In Libertas Triumphans (1708) Charles Gildon oVers a very clear explan-
ation of the new taste for earlier English poetry:
39 However, this novelty could also be seen as a sign of impermanence: in the poem
A Dialogue between Windsor Castle and Blenheim House (London, 1708) the two palaces
come to represent the old and the new in political-artistic culture. Blenheim is eVectively
presented as fashionable frivolity.
40 For the view that this poetry was exclusively moving towards a rejection of older
styles see Arthur S. Williams, ‘Panegyric Decorum in the Reigns of William and Anne’,
Journal of British Studies, 21 (1981), 56–67.
41 On the changing reputations and uses of earlier poets in the long eighteenth century
see Richard Terry, Poetry and the Making of the English Literary Past 1660–1781 (Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 2001); Jack Lynch, The Age of Elizabeth in the Age of Johnson
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003); Jonathan Brody Kramnick, Making
the English Canon: Print Capitalism and the Cultural Past, 1700–1770 (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1998). As William Weber has described, the politicized
rehabilitation of earlier English culture was also prevalent in contemporary music, and
in particular in responses to musical classics (Weber, The Rise of Musical Classics
in Eighteenth-Century England: A Study in Canon, Ritual and Ideology (Oxford: Clarendon,
1992), 93–6).
Assist Harmonious Genius of this Isle,

That on our Ancient Bards were’t wont to smile;
Who didst the Heroe warm with Martial Fire,
And then the Bard to sing his Deeds inspire:
Who Chaucer, Spencer, Milton gavest to Fame,
By Nature made capacious of thy Flame42
Here Chaucer, Spencer, and Milton are seen to provide models of bardic
eulogy, the poetic Wre that the present age demands. In this poem they
have a largely symbolic signiWcance, as voices resonant of a native past,
but elsewhere we can see a more sustained engagement with the verse
itself.
Each poet represented a good model for contemporary panegyrists.
Milton’s Protestant epic oVered writers the opportunity to paint their
panegyric on a truly heroic canvas.43 John Dennis’s epic The Battle of
Ramillia (1706) begins with an imitation of the Wrst book of Paradise
Lost, in which the spirit of Discord addresses her ‘accurst Assembly’,
who plot to bring about the overthrow of Liberty. As Nicholas von
Maltzahn has observed, one of the ironies of the development of the
Miltonic battle poem was that Whig poets had to ignore the fact that
Milton had shown a profound ambivalence about militarism, and new
techniques of war, in his much-emulated description of the War in
Heaven in book VI of Paradise Lost.44 Instead, the epic became a
template for the celebration of the heroism and splendour of martial
conXict. Other poets found a source of inspiration in Shakespeare: in
Jasper Robins’s The Hero of the Age (1704) the bard is lauded as the
prime example of the heroic poet: ‘Were Shakespear living, and had then
stood by, | Shakespear had wanted Words for this Dread Day’.45 Whig
writers continued to draw on the image of the bard to emphasize
Marlborough’s heroics even when the general was under attack from
42 Charles Gildon, Libertas Triumphans: A Poem (London, 1708), 6.

43 One of the earliest instances of Miltonic imitations is James Shute’s A Pindarick Ode
upon Her Majesties sending the Duke of Marlborough (London, 1703), in which Marlbor-
ough confronts all the host of Satan and ‘From Regions of eternal light, | Down, down they
fall to everlasting night’ (p. 5). There seems to have been a Xood of Whig Miltonic
imitations following the Battle of Ramillies. There are Whig poems, which predate
Philips’s Bleinheim, in Joshua: A Poem in Imitation of Milton (London, 1706) and Charles
Johnson’s Ramelies, A Poem (London, 1706). Other examples are ‘Mr Paris’s’ Ramillies.
A Poem (London, 1706); Dennis’s The Battle of Ramillia (London, 1706).
44 Nicholas von Maltzahn, ‘The War in Heaven and the Miltonic Sublime’, in Steven
Pincus and Alan Houston (eds.), The Nation Transformed : England after the Restoration
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 154–79.
45 Jasper Robins, The Hero of the Age (1704), quoted by Horn in Marlborough, A Survey,
89.
the Tories. In Tatler 137 Steele writes that the duke reminds him of ‘that
noble Figure which Shakespear gives Harry the Fifth upon his Exped-
ition against France’ and quotes the prologue to Henry V with its
invocation of a ‘Muse of Fire’.46
Spenser was especially relevant to poets seeking literary models for
their panegyric, because of the long-standing comparison of Anne with
Gloriana. The inXuence of The Faerie Queene is evident not only in
Prior’s Ode, but in Dennis’s Britannia Triumphans (1704), in which
Louis ‘like a hoary Wizard close immur’d, | In his enchanted Castle
sat retir’d, | And there unseen he mutter’d secret Sounds’.47 Again, Whig
poets drew on the idiom of chivalric romance in celebration of their
very modern military campaigns. In 1713 the pamphleteer Samuel Crox-
all drew on Spenser’s status as proto-Whig to produce two sets of
‘continuation cantos’ from the Faerie Queene, which he used to attack
Robert Harley’s Tory administration. An Original Canto of Spencer
(1713) begins with a Whiggish invocation: ‘Fair Liberty, bright Goddess,
Heavenly-born, | So high esteem’d by ev’ry living Wight’, and goes on to
tell the story of a hapless maiden, Britomart (Britain), who is misled by
a wicked old wizard, Archimago (Harley). Archimago persuades her to
‘oVer Terms of Peace, and happy Agreement’ to the evil Sir Burbon
(Louis XIV) and Romania (Rome).48 The Original Canto, like so many
Whig poems of this period, identiWes the prospect of national salvation
in the accession of the Elector of Hanover, and thus the poem concludes
with the prophesy that the valiant Sir Athegall (George I) will one day
rescue Britomart from her captors. Spenser’s pastorals were also popu-
lar, and Whig poets blended pastoral and chivalric elements to create
the oxymoronic genre of ‘war pastoral’.49 John Oldmixon’s A Pastoral
Poem on the Victories at Schellenburgh and Blenheim (1704) establishes a
parallel between Anne and Elizabeth, and between Spenser and contem-
porary Protestant poets:
She, for whom Collin touch’d his golden Lyre,
And sung her Glorious Acts with equal Wre;
Ev’n She, must now to a n n a’s Reign resign
46 Richard Steele, Tatler 137, 23 February 1710, in The Tatler, ed. Donald F. Bond, 3 vols.
(Oxford: Clarendon, 1987), ii. 291.

47 John Dennis, Britannia Triumphans. Or a Poem on the Battel of Blenheim, in The
Select Works of Mr. John Dennis, 2 vols. (London, 1718), i. 173.

48 Samuel Croxall, An Original Canto of Spenser: Design’d as part of his Fairy Queen, but
never Printed (London, 1713), 7.

49 Horn claims that the earliest example of Spenserian war pastoral is A Poem on the
Late Glorious Success of His Grace the Duke of Ormond at Vigo (London, 1702).
The Wrst Bright Page, and in the second shine.

Eliza’s Arms reliev’d an Infant State,
But Empires are by a n n ’s repriev’d from Fate.
Her Hero’s the New World explor’d for Gold,
But a n n’s for Glory only save the Old.
And shall not Her Illustrious Triumphs raise
Thy fainting Voice, and Tempt thy Sylvan Lays.50
Oldmixon sees the Shepheard’s Calender as the remnant of an
earlier age: his emphasis is on the contrast between Elizabeth’s
‘Infant State’ and Anne’s ‘Illustrious Triumphs’, which by implication
demands sylvan lays made appropriate to the new era. This concern
for the adaptation of pastoral for modern contexts is the subject of
the preface to his poem, in which he defends the use of pastoral
for heroic themes, dismissing those readers who imagine that
shepherds and shepherdesses ‘shou’d be always Billing and Cooing,
Sighing and Sobbing’.51 Citing the example of Vergil’s lines on
Pollio, and the eighteenth idyll of Theocritus, Oldmixon argues
that the shepherds of the golden age were not idle philosophers, but
statesmen:
The Shepherds in those Days had not only the Charge of their Flocks upon
their Hands, but the Care of the State; and as the Riches of the World
consisted chieXy in the Riches of the Field, Flocks, Herds, and Corn; so
Husbandry and Labour were so far from being thought below Persons of
the highest Quality, that Kings held at once the Crook and the Scepter.52
In his redeWnition of the genre Oldmixon emphasizes the allegorical

function of the form, within which rural pursuits oVer parallels, rather
than alternatives, to contemporary public life. If, as he argues, shep-
herds are in fact kings, the subjects traditionally excluded by golden-age
pastoral—heroism, politics, war, and money—are in fact themes central
to the pastoral mode. The genre is no longer a retreat into sylvan
nostalgia but oVers models of authority and culture with which to
reXect the modern nation.
50 John Oldmixon, A Pastoral Poem on the Victories at Schellenburgh and Blenheim
(London, 1704), 4–5.

51 Ibid. sigs. c2r, d1r.
52 Ibid. sig. e1v . Other Whig war pastorals are Mary Pix’s A Poem, Humbly Inscrib’d to
the Lords Commissioners for the Union (London, 1707) and Henry Brookes’s Daphnis,
A Pastoral Poem (London, 1707).
Pope, Philips, and the pastoral wars
This argument about the public and contemporary subjects of pastoral

informs one of the most contentious literary debates of the decade: that
over the respective merits of Ambrose Philips’s and Alexander Pope’s
pastoral imitations of 1709. Although the controversy has spawned a
range of political readings, the pastoral wars have rarely been linked to
the battle poems produced to celebrate the War of the Spanish Succes-
sion.53 Yet we might read Pope’s and Philips’s poems alongside these
military panegyrics, which also contested the relevance of earlier poetic
models to the celebration of contemporary aVairs of state, and the role
of neoclassical imitation in modern public poetry. Seen in this light, the
pastoral wars demonstrate that early eighteenth-century intellectual
debates about the relative virtues of the ancients and moderns had
speciWcally political resonances, as poets debated the nature of modern
poetry.
At the time when the pastorals Wrst appeared, Pope and Philips
were both trying to establish themselves in the London literary world.
Philips, who had just returned home after a short career with the
British expeditionary force in Spain, was looking for government em-
ployment, which he hoped to secure by drawing attention to himself
through his writing. Pope was also trying to make contacts in London,
and using Will’s CoVee House to launch his literary career. However,
where Philips had aligned himself with prominent Whigs such as
Addison and Lionel CranWeld, Earl of Dorset, the dedicatee of his
pastorals, Pope’s sympathies lay with Tories such as Wycherley, Swift,
and Arbuthnot.
Their quarrel began with the simultaneous publication of the two
poets’ work in Jacob Tonson’s Poetical Miscellanies, The Sixth Part, of
1709. The opening poems in the collection were six pastorals by Philips,
while Pope’s poems concluded the volume, structurally emphasizing the
comparison between the two poets. The political dimension of Pope’s
and Philips’s diVerences was demonstrated by the responses to their
work. Philips’s fellow Whigs rallied to his side: Steele lauded Philips in
Tatler 10 (1709), and Addison followed suit in Spectator papers 223, 400,
and 523, while Tickell took up his defence in the Guardian. Leonard
53 The best analysis of the political resonances of the pastoral wars is given by Annabel
Patterson in Pastoral and Ideology: Virgil to Valery (Oxford: Clarendon, 1988), 206–14. On
the politics of Pope’s pastorals see Howard Erskine-Hill, ‘Alexander Pope: The Political
Poet in his Time’, Eighteenth-Century Studies, 15 (1981–2), 123–48.
Welsted praised them in his Remarks on the English Poets (1712), Tickell
called him ‘a second Spenser’ in The Prospect of Peace (1712), and Charles
Gildon, in The Complete Art of Poetry (1718), stated that in pastoral ‘most
of our young Dablers in Rhime have try’d their Strength; but alas! not one
besides Mr Philips has hit the Mark’.54 Meanwhile, Wycherley, Granville,
Swift, and Gay had all stated their preference for Pope’s poetry.55 The
more extensive puYng of Philips’s poems in the Whig periodicals may
partly explain their greater popularity in the years immediately following
the appearance of the Miscellany, which saw three new editions of Phi-
lips’s poems between 1706 and 1710, as opposed to only one of Pope’s.56
Most critics have explained the diVerences between the two sets of
poems as concerning existing ideas about contemporary poetry and its
relationship to the classics—the ancients and moderns debate. This
well-documented dispute was based on two opposing theories about
pastoral poetry, one termed the ‘neoclassic’ theory, derived largely from
Paul de Rapin-Thoyras, and the other the ‘rationalistic’ school, from
Bernard de Fontenelle.57 The neoclassic school agreed that a pastoral
should be an imitation of the action of a shepherd living in the golden
age, reXecting the values of the ancient past, of peace, innocence,
and virtue. The prime models for this type of pastoral were those of
the ancients Vergil and Theocritus. Those following Fontenelle, on the
other hand, believed that pastoral was just a representation of the
tranquillity of rural life which could be adapted to the environment
and age of the individual writer.58 The emphasis here was less on a
slavish adherence to the rules of the ancients than on what Fontenelle
described as the ‘Natural Light’ of the poet’s own reason. Yet the contest
between neoclassicism and rationalism was not an exclusively aesthetic
debate. At issue was the question of how far modern imitations of
classical forms should be committed to the depiction of events in
contemporary public life. Of course, in many ways there was no great
opposition between ancient and modern, neoclassic and rationalist. As
54 Charles Gildon, The Complete Art of Poetry, 2 vols. (London, 1718), i. 157.
55 George Sherburn, The Early Career of Alexander Pope (Oxford: Clarendon, 1934/
1968), 117–18.
56 On the impact of these reviews on the ensuing pastoral wars see Edward Heuston,
‘Windsor Forest and Guardian 40’, RES 29 (1978), 160–8.

57 I take these terms from J. E. Congleton, Theories of Pastoral Poetry in England 1684–
1798 (Gainesville, Fla.: University of Florida Press, 1952), 75–95.

58 Fontenelle’s seminal work the Dialogues of the Dead was translated by the Whig poet
John Hughes in 1708 (Hughes, Fontenelle’s Dialogues of the Dead, [ . . . ] with a reply to some
remarks in a critique called the Judgment of Pluto & c (London, 1708)).
Joseph Levine reminds us, both sides shared a common respect for the
literature of antiquity, seeing the ancient past as a storehouse of perfect
examples of life and art: they argued essentially about the possibility of
imitating those examples in modern literature.59
Oldmixon’s preface on pastoral, in which he argued that the shepherd
was the modern-day statesman, and that contemporary pastoral ought
to translate the past into the present, represented the extreme of the
rationalists’ position. Ambrose Philips’s pastorals exempliWed the ra-
tionalist model in that they were Spenserian rather than Vergilian, and
described English rustics, ‘Lobbin’ and ‘Hobbinol’, living in a recogniz-
ably English landscape, with native folklore and rustic archaisms.60 In
his preface to his poems Philips claimed that ‘Theocritus, Virgil, and
Spencer are the only Writers, that seem to have hit upon the true Nature
of Pastoral Poems’—a statement which, in placing Spenser on a level
with Theocritus and Vergil, shared Oldmixon’s conviction of the possi-
bility of adapting pastoral for modern contexts.61 Like other Whig
writers, such as Dennis and Blackmore, Philips was suggesting that
native English poets could create their own poetic models. Moreover,
Philips’s shepherds and shepherdesses were, like Oldmixon’s, often
thinly disguised portraits of contemporary public Wgures, and Philips
used his lyrics to celebrate Whig policies. The most prominent political
issue evident in the poems is anxiety over the stability of the Protestant
succession. The Act of Settlement of 1702 had theoretically secured the
throne after Anne’s death for the Hanoverian heirs of the Electress
Sophia, but this was potentially open to contest from a Jacobite claim-
ant. Phillips’s six poems reXect Whig concern about the future of the
succession in their preoccupation with images of loss and death. The
‘timelessness’ of golden-age pastoral is rejected in favour of a historic-
ally speciWc preoccupation with contemporary aVairs of state. In the
third pastoral there is an elegy for the queen’s dead infant son, the Duke
of Gloucester, ‘Albino’, whose loss is both a public and a private calam-
ity, as Angelot explains:
Nor did the Nymph for this
Place in her Dearling’s Welfare all her Bliss,
59 Joseph M. Levine, The Battle of the Books: History and Literature in the Augustan Age
(Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1991), 44.

60 Although, as Annabel Patterson observes, for all their overt Spenserianism, Philips’s
pastorals were also indebted to Vergil (Patterson, Pastoral and Ideology, 212–13).
61 Ambrose Philips, preface to Pastorals, in Poems of Ambrose Philips, 3. Further line

And teach him young the Silvan Crook to weild,

And rule the peaceful Empire of the Field. (ll. 53–6)
The fourth pastoral centres on the inevitable death of ‘Stella’, and the
mortality of Anne herself: ‘I clasp’d her too; but Death was all too
strong, | Nor Vows, nor Tears, could Xeeting Life prolong’ (ll. 53–4).
Whig anxiety over the uncertain outcome of the inevitable death of the
queen, and the arrangements for the succession, is also the subject of the
second pastoral, where Thenot tells the melancholy Colinet:
Nor Wolf, nor Fox, nor Rot amongst our Sheep;
From these the Shepherd’s Care his Flock may keep:
Against ill Luck all cunning Foresight fails;
Whether we sleep or wake, it naught avails. (ll. 53–6)
In contrast with these allegorical Wgurations of political life, Pope’s

pastorals were not only heavily neoclassical, featuring shepherds called
‘Strephon’ and ‘Alexis’ who made references to classical mythology, but
they were also less overtly engaged with contemporary public aVairs.
Although the poem on Spring contained a riddle alluding to Charles II
in the oak tree, and, by implication, the queen as Stuart monarch: ‘Say,
Daphnis, say, in what glad Soil appears | A wondrous Tree that Sacred
Monarchs bears?’ (ll. 85–6), his pastorals do not function as allegories of
contemporary politics to the extent that his Whig counterpart’s did.62
Moreover, in Pope’s rewriting of Vergil there is no trace of the Roman
historical context, of war and dispossession: the only concerns, with the
exception of the riddle, are love and poetic competition.63 This lack of
engagement is evident in the poems’ dedications. Philips had dedicated
his poems to the Earl of Dorset, the Whig envoy to Hanover who was
responsible for ensuring the security of the Hanoverian succession,
whereas the only one of Pope’s pastorals dedicated to a statesman,
‘Spring’, was addressed to Sir William Trumbull, a former secretary of
state who had retired from politics.
The pastorals are also diVerentiated by the literary traditions with
which they align themselves. Philips’s poems are clearly an attempt to
62 Alexander Pope, ‘Spring’, in TE i. 69. Further line references in the text are to this
edition. On the meanings of the riddles and the revisions to them see the editors’
introduction to the Pastorals, in TE i. 39–41. Howard Erskine-Hill argues that the riddles
give Royalist, not Jacobite, signals (Erskine-Hill, The Poetry of Opposition and Revolution:
Dryden to Wordsworth (Oxford: Clarendon, 1996), 64–5).
63 See Patterson, Pastoral and Ideology, 208.
appropriate Spenser as a proto-Whig, the foremost Protestant poet of

patriotism. In the third pastoral he establishes a tradition of continuity
between national poets and their patrons: as Vergil was to Augustus, and
Spenser ‘made ev’ry sounding Wood | With good Eliza’s Name to ring
around’ (ll. 6–7), so he will ‘teach the vocal Vallies ANNA’s Praise’ (l. 12).
In the sixth poem the Elizabethan parallel is developed further, as
Philips compares Elizabeth and Sidney to Anne and her poetry-loving
Whig statesmen:
Full fain, O blest Eliza! would I praise
Thy Maiden Rule, and Albion’s Golden Days.
Then gentle Sidney liv’d, the Shepherds Friend
. . . . . . .
Thrice happy Shepherds now: For Dorset loves
The Country Muse, and our delightful Groves;
While ANNA reigns. O ever may she reign!
And bring on Earth a Golden Age again. (ll. 37–9, 41–4)
Spenserian pastoral has here become a model of public poetry with

aristocratic patronage, an image of the literary culture of the Whig Kit-
Cat Club. Pope also identiWes himself within a tradition of English
poetry, but it is one with diVerent political implications. In ‘Spring’
he invokes two signiWcant models: ‘Inspire me Phoebus, in my Delia’s
Praise, | With Waller’s Strains, or Granville’s moving Lays!’(ll. 45–6),
revealing a nostalgia for the culture of the Stuart courts, and the
patronage it provided. Moreover, by celebrating the line of succession
between George Granville and Edmund Waller and himself, Pope posits
a kind of hereditary continuity between one generation of committed
Stuart poets and the next—a poetical conWguring of the constitutional
principles at the centre of Jacobite political claims.
Where Pope’s allusions evoke the bounty and splendour of the Stuart
court, Philips’s poems allude to a diVerent model of literary production.
In Philips’s second pastoral Thenot describes the administrative and
cultural role of Menalcas:
Menalcas, Lord of all the neighb’ring Plains,
Preserves the Sheep, and o’er the Shepherds reigns
. . . . . . . .
He, good to all, that good deserve, shall give
Thy Flock to feed, and thee at Ease to live;
Shall curb the Malice of unbridled Tongues,
And with due Praise reward thy rural Songs. (ll. 112–13, 116–19)
Menalcas here represents a patron, possibly the Earl of Dorset, possibly

Addison, whose guardianship of contemporary poetry is presented in
idealized form. As members of the inXuential Whig Kit-Cat Club, and
supporters of a number of Whig poets such as Philips, both men
represented precisely the sort of committed aristocratic patron whom,
as I shall demonstrate, many Whig writers saw as replacing the cultural
hegemony of the court.
Philips picks up the argument made by Oldmixon, adapting pastoral
situations to celebrate the queen and her Whig statesmen. For him the
cultural guardianship of modern poetry lies with these statesmen, who
will fund the true-blue Protestant poetry that the nation demands.
Pope’s profoundly neoclassical pastorals, on the other hand, share
none of this impetus towards modernity, and are characterized by
their nostalgia, both for a golden-age idyll and for the culture of the
Stuart court.64 As Patterson remarks, they espouse ‘a poetics of retreat,
deWned in Virgilian terms, while cautiously engaging in undercover
warfare’.65 In the context of a war in which both Whig and Tory writers
were battling to ensure the cultural dominance of their own mytholo-
gized versions of current events, pastoral, as Oldmixon had observed,
was about far more than the ‘billing and cooing’ of shepherds and
shepherdesses.
The political and cultural ramiWcations of the pastoral controversy
did not end here. The whole issue was revived four years later, when the
Tory ministry began peace negotiations with France. Reversing the
claims to patriotic public service that had characterized Whig triumph-
alism over the war, Tory propagandists accused the Whig ministry of
having perpetuated the conXict to serve their own private ends, while
Whig authors insisted that the conduct of the war had been informed
only by the values of heroism and public spirit. The rhetoric used in
these debates was characterized by both pro-war Whigs’ and anti-war
Tories’ claims to be the guardians of the nation’s true interest in Europe.
Thus once again the concept of ‘the Englishman’ acquired a polemical
force in contemporary propaganda.66 John Arbuthnot drew on the
64 It could be argued that the pervasive nostalgia of Pope’s Pastorals is evident in many
of the poems of the 1717 volume. On Pope’s self-presentation in the collection see Dustin
GriYn, Alexander Pope: The Poet in the Poems (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press,
1978), 71–99.
65 Patterson, Pastoral and Ideology, 212.
66 It is signiWcant here that the debate about the war centred around representations of
Englishness, rather than Britishness. On the development of a speciWcally ‘British’ national

Wgure of ‘John Bull’ to promote the Tory interest in the peace process.
The honest English ‘Bull’ was established in opposition to the Wgure of
the conniving Dutch ‘Frog’, in an attempt to convince contemporaries
that, far from uniting with the Allies and prolonging the war against
France, it was in the nation’s interest to recognize that their real enemy
was the Dutch.67 Whig propagandists such as Steele, on the other hand,
used the term ‘English’ to characterize their concerns about clauses in
the Treaty of Utrecht which seemed to favour French political and
commercial interests.68
This struggle over competing versions of national identity provided
the political context for Thomas Tickell’s revival of the controversy over
the respective literary merits of Pope’s and Philips’s pastorals in his
Guardian papers of 1713.69 Tickell’s papers were published within a
literary culture that was more divided than it had been at the time of
the poems’ initial publication. During the period between 1709 and 1713
the rift between the two poets’ rival camps had deepened, and it had
become increasingly diYcult to maintain cross-party literary friend-
ships such as those between Pope and Addison, or Swift and Addison
and Steele. Party-political diVerences were formalized in the establish-
ment of separate literary clubs: in 1712 Addison set up Daniel Button, a
former servant, to keep a coVee house in Rose Street, Covent Garden,
not far from Will’s, and conveniently close to Jacob Tonson’s oYces in
Bow Street. It was to become Addison’s Whiggish ‘Little Senate’, and its
members included Philips, Tickell, the Oxford poet Henry Carey, John
Hughes, Addison’s cousin Eustace Budgell, Welsted, Thomas Burnet,
youngest son of the Bishop, and George Duckett.70 Addison used the
identity see Linda Colley, Britons: Forging the Nation 1707–1837 (New Haven, Conn.: Yale
University Press, 1992).
67 On the developing use of national characters in the debate over the war see Alan W.
Bower and Robert A. Erickson, introd. to John Arbuthnot, The History of John Bull
(Oxford: Clarendon, 1976), pp. lvii–lxviii.
68 In the autumn of 1713 Steele published a new journal, entitled simply The English-
man. Its editor was, Steele explained, going to lay before his readers the present state of the
world ‘like a Man of Experience and a Patriot’, and, above all, impress upon them the need
to ‘Be an ENGLISHMAN’ (Steele, Englishman 1, 6 October 1713, in The Englishman ed. Rae
Blanchard (Oxford: Clarendon, 1955), 5.) See also Calhoun Winton, Captain Steele: The
Early Career of Richard Steele (Baltimore, Md.: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1964),
154–78.
69 It is signiWcant that the printed debate over the pastorals did not really take oV until
this period: most of the Whig praise of Philips’s poems dates from 1712 (see Heuston,
‘Windsor Forest and Guardian 40’, 160–5).
70 Sherburn, Early Career, 114–48.
Spectator to promote this circle of contemporary Whig poets, publish-

ing essays praising the poetry of Tickell, Budgell, John Hughes, Philips,
Henry Carey, and Laurence Eusden. Meanwhile, Tories such as Pope,
Gay, and Swift, who were eventually to form the Scriblerus Club,
remained centred around Will’s.
Tickell’s defence of Philips’s poems took the form of Wve Guardian
papers of April 1713. His argument concerned the concept of a native
English pastoral, and the need to modify the prescriptions of the
ancients in the light of native custom.71 Tickell began the fourth, and
most inXuential, paper in the series with the statement that he would
treat the English ‘with such Meekness as becomes a good Patriot; and
[I] shall [ . . . ] recommend this our Island as a proper Scene for Pas-
toral’.72 He continued:
our Countrymen have so good an Opinion of the Ancients, and think so
modestly of themselves, that the generality of Pastoral Writers have either
stoln all from the Greeks and Romans, or so servilely imitated their Manners
and Customs, as makes them very ridiculous.73
Tickell’s Whig politics take the form of heavy-handed cultural nation-

alism. By emphasizing the patriotic commitment of writers who used
native settings he could, by implication, claim that ‘servile’ neoclassi-
cists and their defenders were being unpatriotic.74 Pope responded to
Tickell’s essay in his satiric Guardian paper 40, when, in addition to
accusing Philips of plagiarism, he said that his rival, in spite of his
attempts to anglicize the pastoral, had made mistakes in English natural
history, by planting wolves amongst his shepherds.75 According to Pope
it was Philips who was not a true Englishman, being unable even to
provide a faithful account of his nation’s past. He argued that Philips’s
rusticisms were a cruel parody of the speech patterns of his compatriots,
and mocked his attempts to render native idiom by oVering his own
Wctional eclogue about a pair of hapless rustics named ‘Rager’ and
‘Cicily’. Thus the ‘pastoral wars’, begun in the politicized context of
Whig war panegyric, were extended into the following decade by the
71 For a fuller account of the series see Congleton, Pastoral Poetry, 87–9.
72 Guardian 30, 15 April 1713, in Joseph Addison, The Guardian, ed. John Calhoun
Stephens (Lexington, Ky.: University Press of Kentucky, 1982), 128.
73 Ibid.
74 Edward Heuston has argued that Tickell’s decision to write the Guardian essays was
prompted by Pope’s claims to be a pastoral poet at the end of Windsor Forest (Heuston,
‘Windsor Forest and Guardian 40’, 165–8).
75 Guardian 40, 27 April 1713, in The Guardian, ed. Stephens, 161.
polemical conXict over Englishness that was generated by the peace

negotiations. This was a dispute over immediate political questions
played out through discussions of literary form and poetic tradition.
Literary reformation and the Whig periodicals
As this account of the pastoral wars suggests, the emergent periodical

press created a medium within which politico-literary debate Xour-
ished. Addison’s and Steele’s journals provided an essential and contro-
versial outlet for the dissemination of Whig poetry and Whig literary
criticism. Their essays also provided the most explicit exposition of
developing ideas about literary reformation. Over the course of
Anne’s reign the project of literary reformation shifted away from its
associations with John Dennis’s prescriptive and formal criticism.
Reform was redeWned as reWnement, and became part of a developing
discourse of politeness and sociability, crucially linked to the liberties so
recently established with the Revolution. One of the most prominent
Wgures responsible for this transformation was the third Earl of Shaftes-
bury. As Lawrence E. Klein has described, Shaftesbury was committed
to a programme of gentlemanly reformation, which was designed to
improve the moral and cultural health of the ruling elite.76 Like Black-
more’s and Dennis’s criticism, this programme was linked to a political
agenda. However, where these earlier writers had stressed correction
and regulation, Shaftesbury’s project was to be brought about by the use
of polite philosophy, which he saw as a way not just of articulating
ethical ideas but of transforming the modern gentry. He lamented the
decline in recent culture that had brought about the ‘vile Ribaldry and
other gross Irregularitys’ of drama, and yet he dismissed the didacticism
of ‘Zealots’, claiming that ‘the World, however it may be taught, will not
be tutor’d ’.77 Shaftesbury argued that a change in sensibility would be
brought about at the level of manners and politeness:
Wit will mend upon our hands, and Humour will reWne it-self; if we take care
not to tamper with it, and bring it under Constraint, by severe Usage and
76 Lawrence E. Klein, Shaftesbury and the Culture of Politeness (Cambridge: Cambridge

77 Anthony Ashley Cooper, third Earl of Shaftesbury, Soliloquy: or Advice to an Author,
in Characteristicks of Men, Manners, Opinions, Times, ed. Philip Ayres, 2 vols. (Oxford:
Clarendon, 1999), i. 142; Sensus Communis: An Essay on the Freedom of Wit and Humour
(1709), in Characteristicks, i. 41.
rigorous Prescriptions. All Politeness is owing to Liberty. We polish one an-

other, and rub oV our Corners and rough Sides by a sort of amicable Collision.78
The passage reveals both the shift in emphasis from ‘rigorous prescrip-
tions’ to polished politeness, and a stress on the link between manners
and political liberty.
These ideas were to be embodied in Addison’s and Steele’s periodic-
als, which exemplify the redeWnition of reformation as a form of
politeness, although their formulation is far more explicitly linked to
an emphasis on Christian virtue. In Guardian 21 Steele reveals his hopes
for a shift in the deWnition of polite society:
I will not despair but to bring Men of Wit into a Love and Admiration of
Sacred Writings; and [ . . . ] I promise my self to see the Day when it shall be as
much the Fashion among Men of Politeness to admire a Rapture of St Paul, as
any Wne Expression in Virgil or Horace ; and to see a well-dressed young Man
produce an Evangelist out of his Pocket, and be no more out of Countenance
than if it were a Classick Printed by Elzevir.79
Steele’s vision of the gentleman of the future oVers a model of reforma-
tion that is a long way away from that found in the Whig writings of the
1680s, which had condemned the wit and fashion associated with the
court as corrupting and enervating. The Whig periodicals eroded the
opposition between polite society and moral virtue, hoping to create a
new social norm in which Scripture would become as much a part of
everyday life as the latest coVee shop or classical edition. In essays on
subjects from petticoats to Christian doctrine, John Dennis’s minatory
prescriptions were replaced by a companionable and generalist discus-
sion of matters of taste and ethics.80 Although the politics of the Tatler
and the Spectator were ostensibly neutral, they could nonetheless dem-
onstrate quietly that Whiggism was the natural consequence of the
public values and attitudes that they articulated, while at the same
time diverting attention from private and privileged matters of politics
to public matters of social behaviour.81 In deWning the terms of modern
politeness, the essays also oVered a retrospective evaluation of earlier
literary texts, and one of the most prominent objects of criticism was
78 ‘Sensus Communis’, in Characteristicks, i. 39.
79 Steele, Guardian 21, 4 April 1713, in The Guardian, ed. Stephens, 104.
80 On the role of the periodicals in the development of literary criticism see Terry
Eagleton, The Function of Criticism from The Spectator to Post-Structuralism (London:

Verso, 1984), 9–27.
81 In the Wrst number of the Spectator Mr Spectator declares: ‘I never espoused any
Party with Violence, and am resolved to observe an exact Neutrality between the Whigs
the court of Charles II, and the literature that it produced. In his review
of a production of Wycherley’s Country Wife in the Tatler in April 1709
Steele argues that
The Character of Horner, and the Design of it, is a good Representation of the
Age in which that Comedy was written; at which Time, Love and Wenching
were the Business of Life, and the Gallant Manner of pursuing Women, was
the best Recommendation at Court [ . . . ] a Poet had, at that Time, discover’d
his Want of knowing the Manners of the Court he liv’d in, by a Virtuous
Character, in his Wne Gentleman, as he would show his Ignorance, by drawing
a Vitious One to please the present Audience.82
Steele’s argument is premised upon a distinction between the mores of
the previous age and those of the present. By historicizing the phenom-
enon of Restoration comedy, he makes it clear that the modern day
demands a very diVerent form of drama. However, in other papers the
moral agenda appears to be transhistorical. Addison’s opinions on earlier
English poetry posit morality as the cornerstone of literary excellence in
all ages. In the Chevy Chase papers he claims that the old Northumbrian
ballad is superior to the ‘wrong artiWcial Taste’ of ‘Gothick’ writers like
Cowley in being, like the poems of Homer, Vergil, or Milton, founded
‘upon some important Precept of Morality, adapted to the Constitution
of the Country in which the Poet writes’.83 Similarly, in the papers on
Paradise Lost the poem’s excellence is demonstrated in its moral function.
In paper 369 he announces that he is of the opinion that
no just Heroic Poem ever was, or can be made, from whence one great Moral
may not be deduced. That which reigns in Milton is the most universal and
most useful that can be imagined; it is in short this, that Obedience to the Will
of God makes Men happy, and that Disobedience makes them miserable.84
Whilst moral reformation was integral to the contemporary evolution
of polite society, it was evidently not the exclusive preserve of the
moderns.
and Tories’ (Spectator 1, 1 March 1711, in The Spectator, ed. Donald F. Bond, 5 vols. (Oxford:
Clarendon, 1965), i. 5). For a closer examination of the politics of the Spectator see
Lawrence E. Klein, ‘Joseph Addison’s Whiggism’, in David Womersley (ed.), Cultures of
Whiggism: New Essays on Literature and History in the Long Eighteenth Century (Newark,
NJ, and London: University of Delaware Press, forthcoming).
82 Tatler 3, 16 April 1709, in The Tatler, ed. Bond, i. 31. There is a similar emphasis in his
essay on The Man of Mode in Spectator 65, of May 1711, in which he examines the role of wit
in the theatre.
83 Spectator 70, 21 May 1711, in The Spectator, ed. Bond, i. 297, 299.
84 Spectator 369, 3 May 1712, in The Spectator, ed. Bond, iii. 391.
In time Whig writers would come to view all these very varied
approaches towards literary reform as part of a continuum which
stretched from the Reformation to the present day. In Mary Wortley
Montagu’s parody of The Dunciad in ‘Her Palace Placed Beneath a
Muddy Road’ we Wnd a history of Whig and proto-Whig writing that
neutralizes the diVerences between the Puritan and the polite:
When Harry’s Brows the Diadem adorn
From Reformation, Learning shall be born,
Slowly in Strength the infant shall improve
The parents glory and its Country’s love,
Free from the thraldom of Monastic Rhimes,
In bright progression bless succeeding Times,
Milton free Poetry from the Monkish Chain,
And Adisson that Milton shall explain,
Point out the Beauties of each living Page,
Reform the taste of a degenerate Age.85
Wortley Montagu’s poem presents a narrative of English history that
links the Reformation to Milton and Addison in a seamless progression
of ever-increasing moral reWnement. However, as I have already sug-
gested, the Whig endorsement of moral reformation was complex. Not
only, as we have seen, did the Whig opposition of the 1680s have roots in
the activities of prominent Restoration rakes, but there were clearly
some tensions between the virtues preached by the reformists and the
emphasis on sociability that marked the activities of the Court Whigs
and their friends in the Kit-Cat Club. The convivial environment of the
Club and its toasts and lavish feasts were integral to its self-presentation
as an alternative centre of cultural and political values. In emphasizing
how much fun they had together, the Kit-Cats embodied a coupling of
Whig politics and sociability, which was a powerful rejoinder to con-
temporary images of Whigs as unsociable enthusiasts. However, this
very conviviality was, as David Solkin has observed, potentially in
conXict with the reformation movement, a problem which is clearly
negotiated in the contemporary visual representation of Whig social
rituals. In his analysis of James Thornhill’s group portrait of prominent
Whigs in conversation Andrew Quicke in Conversation with the 1st Earl
85 Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, ‘Her Palace Placed Beneath a Muddy Road’, in Essays
and Poems and Simplicity, A Comedy, ed. Robert Halsband and Isobel Grundy (Oxford:
Clarendon, 1977; paperback edn. 1993), 248.
of Godolphin, Joseph Addison, Sir Richard Steele (c.1711–12) Solkin argues

that sociability is carefully presented in moderation: although the
group are centred around a bottle of wine, there is only one bottle,
and two glasses between Wve men.86 We can see a similar ambivalence
about sociability and reformation in Steele’s pronouncements on
drinking in the Tatler. In Tatler 241 he had gone so far as to condemn
the practice of drinking alcohol outright, stating that even when drink-
ing did not lead to excess it still prevented a man from being ‘Master of
himself ’.87 Yet Steele himself was no stranger to the high life, as
Macaulay phrases it, ‘a rake among scholars, and a scholar among
rakes’, while his club, the spiritual home of modern Whiggism, was
famed for its splendid feasts and drinking songs.88 His high-minded
attack prompted irate responses from his readers, and a month after
the piece Wrst came out he oVered a more accommodating approach
towards alcohol, which emphasized the polite virtues of moderate
consumption of spirits:
Noisy Mirth has something too rustick in it to be considered without Terror
by Men of Politeness: But while the Discourse improves in a well-chosen
Company, from the Addition of Spirits which Xow from moderate Cups, it
must be acknowledged, that Leisure Time cannot be more agreeably, or
perhaps more usefully employed than at such Meetings.89
Steele’s retraction and re-evaluation of his position says much about the
ongoing dialogues within early eighteenth-century Whig ideology. Ma-
caulay famously observed that Addison ‘reconciled wit and virtue, after
a long and disastrous separation, during which wit had been led astray
by proXigacy, and virtue by fanaticism’.90 However, this marriage be-
tween wit and virtue was not always entirely harmonious. The ideo-
logical and social distance between the discourses of Puritan piety and
civilized politeness inevitably created moments of tension such as the
one described above, in the process exposing discontinuities between
the competing political agendas that informed early eighteenth-century
Whiggism.
86 David Solkin, Painting for Money: The Visual Arts and the Public Sphere in Eight-
eenth-Century England (New Haven and Yale, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1993), 41–7.
87 Tatler 241, 24 October 1710, in The Tatler, ed. Bond, iii. 237.
88 Thomas Babington Macaulay, ‘The Life and Writings of Addison’ (1843), in The
Works of Lord Macaulay, 10 vols. (London: Longmans, Green, 1898), x. 121.

89 Tatler 252, 18 November 1710, in The Tatler, ed. Bond, iii. 282.
90 Macaulay, Works, x. 167.
Peace poems
As Queen Anne’s reign drew to a close Tory diplomacy moved Wnally

towards the conclusion of peace with France, which was cemented with
the signing of the Treaty of Utrecht in April 1713. The Whigs, predict-
ably, saw the event as a capitulation to France and a negation of the
years of Continental warfare that had preceded it.91 Tories, on the other
hand, were jubilant. Many poets, like the author of The Triumph of
Virtue (1713), crowed over the defeat of the Whigs and their warmonger-
ing: in this poem Harley is lauded as the ‘Noble Patriot’ who has
delivered a suVering Israel, and ‘Freed the Nation from its servile
Yoak: | The Yoak of War, of all things most accurs’d’.92 The author of
the anonymous Peace. A Poem (1713) turns the rhetoric of Whig tri-
umphalism on its head: ‘Too long have We indulg’d our Martial Flame, |
Disgrac’d by Triumphs, pillag’d into Fame’.93 The Whig poems on the
peace are, unsurprisingly, characterized by a reassertion of the merits of
the war. Their emphasis is on the success of the battles and, above all, on
the heroism of the disgraced general who led them. Thus in Thomas
Tickell’s poem On the Prospect of Peace (1713), while there are tributes to
the Tory ministers, the hero is not Harley, or Bolingbroke, or Shrews-
bury, but Marlborough. The poem begins in territory familiar from
countless Whig celebrations of the war, with a scathing account of the
cowardice of French soldiers who ‘Lurk’d in the Trench, and skulk’d
behind the Line’ while ‘Britain’s heroes [ . . . ] Such temper’d Fire with
manly Beauty join’d’.94 In the retelling Marlborough’s exploits have
acquired a fabulous quality, as returning heroes regaled their young
with romantic tales ‘of Palfrey’d Dames, bold Knights, and Magic Spells,
| Where whole Brigades one Champion’s Arms o’erthrow’ (pp. 3–4).
Tickell’s poem is as much a consolidation of the Whig mythologization
of the war as it is a celebration of the peace. Even when he is commem-
orating the advent of peace his vision of Britannia’s place in the world is
still one of a nation rooted in the European conXict that generated the
war. Britain may no longer be Wghting, but her commitment to the
91 A good account of the peace negotiations is given by MacLachlan, ‘The Road to
Peace 1710–13’, in Holmes, (ed.), Britain after the Glorious Revolution, 197–215.
92 The Triumph of Virtue: A Poem Upon the Peace, Inscribed to the Earl of Oxford
(London, 1713), 1.
93 Peace. A Poem Inscrib’d to the Right Honourable the Viscount Lord Bolingbroke
(London, 1713), 1.
94 Thomas Tickell, A Poem, To His Excellency the Lord Privy Seal, on The Prospect of
Peace (London, 1713), 1–2. Further page references in the text are to this edition.
policies of the alliance is unchanged: ‘To Europe’s Wounds a Mother’s

Aid she brings, | And holds in equal Scales the Rival Kings’ (p. 7). From
Tickell’s perspective the peace is only possible because the war has been
won, and thus the event can be celebrated as a Whig achievement made
possible by military victory.95 Like all the poems on the peace, The
Prospect of Peace focuses on the trading opportunities oVered by the
Treaty of Utrecht, but Tickell again deWnes the nation’s role in the new
world order in familiar terms: ‘In circling Beams shall Godlike An n a
glow, | And Churchill’s Sword hang o’er the prostrate Foe’ (p. 10).
Tickell’s poem could not be more diVerent from its Tory counterpart,
Pope’s Windsor-Forest. Sales of The Prospect of Peace immediately out-
stripped those of Windsor-Forest, but Pope’s poem is the only celebra-
tion of the peace that is still read.96 Traditional accounts of Pope’s
oVering have explained the poem within the contexts of biblical and
classical allusion, and the most contemporary point of comparison is
generally John Denham’s Cooper’s Hill.97 However, reading Windsor-
Forest in the context of contemporary Whig and Tory poems on the war
discloses an interesting perspective on its literary politics. This context
reveals the poem as rooted in the contested versions of the national
poetic and political past that we have seen developing in Whig poetry
over the decade, and also demonstrates that it is based on a very
selective reading of the poem taken as its model, Cooper’s Hill.
Where Tickell’s poem is, as we have seen, as much a celebration of
war as of its conclusion, Pope’s poem, as numerous commentators have
shown, is an unequivocal rejection of the arts of warfare in place of
those of peace. The War of the Spanish Succession is largely occluded in
the poem, to the extent that, as Robert Cummings observes, Windsor-
Forest is ‘radically inappropriate to the celebration of a political event’.98
95 For a fuller account of Tickell’s poem and its representation of the Treaty see John
Richardson, ‘Alexander Pope’s Windsor-Forest: Its Context and Attitudes towards Slavery’,
96 The Prospect of Peace averaged almost an edition a month for the early months of its
existence, while Pope’s poem had only two editions in its Wrst year (Sherburn, Early
Career, 101).
97 One of the most inXuential of these accounts is Earl Wasserman’s chapter on
Windsor-Forest in The Subtler Language: Critical Readings of Neoclassic and Romantic

Poems (Baltimore, Md.: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1959), 101–68. See also Reuben
A. Brower, Alexander Pope: The Poetry of Allusion (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1959);
Howard Erskine-Hill, ‘The Political Poet in his Time’.
98 Cummings, ‘Addison’s ‘‘Inexpressible Chagrin’’ and Pope’s Poem on the Peace’. This
essay oVers an important, and long overdue, consideration of Windsor-Forest in the

context of other poems on the peace.
Where Tickell’s poem ends with a list of the poets who will celebrate the
liberty of peacetime culture, such as Congreve, Rowe, Prior, Addison,
Garth, and Philips, all poets who had written serious public verse, Pope
addresses his poem to George Granville, a writer whose operas and
short lyrics made him an unlikely national bard. Rather than engage
with the public occasion of the poem, Pope develops the mythical
associations of the natural world of Windsor Forest, which, Earl Wasser-
man and others have claimed, become an extended metaphor for the
political life of the nation. Wasserman argues that where images of
warfare do appear in the poem, they tend towards the depiction of
warfare as destruction and aggression, and the hunting scenes, so often
used in war panegyric (such as Harrison’s Woodstock Park) as a meta-
phor for the impending military victory, are here signiWcant by their
emphasis on the poignancy of the short lives and violent deaths of the
hunted pheasant, lapwing, or lark. Windsor-Forest demonstrates its
opposition to Whig war panegyric not by entering into overt conXict
with it, but rather by obscuring its own political stance, and thus
opposing panegyric style as much as substance.
Pope’s use of Windsor as the local focus of the poem is important: it
is clearly deWned in opposition to the Whiggish ‘rural court’ at Blen-
heim, the topos of so many Whig poems. Several Tory satires published
in the years immediately preceding the peace use Windsor as shorthand
for Tory party allegiance. The Windsor Prophecy. Found in Marlborough
Rock (1711), a satire on the ambitions of the Churchills, oVsets Blenheim
Palace against Windsor Forest. The anonymous author claims that:
When Stock of Wood shall come to owe,
Its New-born Name to m a r l b o r o u g h
Believe it then, from hence shall Rise
A p l a n t , whose Boughs shall reach the Skies.99
It is Windsor that represents the rightful home of the nation’s leader,
and her justice will ultimately prevail to overcome the designing
Churchills. In another poem of the same name the struggle between
the Whig war party and the Tory peacemakers is represented as the
hawks versus the doves—an image which reappears in Windsor-Forest,
where Pan’s pursuit of Lodona is compared to the Xight of the ‘Werce
Eagle’ after the ‘trembling Doves’ (ll. 185–8).100
99 The Windsor Prophecy. Found in Marlborough Rock (London, 1711), 3.
100 The Windsor Prophecy. Printed in the Year 1712 (London, 1712). See also Swift’s poem
of the same name, The W—ds—r Prophecy (1711), in The Poems of Jonathan Swift, ed.
Yet while Pope’s poem is undoubtedly informed by a Whig/Tory

divide over the topos of Blenheim versus Windsor, it is also deWned
in opposition to an emphasis on Windsor as the home of constitutional
freedom that can be found in earlier Whig panegyrics on the
war.101 Charles Gildon’s Libertas Triumphans (1708) ended with a pro-
spect of Windsor which made the political implications of the site
explicit:
Near, r u n n y m e a d with Pleasure it surveys,
Of Old enobl’d, with Peculiar Praise:
With righteous Force the f r e e - b o r n e n g l i s h there
For Sacred m a g n a c h a r t a did declare.
And with their a n c i e n t r i g h t s and l i b e r t y
Compell’d reluctant Tyrants to comply.
Third Edward here to conquer France was born,
And Valour, with new Ornaments adorn.
Here a n n a yearly makes Her blest Retreat;
And with wise Counsels Gallic Fraud defeat.102
Gildon saw in Windsor not only the birthplace of modern political
liberty, but also a royal palace linked to a long tradition of heroic anti-
French warfare.103 It is not surprising that Pope chose to distance his
account of the forest from these powerfully Whiggish associations.
However, in neglecting the constitutional signiWcance of Windsor he
produced a poem which was also very diVerent from Denham’s Cooper’s
Hill. Pope gives an account of Denham’s poem as a series of images and
descriptions of a place ‘tending to some Hint, or leading into some
ReXection, upon moral Life or political Institution’,104 and many critics
have read this as a description of Pope’s own method in Windsor-Forest,
but in fact the two poems are very diVerent.105 Denham’s poem is far
Harold Williams, 3 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon, 1958). All line references to Windsor-Forest
are to the Twickenham edition.
101 Vincent Carretta has argued that Windsor-Forest should also be seen alongside the
Whig representation of recent history in contemporary paintings, and in particular in

the context of Sir James Thornhill’s Allegory of the Protestant Succession at Greenwich (The
Snarling Muse, 12–18).
102 Charles Gildon, Libertas Triumphans: A Poem (London, 1708), 17.
103 In Windsor Castle: A Poem (London, 1708) the interest is again focused on the
ceiling paintings of Williamite military victories, and on the statues of heroic Edward and
his Knights of the Garter.
104 Pope, Iliad, XVI. 466 n. in TE viii. 261.
105 e.g. Brendan O’Hehir, editor of Cooper’s Hill, claims that ‘not merely does Windsor-
Forest stand self-confessed as a poem inspired by Cooper’s Hill, but a careful analysis shows
it to conform to the precedents of Denham’s piece in every signiWcant detail’ (introd. to
more politically explicit than Pope’s.106 He uses the buildings of the

castle itself, the monuments of the monarchs interred within it, and the
proximity of Runnymede to articulate a series of very explicit state-
ments about the need for a mixed monarchy, where ‘Happy, when both
to the same Center move, | When Kings give liberty, and Subjects
love’.107 In Pope’s poem there is little interest in the castle building
itself, as Joseph Warton was to observe.108 Where Pope does refer to it, it
is to make a very diVerent point from that made either by Gildon or
Denham, both of whom used the palace to present a gallery of royal
military heroes. In Denham’s case the list of royal warriors emphasizes
his royalist agenda, while in Gildon’s poem they are seen to anticipate
Marlborough’s actions. However, when Pope refers to the line of princes
buried in or born at the palace (ll. 299–320) it is in order to emphasize
the ravages of time. He notes that Verrio’s paintings of Edward III’s
victories are already decaying on the walls, and that the signiWcance of
the buried tribe of English heroes is that ‘the Grave unites’ and ‘blended
lie th’Oppressor and th’Opprest’ (ll. 317–18).
It was this neglect of the historical import of the palace that formed
the basis of John Dennis’s criticism of Pope’s poem. Dennis argues that
the political reXections that form the moral centre of Cooper’s Hill are
entirely missing from Pope’s prospect of the park:
The Objects that are presented to the Reader in this latter Poem, are for the
most part trivial and triXing, as Hunting, Fishing, Setting, Shooting, and a
thousand common Landskips. Whereas of a thousand Objects that Cooper’s-
Hill presents to the View, Sir j o h n d e n h a m chuses only the most Instruct-
ive, the most Noble, and the most MagniWcent [ . . . ] As St. Paul’s, London,
Windsor, Thames, the Side of Cooper’s-Hill that is next to the Thames, and
Runny-Mead between them, ennobled by the Grant of the Great Charter there
to the People of England.109
Expans’d Hieroglyphicks: A Critical Edition of Sir John Denham’s Cooper’s Hill, ed. O’Hehir
(Berkeley and Los Angeles, Calif.: University of California Press, 1969), 5).
106 For the speciWc political occasion of the poem see William Rockett, ‘ ‘‘Courts make
Kings, but Kings the Court’’: Cooper’s Hill and the Constitutional Crisis of 1642 ’, Restor-
ation, 17 (1993), 1–14.
107 John Denham, Cooper’s Hill (1668 edn.), in Expans’d Hieroglyphicks, ed. O’Hehir,
160, ll. 333–4.

108 Warton writes: ‘I have frequently wondered that he should have omitted the
opportunity of describing at length its venerable ancient castle’ (Warton, An Essay on

the Writings and Genius of Pope (London, 1756), 24).
109 John Dennis, Remarks upon Mr. Pope’s Translation of Homer. With Two Letters
concerning Windsor Forest, and the Temple of Fame (1717), in Critical Works, ii. 136. Further
page references in the text are to this edition.
Dennis, like Gildon, places a typically Whiggish emphasis on the consti-

tutional importance of Runnymede. He also shares his stress on the
signiWcance of the buried kings at Windsor, who were powerful symbols
as ‘the Advancers of England ’s Glory’ and an important ‘Remembrance
of our past Triumphs’ (p. 136). Dennis’s short critique of Windsor-Forest
in some ways comes to the nub of the party politics of the poem. Pope,
as he observes, borrows much from Cooper’s Hill, a topographical poem
which Denham had used to emphasize the importance of political
moderation and mixed government.110 However, Pope’s poem takes
this framework and Wllets out the constitutional politics that Gildon
and others had found so attractive. He replaces them with subjects
which, as Dennis says, are ‘trivial’: the pursuits of leisure. From this
perspective the public occasion that Pope is ostensibly celebrating is
obscured, appearing only, if at all, through a series of literary tropes: the
brutal chase, the pursuit of Lodona, and the double fall of the two
Williams.111 Viewed in the context of contemporary Whig panegyrics, it
appears that the political import of Windsor-Forest, like that of the
Pastorals, lies as much in its refusal to engage with public poetry at all
as in the coded hints of Jacobitism that many recent critics have
identiWed as the sign of a political agenda.112 It is thus a poem whose
politics are ‘radically inappropriate’ not just to its occasion but also to
the poem it takes as its model.
The death of the queen
Although Pope began Windsor-Forest with the joyful pronouncement

that ‘Peace and Plenty tell, a s t u a r t reigns’ (l. 42), Anne’s days were
numbered, as he well knew. She died on 1 August 1714, and on her
110 On the relationship between politics and aesthetics in Cooper’s Hill see Paul
Korshin, ‘The Evolution of Neo-Classical Poetics: Cleveland, Denham, and Waller as

Poetic Theorists’, Eighteenth-Century Studies, 2 (1968–9), 102–37.
111 Robert Cummings argues convincingly that recent critics of Windsor-Forest, in-
spired by Wasserman, have been too quick to read everything in the poem as a metaphor
of its proposed subject; namely, the replacement of war with peace. He argues that the
poem does not have this political and thematic coherence, and is better understood as
belonging to a tradition of sylvan poetry typiWed by Statius (Cummings, ‘Windsor-Forest
as a Silvan Poem’, English Literary History, 54 (1987), 63–79).
112 In fact, Pope’s criticism of the management of the war, and of the Whig ministry, is
restrained compared with many of the other Tory or Jacobite peace poems, such as Bevil
Higgons’s A Poem on the Peace (London, 1713) or the anonymous The Triumph of Virtue
(London, 1713).
deathbed placed the white rod of the Lord Treasurer in the hands of
Shrewsbury. The choice of the moderate Shrewsbury, rather than the
Jacobite Bolingbroke, in eVect secured the future of the Hanoverian
succession. Fearful of a Jacobite rising against the Elector, Shrewsbury
ordered immediate military fortiWcations, ensuring that when George
arrived in London, where he was crowned on 1 August, he was met ‘with
such Tranquility as can scarce be believ’d but by them who were Eye-
Witnesses of that memorable Event’.113
The editor of the Wnal volume of Poems on AVairs of State writes of
Anne’s death that ‘few princes ever died so little celebrated in verse’.114
However, if the queen’s death in itself did not produce a Xood of poetry,
the accession of George I did. All those anxious to secure places or
pensions under the new regime rushed their oVerings to the presses,
and David Foxon lists over Wfty poems written on the accession, arrival,
and coronation of the new king in 1714, more than twice as many as
those produced on Anne’s accession.115 For Whig poets George was in
many ways a much easier subject for panegyric than his predecessor,
and he was swiftly appropriated into the tradition of military heroism
they had celebrated in William and Marlborough. The Whig panegyric
tradition ensured that the new king automatically inherited a number of
historical and mythical forebears. For Welsted his leadership is on a par
with ‘Alcides, Pollux, Numa, and Nassau’; for Samuel Croxall, George
takes his place alongside a group made up of ‘the Barons who in Times
of Yore | Successful Arms for England ’s Safety bore’, the two Edwards,
Henry V, Elizabeth, and, again, William.116 The new king was also
connected to the ongoing narrative of patriotic martyrdom, through
the losses of the War of the Spanish Succession, as Welsted emphasizes:
for this, the British youth expir’d,
Blanamian Welds were strow’d with heaps of slain,
And Virtue won on Almenara’s plain.117
113 Abel Boyer, Quadriennium Annae Postremum; or the Political State of Great Britain,
2nd edn., 8 vols. (London, 1718–20), viii. 119.

114 Frank H. Ellis, in POAS vii. 603. David Foxon numbers twenty funeral poems
produced in 1714.
115 David Foxon, English Verse 1701–1750: A Catalogue of Separately Printed Poems with
Notes on Contemporary Collected Editions, 2 vols. (Cambridge: Cambridge University

Press, 1975).
116 Leonard Welsted, An Epistle to Mr Steele, on the King’s Accession to the Crown
(London, 1714), 29; Samuel Croxall, The Vision, A Poem (London, 1715), 7–15.
117 Welsted, An Epistle to Mr Steele, 28. See also Dennis, On the Accession of King George,
where he celebrates ‘the Souls of the triumphant Slain, | Who dy’d to compass this
However, while there are many similarities between the poems on the
accession of George I and those written in 1689, in the later poems
the nature of the transfer of power is less problematic than it was for the
panegyrists of the Revolution. Contemporaries were not faced with a
sudden and unprecedented change of ruler, but a constitutional fait
accompli that had been prepared over a decade earlier. Another import-
ant shift away from the themes of the Revolution is the emphasis on
trade and prosperity that we Wnd in the accession panegyrics. After two
decades of prolonged Continental warfare, poets writing on the acces-
sion envisage the reign of their new monarch as one dedicated to peace,
trade, and liberty rather than renewed engagement overseas. For all the
allusions to William, and the race of godlike heroes, the most charac-
teristic note of the poems of 1714 is one of relatively peaceful optimism:
Not long Religious Rage mankind shall tear,
Nor wasting Zeal her bloody standard rear.
Commerce again prepares to lift its head,
Again to Xourish, and its bounds to spread;
The Merchant shall transplant in British air
Whatever growths remotest regions bear,
Whatever Art in various lands improves,
Or the sun ripens, or its climate loves118
Along with this new peace and political stability would come a bur-
geoning of British arts.119 Welsted prophesies an age of cultural bril-
liance fostered under peace and liberty:
O Liberty! O Goddess! hail. Thy charms
Politeness give to Peace, and fame to Arms:
Great Patroness of arts! thy ripening Wre
Instructs each waking genius to aspire120
The liberty for which Whigs had struggled and argued through the
preceding century was now, it would seem, established and ready to
bear social, economic, and cultural fruit. Poets were preparing to
Auspicious Day, | In Blenheim and Ramillia’s deathless Fields’ (Select Works of John Dennis,
i. 335).
118 Welsted, An Epistle to Mr Steele, 27–8.
119 This claim is also anticipated in much earlier poetry: in Libertas Triumphans (1708),
Charles Gildon prophesies of George: ‘Neglected a r t s shall find his early Care, | The
Hev’n-born m u s e his royal Bounty share . . .’ (20)
120 Welsted, An Epistle to Mr Steele, 8. See also Ambrose Philips: ‘Once more the long
neglected Arts to raise, | And form each rising Genius for the Bays.’ An Epistle to the Rt.
Hon. Charles Lord Halifax (London. 1714), 4.
celebrate English triumphs beyond the battleWeld. Their sense of what

Whiggism meant and what it signiWed to be a Whig poet had come
some way from the verse produced in response to the Exclusion Crisis.
As we have seen, at that time a strong, self-aware tradition of poetry
emerged as an oppositional voice in literary-political debate. Over the
next decades it adapted to accommodate the changing role of Whig
political culture, which occupied an increasingly central position in the
evolution of post-Revolution Britain. Yet we should nonetheless see the
Whig verse produced over the whole period as a coherent and evolving
poetic tradition. It was a tradition that was recognized from within: its
later proponents acknowledged their forebears, and developed their
themes, styles, and imagery as well as claiming a much longer native
lineage. It was recognized by opposition Tory poets, both explicitly and
implicitly. It was integral to the literary debates of its time; it exerted a
signiWcant inXuence on the progress of politics, and on their interpret-
ation. The fact that Dryden and Pope’s work of this period remains
familiar to us now, while this poetry with which they were in dialogue is
decidedly unfamiliar, has less to do with the contemporary signiWcance
of Whig poetry, and more to do with later politics of aesthetics. Chapter
5 reconsiders this complex relationship between aesthetics and politics
by turning to examine the ways in which Whig writers theorized and
evaluated their own poetic tradition.
5
The sublime and the liberty of
writing
Whig poetry has long been tarred with the label of ‘bad poetry’, and one
of the aims of this study is to historicize such questions of literary merit
as a way of moving beyond the reductive notions of ‘good’ and ‘bad’
literature. I have argued that we need to recognize the extent to which
attacks on Whig poetry were politicized. In the work of Dryden and the
Scriblerians Whig writers were ridiculed in language which related their
aesthetic quality to their political identity. A reappraisal of the Whig
tradition needs to acknowledge the blurring of the two sets of concerns
to understand the negative criticism which has dominated the reception
of the poetry. However, historicizing notions of literary merit and value
involves considering how Whig poetry was seen by those who liked it, as
well as by those who didn’t. This chapter will explore some of the
reasons why Whig poetry was so highly praised by contemporary
readers. In a recent essay J. Paul Hunter has argued powerfully for
such a reconsideration of historical aesthetics, emphasizing the need
for critics to recognize ‘the dependence, circumstantiality, locality, tem-
porality, and subjectivity of taste’.1 We need only examine the publish-
ing history of the Whig poetry discussed in previous chapters to Wnd
evidence of its contemporary popularity. As we saw in the Introduction,
one of the most widely praised Whig poems was Charles Montagu’s
Epistle to Dorset, which was published by Francis Saunders in two folio
editions in 1690, with further editions in 1702 and 1716.2 Contemporary
enthusiasm for the Epistle was commonly expressed in terms of the
poem’s aVect. In attempting to deWne the true poetic sublime, John
1 J. Paul Hunter, ‘Sleeping Beauties: Are Historical Aesthetics worth Recovering?’,
Eighteenth-Century Studies, 34 (2000), 1–20 (2).

2 The Epistle to Dorset was also circulating in a number of printed miscellanies of the
period. It reappears alongside works by Normanby, Robert Howard, and Roscommon in

A Collection of Poems: Viz, the Temple of Death . . . in editions of 1701, 1702 and 1716, and in a
similar collection, An Essay on Poetry . . . with Several other Poems (London, 1697), which
included Normanby again, Stepney, and Prior.
174 The sublime and the liberty of writing
Dennis wrote of Montagu’s Epistle to Dorset as embodying the ‘wonder-

ful Wre’ that was the very essence of poetic genius,3 while George Sewell
writes of its ‘proper Raptures, and Poetic Fire’.4 Critical and commercial
success was not unique to the Epistle. Addison’s poem on the Battle of
Blenheim, The Campaign, was also very popular, with three editions by
Tonson in folio within the Wrst three months of its publication, and
further editions in London, Edinburgh, and Dublin in 1708, 1710, 1713,
and 1715.5 Again, it was praised for the heat and Wre associated with
poetic Xight: William Harrison’s lines on the poem from Woodstock Park
are echoed elsewhere in contemporary reception:
Each Action he exalts with Rage divine,
And the full Danube Xows in ev’ry Line.
But we in vain to Thy Sublime aspire;
So heatless Glow-worms emulate the Fire.6
Another notable poetic hit of the period was Thomas Tickell’s poem on
the Peace of Utrecht in 1713. Although Pope’s Windsor-Forest is today the
most widely known celebration of the Peace, in 1712 it was Tickell’s
poem The Prospect of Peace that was met with greater acclaim by
contemporaries, published in folio by Tonson in 1712, and going into
Wve editions in its Wrst year, with a sixth in 1714: this compares with
Pope’s poem which had two London editions in 1713 and one in Dublin.
Montagu, Addison, and Tickell would now probably be classiWed as
minor writers, rather than bad poets. But the same cannot be said for
the physician-poet Richard Blackmore, immortalized through his son-
orous braying in The Dunciad and still now a watchword for mediocrity.
Yet he too was popular in his own time: his Wrst epic poem, Prince
Arthur, published by Awnsham and John Churchill, went into two folio
3 John Dennis, Remarks on a Book Entituled, Prince Arthur, An Heroick Poem (1696), in
Critical Works, i. 47.

4 George Sewell, ‘An Epistle to Joseph Addison Esq. Occasion’d by the Death of the
Right Honourable Charles, late Earl of Halifax’ (1715), in The Posthumous Works of Dr
George Sewell (London, 1728), 37.
5 The Campaign also reappeared in printed miscellanies, in Tonson’s 1708 collection of
war poems, A Collection of Poems, occasionally written upon the Victories of Blenheim and
Ramillies, A Select Collection of Modern Poems by Several Hands (London, 1713), Tonson
Miscellany pt. VI of 1716, and the volume A Collection of the Best English Poetry (London,
1717).
6 William Harrison, Woodstock Park. A Poem (London, 1706), 1. See also Jane Brereton,
‘An Epistle to Sir Richard Steele; On the Death of Mr Addison’ in Poems on Several
Occasions: by Mrs Jane Brereton. With Letters to her Friends, and an Account of Her Life
(London, 1744).
The sublime and the liberty of writing 175
editions in 1695, then again in 1696, 1697, an edition by Tonson in 1714,

and a Latin translation in 1700.7
This chapter will attempt to understand and explain this popularity
by exploring the role of the sublime. While there were many diVerent
sorts of Whig poems, from satires and lampoons to ballads and hymns,
the most celebrated were undoubtedly the elevated public poems on
contemporary political events, which were praised for the Wre and
genius of their rapturous poetic excursions: the sublime aVects of the
verse. The prominent Whig literary critics of the period, such as Ad-
dison, Dennis, and Blackmore, all developed and promoted interest in
the native sublime, while Leonard Welsted’s 1712 translation of Longi-
nus’ Peri Hupsous provided an accessible version of the most inXuential
classical theory on the nature of poetic aVect.8
The perceived re-emergence of the sublime in this period was cru-
cially linked to its long-standing relationship with political liberty, an
association which had already been exploited by earlier seventeenth-
century poets. David Norbrook and Nigel Smith have shown the way in
which earlier seventeenth-century republican writers perceived that the
transgressive qualities of the sublime made it a mode Wtting for revolu-
tionary times, enabling poets to echo in stylistic terms the subversive-
ness of their radical political ideology.9 The rejection of formal
precision and order that the sublime entailed also oVered a critique of
the specious harmony associated with Royalist poetics.10 Writers com-
monly traced the linkage of political and poetic freedom to the great
theoretical work on the sublime, Longinus’ Peri Hupsous, which was
7 Prince Arthur was not Blackmore’s only commercial success: his attack on the Wits,
A Satyr Against Wit, went into three editions in London in 1700, and one in Dublin. The
Kit-Cats had three editions in 1708, one in 1709, and one in 1718. And Blackmore’s ‘advice
to a painter’ poem Instructions to Vander Bank went into three editions in 1709, while
Creation, his physico-theological poem, went into four editions in the Wrst six years after
its publication. These bibliographical statistics are supported by the extent of Blackmore
quotation in Edward Bysshe’s The Art of English Poetry (London, 1702), which cites
Blackmore alongside Dryden, Cowley, and Waller as examples of ‘noble thoughts [ . . . ]
that are to be found in the best English Poets’.
8 On the role of this important ‘Longinian’ tradition in the development of the
sublime in the eighteenth century see Peter de Bolla and Andrew AshWeld (eds.), The
Sublime: A Reader in British Eighteenth-Century Aesthetic Theory (Cambridge: Cambridge
9 David Norbrook, Writing the English Republic: Poetry, Rhetoric and Politics, 1627–1660
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 137–41, 212–21; Nigel Smith, Literature and
Revolution in England, 1640–1660 (New Haven, Conn., and London: Yale University
Press, 1994), 125–6, 189, 203.
10 Norbrook, Writing the English Republic, 137–9.
translated by John Hall in 1652.11 Longinus’ theories of poetic process

were rooted in the concept that great writing could only Xourish with
political freedom. At the end of Peri Hupsous he presents the view that
’tis a popular Government which forms and nourishes great Genius’s, since in
eVect all our most celebrated Orators Xourish’d under that Administration
and dy’d with it. There is nothing perhaps, added he, which more elevates the
Souls of great Men than Liberty12
While in the treatise the views expressed here are not explicitly attrib-
uted to Longinus himself, this passage was to provide the basis for the
long-standing perception that the sublime was intrinsically linked to
political liberty. Liberty and sublimity are here causally linked, and this
link stems, importantly, from the historical and ideological contexts of
‘genius’. Poetic genius is not a transcendent attribute of an individual
but one which manifests itself in particular historical conditions. This
sense of the historical-ideological context of poetic aVect is central to
the later evolution of sublime theory. It exists in tension with the
Romantic conviction that genius rises above historical and material
spheres. Here, genius, and thus sublimity, is inseparable from the
particulars of politics and history. Although few early Whig writers
associated themselves with the republican theorists of the 1650s, in the
decades after the Revolution they, like the republicans, recognized the
sublime as a mode appropriate to their political agenda. Leonard
Welsted’s version of Peri Hupsous refashioned the Greek critic as an
early eighteenth-century gentleman, Wnding in his works that ‘Spirit of
Politeness, that Elevation both of Thought and Language, and that
piercing Judgment’ that marked a great writer.13 In his ‘Remarks on
the English Poets’ attached to the translation Welsted read Milton,
Shakespeare, and Spenser through Longinus, and argued that native
English poetry could oVer moments of transport comparable with
classical epic.
The relationship between liberty and sublimity was not only
perceived in the constitutional contexts of modern poetry. Early eight-
eenth-century enthusiasm for the sublime was crucially linked to the
notion that the Revolution demanded new literary forms to express its
11 J.[ohn] H.[all], Peri Hypsous, or Dionysius Longinus of the Height of Eloquence
(London, 1652).
12 Longinus, On Great Writing, trans. Leonard Welsted, in The Works of Dionysius
Longinus, on the Sublime. Or, a Treatise Concerning the Sovereign Perfection of Writing
(London, 1712), 125–6.
13 Welsted, The Works of Dionysius Longinus, sig. a4v .
radical implications.14 Whig literary critics drew on a libertarian rhetoric

to express their hopes for modern verse. Richard Blackmore, for example,
calls for ‘some Good Genius qualify’d for such an Undertaking’ who
‘would break the Ice, assert the Liberty of Poetry, and set up for an Original
in Writing in a way accommodated to the Religion, Manners, and other
Circumstances we are now under’.15 Samuel Cobb declares that ‘an over-
curious Study of being correct, enervates the Vigour of the Mind, slackens
the Spirits, and cramps the Genius of a Free Writer’.16 For some, this
interest in ‘the Liberty of Poetry’ took the form of a new enthusiasm for
blank verse.17 By writing poetry without a formal rhyme scheme, it was
argued, poets could restore native verse to an ancient state of liberty, just
as the Revolution had restored the liberties earlier founded in the ancient
Constitution. Thus Shaftesbury praises Milton and Shakespeare, who
To their eternal Honour they have withal been the Wrst of Eu r o p e a n s , who
since the Go t h i c k Model of Poetry, attempted to throw oV the horrid
Discord of jingling Rhyme. They have asserted antient Poetick Liberty, and
have happily broken the Ice for those who are to follow ’em18
As Shaftesbury’s statement suggests, blank verse contained within it

elements both of the modern and the ancient. It could represent the
restitution of ancient political liberty and, at the same time, the casting
oV of a barbarous and uncivilized literary tradition, ‘the Gothick Model’.
John Dennis justiWes his use of blank verse in The Monument (1702) citing
two very diVerent traditions of literary criticism: ‘I will only put the
Reader in mind that Mr Milton looked upon Ryme as a Bondage, and my
Lord Roscommon and Mr Dryden as a Barbarity’.19 In this formulation
14 John Tutchin, for example, asserts that ‘Freedom (the much-lov’d Theme) our Lines
adorn, | Of which our Fathers sang beneath the Morn’ (An Heroick Poem upon the Late
Expedition of His Majesty, to rescue England from Popery, Tyranny, and Arbitrary Govern-
ment (London, 1689), 8).
15 Richard Blackmore, preface to A Paraphrase on the Book of Job (London, 1700), sig.
b1r.
16 Samuel Cobb, ‘Discourse on Criticism and the Liberty of Writing’, in Poems on
Several Occasions (London, 1709), sig. a3v .

17 The perceived link between blank verse and political freedom was not a new
argument, as Paradise Lost demonstrated. On arguments about Miltonic blank verse see
Eric Rothstein, Restoration and Eighteenth-Century Poetry 1660–1780 (Boston, Mass., and
London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1981), 63–8; Dustin GriYn, Regaining Paradise: Milton
and the Eighteenth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), 7, 81.
18 Anthony Ashley Cooper, third Earl of Shaftesbury, Soliloquy, in Characteristicks of
Men, Manners, Opinions, Times, ed. Philip Ayres, 2 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon, 1999), i. 116.
19 John Dennis, preface to The Monument (1702), in Critical Works, i. 297. See also
Dennis’s preface to Britannia Triumphans (London, 1704).

rhyme is both a recent shackle to be thrown oV and an obstacle to

modern politeness. Other writers saw the rejection of rhyme as a way of
restoring poetry to a prelapsarian purity. Samuel Cobb writes of Adam’s
Wrst poetry:
No shackling Rhyme chain’d the free Poet’s mind,
Majestick was His Style, and unconWn’d.
Vast was each Sentence, and each wondrous strain
Sprung forth, unlabour’d, from His fruitful Brain.20
Yet, as this example suggests, the theoretical commitment to blank verse
was rarely manifested in practice. Despite the widespread enthusiasm
for ‘unconWn’d’ forms, most Whig poems were still written in heroic
couplets, and it is one of the ironies of the development of poetics in
this period that the writer who was most successful in popularizing
blank verse was in fact a Tory poet, John Philips.21
For many writers the freeing of modern verse was more likely to
manifest itself in attempts to attain a poetic sublime. With its emphasis
on eVect, its rejection of formal harmonies in favour of transcendent
expression, and its privileging of poetic genius, the sublime seemed to
represent a ‘break’ with the formal traditions of earlier verse. One of the
virtues of the sublime was that it oVered a paradigm for a paradoxical
combination of classical authority and aesthetic freedom: it was, in
eVect, an established and authoritative poetic tradition deWned by the
rejection of set forms. Whig writers wrote of ‘breaking the ice’ and
asserting the liberty of poetry, yet they continued to measure the
standards of sublime verse by the poetry and rhetorical theory of an
earlier age: in his famous series of essays on Paradise Lost Addison
justiWed his defence of the sublimity of the epic with reference to
Longinus and Homer. Welsted’s remarks on the English poets compared
selected passages from Shakespeare’s plays, Milton’s Paradise Lost, and
Spenser’s Faerie Queene with the Greek critic’s examples of sublimity
from Homer, while John Dennis develops his concepts of a native
Christian sublime with reference to Longinus and Homer. Those intent
on reaching the sublime also found inspiration in the odes of the Greek
poet Pindar, whose elevated excursions on the glories of Olympic and
mythic heroes, commonly believed to be related to Longinian theory,
20 Samuel Cobb, ‘Of Poetry’, in Poems on Several Occasions, 177–8.

21 See David Fairer, English Poetry of the Eighteenth Century, 1700–1789 (London: Long-
man, 2003), 149. For a discussion of the implications of the couplet form in this period see
Hunter, Sleeping Beauties.
were a classical prototype for precisely the sort of poetic vigour that
modern poets were keen to adopt in their celebrations of public life.22
Pindar was signiWcant as both a public poet and a practitioner of the
sublime. He provided an important model for many Whig writers
because he demonstrated the political role of the poet in Greek society.
In his preface to his Pindaric ode on the death of Queen Mary, The
Court of Death (1695), John Dennis, quoting Rapin, argued that the ode
‘is not only great by the sublimeness of its Spirit, but by the greatness of
its Subjects. For it is made use of to sing the praises of gods, and to
celebrate the most glorious actions of men’.23 The ‘sublimeness’ of spirit
had long been exploited by earlier English poets. Cowley’s Pindarique
Odes (1656) provided an important model for the naturalization of the
Pindaric into English. Part of the signiWcance of Cowley’s use of the
form was his emphasis on adaptation rather than faithful reproduction,
so that the ode did not need to be conWned to personal encomium, but
could be used for other similarly elevated subjects. After Cowley the
form began to be used for the awe-inspiring subjects of resurrection and
destiny in religious poetry and natural disasters in occasional poetry.24
Moreover, through Cowley’s verse the notion of the Pindaric increas-
ingly came to signify not only the triadic form but a more general
escape from the rules of poetic tradition. In ‘Upon Liberty’ the proud
independent spirit of Pindar is opposed to the monotony and servility
of other verse forms.25 For the early Whig poets, then, the Pindaric ode
was an ideal vehicle for the imaginative daring and Xights of eloquence
associated with the sublime, without the ambitious length of the epic.
The Xexibility of the form and its ability to convey the breathless
aspiration associated with poetic Wre was exploited by many. The
sense it conveyed of a poet barely able to master the energies of his
poetic matter oVered a way of communicating the extraordinary events
of contemporary life, from the awe-inspiring visions of heroic valour to
22 For a fuller discussion of the rise and fall of the Pindaric ode in this period see
Penelope Burke Wilson, ‘The Knowledge and Appreciation of Pindar in the Seventeenth
and Eighteenth Centuries’, D.Phil. thesis (Oxford University, 1974). See also Howard
Weinbrot, Britannia’s Issue: The Rise of British Literature from Dryden to Ossian (Cam-
bridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 334–58. For the continuing use of Pindar in
mid-century political poetry see Dustin GriYn, Patriotism and Poetry in Eighteenth
Century Britain (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 63–7.
23 Dennis, The Court of Death (1695), in Critical Works, i. 42. See also Weinbrot,
Britannia’s Issue, 348.

24 See John Tutchin, The Earthquake of Jamaica, describ’d in a Pindarick Poem (London,
1692).
25 See Wilson, ‘The Knowledge and Appreciation of Pindar’, 82.
the terrifying forces of darkness.26 John Dennis was an acclaimed

practitioner of the form, hailed by Dryden in 1694 as one of the ‘greatest
Masters’ of the ode, ‘in which the English stand almost upon an equal
foot with the Ancients’.27 Congreve, Maynwaring, and Samuel Cobb
were among many who also struggled with the metrical complexity of
the ode in their attempts to emulate the Greek poet’s exalted utterances
in celebration of the mythic battles of the 1690s and 1700s.28
As this account of the classical modelling of the sublime suggests,
there were paradoxes in the conceptualization of the relationship be-
tween sublimity and liberty. Critics frequently described a ‘genius’ that
is ‘unconWn’d’ by formal contraints. In emphasizing aesthetic freedom
in this way, this criticism could appear to be advocating a form of
literary liberalism, a rejection of existing poetic models. Theorists
such as Dennis certainly argued for the need for new poetic forms to
free English literature from the cultural hegemony of the pagan an-
cients, seeing in the Revolution the freedom to create a new classic
culture.29 And, as we have seen, Whig panegyrists claimed that Wil-
liam’s or Marlborough’s feats made classical epic redundant.30 Yet we
should be cautious about taking these professions of literary liberation
at face value: freedom from formal constraints and the emphasis on new
native poetry did not necessarily entail the rejection of the past. Al-
though David Womersley has written of ‘the Whiggish rejection of
classical models for modern British epic’, the negotiation of the antique
past was more complex than this.31 As the poems quoted in previous
26 For a contemporary discussion of the potential problems of Pindaric style see
Dennis, preface to The Court of Death, in Critical Works, i. 42–5.

27 Dryden went on to proclaim: ‘You [Dennis] have the Sublimity of Sense as well as
Sound, and know how far the Boldness of a Poet may lawfully extend’. Dryden to John
Dennis, March 1694, in The Letters of John Dryden, ed. Charles E. Ward (Durham, NC:
Duke University Press, 1942), 72.
28 William Congreve, A Pindarique Ode, Humbly OVer’d to the Queen (London, 1706);
John Dennis, The Court of Death; Arthur Maynwaring, A Pindarick Ode, Inscrib’d to His
Grace the Duke of Marlborough (London, 1705); Thomas Yalden, On the Conquest of
Namur. A Pindarick Ode (London, 1695); see also Samuel Cobb, A Pindarique Ode to the
Memory of Queen Mary (London, 1695); anon, On the Victory of Ramelies: A Pindaric
(London, 1706).
29 See David Womersley, introd. to Augustan Critical Writing (Harmondsworth: Pen-
guin, 1997), pp. xxii–xxxi.

30 See Addison, An Account of the Greatest English Poets, in The Miscellaneous Works of
Joseph Addison, ed. A. C. Guthkelch, 3 vols. (London: Bell, 1914), i. 35; Richard Blackmore,
Advice to the Poets. A Poem (London, 1706), 12.
31 Womersley, Introd. to Augustan Critical Writing, p. xxvi. See also Arthur S. Williams,
‘Panegyric Decorum in the Reigns of William and Anne’, Journal of British Studies, 21
(1981), 56–67.
chapters demonstrate, there was a pervasive interest in the validity of

classical models for modern poetry. When panegyrists rated the exploits
of William III or Marlborough over those of Hercules or Achilles, they
argued not that classical models were to be rejected in favour of a purely
native tradition, but that the events of contemporary life were as
impressive as, or more than, those depicted in classical epic. In the
literary criticism of Dennis, Addison, and Blackmore we Wnd the claim
that modern Christian culture oVered a sounder basis for the sublime
than the pagan mythologies of the ancients, but this is coupled with the
use of those classical models as paradigms of the heroic sublime. And in
the pastoral wars of Queen Anne’s reign Ambrose Philips and John
Oldmixon attempted to redeWne earlier poetic modes to make them
Wtting to the celebration of contemporary aVairs of state. We might
compare all these writers’ complex negotiation of classical and native
art with the Whiggish temples of virtue later constructed by Queen
Caroline at Richmond and Cobham at Stowe in which a classicized
framework and structure surrounded Wgures such as Isaac Newton or
Samuel Clarke, who were representatives of the future of modern Whig
culture.32 In both cases classical models oVered both a form of cultural
authority and a point of comparison: modern achievements were meas-
ured up against ancient to aYrm their ‘classic’ status, rather than to
undermine the signiWcance of earlier models.33
Religious sublime
Both Longinian criticism and the Pindaric ode oVered classical models
through which Whig poets would conceptualize and evaluate their
32 This discussion is informed by a paper given by Emma Jay entitled ‘Death, Fame, and
Authorship: Literary Responses to Queen Caroline’s Hermitage at Richmond’ given at the

‘Restoration to Reform’ seminar in Oxford on 26 May 2003. For further detail on the busts
see Katherine Eustace, ‘The Politics of the Past: Stowe and the Development of the
Historical Portrait Bust’, Apollo, 148 (1998), 31–40; George Clarke, ‘Grecian Taste and
Gothic Virtue: Lord Cobham’s Gardening Programme and its Iconography’, Apollo, 97
(1973), 566–71; Judith Colton: ‘Merlin’s Cave and Queen Caroline: Garden Art as
Political Propaganda’, Eighteenth-Century Studies, 10 (1976–7), 1–20.
33 As David Spadafora has argued, while many were convinced of the progressive
nature of contemporary cultural achievements, claims for the superiority of modern

culture rested on subjective arguments about the perceived virtues of ancient or modern
cultures, and it was for this reason that contemporaries were more likely to identify the
advances of modernity with the more visible, palpable signs of progress evident in
scientiWc and mechanical developments (Spadafora, The Idea of Progress in Eighteenth-
Century Britain (New Haven, Conn., and London: Yale University Press, 1990)), 76.
notions of the contemporary sublime. Both were often associated with

the rapturous idiom of biblical poetry, and it was through this Christian-
ized sublime that the Wrst Whig writers began to articulate their desire for
an elevated native poetry.34 The elevated exclamatory verse typiWed by
the Song of Solomon oVered a Wtting model for poets intent on express-
ing the wonders of divine truth.35 In the preface to her Poems on Several
Occasions Elizabeth Rowe recommends the ‘vivacity’ and ‘purity’ of the
Canticles, while John Cutts, rejecting the meditative devotional tradition
of Herbert and Vaughan, describes the passion of the Song of Solomon:36
Witness his Songs of Love so Wnely writ,
Where Nature puts on various forms of Wit,
To move the secret Springs of Sympathy,
And Wre the Soul into an Exstasie.37
Other poets aspire towards a similar spirit. Benjamin Keach pleads:
Wilt Thou, who dost the Muses aid, aVord
Divine assistance, that each pow’rful word
May rend a heart at least, and every line
Turn Kingdoms and whole Nations into brine
Of their own tears? Teach me, O Lord, the skill
T’extract the spirit of grief, O let my Quill,
Like Moses Rod, make Adamants to Xy,
That tears may gush like Rivers from each eye.38
Rowe, Cutts, and Keach all draw their vocabulary of ecstasy and inspir-
ation from biblical sources. As David Morris has shown, over the course
of the seventeenth century a range of writers became increasingly
interested in replicating the high style of the Bible in modern religious
poetry.39 Some attempted paraphrases of the Bible, and particularly the
34 On Pindar and the Psalms of David see Wilson, ‘The Knowledge and Appreciation of
Pindar’, 185.
35 For a fuller account of the reception of the Song of Songs in the seventeenth century
see Elizabeth Clarke’s forthcoming book, Rewriting the Bride: Authorship, Gender, and the
Song of Songs.
36 Elizabeth Singer Rowe, ‘Preface to the Reader’, in Poems on Several Occasions Written
by Philomela (London, 1696), sig. a4v .

37 John Cutts, ‘Musarum Origo: or the Original and Excellence of the Muses’, in Poetical
Exercises Written upon Several Occasions (London, 1687), 23.

38 Benjamin Keach, The Glorious Lover. A Divine Poem Upon the Adorable Majesty of
Sinners Redemption (London, 1685), 115.

39 David B. Morris, The Religious Sublime: Christian Poetry and Critical Tradition in
Eighteenth-Century England (Kentucky, Ky.: University of Kentucky Press, 1972), 14–22. On

Psalms, while others aimed to produce a powerful religious poetry by

creating an original poem which took its subject, or style, from the
Bible, as in Milton’s Paradise Lost and Cowley’s unWnished Davideis.40
Elsewhere, the Christian sublime took the form of eschatological verse
and the poetry of imaginative devotion.41
However, while many wanted to duplicate the high style of Hebrew
poetry, they as yet had no means of explaining why and how it achieved
its powerful eVects. It was not until Boileau’s translation of Longinus’
third-century fragmentary treatise on the rhetorical sublime, Peri Hup-
sous, became widely available towards the end of the seventeenth cen-
tury that critics had a working vocabulary and method of literary
criticism with which this ‘grand style’ could be analysed.42 Although
there were at least Wve editions or translations of Longinus during the
seventeenth century, it was Boileau’s translation of 1674 which Wrst
made widely available a critical terminology which soon became in-
Xuential in descriptions of poetic and rhetorical aVect. And it was in
John Dennis’s essays on literary criticism, written during the 1690s, that
the combination of Longinian theory and biblical style found its most
inXuential expression. In The Advancement and Reformation of Poetry
(1701) Dennis argued that while it was true that the ancients had
produced poetic works that had drawn on the ‘enthusiastic passions’,
there were passages in the Bible that far surpassed them. Comparing
Psalm 18 with a passage from Vergil’s Georgics, he asks his readers to
consider of the psalm
That there is more Terror here, both Ordinary and Enthusiastick, and conse-
quently, more Spirit in a faint Copy [ . . . ] than there is in Virgil’s Original.
What Force, and what inWnite Spirit must there not have been in the Original
Hebrew?43
Dennis believed that the future of modern poetry lay in the Christian
sublime. He was convinced the evidence of the Wre and spirit of Hebrew
the rhetoric of the Christian grand style see Deborah K. Shuger, Sacred Rhetoric: The Christian
Grand Style in the English Renaissance (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1989).
40 Examples of biblical paraphrase include Richard Blackmore, A Paraphrase on the
Book of Job (London, 1700); Edward Young, A Paraphrase on Part of the Book of Job
(London, 1719); Isaac Watts, Horae Lyricae Poems ChieXy of the Lyric Kind (London, 1706).
41 Examples of eschatological verse are Edward Young, A Poem on the Last Day (Oxford,
1713) and Isaac Watts, ‘The Day of Judgment’, in Horae Lyricae. For a full discussion of all
forms of sublime religious verse in the period see Morris, The Religious Sublime, 104–54.
42 Morris, The Religious Sublime, 28–39.
43 Dennis, The Advancement and Reformation of Poetry, in Critical Works, i. 269.
verse demonstrated that truly divine poetry was capable of stronger

eVects than pagan verse, and that by developing a tradition of powerful
native religious verse modern writers could surpass the triumphs of
classical literature. Thus he announces that the intention of The
Grounds of Criticism in Poetry is no less than ‘to raise it [poetry] to a
height which it has never known before among us, and to restore it
[ . . . ] to all its Greatness, and to all its Innocence’.44 This belief in the
need to create an original native religious poetry was shared by other
Whig writers. In his Paraphrase on the Book of Job (1700) Blackmore
argued that overdependence on classical traditions meant that ‘we have
no Originals’. Rather than imitate, he suggested that native writers
create their own Christian verse, claiming that passages from the Bible
‘are nobler Examples of the sublime Stile, than any can be found in the
Pagan Writers’.45 In the context of Blackmore’s criticism, ‘original’ here
means native original: a model of elevated writing produced by an
English writer. For both Dennis and Blackmore, Milton’s Paradise Lost
provided an example of just the sort of new freedoms that poets and
critics aspired to. Milton’s grand style took his verse far beyond the
contrived fancy of Waller or Cowley, and the Christian subject matter of
the poem provided concrete proof of a sublime ‘accommodated to the
Religion, Manners, and other Circumstances we are now under’.46
Addison’s series of Spectator essays secured the poet’s posthumous
reputation as the author of the great heroic poem on a Christian
subject.
Dennis’s explanation for the ‘inWnite Spirit’ of Hebrew poetry was that
it was the work of a divine hand which no mortal could ever hope to
match. In the preface to Horae Lyricae (1706) Isaac Watts oVers his
explanation of why religious verse was more likely to create sublime aVect:
If the Heart were Wrst inXam’d from Heaven, and the Muse were not left alone
to form the Devotion and Pursue a Cold Scent [ . . . ] the whole Composure
would be of a Piece, all Meridian Light and Meridian Fervor.47
Watts’s reference to the heart ‘inXam’d from Heaven’ reXects a wide-

spread conviction that sacred subjects could inspire poetic passion on a
level unparalleled in secular verse. However, one of the problems with
the notion of creating a modern sublime and sacred poetry was that
44 Dennis, The Grounds of Criticism in Poetry, in Critical Works, i. 328.

45 Richard Blackmore, preface to A Paraphrase on the Book of Job, sigs. b1r. i2r.
46 Ibid. sig. b1r.
47 Watts, preface to Horae Lyricae, n.p.
poets needed to Wnd explanations of the sources of poetic transport

whilst avoiding the suggestion that they had been directly inspired by
God. Tory satirists had long associated Puritanism and Whig verse with
enthusiasm: with claims to false literary and spiritual inspiration. The
Whig appropriation of the sublime in the late seventeenth century was
shaped by a desire to distance the expression of the sublime from such
attacks. The beauty of Longinus’ treatise was that it provided English
critics with a non-mystical and non-mechanical justiWcation for the
poetic process. Longinus had claimed that passion was the essence of
poetic spirit, and so it was in terms of passion rather than divine
inspiration that Dennis mounted his arguments for modern poetry. In
one of the earliest formulations of his ideas, Remarks on a Book Entitul’d
Prince Arthur (1696), Dennis quotes and modiWes Aristotle, arguing that
although the Greek philosopher’s use of the term entheos, or enthusi-
asm, has been taken to mean ‘there is something divine in poetry’, he is
‘pretty conWdent that enueoB is us’d metaphorically here, and signiWes
something extreamly pathetick’. This, he argues, would dispense with
the notion of divine inspiration in poetry and mean that ‘Genius is
nothing but Passion’.48 Later on Dennis was to distinguish between two
sorts of passion: vulgar passion, such as anger or pity, which is
prompted by the immediate apprehension of a particular event or
object, and enthusiastic passion, which is the source of poetry, and
which is produced by ideas in contemplation. Through meditation on
a particular idea the enthusiastic passions of admiration, terror, horror,
joy, sadness, and desire could be evoked and exploited in contemporary
poetry. The whole process by which a poet attained spirit, passion, and
Wre could be explained as an exercise of the imagination and intellect, as
he demonstrates with an example of the way in which an ordinary
object is transformed by meditation:
The Sun mention’d in ordinary Conversation, gives the Idea of a round Xat
shining Body, of about two foot diameter. But the Sun occurring to us in
Meditation, gives the Idea of a vast and glorious Body, and the top of all the
visible Creation, and the brightest material Image of the Divinity. I leave the
Reader therefore to judge, if this Idea must not necessarily be attended with
Admiration; and that Admiration I call Enthusiasm.49
We can see the way that Dennis has distanced himself here from the
mystical and supernatural elements of poetic inspiration. Enthusiasm, a
48 Dennis, Remarks on a Book Entitul’d Prince Arthur (1696), in Critical Works, i. 135.
concept associated elsewhere with spurious claims to divine power, is in

Dennis’s opinion merely an eVect of awe and admiration, which is felt
by the reader. This shift towards a secularized theory of poetic inspir-
ation was to prove inXuential in the theorizing of the sublime in later
eighteenth-century poetry.50
Dennis’s criticism created a theoretical basis for the understanding of
poetic aVect and its relationship with contemporary Christian culture.
However, the question remained of how to fulWl the poetic destiny that
he and Addison had described in such rapturous terms. It was all very
well to celebrate Milton as the new Homer, to analyse Paradise Lost in
Longinian terms, but what were the implications for the practice of the
post-Revolution poet? In his essay on book VII of Paradise Lost Addison
identiWed what he saw as the closest thing to the Miltonic sublime in
modern verse. Drawing his readers’ attention to the recent publication
of Richard Blackmore’s physico-theological poem, Creation: A Philo-
sophical Poem (1712), Addison declared that it ‘deserves to be looked
upon as one of the most useful and noble Productions in our English
Verse’.51 Blackmore’s poem, which used Newton’s natural philosophy to
celebrate the divine workings of the natural world, oVered an inXuential
model for rapturous Christian poetry. As a number of critics have
described, Newtonian science had oVered to many early eighteenth-
century writers new ways of accounting for the relationship between
God and created nature.52 Blackmore explained in the preface to his
poem that Newton’s theories could be used ‘to demonstrate the Self-
Existence of an Eternal Mind from the created and dependent Existence
of the Universe’.53 In the Spectator Addison had suggested the sublime
potential of the new natural philosophy, arguing in one of the papers on
50 See Jon Mee, Romanticism, Enthusiasm and Regulation: Poetics and the Policing of
Culture in the Romantic Period (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003); John Morillo,
Uneasy Feelings: Literature, the Passions and Class from Neoclassicism to Romanticism (New
York: AMS, 2001); Shaun Irlam, Elations: The Poetics of Enthusiasm in Eighteenth-Century
Britain (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1999).
51 Spectator 339, 29 March 1712, in The Spectator, ed. Donald F. Bond, 5 vols. (Oxford:
Clarendon, 1965), iii. 261.

52 The Wrst decade of the eighteenth century saw an increase in this subject in the works
of writers such as Lady Mary Chudleigh, Henry Needler, and John Reynolds. The fullest
account of the physico-theological tradition is found in William Powell Jones, The Rhetoric
of Science: A Study of ScientiWc Ideas and Imagery in Eighteenth-Century English Poetry
(London: Routledge, 1966). See also Robert InglesWeld, ‘James Thomson, Aaron Hill, and
the Poetic ‘‘Sublime’’ ’, British Journal for Eighteenth-Century Studies, 9 (1986), 141–56;
Michael Cohen, ‘The Whig Sublime and James Thomson’, English Language Notes, 24
(1986), 27–35.
53 Richard Blackmore, preface to Creation, p. xxxviii.
the imagination that no one had done more to ‘gratiWe and enlarge the
Imagination’ than ‘the Authors of the new Philosophy’, and had de-
scribed the ‘amazing Pomp and Solemnity’ and ‘Immensity and Mag-
niWcence of Nature’ that were to be enjoyed in the contemplation of the
earth in its Wrmament.54 As his description suggests, the embrace of
science and consequently the physico-theological genre was rooted in
the concern for reformation and education through polite discourse
that lay behind Addison’s and Steele’s periodical journalism and Shaf-
tesbury’s philosophy. Blackmore said that he had chosen poetry as the
medium for his message because it ‘engages many to read and retain
what they would neglect, if written in Prose’, and his emphasis in his
preface to Creation is on the role of poetry in a social context.55 He
declares that his aim is ‘to bring Philosophy out of the secret Recesses of
the Schools, and strip it of its uncouth and mysterious Dress, that it may
become agreeable, and admitted to a general Conversation’.56 While the
end is instruction, poetry provides a more polite and approachable
medium for the education of the reader than straight instruction. The
physico-theological poem eVectively brought divinity to the masses
through the engaging conceit of the poet as telescope (or microscope),
oVering the reader unseen worlds of heavenly order.
Whig poets had long found useful political metaphors in Newton’s
natural philosophy.57 The Principia could be read as a series of meta-
phors for the balanced energies of a mixed Constitution, and the
political resonances of Newton’s theories would later Wnd their most
explicit form in John Desagauliers’s poem, The Newtonian System of the
World, the Best Model of Government: An Allegorical Poem (1728).58
54 Spectator 420, 2 July 1712, in The Spectator, ed. Bond, iii. 574–5. Other Spectator papers
on the beauties of science are nos. 121, 387, 519, and 543.
55 Richard Blackmore, preface to Creation, p. xxxiii.
56 Blackmore, preface to Creation, p. xxxv. Cf. Addison in Spectator 10: ‘I shall be
ambitious to have it said of me, that I have brought Philosophy out of Closets and
Libraries, Schools and Colleges, to dwell in Clubs and Assemblies, at Tea-Tables, and in
CoVee-Houses’ (Spectator 10, 12 March 1711, in The Spectator, ed. Bond, i. 44).
57 As John Gascoigne has argued, although it was possible to be a Tory and a Newton-
ian, it was amongst the Whigs and latitudinarians, who were more inclined to emphasize
the importance of natural rather than revealed theology, that Newton’s theories found
most support (Gascoigne, Cambridge in the Age of the Enlightenment: Science, Religion and
Politics from the Restoration to the French Revolution (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1989), 147).
58 I am grateful to Kendra Packham for this source, and also for her useful insights into
the use of Newtonian science as constitutional metaphor. For an early example of

Newtonian science as political metaphor see Thomas Shadwell, A Congratulatory Poem
on His Highness the Prince of Orange His Coming into England (1689), in Works, v. 340.
However, what really inspired the poets of the early eighteenth century
was not images of order and balance but the imaginative potential of the
complexities and enormities of Newton’s divine structure. This was not
Newtonianism in a Blakeian sense, the universe reduced to a Wxed order
thanks to the triumph of reason over the imagination. Blackmore and
later followers such as Aaron Hill, James Thomson, and David Mallet
instead dramatized the visionary impact of Newton’s revelations. The
Principia opened up new worlds of poetic exploration, inspiring them
to swoop through the solar system, dive to the depths of the ocean bed,
and pierce the mysteries of the atom and the raindrop.59
Blackmore’s Creation begins, like many poems of its kind, with a
description of the inconceivable:
How Abject, how Inglorious ’tis to lye
Groveling in Dust and Darkness, when on high
Empires immense and rolling Worlds of Light
To range their Heav’nly Scenes the Muse invite?
I meditate to Soar above the Skies,
To Heights unknown, thro’ Ways untry’d, to rise.60
Blackmore’s vision of himself rising and soaring to the outer limits of
the universe exempliWed Longinus’ claims for the sublime quality of
human perception. In Peri Hupsous the Greek critic had claimed that
the whole World is not capacious enough for the extensive Contemplations of
the Human Mind, and [ . . . ] our Thoughts soar above the Heavens, and
penetrate even beyond those Boundaries which encircle and terminate the
Universe61
In demonstrating the sublime potential of the natural world, Creation
literalized Longinus’ images of poetic vision. Blackmore’s dizzying
juxtapositions of light and dark, human and divine, great and small
were to become characteristic of the genre, which was marked by its
rhetorical balance between the limits of human perception and the
vistas that could potentially be described. A recurring emphasis in
Creation is the dynamism of the created world. Again and again Black-
more is drawn to the ‘Attractive Vigour’, ‘strange Energy’, and ‘force
59 In his recent account of Augustan poetics Blanford Parker argues that such detailed
description of ‘the world of things’ is characteristic of the Augustan shift away from
symbol and allegoresis into the quotidian and the naturalistic (Parker, The Triumph of
Augustan Poetics: English Literary Culture from Butler to Johnson (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1998) ).
60 Blackmore, Creation, 3.
61 Welsted, Works of Dionysius Longinus, 105.
Innate’ of tides, atoms, and rivers. Nature positively pulsates with com-
peting life forces, energies whose complex balance in itself provides
evidence of a divine presence.62 Blackmore combines a Whiggish opti-
mism about Newton’s scientiWc modernity with Dennis’s conviction that
divinity and sublimity of poetic aVect are always mutually enhanced.
Secular sublime
In the physico-theological verse of the early eighteenth century the

sublime was embodied in a rhetoric of transcendent Xight which linked
divine providence to scientiWc and poetic aspiration. The emphasis on
inspired Xight, on the ecstasy of poetic excursion, that typiWes this
poetry was also found in the panegyrics on aVairs of state. Poets like
Blackmore, Dennis, John Hughes, and Elizabeth Rowe wrote both
divine and secular sublime, using the same elevated verse to celebrate
the events of public life that characterized their rapturous religious
poetry. In her early poem on the Battle of the Boyne, Rowe exclaims:
Oh were the potent inspiration less!
I might Wnd words its Raptures to express;
But now I neither can its force controul,
Nor paint the great Ideas of my Soul.63
For Rowe the secular and the divine sublime were brought together in
biblical paraphrase. Images of the violent and martial god of the Old
Testament oVered precedents for the depiction of the heroic battles of
William III. In ‘A Pindarick Poem on Habbakuk’ Rowe presents God’s
power over the Chaldeans as symbolic of William’s victories over the
French and Jacobites.64 At the end of the poem her vision of the
avenging deity becomes conXated with that of the king:
Thy threatning Arrows gild their Xaming way,
And at the glittering of thy Spear the Heathen dare not stay;
62 See e.g. John Hughes, An Ode to the Creator of the World, Occasion’d by the Fragments
of Orpheus (London, 1713); Leonard Welsted, The Scheme and Conduct of Providence
(London, 1736).
63 Rowe, ‘Upon King William’s passing the Boyn’, in Poems on Several Occasions, 31. On
Rowe’s political verse in the context of contemporary Whig poetry see Sarah Prescott,
Women, Authorship, and Literary Culture, 1690–1740 (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan,
2003), 141–66. On the early poetry see also Henry F. Stecher, Elizabeth Singer Rowe, the Poetess
of Frome: A Study in Eighteenth-Century English Pietism (Bern: Herbert Lang, 1986), 38–45.
64 For a fuller discussion of biblical models and the female poet see Prescott, Women,
Authorship, and Literary Culture, 150–3. On the use of images of biblical violence by earlier
The very sight of thee did them subdue,

And arm’d with Fury thou the Vict’ry didst pursue.
So now, great God, wrapt in avenging Thunder,
Meet thine and William’s Foes, and tread them groveling under.65
In The Grounds of Criticism Dennis had observed that ‘nothing is so
wonderful in its EVects’ as those ideas ‘which shew the Wrath and
Vengeance of an angry God’.66 His selections from biblical verse,
intended to prove the sublimity of Hebrew poetry, are dominated by
images of martial fury and valour drawn from Habbakuk and from the
Psalms.67 It is clear that even when these passages did not make the
parallel with secular violence explicit, they provided an inXuential
idiom for the contemporary celebration of military might.
However, there were other Whig writers who believed that divine
themes were not the most Wtting subject matter for sublime poetry.68
Shaftesbury comments that while biblical Wgures such as Moses or
Joshua oVered Wne examples of illustrious men:
’twou’d be hard to copy them in just Heroick. ’Twou’d be hard to give to many
of ’em that graceful Air, which is necessary to render ’em naturally pleasing to
Mankind; according to the Idea Men are universally found to have of
Heroism, and Generosity.69
As many Whig writers saw it, the great victories of the 1690s and 1700s
oVered examples of awe-inspiring feats which were almost beyond
comprehension, and which left contemporaries struggling to Wnd lan-
guage within which to express their admiration. The sublime enabled
them to express this sense of awe and astonishment, as in Montagu’s
inXuential Epistle to Dorset:
Oh Dorset! I am rais’d! I’m all on Wre!
And, if my Strength could answer my Desire,
In speaking Paint this Figure should be seen,
Like Jove his Grandeur, and like Mars his Mien.70
Dissenting writers see Sharon Achinstein, Literature and Dissent in Milton’s England
65 Elizabeth Rowe, ‘A Pindarick Poem on Habbakuk’, in Poems on Several Occasions, 21.
67 Dennis, The Grounds of Criticism in Poetry, in Critical Works, i. 366–8.
68 Morris, The Religious Sublime, 43–4.
69 Shaftesbury, Soliloquy, in Characteristicks, i. 183.
Dorset and Middlesex (London, 1690), 5.

Similarly, Blackmore describes the poetic process in his Advice to the

Poets:
The Inspiration comes, my Bosom glows,
I strive with strong Enthusiastic Throws.
Oh! I am all in Rapture, all on Fire,
Give me, to ease the Muse’s Pangs, the Lyre.71
Neither of these passages presents a rational or coherent account
of the battle scenes it describes, but instead uses the vocabulary of
sublime aVect: Wre, rapture, and enthusiasm denote the magnitude
of the subject matter. The subject described is placed beyond compre-
hension and, importantly, beyond criticism. Longinus had declared
that
The Sublime rather ravishes than persuades; it creates in us a certain trans-
port and admiration, mixed with astonishment and surprize, which is al-
together distinct from barely pleasing or perswading.72
In presenting their accounts of recent history in terms of the sublime,
Montagu and Blackmore not only gave stature to their hero but they
also hoped to place their poetry beyond the realm of propaganda. One
of the perceived qualities of the sublime was that it transcended logical
argument or persuasion. The polemical representation of recent history
was couched in terms that supposedly rose above mere partisanship.
Elevated verse did not seek to justify because it did not have to: the
reader is simply ‘ravished’, a passive receptor of an overwhelming force.
John Dennis develops this sexual dimension more explicitly in his
observation that the sublime is ‘an invincible Force, which commits a
pleasing Rape upon the very Soul of the Reader’.73 While Dennis does
not explore the full sexual connotations of the reading process, his
deWnition illustrates the way in which the sublime was seen as position-
ing the reader beyond the realm of reason and choice. It is not, of
course, only the reader who is overwhelmed by the object described.
Both the examples cited here illustrate the eroticized vocabulary of
poetic inspiration, whereby the poet, too, is overcome by a force
comparable with sexual passion. Sharon Achinstein has written of
the overlapping vocabularies of holy ardour and carnal eroticism in
71 Sir Richard Blackmore, Advice to the Poets (London, 1706), 25. Importantly, Black-
more also speciWes that these ‘throws’ must be ‘Enthusiastick in a proper place’ (p. 12).
72 Welsted, The Works of Dionysius Longinus, 3.
73 Dennis, Grounds of Criticism in Poetry, in Critical Works, i. 359.
Dissenting verse of this period, and, discussing Elizabeth Rowe’s ver-

sions of the Canticles, she argues that a sexualized response becomes a
testimony to genuine spiritual experience, since ‘the poetic rapture
becomes a legitimizing sign of a divine presence’.74 Yet Rowe’s own
Williamite poetry, like the examples from Montagu and Blackmore
above, is also marked by this sexualized language, as we see in her
gasping exclamation of ‘potent inspiration’ and inexpressible ‘Raptures’
over the king.75 Within Whig panegyric poetic rapture operates to place
the political authority of its object beyond the need for legitimation,
through the overwhelming force of the secular heroic sublime.
The sublime moment
One of the most celebrated examples of sublimity in Whig poetry,

frequently cited as the paradigm of the modern heroic sublime, was
Addison’s description of Marlborough as an angel riding the storm in
The Campaign:
So when an Angel by divine command
With rising tempests shakes a guilty land,
Such as of late o’er pale Britannia past,
Calm and serene he drives the furious blast;
And, pleas’d th’Almighty’s orders to perform,
Rides in the whirl-wind, and directs the storm.76
In the Tatler Steele used the passage as the greatest example of the
sublime style, citing the opinion of a man who claimed that ‘tho’ he
ran thro’ many Instances of Sublimity from the ancient Writers’ he
knew of no other occasion ‘wherein the true Greatness of Soul, which
animates a General in Action, is so well represented’. The image of the
angel in the storm, he declares, ‘sets forth the most sedate and the most
active Courage engag’d in an Uproar of Nature, a Confusion of Ele-
ments’.77 Steele’s approval of Addison’s evocation of the chaotic disturb-
74 Sharon Achinstein, ‘Romance of the Spirit: Female Sexuality and Religious Desire in
Early Modern England’, ELH 69 (2002), 413–38.

75 Elizabeth Singer Rowe, ‘Upon King William’s passing the Boyn’, in Poems on Several
Occasions Written by Philomela, 31.

76 Addison, The Campaign (1705), in Works, i. 165.
77 Tatler 43, 19 July 1709, in The Tatler, ed. Donald F. Bond, 3 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon,
1987), i. 310–11.
ance of the natural world points to another aspect of sublime poetry in

this period: its ability to invite visions of apocalypse. As David Fairer
observes, early eighteenth-century poets were drawn to the terrifying
aspects of the sublime: to scenarios of destruction such as those found
in Aaron Hill’s The Judgment-Day (1721).78 But it is signiWcant that in
Addison’s poem, as in much of the Whig panegyric of this period, the
apocalyptic is countered by the controlling Wgure at the centre of the
chaos. The force of this passage in The Campaign is to draw attention to
the sedate general, the eye at the heart of the storm, a sense which is
reinforced by the echo of Nahum 1: 3: ‘the Lord hath his way in the
whirlwind and in the storm’.79 Such visions of controlled destruction, of
almost-apocalypse, recur throughout the poetry of this period, as a
form of tribute to military leaders whose ultimate control is visible
behind the chaos. But we could also read the image of the controlled
storm as one of the sublime eVect itself. Longinus compares the poet’s
capacities to rouse sensation with those of natural phenomena, so that
the sublime ‘bears all before it like a Hurricane, and presents, at one
view, the Orator’s whole collected force’.80 The poet, like the general,
commands a force that he is only just master of. The popularity of
Addison’s image of the angel in the storm may lie partly in its conXation
of poetic and military power.
As Steele’s comments demonstrate, the merit of The Campaign was
perceived to lie less in its whole than in the image that formed the core
of its sublimity. This is characteristic of critical responses to the sublime:
readers most commonly found moments of brilliance in particular
passages or phrases, rather than across a work as a whole. Thus when
Addison came to describe the virtues of Paradise Lost in his Spectator
papers it was his emphasis on the isolated ‘beauties’ of Milton’s style
that proved most inXuential on later responses to the poem.81 A sense of
the unevenness of the sublime can again be traced back to Longinus,
who identiWed the sublime style in isolated passages of poetry, rather
than in its wider structure. Longinus oVered a very diVerent approach
78 Fairer, English Poetry of the Eighteenth Century, 125–7.

79 Samuel Johnson, whilst praising the poem, comments on the repetitive nature of the
simile, arguing that Marlborough is so like the storm that the lines on the storm are merely
repetitive (Johnson, ‘Life of Addison’, in Lives of the Poets (1779–81), ed. G. Birkbeck Hill,
3 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon, 1935), ii. 130–1).
80 Welsted, The Works of Dionysius Longinus, 4.
81 There is a similar emphasis in his An Account of the Greatest English Poets, where
Addison describes Milton as ‘Bold, and sublime, my whole attention draws, | And seems
above the critick’s nicer laws’ (Works, i. 33).
to literary texts from the rule-bound formality of Aristotelian criticism.

Rather than examine the coherence of plots and unities, Longinus
concentrated on smaller units of composition, on particular passages,
that represented the examples of great writing. Sublimity was to be
found, like a nugget of gold, hidden among a mass of less spectacular
material. This idea of the erratic and unattainable nature of poetic
sublimity clearly shapes the critical evaluation of poetry in this period,
and literary criticism in turn sought to identify and celebrate such
passages, rather than justify the whole work. An emphasis on the
moment is also evident in the way in which poetic texts were reread
after their initial publication. Peter de Bolla and Andrew AshWeld have
suggested that anthologies oVering the selected ‘beauties’ of poetry
eVectively constructed a ‘taxonomy of textualized aVect’, a collection
of individual passages which represented the most elevated moments of
individual poems. Edward Bysshe’s hugely popular The Art of English
Poetry (1702) oVers lines from a range of seventeenth- and early eight-
eenth-century poems under various subject headings, ranging from war
and thunder to love or dolphins.82 Richard Blackmore’s poetry is
extremely well represented in the collection, as Bysshe according to
the subtitle of the anthology, selects the moments that to him seem to
embody the ‘most natural, agreeable, and noble Thoughts [ . . . ] that are
to be found in the best English Poets’. The physician’s lengthy epics seem
to have gained longer life as a collection of thoughts rather than as
sustained narrative poems. Considering this model of reception
prompts the question of whether in seeking to reread this sublime
Whig verse (and in particular lengthier works such as Blackmore’s) as
whole poems, and in criticizing their lack of consistency, we neglect the
terms in which they were Wrst written and appreciated.
In his discussion of the sporadic nature of the sublime Longinus
oVered the examples of Pindar and Sophocles who ‘sometimes in the
midst of their greatest Violence, while they Lighten and Thunder [ . . . ]
their Fires suddenly become extinct, and they unhappily fall’.83 The
perceived unsustainability of the sublime not only aVects the evaluation
of poetry in this period, but also its expression. Whig poets attempting
to attain the sublime routinely testify to the erratic and Xeeting nature
of the lofty imagination, and their poetry rarely assumes the form of
82 De Bolla and AshWeld, The Sublime: A Reader in Eighteenth-Century Aesthetic Theory,
11. Bysshe’s The Art of English Poetry was reprinted in 1705, 1708, 1710, 1714, 1718, 1724, 1725,
1737, 1739, and 1762.
83 Welsted, The Works of Dionysius Longinus, 99–100.
an assured and seamless poetic excursion. The struggle towards im-

aginative transcendence is part of the poetic process. Sublime verse is
characterized by the professions of linguistic inadequacy that accom-
pany the Xight of imagination, and the need to describe ‘something too
great for utterance’. Over and over again writers such as Addison,
Montagu, and Blackmore struggle to articulate the enormity of their
subject: Addison begs: ‘wou’d my strength but second my desire, | I’d all
his boundless Bravery rehearse’ (To the King, ll. 170–1), and Samuel
Cobb implores ‘O cou’d my Muse reach Milton’s tow’ring Flight, | Or
stretch her Wings to the Maeonian Height!’ only to discover that ‘The
Muse grows dumb | Not weary’d with his Praise, but overcome’.84 As we
saw in Chapter 3, Montagu’s celebrated Epistle falls in mid-Xight:
My Spirits shrink, and will no longer bear;
Rapture and Fury carry’d me thus far
Transported and Amaz’d.
That Rage once spent, I can no more sustain
Your Flights, your Energies, and Tragic Strain,
But fall back to my Nat’ral Pace again.85
Montagu is as concerned with the act of writing, or attaining poetic
Xight, as he is with the ostensible subject being praised. The Epistle may
have been consistently cited as the pinnacle of high style, but it was a
poem dominated by its author’s sense of his inability to write sustained
heroic verse. In Elizabeth Rowe’s verse this inability to sustain the
sublime vision is feminized, as she declares her woman’s voice inadequate
to hymn the bloody victory: ‘Too soft’s my Voice the Hero to express; | Or,
like himself, the War-like Prince to dress’.86 In all these poems it seems
that, paradoxically, it was in the very failure to attain a coherent and
consistent elevation that the true sublime was most evident.
Sublime failures
This troping of failure within the sublime was to reverberate through-

out Whig and Tory verse of the early eighteenth century. Longinus had
84 Joseph Addison, To the King (1695), in Works, i. 45; Cobb, ‘Of Poetry: A Poem’, in
Poems on Several Occasions, 223–4.

85 Montagu, Epistle to Dorset, 8. For a contemporary parody of the style see the
anonymous The Flight of the Pretender, With Advice to the Poets, a Poem (London, 1708).
86 Rowe, ‘Upon King William’s passing the Boyn’, in Poems on Several Occasions, 31.
discussed the bathetic elements of the sublime, remarking rather tritely,

in Welsted’s translation, that ‘He greatly falls, who falls in great Attempst
[sic]’, and it is clear that a striving for poetic grandeur and elevation is
closely related to bathos, to the failure to attain this height.87 Thus even
within the terms of its own aesthetic theory Whig writing could verge
on the absurd, in a poetics in which elevation was inseparable from
deXation, true inspiration inevitably coupled with false. The juxtapos-
itions of physico-theological poetry, where a piece of beeswax could be
described in the same rapturous tones as the whole of the solar system,
gave the verse of Blackmore and others a mock-heroic dimension, while
the rhetoric of Wre and soaring Xight was, as Longinus had observed, apt
to deteriorate into mere ‘Noise and Vapour’.88 As we have seen, such
instability was exploited to its full satiric potential by Pope and Swift, in
works such as The Dunciad and Peri Bathous which mocked the failed
pretensions of the Whig poet.
However, an interest in the relationship between true and false inspir-
ation, between sublimity and mere fustian, was not exclusively the
province of Tory critics. In the preface to The Court of Death (1695)
John Dennis discusses the nature of the sublime, and how to achieve it,
and comments on the way in which ‘fustian’ and ‘superXuity of
epithetes’ must be avoided by the modern writer aiming to achieve
sublimity and magniWcence. Fustian, he says, proceeds ‘only from an
Impotent eVort of the mind to rise, when it wants both warmth and
force to take its Xight with vigour’.89 Similarly, an excess of epithets
‘brings Deformity and Impotence, and becomes a clog to the Mind’
(p. 44). However, a qualitative distinction between the true and false
sublime was problematic. Longinian criticism was focused on poetic
aVect rather than the rules of poetic form, yet the subjective nature of
the aVective experience made it hard to legislate for a ‘true’ sublime.
Dennis asserts that ‘a man of Sense must have a very fantastick opinion
of himself, if he thinks that the false Sublime can warm him’ and that
‘Verses that seem warm to a man of sense can never contain any Fustian’
(p. 43). As he describes it, the distinction between the true and the false
sublime is as obvious as that between hot and cold.
Yet these evaluative absolutes were to prove simpler in theory than in
practice, as Dennis’s subsequent criticism of Richard Blackmore’s epic
87 Welsted, The Works of Dionysius Longinus, 8. 88 Ibid. 18.

89 Dennis, The Court of Death, in Critical Works, i. 43. Further page references in the
text are to this edition.
poem Prince Arthur revealed. In his Remarks on Prince Arthur Dennis

undertook to demonstrate the poem’s failure as an epic. Working from
the premise that ‘An Epick Poem is [ . . . ] a Narration, and that Narra-
tion must be delightfull’, Dennis asserted that in the case of Blackmore’s
poem ‘the greater part of the Narration, neither is nor can be delightfull
to Men of the best tast’.90 In Prince Arthur he Wnds the bombast and
fustian that are the hallmark of the false sublime. As he sees it, the
incidents are not surprising, the episodes are not pathetic, and the
whole is characterized by ‘needless and triXing Descriptions’ (p. 141).
Dennis reassures his readers that reception provides objective evidence
of literary merit, since the true quality of great poetry is evident to ‘Men
of the best tast’. There were indeed many, like Dennis, who had en-
thused elsewhere at the Xights of Whig panegyric, but who insisted that
Blackmore’s aspirations to epic sublimity were misplaced. In his history
of English poetry in ‘Poetae Britannici’ (1700) Samuel Cobb praises the
excursions of Montagu’s Epistle, and declares that the heroic endeavours
of William III are to be the theme of modern poetry. Yet Blackmore is
identiWed as one who strives for Xight but ultimately misses the mark:
We grant he labours with no want of Brains,
Or Fire, or Spirit; but He spares the Pains,
One happy Thought, or two, may at a Heat
Be struck, but Time and Study must compleat
A Verse, sublimely Good, and justly Great.91
Yet the trouble with Prince Arthur was that it prompted much praise as
well as criticism. The poem, as we have seen, was hugely popular:
Samuel Johnson, who made a special case for the inclusion of Black-
more in his Lives of the Poets, comments:
That Prince Arthur found many readers is certain, for in two years it had three
editions; a very uncommon instance of favourable reception, at a time when
literary curiosity was yet conWned to particular classes of the nation.92
The contrast between such popularity and the criticism of other readers
illustrated the fact that not all men of sense agreed: one man’s sublimity
could very well be another man’s fustian, and vice versa.
90 John Dennis, Remarks on a Book Entituled, Prince Arthur, An Heroick Poem. With
Some General Critical Observations, and Several New Remarks Upon Virgil (1696), in
Critical Works, i. 70–1. Further page references in the text are to this edition.
91 Samuel Cobb, ‘Of Poetry’, in Poems on Several Occasions, 214.
92 Samuel Johnson, ‘Life of Blackmore’, in Lives of the Poets, ii. 238.
In the Remarks on Prince Arthur Dennis attempted to address

this knotty relationship between poetic aVect and literary quality.
Acknowledging that Prince Arthur had enjoyed great popular acclaim,
he considered the hypothetical argument of the reader who observed
that ‘the Narration of Prince Arthur pleases me, and pleases ten thou-
sand more, and therefore it is delightfull’ (p. 70). Dennis quickly
dismissed this notion of mere popularity as an index of merit, stating
that ‘there is a good tast, and [ . . . ] there is a bad, and [ . . . ] the latter
very often prevails’ (p. 70). However, he was on more diYcult ground
when forced to consider the nature of his readership and the undeniable
evidence of ‘men of good sence’ who had enjoyed Blackmore’s
poem. In the ensuing discussion of poetry, popularity, and taste Dennis
problematized some of the central terms of contemporary literary
criticism. What exactly was a man of sense? What was a man of taste?
Were they the same thing? In attempting to legislate for the evaluation
of literary works he declared that those who were genuinely qualiWed
to judge of literary merit were a select group. He asserts that ‘that
which is commonly call’d good sence, is not suYcient to form a good
tast in Poetry’ and argues that in the ‘best Judges’ ‘good sence should
be joyn’d with an inclination for Poetry, and with a tolerable share of
experience in it’ (p. 70). Only these ‘best Judges’ are able to discern
‘Pebbles [which] may, by their false glittering, be impos’d on the
ignorant for Diamonds’ (p. 71). As this account suggests, Dennis’s
endeavours to establish the markers of genuine poetic genius became
more fraught the further he probed into the relationship between
taste and literary excellence. Having established that aVect was the
hallmark of the true sublime, he then speciWed that that aVect was
only signiWcant if felt by a man qualiWed to judge. This was an argument
that in turn complicated ideas of the broader function of literature.
As Dennis acknowledges, an emphasis on the exclusivity of ‘true’
taste was incompatible with notions of the reformative function of
literature:
if a true tast for Epick Poetry were conWn’d to so small a number, and
consequently, so few were capable of receiving the true delight from it, it
would follow from hence, that its Instruction, which it conveys to the Reader
by pleasure, would not only be restrain’d to a very few, but to those who want
it least (p. 71)
Dennis counters this argument by maintaining that if poetry can please

the best judges it will automatically please other, less discerning
readers, who will soon lose interest in the mediocre verse they have
previously enjoyed. It remained, however, a source of tension in the
critic’s discussions of the sublime.93 The periodical essays of the Tatler
and the Spectator are the intellectual fruits of Dennis’s theories about
literary merit and literary criticism. Addison’s and Steele’s essays on
poetry and drama attempted to reconcile the exclusivity of literary
criticism with an emphasis on the didactic and reformative role of
literature. In their informed and literate discussions of contemporary
and classic literature they showed their readers not only why some texts
were diamonds rather than pebbles, but also how those diamonds could
oVer moral touchstones for contemporary society.
Sublime oppositions
The emphasis on irregularity, on excess, and on the transgression of the

known boundaries of poetic experience that was central to Whig deWni-
tions of the sublime runs directly counter to the elegant wit and order
privileged by Tory critics such as George Granville and the Earl of
Roscommon. So how far are poetics party-political in this period?
Whig writers frequently presented their ideas from an oppositional
perspective. As we have seen, many poets of the 1680s had linked the
emphasis on wit and eloquence in Tory writing to the elegant corrup-
tion of the Stuart court. This suspicion of verbal order and stylishness is
perpetuated in later critical writing. Leonard Welsted’s treatise on the
sublimity of the English poets belittles the ‘gawdy Strokes of this
glittering Tinsel-Vein’ in Edmund Waller’s poetry and writes of the
‘certain prettinesses of Fancy, by some mistaken for easy Writing, by
others for genteel Poetry’ that are valued in contemporary verse.94 The
editor of the Whig miscellany Poems on AVairs of State prefaces his
selection of liberty-loving Whig and republican poets with an explicit
attack on poetic harmony:
There are a sort of Men, who having little other merit than a happy chime,
would fain Wx the Excellence of Poetry in the smoothness of the VersiWcation
[ . . . ] I must own that I am of opinion, that a great many rough Cadencies
93 For a full discussion of the negotiation of taste and class in Dennis’s criticism see
John Morillo, ‘John Dennis: Enthusiastic Passions, Cultural Memory and Literary Theory’,
94 Welsted, The Works of Dionysius Longinus, 168, 172.
[sic] that are to be found in these Poems, and in the admirable Paradise Lost,
are so far from Faults that they are Beauties.95
And on the other side Tory writers were outspoken in their condemna-
tion of poets straining for the sublime: in Concerning Unnatural Flights
in Poetry (1702) George Granville attacks the writers
Who, driven with ungovernable Wre,
Or void of Art, beyond these bounds aspire,
Gygantick forms, and monstrous Births alone
Produce, which Nature shockt, disdains to own
. . . . . . . .
Such frantick Xights, are like a Mad-mans dream,
And nature suVers, in the wild extream. (ll. 13–16, 57–8)96
These lines expose Granville’s fear of the wider implications of the
sublime: the suggestion of unnatural aspiration betrays the social di-
mensions of poetic ambition, and there is a ‘monstrous’, ‘ungovernable’
quality to elevated poetry that suggests the transgression of an estab-
lished political order which shocks Nature herself. It is not hard to see
how Samuel Kliger argued that the distinctions between the ‘irregular-
ity’ of Whig poetry and the ‘regularity’ of Tory poetry form the basis of
party-political aesthetics in the eighteenth century.97
However, there are a number of factors which complicate this reading
of early eighteenth-century poetry. While the heated cultural politics of
the Wrst decade of the eighteenth century might have encouraged a
Whig appropriation of sublime or elevated verse, this argument be-
comes less sustainable by the mid-eighteenth century, when politics
were not so dramatically oppositional, but verse was still highly ‘irregu-
lar’.98 And recent critics have drawn attention to the ways in which the
sublime could be used by poets across the political spectrum. Christine
95 Preface to Poems on AVairs of State from the Reign of King James the First to this
Present Year 1703 (London, 1703), sigs. a2r-a2v. On the political implications of this critique
of poetic regularity by republican writers see Norbrook, Writing the English Republic,
134–9.
96 George Granville, Concerning Unnatural Flights in Poetry (1701), in Womersley (ed.),
Augustan Critical Writing, 126–8.

97 Samuel Kliger, The Goths in England: A Study in Seventeenth- and Eighteenth-Century
Thought (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1952), 3–6.

98 Christine Gerrard explores some of the diYculties of theorizing about the corres-
pondence between political ideology and aesthetic form in The Patriot Opposition to
Walpole: Politics, Poetry, and National Myth, 1725–1742 (Oxford: Oxford University Press,
1994), 71–81.
Gerrard has shown the way in which writers of the patriot opposition,
such as Aaron Hill, James Thomson, and David Mallet, took up Den-
nis’s theories in their criticism of the Walpole government during the
1720s and 1730s.99 David Fairer has argued that the sublime, with its
suggestion of a truth that could not be articulated, could also provide an
appropriate form for Jacobite sentiment.100 Taking a diVerent angle,
James Noggle has recently argued for the existence of a ‘sceptical
sublime’ in Tory poetry of the early eighteenth century. He asserts
that we can read the constant undercutting of the sublime in Pope’s
poetry as another way of expressing the unutterable nature of truly
elevated thought. Thus the scepticism of the Essay on Man ‘far from
abolishing a sense of the sublime, elevates it out of sight, itself a
paradoxical movement that generates a commanding but peculiarly
empty authority’.101 In this way Pope’s endless parodying of the Xights
of Blackmore, Dennis, and others demonstrates a conviction that a
sublime vision may theoretically exist, but it cannot be articulated.
Noggle’s argument requires us to accept parody of the sublime as a
form of sublimity, but there is also evidence of straightforwardly sub-
lime or enthusiastic tendencies in early eighteenth-century Tory
writing.102 If we reread Roscommon’s Essay on Translated Verse we
can see that while Roscommon praises a ‘strict harmonious Symetry
of Parts’, he also aspires towards poetic elevation:
Hail, mighty MARO! may that Sacred Name,
Kindle my Breast with thy caelestial Flame;
Sublime Ideas, and apt Words infuse.
The Muse instruct my Voice, and Thou inspire the Muse!103
Such interest in the sublime can also be found in Pope’s Essay on

Criticism. I argued in Chapter 1 that Pope’s Essay was essentially deWned
in reaction to Dennis’s Grounds of Criticism. But alongside the attacks
99 Christine Gerrard, ‘Pope, Peri Bathous and the Whig Sublime’, in David Womersley
(ed.), Cultures of Whiggism: New Essays on Literature and History in the Long Eighteenth
Century (Newark, NJ, and London: University of Delaware Press, forthcoming).
100 Fairer, English Poetry of the Eighteenth Century, 128.
101 James Noggle, The Skeptical Sublime: Aesthetic Ideology in Pope and the Tory Satirists
(New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), 127.

102 For a fuller discussion of the politics of enthusiasm see my article ‘The Poetry of the
Un-Enlightened: Politics and Literary Enthusiasm in the Early Eighteenth Century’,

History of European Ideas (2004).
103 Roscommon, An Essay on Translated Verse, Womersley (ed.), in Augustan Critical
Writing, 113.
on Dennis and the incipient Whig critical tradition we also Wnd admir-
ation for the rapturous mode of Longinian poetics. This is implicit
in Pope’s praise of the critic who can ‘From vulgar Bounds with
brave Disorder part, | And snatch a Grace beyond the Reach of Art’
(ll. 154–5).104 It is also made explicit in the lines on Longinus, who, Pope
declares: ‘Is himself that great Sublime he draws’ (l. 680).
Pope evidently found substantial evidence of such poetic aVect in
Homer’s Iliad. In the preface to his six-volume translation he marvelled
at the ‘sublimity and spirit of [Homer’s] thoughts’ and observed that:
Exact Disposition, just Thought, correct Elocution, polish’d Numbers, may
have been found in a thousand; but this Poetical Fire, this Vivida vis animi, in
a very few105
As Kirsti Simonsuuri and others have shown, Pope’s Iliad was to be
inXuential in its promotion of the sublime qualities of the epic, paving
the way for the reconsideration of the Greek bard’s ‘original genius’.106
However, Pope also hoped to achieve similar eVects in his own poetry.
He writes in a letter to William Cowper in February 1732:
I should not be sorry if you tryed your hand upon Eloisa to Abelard, since it
has more of that Descriptive, &, (if I may so say) Enthusiastic Spirit, which is
the Character of the Ancient Poets, & will give you more occasions of
Imitating them.107
The term ‘enthusiasm’ is used here not to denote false inspiration and
religious radicalism, but in the sense that Dennis had developed in The
Grounds of Criticism, as a form of poetic inspiration and genius associ-
ated with primitive poetry. Further evidence of Pope’s own attempts to
achieve such poetic aVect may be found in his ‘Messiah’ (1712), a ‘sacred
eclogue’ that begins with the lofty invocation: ‘Ye Nymphs of Solyma!
begin the Song: | To heavn’ly Themes sublimer Strains belong’.108 In
invoking the nymphs of Jerusalem rather than the conventional
maidens of pastoral, Pope announces his emphasis on sublimity rather
than mere delight, and the later allusions to Vergil and Isaiah reinforce
104 Alexander Pope, An Essay on Criticism (1711), in TE i. 257–8. Further line references
in the text are to this edition.

105 Alexander Pope, preface to the Iliad, in TE vii. 4.
106 On Pope’s Homer see Kirsti Simonsuuri, Homer’s Original Genius: Eighteenth-
Century Notions of the Early Greek Epic, 1688–1798 (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1989).
107 Pope to Cowper, February 1732, in The Correspondence of Alexander Pope, ed. George
Sherburn, 5 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon, 1956), iii. 269.

108 Alexander Pope, ‘Messiah’ (1712), in TE i. 112.
the expectation of poetic Xight. David B. Morris has suggested that the
poem may represent Pope’s oblique answer to Henry Cromwell, who
had reminded him that while he had surpassed Dennis in the realm of
criticism he had yet to prove his superiority in the grander poetic forms
in which Dennis specialized.109 Whatever the origins of the poem,
contemporaries and later readers from Richard Steele to Joseph Warton
recognized ‘Messiah’ as a prime example of the biblical sublime.110
An interest in sublime enthusiasm was evidently not an exclusively
Whiggish preoccupation. Tory writers were certainly more likely to
attack their contemporaries for their enthusiastic tendencies and mis-
guided attempts at poetic Xight than aspire towards an elevated poetics
themselves. However, they also were reluctant to lose purchase on the
concept of the sublime, with its connotations of poetic genius and Wre.
There are undoubtedly diVerences of emphasis in the Whig and Tory
versions of the sublime. In the examples of the Tory poetry given above
the sublime is not causally linked to political liberty, nor is it used in the
context of political topics. In Whig verse and literary criticism the
sublime is fundamentally related to a political context. There was
perceived to be a connection between the establishing of political liberty
and the fruition of native literature, in the form of sublime verse. The
sublime, with its suggestion of innovation and freedom from formal
constraint was the ideal mode in which to celebrate the events of post-
Revolution Britain. Moreover, it was also seen as the appropriate model
for a body of public poetry in celebration of the awe-inspiring heroism
of contemporary military leaders.
Reading contemporary praise for the Whig sublime both alongside its
more famous Tory critique and alongside Tory attempts at the sublime
illustrates the necessity for bringing a historical awareness to the aes-
thetic rules and values through which we might now read and judge
both Whig and Tory poetry. To cite J. Paul Hunter again: ‘Aesthetics are
particular, local, time and technology-dependent, and Beauty is in the
culturally trained eye of a Beholder who exists in time and space for
such a little while’.111 It is only in attempting to reconstruct such a
historical ‘Beholder’ that we can start to understand early eighteenth-
century poetry on its own terms.
109 Morris, The Religious Sublime, 111.

110 On the reception see Morris, The Religious Sublime, 112.
111 Hunter, ‘Sleeping Beauties’, 18.
6
Patronage and the public writer
in Whig literary culture
In this Wnal chapter I will return to the broader relations between

political and literary culture by addressing the material basis of the
production of early Whig literature and in particular the networks of
patronage that lay behind Whig poetry. Within these networks we can
discern the interconnection of state Wnances, government aVairs,
court authority, and literary culture. This interconnection was so
complete that boundaries and distinctions which are now taken for
granted, between the commercial world, the world of court and gov-
ernment, and the world of the arts, were barely recognized in the glory
days of the Whig ascendancy. The close connection between literary
and political cultures was not conWned to the Whigs, as any study of
Tory Augustan satire and ‘the rage of party’ will show. But amongst
Whigs in particular there was an ideological and practical commitment
to the beneWts of the marriage of arts and politics: a sense that the
two were interdependent. On the one hand, as we have seen, Whig
poetry was dedicated to the celebration of events in public life, and there
was a widespread belief that literature could both create and provide
evidence of political legitimacy. And on the other hand key Whig
political Wgures became the sponsors and guardians of the new literary
culture.
In examining the exchanges of material support and literary endorse-
ment that provided the basis of Whig patronage we can gain new
perspectives on the intersection of political and cultural life in the
period. The exposure of such networks of support further explains
why Whig poets represented an aVront and a threat to their Tory critics.
Whig writers were coopted into the machinery of government to such
an extent that they and their work became at times indistinguishable
from party-political life. In such a situation, party-speciWc Wnancing for
literary endeavour could not but create resentment in those writers
Patronage and the public writer in Whig culture 205
clearly excluded from the spoils.1 Exposing systems of Whig patronage

will also give further resonance to my description of this verse as public
poetry. The literary work produced by Whig patronage is in many cases
commissioned to serve that Wne borderline between government or
party interest and public, general, or national interest. Making systems
of Whig patronage apparent will conWrm powerfully that the poetry
discussed in this book is Whig poetry. The ties between statesmen and
authors, between state ideology and literature, are so tight that the
association of party and poems becomes self-evident. The value—even
the necessity—of bringing political understanding to any of the poetry
of this period is made explicit, demonstrating again that politics and
aesthetics cannot be separated in analysis of these poems. Yet at the
same time it is clear that the wealthy Whig aristocracy became involved
in literary and artistic projects that did not have a speciWc political
agenda. The evidence of the lavish theatre, publications, architecture,
and music sponsored by the Whig aristocracy demonstrates that pat-
ronage was also used to secure cultural authority in the broadest sense.
Patronage and the author
A reappraisal of Whig patronage clearly oVers new perspectives on

authorship in this period, and it oVers in particular a corrective to the
notion that the late seventeenth century and early eighteenth century
witnessed the gradual rise of the independent author. Recent criticism
has moved away from the morally loaded idea of patronage as ‘depend-
ence’ that we have seen in earlier critical responses to Whig verse, but it
has perpetuated a narrative of the rise of the professional author in the
early eighteenth century.2 In his recent account of the literary market
1 Several of Charles Montagu’s biographers explain Pope’s and Swift’s hostility to the
famous patron as a result of their jealousy and disappointment at failing to secure his
support (see John Aiken, The General Biographical Dictionary; or Lives, Critical and
Historical, of the most Eminent Persons (London, 1799–1815); Alexander Chalmers, The
General Biographical Dictionary: Containing an Historical and Critical Account (London,
1812–17).
2 As Dustin GriYn has argued, the concept of the rise of the professional author
became increasingly attractive during the 1980s because it dovetailed with wider argu-
ments about the ‘commercialization of culture’. (See e.g. Deborah Rogers, ‘The Commer-
cialization of Eighteenth-Century English Literature’, Clio, 18 (1989), 171–8, and J. H.
Plumb, ‘The Commercialization of Leisure in Eighteenth-Century England’, in Neil
206 Patronage and the public writer in Whig culture
place in the eighteenth century, Professional Imaginative Writing in

England (1997), Brean Hammond asserts: ‘I see the decades following
1660 as a period of English cultural history in which a relatively rapid
shift from patronage to marketing as the primary way of Wnancing
imaginative writing was accomplished’.3 This chapter will complicate
this teleological history. Not only will it show that many writers con-
tinued to be supported by aristocratic patronage well into the eight-
eenth century, but it will also disturb the equation of patronage with
tradition, and commercialism with modernity underpinning the story of
the rise of the professional writer. Prominent early eighteenth-century
Whigs viewed their support of the arts not as an antiquated quasi-
feudal system, but as part of the new and invigorated reorganization of
modern Britain. Through literary patronage the Whig elite hoped to
foster an original and distinctively Whiggish national culture.4
Stuart patronage
As we have seen, Tory attacks on the commercialism of Whig poetry

frequently involved a nostalgic longing for an earlier ‘golden age’ of
Stuart patronage. Their images of the generosity and magniWcence of
the Stuart court have been so inXuential they have prompted later critics
to accept as a fact the argument of these texts: that patronage ended
with the Stuarts, and that professional writing had to replace it as the
McKendrick, John Brewer, and J. H. Plumb (eds.), The Commercialization of Eighteenth-
Century England: The Birth of a Consumer Society (London: Europa, 1982), 265–285.)
3 Brean Hammond, Professional Imaginative Writing in England 1670–1740: ‘Hackney for
Bread’ (Oxford: Clarendon, 1997), 249. The recent, and important, investigation into the
role of women in the eighteenth-century literary market place found in the work of Paula
McDowell and Catherine Ingrassia has tended to corroborate this emphasis on commer-
cialization (McDowell, The Women of Grub Street: Press, Politics, and Gender in the London
Literary Marketplace, 1678–1730 (Oxford: Clarendon, 1998); Catherine Ingrassia, Author-
ship, Commerce, and Gender in Early Eighteenth-Century England: A Culture of Paper Credit
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998) ).
4 There are, of course, critics who have dissented from this argument about the
commercialization of literature. In Social Authorship and the Advent of Print (Baltimore,

Md.: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999) Margaret Ezell emphasizes the continuation of
a ‘social’ literary culture based on manuscript transmission. In Literary Patronage in
England 1650–1800 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996) Dustin GriYn argues
that literary patronage remained alive and well throughout this period. However, GriYn’s
preoccupation with the ambiguities of dedicatory prose, and its place as a ‘site of
contestation’, means that it is the way that Tory writers simultaneously resist and endorse
patronal authority that engages most of his attention. The Whig writers who beneWted
most fully from systematic government patronage are given much less consideration.
dominant force in literary production.5 The narrative of the eighteenth-

century rise of the professional author out of a system of patronage
depends upon the assumption that seventeenth-century patronage was
Wrmly entrenched and not itself subject to signiWcant change. Yet this
image of the Stuart court is a myth, and was recognized as such even at
the time it was being constructed. In a strident attack on Pope’s Essay on
Criticism the Whig critic John Dennis took issue with its claim that
under Charles II ‘wits had pensions’, arguing that
all the World knows that it was one of the Faults of that Reign that none of
the politer Arts were then encourag’d [ . . . ] there was then indeed a favour-
able regard shewn to Wit, but no real Encouragement. Butler was starv’d at
the same time that the King had his Book in his Pocket. Another great Wit lay
seven Years in Prison for an inconsiderable debt, and Otway dar’d not to shew
his Head for fear of the same Fate.6
Dennis’s claims that under Charles II the arts were not genuinely
encouraged are supported by recent historical research on the Wnances
of the late Stuart kings. R. O. Bucholz’s study of the Augustan court has
shown that the decline of court culture can in fact be dated from the
reign of Charles II, and that the real achievement of the Restoration
court was to create its own reputation, so that contemporaries assumed
that cultural innovation and patronage depended on the king.7 Other
accounts have shown that the Stuarts fared poorly compared with the
monarchs of Continental Europe, and were never as active in artistic
patronage as the Bourbons or Habsburgs. Charles I and Charles II
might have tried to build an imitation of the cultural life of an absolutist
court, but it was a very pale imitation.8 As we shall see, it was not until
5 Steven Zwicker for example has referred to: ‘The sudden disappearance of the centre
of . . . [court] patronage with the Xight of James II [which] must have been a source of
some consternation in 1688’ (‘Representing the Revolution’, in Lines of Authority: Politics
and English Literary Culture, 1649–1689 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1993), 173–99
(176) ).
6 John Dennis, ReXections Critical and Satyrical, upon a late Rhapsody, call’d, An Essay
Upon Criticism (1711), in Critical Works, i. 412–13.

7 R. O. Bucholz, The Augustan Court: Queen Anne and the Decline of Court Culture
(Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1993), 16.

8 See J. H. Elliott, ‘The Court of the Spanish Habsburgs: A Peculiar Institution?’, in
P. Mack and M. C. Jacob (eds.), Politics and Culture in Early Modern Europe: Essays in
Honour of H. G. Koenigsberger (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), 2–24;
R. Isherwood, Music in Service of the King: France in the Seventeenth Century (Ithaca,
NY: Cornell University Press, 1973); S. Orgel, ‘The Royal Theatre and the Role of the King’,
in S. Orgel and G. Fitch Lytle (eds.), Patronage in the Renaissance (Princeton, NJ:
Princeton University Press, 1981), 26–73.
the advent of William III that England saw the development and
funding of the kinds of cultural programmes associated with the French
court. There were good reasons why it was diYcult for Charles II to
maintain high levels of royal spending on the arts during this period:
the privy purse was simply too tightly controlled by Parliament, and too
impoverished, to be able to aVord the generosity of the French king.9
And in fact, if we look more closely at the 1670s and 1680s, we Wnd that,
for all the later nostalgia for Stuart court patronage, many writers
favoured by Charles II were complaining that the king’s enthusiasm
for poetry was not matched by his Wnancial commitment. Even John
Dryden, the Laureate who had proclaimed the Restoration as a new
Augustan age, and had sung the achievements of the Stuarts for over
four decades, writes in his ‘Discourse Concerning the Original and
Progress of Satire’ (1693) that he was ‘encourag’d only with fair
Words, by King Charles II, my little Sallary ill paid, and no prospect
of a future Subsistance, I was then Discourag’d in the beginning of my
Attempt’.10 The accepted description of the Restoration period as a time
of glorious Xourishing of court-sponsored arts may be based more on
rhetoric than evidence.
Opposition patronage during the Exclusion Crisis
The erratic benevolence of Charles II was not of course the only source
of artistic support during the 1670s and 1680s. Study of opposition
publications during this period reveals that there was a network of
support available to early Whig writers. This patronage seems to have
taken the form of one-oV payments for individual publications or
occasional donations rather than the systematic funding of the arts
9 This restriction aVected the whole spectrum of artistic activity—the theatre, which
Charles II had famously supported in the early years of his reign, was struggling so much
by 1682 that the King’s Company was forced to unite with the stronger Duke’s Company.
By the 1670s court musicians’ salaries were so seriously in arrears that the King’s Musick
decayed, and payments to Dryden, Charles’s Poet Laureate and Historiographer Royal,
were so overdue that Dryden instigated more commercial projects to supplement his
income. Kathleen M. Lynch argues that Dryden himself may have suggested Tonson’s
scheme for the publication of an annual miscellany of poems by selected writers (Lynch,
Jacob Tonson, Kit-Cat Publisher (Tennessee, Tenn.: University of Tennessee Press, 1971), 21).
10 John Dryden, ‘Discourse concerning the Original and Progress of Satire’, in Works, iv.
23. For a similar story see John Oldham, ‘A Satyr . . . Dissuading the Author from the Study
of Poetry’ (1682/3?), in The Poems of John Oldham, ed. Harold F. Brooks and Raman Selden
(Oxford: Clarendon, 1987).
that was to characterize the post-Revolution period. The only central-

ized source of patronage during the 1680s was the Green Ribbon Club, a
Whig club which met at the King’s Head on Chancery Lane.11 It
provided a point of contact for the various and dissimilar political
groups that made up the opposition: amongst the 170-plus members
of the Club there were peers and MPs, like Ford Lord Grey, the Rye
House plotter, or the Whig leader the Wrst Earl of Shaftesbury; old
puritans like Slingsby Bethel; wealthy merchants from the City, lawyers,
and minor City oYcers; and politically active country gentlemen, whose
connections inside and outside London made them hugely inXuential.12
The most public form of propaganda organized by the Green Ribbon
Club was the huge pope-burning procession that its members held on 17
November, the anniversary of Elizabeth I’s birthday. However, the Green
Ribbon also seems to have been responsible for the publication and
dissemination of topical pamphlets and poems.13 The mixed member-
ship of the Club, with its combination of politicians, writers, and
publishers, clearly brought together potential writers of Whig propa-
ganda with potential patrons. The writers who frequented the King’s
Head included Charles Blount, John AyloVe, Thomas Shadwell, and the
journalist and publisher Henry Care, who was Wnancially supported by
the Club during a period of persecution by the government author-
ities.14 The aristocratic leaders of the Whig opposition were also
members. These included the Wrst Earl of Shaftesbury, and Ford Lord
Grey. The Duke of Buckingham had links with many of the radicals in
the Club, and may even have sought to patronize it.15 Whig stationers
represented at the King’s Head included the Baptist Francis Smith and
the bookseller John Starkey, whose shop was one of the alternative
locations for Club meetings.16
11 For a fuller account of the Club see J. R. Jones, ‘The Green Ribbon Club’, Durham
University Journal, 49 (1956), 17–20.

12 Many members also belonged to other city clubs, such as the Green Dragon, the
Angel, or the Salutation. Others belonged to political clubs in their own provincial towns,
and the contact that this provided between the centre of Whig political organization and
the rest of the country proved essential to the success of the mass petitions for the
summoning of Parliament between 1678 and 1681.
13 Surviving historical records are so scant that it is not possible to trace which
publications Green Ribbon members supported.

14 See Jones, ‘The Green Ribbon Club’, 17.
15 Jonathan Scott, Algernon Sidney and the Restoration Crisis, 1677–1683 (Cambridge:

16 Mark Knights, Politics and Opinion in Crisis, 1678–1681 (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1994), 163.

Outside the Club patronage of opposition writing was organized

largely through Nonconformist publishing networks. Contemporary
accounts suggest that Nonconformists in the book trade were recog-
nized as playing a central role in the production of opposition writing,
and Lois Schwoerer’s study of Henry Care has shown that the printer/
publisher or bookseller often actually acted as a patron him- or herself,
commissioning the writing of a particular pamphlet and supplying the
author with ideas and money.17 The restrictions upon Dissenters in the
pulpit and in the press had forced Nonconformists to develop a sophis-
ticated undercover publishing system through which opposition writers
circulated their unlicensed propaganda. The years immediately after the
lapse of the Licensing Act in 1679 marked a crucial period for the
emergence of these Nonconformist booksellers and printers as central
Wgures in the literary market place, as Michael Treadwell has shown.18
Such printers and publishers produced both prose and poetry, and they
evidently packaged political verse for diVerent markets: topical verse
and ballads were included alongside the news and commentary in
weekly serials such as Henry Care’s Popish Courant, but there were
also the more prestigious poems that form the basis of this study,
which appeared singly in folio editions.19 This commercial tailoring
17 Roger L’Estrange, the licenser of the press, refers to Francis Smith as ‘The principall-
Agent for the Presbyterians [i.e. the future Whigs] in their Trade of Libells, being entrusted
with their Manuscripts’ (cited by Richard L. Greaves in Secrets of the Kingdom: British
Radicals from the Popish Plot to the Revolution of 1688–9 (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford
University Press, 1992), 18). Henry Muddiman referred to Smith as ‘The prime dispenser
of all sorts of the most lewd and seditious pamphlets’ (Muddiman, newsletter of 4 March
1684, cited by J. G. Muddiman in The King’s Journalist 1659–1689: Studies in the Reign of
Charles II (New York: Augustus M. Kelley, 1971), 243). Schwoerer discusses in particular
Henry Care’s involvement in A Narrative and Impartial Discovery of the Horrid Popish Plot
(1679) (Schwoerer, The Ingenious Mr Henry Care, Restoration Publicist (Baltimore, Md.,
and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001), 77–80).
18 Michael Treadwell, ‘London Trade Publishers 1675–1750’, Library, 6th ser., 4 (1982),
99–135. Treadwell cites the Whig publishers Richard Janeway, Richard Baldwin, and
Langley Curtis as prime examples of the rise of the trade publisher, whose commercial
exploitation of the Exclusion Crisis was informed by their long-standing political com-
mitment. For a more detailed account of the Baldwins’ trade see L. Rostenberg, ‘Richard
and Anne Baldwin, Whig Patriot Publishers’, Papers of the Bibliographical Society of
America, 47 (1953), 1–42.
19 Of the singly published poetic responses to Dryden’s Absalom and Achitophel that are
discussed in Chapter 2, Thomas Shadwell’s The Medal of John Bayes was published by
Richard Janeway, Elkanah Settle’s Absalom Senior by Langley Curtis, and Edmund Hick-
eringill’s The Mushroom by Francis Smith. For a substantial discussion of the circulation of
political material in pamphlets and MSS in the Exclusion Crisis see Mark Knights, Politics
and Opinion in Crisis, 1678–81 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 156–84.
indicates that early Whig writing was funded through both sales and
patronage.
Although there are very few documents that have survived to show the
extent to which Whig politicians planned and directed political propa-
ganda, there is some proof that the activities of opposition printers were
supported by senior political leaders. At a general level the lapse of the
Licensing Act unleashing the publication of so much Whig propaganda
was probably brought about through campaigning in the House of Lords
by Lord Wharton and other unidentiWed Nonconformists.20 More spe-
ciWcally, there seem to be a number of ties between the Whig leader the
Wrst Earl of Shaftesbury and various Whig publishers. Roger L’Estrange
described Shaftesbury as the ‘brain’ in the press of the Whig opposition,
and the author of the Memoirs of the life of Anthony Late Earl of Shaftes-
bury (1682) alleges that at Shaftesbury’s London home, Thanet House on
Aldersgate Street, ‘Whole Sholes of Lewd and Seditious Pamphlets’ were
written, printed, and dispersed, with the help of ‘the Anabaptist Book-
sellers, Smith and Harris, Jack Starkey &c.’21 The location of Thanet
House was certainly close to many of the radical printers, as well as to the
prominent City Nonconformists, merchants, and artisans who sup-
ported the Exclusion movement. Shaftesbury organized the ‘monster
petition’ of January 1680, and there is also some evidence to suggest he
commissioned and authored individual publications. This is conWrmed
by the reports of government informers from this period.22 Thus, al-
though the details of transactions between Whig peers and opposition
stationers may no longer exist, contemporary accounts and occasional
documents suggest that the huge output of exclusionist propaganda
during this period was in part sustained by support from Whig leaders.
However, this patronage probably constituted occasional donations to
individual poets rather than the larger-scale bureaucratic systems of
support developed under William III.
20 Douglas R. Lacey, Dissent and Parliamentary Politics in England, 1661–1689: A Study
in the Perpetuation and Tempering of Parliamentarianism (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers

21 G. W. Kitchin, Sir Roger L’Estrange: A Contribution to the History of the Press in the
Seventeenth Century (London: K. Paul, Trench, Trubner, 1913), 272; Memoirs of the Life of
Anthony Late Earl of Shaftesbury (London, 1682), 6–7.
22 On the monster petition see Mark Knights, ‘London’s ‘‘Monster’’ Petition of 1680’,
Historical Journal, 36 (1993), 39–67. On evidence of Shaftesbury’s role in commissioning

writing see Knights, Politics and Opinion in Crisis, 162; Scandalum Magnatum: Or, Potaps-
ki’s Case (London, 1682), sig. a2v ; T. J. Crist, ‘Francis Smith and the Opposition Press’,
Ph.D. thesis (Cambridge University, 1977), 159; F. Smith, An Account of the Injurious
Proceedings of Sir George JeVreys . . . (London, 1680), sig. a1r.
Charles’s Oxford Parliament of 1681 and the punitive campaign to

reassert royal authority that followed it had signiWcant implications for
the production of opposition writing over the next few years. Some
writers found aristocratic patrons who could support them: Thomas
Shadwell was taken in by Charles Sackville, the Earl of Dorset, who was
later to become a prominent supporter of Whig writers, including, as
we have seen, Charles Montagu.23 The opposition stationers who had
produced and distributed much of the exclusionist propaganda of the
previous decade were heavily hit by the Tory backlash. When the
government censor, Roger L’Estrange, clamped down on seditious pub-
lishing networks during the summer of 1682 most of the opposition
stationers collapsed, many of those who were not imprisoned going into
hiding or exile.24 Yet, as discussed in Chapter 2, Whig poetry, particu-
larly satires, continued to be written in this period. Many poems
circulated in manuscript, and some of them found their way into
print, probably with the aid of the women involved in opposition
publishing, who maintained presses when their husbands and fathers
were in prison.25
The Revolution, William III, and Louis XIV
Gilbert Burnet, the Anglican bishop who, as we discovered through

Aphra Behn’s Pindaric Poem to the Reverend Doctor Burnet (1689), was
to direct the production of much Williamite propaganda, was in contact
with at least two underground opposition stationers during the later
1680s.26 As opposition to James II increased after 1685, and the prospect
23 In his dedication of The Squire of Alsatia (1688) Shadwell says that Dorset gave him
the use of his house, Copt Hall, to write in, and in his dedication to Bury Fair (1689) he
says that he supported him during the ‘near Ten years I was kept from the exercise of that
Profession which had aVorded me a competent Subsistence’ (Shadwell, dedication to The
Squire of Alsatia (1688), in Works, iv. 202; dedication to Bury-Fair (1689), in Works, iv. 294).
24 These indictments reached a peak in December of that year, when the new Tory
sheriVs of London were able to select juries to deliver convictions against booksellers and
printers (see Crist, ‘Francis Smith and the Opposition Press’, 235).
25 Wives and daughters such as Eleanor Smith and Elizabeth Calvert kept an under-
ground publishing business going while their husbands were in prison (see Maureen Bell,
‘Seditious Sisterhood: Women Publishers of Opposition Literature at the Restoration’, in
Kate Chedgzoy, Melanie Hansen, and Suzanne Trill (eds.), Voicing Women: Gender and
Sexuality in Early Modern Writing (Keele: Keele University Press, 1996), 39–60).
26 John Hetet’s study of the underground Nonconformist press provides evidence of
Burnet’s links with John Darby (Hetet, ‘A Literary Underground in Restoration England:
Printers and Dissenters in the Context of Constraints 1660–1689’, Ph.D. thesis (Cambridge,
of William of Orange entering into the constitutional crisis seemed ever

more likely, the Dutch stadthouder used Burnet to help mount a cam-
paign to produce a series of works in support of the Orange position.27
The Williamite propaganda machine produced printed tracts alongside
prints and commemorative medals on a scale unprecedented in earlier
political culture. Lois Schwoerer asserts that ‘Never before in England or
on the Continent had these instruments been used together in such
large number for a single purpose or employed, perhaps, with greater
eVect’.28
After the Revolution William and Mary sought to establish the
authority of the new regime, and a vital technique for this project was
their investment in contemporary architecture, painting, and poetry.29
R. O. Bucholz shows that when William and Mary assumed the throne
they poured large sums of money into the royal household and into new
building work, thus creating the impression of a lavish and thriving
court culture. The paintings and craftsmanship at the palace at Hamp-
ton Court are the most obvious sign of this intended splendour:
research based on the recent restoration of the King’s Apartments
reveals that William III commissioned artists from Versailles to create
his own ‘iconographic programme of self-gloriWcation to rival that of
Louis XIV’.30 The extent and nature of Williamite patronage was indeed
intrinsically related to the contemporary activities of the French court.
University, 1987), 189). If Burnet was involved in Williamite propaganda in the 1680s, this
is unlikely to have happened before 1686, since William was reluctant to ally himself with
the Whig opposition in England until about 1687–8. Although William was involved in a
propaganda campaign in England in the early 1670s, with Peter du Moulin and the
opposition writers Marvell and John AyloVe amongst others, he resisted the attempts of
the Whig leaders to draw him into the Exclusion controversy. For more detail on the
campaign see K. H. D. Haley, William of Orange and the English Opposition 1672–4
(Oxford: Clarendon, 1953), 52, 53, 105–7.
27 On Burnet’s role in producing the Declaration, thanksgiving sermons, and other
material see Tony Claydon, William III and the Godly Revolution (Cambridge: Cambridge
28 Lois Schwoerer, ‘Propaganda in the Revolution of 1688–9’, American Historical
Review, 82 (1977), 843–74 (843). On the evidence of coordinated publishing immediately

after the Revolution see Mark Goldie, ‘The Revolution of 1689 and the Structure of
Political Argument: An Essay and an Annotated Bibliography of Pamphlets’, Bulletin of
Research in the Humanities, 83 (1980), 573–664 (592–4).
29 On William’s achievements as a patron of the visual arts see Christopher Brown,
‘Patrons and Collectors of Dutch Painting in Britain in the Reign of William and Mary’, in
David Howarth (ed.), Art and Patronage in the Caroline Courts: Essays in honour of Sir
Oliver Millar (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 12–31 (12–16).
30 Susan Jenkins, ‘The Artistic Taste of William III’, in The King’s Apartments: Hampton
Court Palace (London: Apollo, 1994), 4–9 (9).

T. C. W. Blanning has shown that the representational culture of the

court at Versailles inXuenced most of the rest of Europe, and we might
understand the role of Williamite patronage through his description of
the French model.31 Blanning argues that Louis XIV
realized that states were centres of authority as well as power and could be
eVective only if their coercive capability was recognized as legitimate by their
members. It was in pursuit of this legitimacy that he unfolded his grand
cultural programme.32
Williamite patronage was clearly used to secure political legitimacy in
a similar way, and it was also used to rival the eVorts of Louis
XIV, intended to replicate and compete with the display of French au-
thority. It is perhaps not surprising, then, that William III’s aesthetic
choices were very similar to his counterpart’s. As Christopher Brown
describes, William’s artistic tastes were closely modelled on the gilded
and highly decorated interiors of Versailles, and he consequently
patronized the French Huguenot architect-designer Daniel Marot, and
the baroque painter Antonio Verrio.33 It is ironic that although William
spent his entire military and political career trying to curb the power
of France, he and his courtiers brought a French baroque style to England.
The evidence of William and Mary’s substantial support for the arts
does not tally with the received view of Williamite culture. In Anecdotes
of Painting in England (1765–80) Horace Walpole wrote that William III
contributed nothing to the advancement of arts. He was born in a country
where taste never Xourished, and nature had not given it to him as an embel-
lishment to his great qualities. He courted Fame, but none of her ministers.34
This idea of William III as anti-cultural, neglectful of the arts, is one
which has been perpetuated up to the present day. Yet it was not always
so. Even at the time Walpole was writing there were those who looked
back on William’s reign as a golden age for the arts. In April 1777 John
Wilkes made a speech in the House of Commons lamenting George III’s
removal of the Raphael cartoons from Hampton Court to Buckingham
Palace, where they were no longer accessible to the public. Wilkes
reminded his audience that it was William III who had originally
31 T. C. W. Blanning, The Culture of Power and the Power of Culture: Old Regime Europe
1660–1789 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), 29–52.

32 Blanning, The Culture of Power, 33.
33 Brown, ‘Patrons and Collectors of Dutch painting in Britain’, 27–8.
34 Horace Walpole, Anecdotes of Painting in England with Some Account of the Principal
Artists (1765–80), ed. Ralph N. Wornum, 3 vols. (London, 1888), ii. 201.
restored the cartoons and had them installed in a new gallery at

Hampton Court, observing that ‘King William, although a Dutchman,
really loved and understood the polite arts. He had the Wne feelings of a
man of taste, as well as the sentiments of a hero’.35
The relationship between self-representation and cultural patronage
is complex. Part of the reason why William III’s role as a patron has not
been recognized is that he did not encourage images of himself as a man
of the arts. His perceived hostility to such matters Wtted well with the
notion of a heroic warrior king, too busy saving Europe to engage with
the Xattery of portrait painters and panegyrists. Whig writers actively
encouraged the idea of William’s rule as the reverse of the ineVectual,
luxurious court culture associated with the Stuart kings. William also
beneWted from the contrast with Louis XIV, who was presented by his
opponents as ever eager to sponsor his own cultural myth-making.36
The poet and diplomat Matthew Prior scoVed at the vanity of the
French king: ‘His house at Versailles is something the foolishest in the
world; he is strutting in every panel, and galloping over one’s head in
every ceiling’.37 The rivalry with the French court created a need for
artistic patronage, yet meant at the same time that the new English king
had to be seen as scorning the role of the self-serving patron. Richard
Blackmore praises William as:
Reverse of Lewis He (example rare!)
Lov’d to deserve the Praise he could not bear.
He shun’d the Acclamations of the Throng,
And always coldly heard the Poet’s Song.38
Charles Montagu’s encomium to William in the Epistle to Dorset also

makes a comparison with the French monarch: ‘Oh! if in France this
Heroe had been born; | What Glittering Tinsel wou’d His Acts adorn’!39
Yet for all this rhetorical emphasis on the king’s lack of interest in the
arts, William was investing in major changes in contemporary cultural
35 Quoted by John Shearman, Raphael’s Cartoons in the Collection of Her Majesty the
Queen, and the Tapestries for the Sistine Chapel (London: Phaidon, 1972), 152–3.
36 On contemporary German distrust of Louis XIV’s baroque court culture and
patronage see Georges Livet, ‘Louis XIV and the Germanies’, in Ragnhild Hatton (ed.),
Louis XIV and Europe (London: Macmillan, 1976), 60–81 (74–6).
37 Matthew Prior to Charles Montagu, 18 February 1698, in HMC Calendar of the
Manuscripts of the Marquis of Bath, 5 vols. (London: HMSO, 1904–80), iii. 193.
38 Richard Blackmore, The Kit-Cats: A Poem (London, 1708), 3.
Dorset (London, 1690), 8.

life. These changes included the establishment of bureaucracies, polit-

ical programmes, and systems of Wnance that could channel resources to
writers and other men of wit and ability; particularly, of course, if these
men were Whigs. Some of these structures and systems, such as the civil
list and the secret service, would remain in place throughout the
eighteenth century.
Networks of literary patronage under William III
William III transformed the structure of the royal court after 1688,
dismissing almost all of James II’s old servants and allies and replacing
them with Englishmen who had backed him both politically and Wnan-
cially from the Revolution onwards.40 This Whig Junto became hugely
powerful, with immense resources in their control. In order to direct
more closely the progress and funding of the wars on the Continent,
William reorganized state Wnancial and administrative structures,
centralizing power and wealth in the hands of the Junto immediately
surrounding him. These new Whig ministers were able to use the
resources of the crown, in the form of pensions and places, to reward
their friends. Although patronage was clearly not an exclusively
Whig activity, it was the Whig nobility, politicians, and clergy who
were in a position to distribute places and Wnancial support after
1688.41
The patronage of contemporary writers by Whig statesmen took
place under William’s personal authority. Although Johnson suggests
in the Lives that William did not deserve all the honour and respect
heaped on him as patron but ‘by a choice of ministers, whose dispos-
ition was diVerent from his own, he procured without intention a very
liberal patronage to poets’, it is hard to see how the huge government
40 Others who had played supporting roles during the 1680s also immediately beneWted
from the new regime: Shadwell became Poet Laureate and Historiographer Royal, while
the English printers who had helped circulate Williamite propaganda were given govern-
ment printing jobs and monopolies (see Lois Schwoerer, ‘Propaganda in the Revolution of
1688–9’, 855).
41 John Gascoigne’s account of the creation of a ‘Whig Cambridge’ after the Revolution
reveals the growth of networks of ecclesiastical and academic patronage during the 1690s,
as newly prominent latitudinarian bishops such as Gilbert Burnet, Benjamin Hoadly, and
Simon Patrick began to use their inXuence to shape the theological, political, and cultural
future of the university (Gascoigne, Cambridge in the Age of Enlightenment: Science,
Religion, and Politics from the Restoration to the French Revolution (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1989), 69–184).
funding of Whig writers in the 1690s could have been achieved without
his support.42 As Stephen Baxter observes, despite his reliance on a
series of ministers, William retained control to the extent that ‘none of
them could make or break a Wrst lord of the treasury, spend a shilling
beyond his own salary, or write a line of the speech from the throne’.43
The necessary link between the king and the gifts of his ministers was
certainly evident to contemporary writers—Samuel Wesley’s Epistle to a
Friend Concerning Poetry (1700) makes the source of Montagu’s benevo-
lence explicit: ‘True Worth his Patronage can never miss, | He has his
Prince’s Smiles and that has his’, whilst in Samuel Cobb’s ‘Of Poetry’
(1700) we Wnd William surpassing all previous patrons: ‘No more of
Richelieu’s Worth: Forget not, Fame, | To change Augustus for Great
William’s Name’.44
One of the most signiWcant implications of these developments was
that the most conspicuously celebrated patrons and poets of Williamite
literature held positions in the government and court. The Whig
patrons were major statesmen: men like Charles Montagu, Earl of
Halifax, John, Baron Somers, and Charles Sackville, Earl of Dorset.
Poets like Addison, Stepney, Prior, Congreve, and Hughes were all
given posts in return for poems celebrating either the Revolution or
William’s victories in the Nine Years’ War. The Whig ideological com-
mitment to a unity of politics and letters was thus institutionalized
through networks of patronage which linked poets and statesmen at the
highest level. Poets themselves were given administrative roles because
Whig patronage did not take the form of individual payments, but
rather the gift of positions of public service. As Macaulay observes of
Addison’s rapid promotion from poet to Secretary of State, ‘without
opening his lips in debate, he rose to a post, the highest that Chatham
or Fox ever reached’.45 The man of wit and the man of business were
seen as interchangeable.
42 Samuel Johnson, ‘Life of Addison’, in Lives of the Poets (1779–81), ed. G. Birkbeck Hill,
3 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon, 1935), ii. 85.

43 Stephen Baxter, ‘The Age of Personal Monarchy in England’, in Peter Gay (ed.)
Eighteenth-Century Studies Presented to Arthur M. Wilson (Hanover, NH: University Press

of New England, 1972), 1–11 (6).
44 Samuel Wesley, An Epistle to a Friend Concerning Poetry (London, 1700) repr. by
Augustan Reprint Society (Ann Arbor, Mich.: University of Michigan Press, 1947), 17;
Samuel Cobb, ‘Of Poetry, A Poem’ (1700) in Poems on Several Occasions (London, 1707)
repr. by Augustan Reprint Society (Ann Arbor, Mich.: University of Michigan Press,
1946), 222.
45 Thomas Babington Macaulay, ‘The Life and Writings of Addison’ (1843), in The
Works of Lord Macaulay, 10 vols. (London: Longmans, Green and Co, 1898), x. 111.
The great aristocratic patrons of the 1690s were tied into the centre of
the Williamite regime from its inception. John, Baron Somers had
played a part in the Convention Parliament, heading the committee
that drew up the Declaration of Rights. Appointed Solicitor General in
1689, he rose to Attorney General, and then Keeper of the Seal, Wnally
becoming Lord Chancellor by 1697. His own work consisted of anonym-
ous translations for Tonson of epistles by Ovid, biographies by Plutarch,
and orations by Demosthenes. The huge number of Whig writers
dedicating to him suggests the symbiotic relationship between his
literary and political interests: John Locke, Joseph Addison, Jacob Ton-
son, Pierre Bayle, Richard Steele, and John Hughes were all supported
by Somers under William and Anne.46 Charles Sackville, the elderly Earl
of Dorset, occupied a position even closer to William, as Lord Cham-
berlain of the Household from 1689–97 and member of the Regency
Commission in 1698. A court wit during the reign of Charles II, he was
out of favour under James II, backed the invitation of 1688, and was
consequently given his position in the royal household under William.
This was celebrated, as we have seen, by Charles Montagu in his Epistle.
Dorset, who had himself written a number of opposition satires, was
well placed to help writers into government positions. He had become
famous for his support of writers such as Dryden and Samuel Butler,
and he continued to welcome poets to his houses, Knole and Copt
Hall.47 It was also believed that Shadwell’s promotion to Poet Laureate
in 1689 was owing to Dorset.48
The most celebrated of the Whig patrons in the 1690s and 1700s was
Charles Montagu. Montagu’s career reveals the way in which the de-
veloping system of Whig patronage blurred the distinctions between
men of business and men of letters: a poet could rise up through
government ranks, so that one patronized could eventually become a
patron in his own right. Montagu’s poetry became known following the
success of The Hind and the Panther Transvers’d to the Story of the
Country Mouse and the City Mouse (1687), his collaborative parody,
46 For a more detailed account of Somers and literary patronage see Robert M. Adams,
‘In Search of Baron Somers’, in Perez Zagorin (ed.) Culture and Politics from Puritanism to
the Enlightenment (Berkeley, Calif.: University of California Press, 1980), 165–202.
47 On Dorset’s generosity to writers such as Dryden and Butler see Giles Jacob, The
Mirrour: Or, Letters Satyrical, Panegyrical, Serious and Humorous on the Present Times
(London, 1733), 22.
48 Gerard Langbaine, An Account of the English Dramatick Poets (1691), repr. with an
introd. by John Loftis, 2 vols. (Los Angeles, Calif.: William Andrews Clark Memorial
Library, 1971), ii. 443.
with Prior, of Dryden’s The Hind and the Panther, which was succeeded
by the popular anti-court satire The Man of Honour. When Montagu
then produced his Epistle to Dorset, the Earl of Dorset took the oppor-
tunity to present the young poet to the king. From these beginnings
Montagu rose up through the Treasury and, along with Somers, de-
veloped and directed Wnancial policy under William, founding the Bank
of England and the system of public credit. Although he did not have
the wealth or the social inXuence of the other great aristocratic patrons,
Montagu’s inXuential position at court meant that he was free to
dispense oYcial favours and appointments.49 He was celebrated by
Whig panegyrists as ‘the great Maecenas’ and he supported writers
such as Stepney, Addison, and Congreve. He was also involved in the
promotion of contemporary philosophy and science, through his life-
long friendship with Isaac Newton and his role as President of the Royal
Society between 1695 and 1698.
Other Whig writers were to reap similar rewards. Joseph Addison’s
panegyric ‘To His Majesty’ of 1695, with its compliment to Somers, and
his 1697 poem on the Peace of Ryswick, addressed to Halifax, secured
his literary and political credentials, so that in 1699 he was given £200 of
government money to travel in Italy, an expedition which produced his
A Letter from Italy (1704), dedicated to Halifax, and his Remarks on
Several Parts of Italy (1705), addressed to Somers. On his return he
celebrated Marlborough’s victories with The Campaign (1705), was
made Under-Secretary of State in 1706, and, with works such as The
Free-Holder, defended government policy right up to his resignation in
1717, when he retired with a £1500 government pension. George Stepney,
who was educated at Westminster and Cambridge alongside Charles
Montagu and Matthew Prior, was taken up by Dorset following his
contribution to the Cambridge collection of verses on Charles II’s death.
As Wrst one of ‘my Lord Dorset’s boys’ and then a client of his old friend
Montagu, he was given a series of diplomatic posts, becoming secretary
and envoy to the Elector of Brandenburg in 1692, and a commissioner of
trade in 1697. By the time of his death in 1707 Stepney had become one
of the most accomplished men in government service.50 Prior himself
49 For an account of the way in which Montagu was able to make introductions for
Whig writers see John Oldmixon, preface to The Life and Posthumous Works of Arthur
Maynwaring (London, 1715), 18.
50 The support of the king was ultimately behind these appointments, as a letter from
Prior to Dorset makes clear—Prior writes that Stepney might almost choose his place,
‘having had the fortune to be placed in such a light that his Majesty has known and
was discovered by the Earl of Dorset while he was reading Horace in his
uncle’s tavern, and brought to London, where he was educated at
Westminster School. Dorset continued supporting him throughout
the 1690s, and he, like Stepney, was given diplomatic posts in exchange
for his literary support of the regime in poems such as Carmen Seculare
(1700) and An English Ballad on the Taking of Namur (1695). In 1690 he
was appointed secretary to the ambassador at the Hague, in 1697 he was
made secretary to the embassy at the Treaty of Ryswick, and in 1701 he
entered Parliament as MP for East Grinstead.51 John Hughes, author of
The Triumph of Peace (1698), The Court of Neptune (1699), and The
House of Nassau (1702), was another writer who earned diplomatic
appointments from Whig panegyrics. Having dedicated his translation
of Fontanelle to the Earl of Wharton, when Wharton went as Lord
Lieutenant to Ireland in 1708 he oVered to take Hughes with him and
establish him there.52 Similarly, the critic John Dennis earned the
patronage of the Duke of Marlborough for his panegyrics on the War
of the Spanish Succession, and in 1705 was given a place as a royal waiter
in the port of London at a salary of £120 a year.
Jacob Tonson and the Kit-Cat Club
Whig poetry was clearly funded as part of the very infrastructure of the
Williamite government. Many of the writers linked to the networks
around the Whig Junto published at least some of their poetry through
Jacob Tonson, who during the course of the 1690s established himself as
a central Wgure in the post-Revolution literary scene. Tonson started out
from relatively humble beginnings: the son of a Holborn surgeon, he
became apprenticed to the publisher Thomas Basset at fourteen. Having
completed his training, he began by working with other publishers until
approved of him’ (Prior to Dorset, 24 November 1693, quoted by H. T. Swedenberg Jr., in

‘George Stepney, My Lord Dorset’s Boy’, Huntington Library Quarterly, 10 (1946), 1–33 (8) ).
For fuller details of Stepney’s career see Susan Spens, George Stepney: 1663–1707, Diplomat
and Poet (Cambridge: James Clarke, 1997).
51 For fuller details of Prior’s career see C. C. Barfoot, ‘ ‘‘Hey for Praise and Panegyric’’:
William III and the Political Poetry of Matthew Prior’, in C. C. Barfoot and P. G. Hoftijzer
(eds.), Fabrics and Fabrications: The Myth and Making of William and Mary (Amsterdam:
Rodopi, 1990), 135–88.
52 Michael Foss, The Age of Patronage—the Arts in Society 1600–1750 (London: Hamish
Hamilton, 1971), 147–51. For claims for Wharton, like Montagu, as ‘the Maecenas of our
Isle’ see Giles Jacob, dedicatory verses to A Miscellany of Poems (London, 1718).
his career took oV with the publication of John Dryden’s Troilus and
Cressida in 1679.53 Tonson and Dryden worked together for two
decades, and Tonson became involved in increasingly prestigious ven-
tures. His success was consolidated with his illustrated edition of Mil-
ton’s Paradise Lost in 1688, and by 1700 he was identiWed as a major
literary power-broker: in Richard Blackmore’s Satyr against Wit (1699)
he is described as ‘the great Wit-Jobber of the Age’.54 Although Tonson
made most of his huge fortune from stocks and speculation in England
and France, the money that he originally invested in this was earned
from publishing. From 1688 he had taken on a number of projects
designed to tally his literary and political interests, publishing panegyr-
ics on the war by Joseph Addison, Matthew Prior, Richard Blackmore,
William Congreve, and George Stepney. He also brokered aYliations
between promising or established writers and politically prominent
dedicatees: he famously tried to persuade Dryden to dedicate his Aeneid
to William III, and when Dryden refused he had his way by altering the
engravings of Aeneas to give the hero William’s hooked nose.55 Al-
though a number of literary critics have identiWed the Wnancial success
and independence of Tonson as an indication of the commercialization
of the literary market place, an examination of Tonson’s role in the
networks of Whig writers and statesmen reveals the extent to which his
success was in fact dependent upon his pivotal position in a patronage
system.56 There were undoubtedly signiWcant personal economic incen-
tives for Tonson’s coordination of patrons and authors. As the history of
his relationship with Joseph Addison suggests, the publisher was adept
at working the patronage system to his own advantage. Addison began
corresponding with Tonson while he was still at Oxford, when he agreed
to produce a translation of Herodotus for him.57 Tonson went on to
publish a number of further works by Addison, and was to reap the
rewards of his literary brokering most spectacularly when he bought
53 On Tonson’s background and early career see Lynch, Jacob Tonson, 1–16.
54 Richard Blackmore, A Satyr against Wit (1699), in POAS vi. 149.
55 See James A. Winn, John Dryden and his World (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University
Press, 1987), 484. Similarly, in 1695 Tonson asked Matthew Prior, via Sir William Trumbull,
the Secretary of State, to compose a poem on the death of Queen Mary (Lynch, Jacob
Tonson, 76).
56 See Elizabeth L. Eisenstein on the role of the printer as patron, in The Printing
Revolution in Early Modern Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983; repr.
1990), 100.
57 On the Herodotus project see Joseph Addison to Jacob Tonson, spring 1695, in The
Letters of Joseph Addison, ed. Walter Graham (Oxford: Clarendon, 1941), 1–2.
Addison’s copyright for the hugely successful Cato before it opened in

Drury Lane in April 1713.
Beyond their private Wnancial value, Tonson’s activities also had a
broader politico-cultural signiWcance, particularly through his involve-
ment in the Kit-Cat Club. Early eighteenth-century sources agree that
Tonson acted as permanent secretary of the Club, and when he was away
the Club did not meet. In many ways the Kit-Cat Club represented the
fulWlment of the Whig commitment to a symbiotic relationship be-
tween poetry and public life. The Club was home to almost every
important Whig potentate of the period, and incorporated statesmen
like Lord Somers, Robert Walpole, and Sir William Pulteney, alongside
prominent Wnanciers, military oYcers, and a series of writers, including
Addison, Steele, Congreve, Samuel Garth, John Vanbrugh, and Arthur
Maynwaring. The group began to meet around 1696–8 for weekly
dinners and drinks. The Wrst meetings took place at Christopher Cat-
ling’s tavern, the Cat and Fiddle in Gray’s Inn Lane, and it was from
Catling’s famous ‘Kit-Cat’ mutton pies that the Club gained its name.
The group moved from there to the Fountain Tavern in the Strand, and
then, in 1704, Tonson built a special room for the Club to meet in at his
house in Barn Elms.58 It was from the outset a social club rather than a
political club like the Green Ribbon, or an exclusively literary one like
Will’s, and meetings took the form of lavish feasts, with poetic toasts to
celebrated beauties of the day. By 1700 the group had grown to approxi-
mately forty, all men, from a variety of backgrounds. Although peers
predominated over commoners, making up three-Wfths of the Club, the
Kit-Cats seem to have been keen to stress their mixed membership, with
Tonson, the son of a bootmaker, on an equal footing with the Earl of
Wharton. This social diversity is reXected in Godfrey Kneller’s famous
series of portraits of the Club’s members, which were hung around the
walls of the room at Barn Elms. As David Solkin has observed, where a
series of formal portraits might traditionally adorn an aristocratic
family seat, supporting the dynastic claims of the family, the Kit-Cat
paintings instead celebrate a group of men linked by their commitment
to a set of social and political ideals. Moreover, within the elite conWnes
of the Club’s closed membership, the portraits emphasize a certain
58 Catherine Howells, ‘The Kit-Cat Club: A Study of Patronage and InXuence in Britain
1696–1720’, Ph.D. thesis (Calif.: UCLA Press, 1982), 31. For contemporary accounts of the
Club see Edward Ward, The Secret History of Clubs (London, 1709) and John Oldmixon,
The History of England During the Reigns of King William and Queen Mary, Queen Anne,
and George I (London, 1735).
homogeneity among their subjects. Rather than drawing attention to

the badges of rank and status, the portraits suggest a level of friendly
equality, a clubbability and worldly sociability that was to be reXected in
the cultural projects that the Club endorsed.59 This is reXected in
Richard Blackmore’s account of the origins of the Club in The Kit-
Cats (1708): ‘All the Wrst Members for their Place were Wt, | Tho’ not of
Title, Men of Sense and Wit’.60 Thus although the Club assumed many
of the responsibilities of an alternative court, and many of its members
were aristocratic, it was a court that proclaimed a membership deWned
by shared political ideals rather than lineage.61
James Ralph describes the era of the Kit-Cat Club as a time when ‘the
Talents of a good Writer were esteemed a suYcient QualiWcation for
almost any Employment whatsoever, and when Room was left or made
for their Admission’.62 The Club’s procurement of government posts
and sinecures for politically committed Whig writers was impressive: in
1708 only three members of the Kit-Cat Club were not on some govern-
ment payroll. This was not only because through the Club they had
gained Whiggish patrons in high places. It also resulted from the growth
of government machinery after the accession of William III, and in
particular the centralized bureaucracy needed to sustain the war eVort
during the 1690s. This growth had created many new jobs which could
be disposed of by patronage and place peddling. The link with the Duke
of Marlborough and Sidney, Earl of Godolphin, gave the Whigs the
advantage in this place market, since these two men could inXuence
appointments in the military and all other branches of government
service. The diplomatic service was a particularly reliable supplier of
jobs for Kit-Cats, providing for Ambrose Philips, Matthew Prior, and
George Stepney, among others.63 Other Kit-Cats also had inXuence over
the disposal of bureaucratic positions, especially those placed in the
Treasury and the secretaryships of State, who had control over all major
59 For Solkin’s useful discussion of the Club and the portraits see David H. Solkin,
Painting for Money: The Visual Arts and the Public Sphere in Eighteenth-Century England
(New Haven, Conn., and London: Yale University Press, 1993), 27–47.
60 Blackmore, The Kit-Cats: A Poem, 5.
61 Cf. Bucholz: ‘The Kit-Cat acted very much like a court, bringing artists, patrons and
middlemen together, and commissioning in its own right pamphlets, poems, plays and
even a theatre in the Haymarket’ (Bucholz, Queen Anne and the Decline of Court Culture,
242).
62 James Ralph, The Case of Authors by Profession or Trade (London, 1758), 32.
63 The number of diplomatic representatives in service had grown signiWcantly under
William and Anne, and by 1706 there were Whig representatives in every European court
but Spain (Howells, ‘The Kit-Cat Club’, 178).
business at home and abroad.64 The Kit-Cat Club was not the only
powerful institution forging associations between Whig patrons and
Whig writers. Many connections inside and outside the Club were
formed at school and university. As the biographical appendix reveals,
many were linked through Westminster School and Cambridge Univer-
sity, and in particular Trinity College, Cambridge. At a time when a
decreasing proportion of the gentry and aristocracy were going to either
Oxford or Cambridge, these college links would have meant that con-
temporaries would almost inevitably have been Wrst-hand acquaint-
ances.65 Of course, none of these factors represents an absolute recipe
for Whiggish alignment: the Tory, later Catholic, John Dryden also went
to Westminster and Trinity Cambridge, while Richard Steele and John
Locke studied at the Tory stronghold of Christ Church, Oxford. And
there were other patterns for Whig writers, some of whom like John
Hughes were educated at Dissenting academies, but had no university
education. However, it is fair to say that a signiWcant number of Whig
writers shared a university education at Cambridge, especially Trinity
College, had access to the Kit-Cat Club, possibly through Halifax, the
Earl of Dorset, or Joseph Addison, and were rewarded with places or
pensions from aristocratic Whig patrons.
Tonson and Kit-Cat publications
Jacob Tonson was the organizer and publisher of the Kit-Cat Club and
the focal point of its members’ various literary activities.66 Not only did
64 The career of William Congreve demonstrates how these connections could work.
For thirty-Wve years Congreve held lucrative positions in the bureaucracy, starting in 1695,
when Charles Montagu helped him into his place as one of the commissioners for
regulating and licensing hackney and stage coaches. In 1697 he was appointed, again
through Montagu, one of the managers of the lottery, and then in 1700 awarded the
sinecure of ‘customs of the Poole port’. In 1705, thanks to the inXuence of fellow Kit-Cats
Henry Boyle and John Smith in the Treasury Commission, he became one of the
commissioners for wine licenses.
65 See Gascoigne, Cambridge in the Age of Enlightenment, 22. Charles Montagu, Richard
Blackmore, George Stepney, Leonard Welsted, Matthew Prior, John Locke, and Nicholas
Rowe were at Westminster School, most of them under Richard Busby; John AyloVe,
George Stepney, Montagu, Welsted, Samuel Cobb, and Laurence Eusden were all at Trinity
College, Cambridge, and their contemporaries at Cambridge between 1660 and 1700
included Thomas Shadwell, Ambrose Philips, John Dennis, Samuel Garth, Matthew
Prior, Samuel Croxall, and John Cutts.
66 Tonson’s publishing activities were undoubtedly aided by his association with
fellow Kit-Cat Charles Seymour, sixth Duke of Somerset and Chancellor of Cambridge
Tonson supervise the contact between individual poets and their in-
Xuential dedicatees, and publish a string of works by young and estab-
lished Whig poets, but he also organized a series of prestigious
collaborative publications written or funded by members of the Kit-
Cat Club. Tonson’s Wrst big institutional project involving the Club’s
members was the Several Orations of Demosthenes (1702), a series of
seven jingoistic orations encouraging the Athenians into war against
Philip of Macedon. This anti-French Whig propaganda included trans-
lations by the Earl of Peterborough, Samuel Garth, and James Stanhope,
and a second Philippic by ‘K. C.’—possibly a joint eVort by a group of
Kit-Cats—which urged war in order to ‘stop the Growth of His Power,
least it Rise insensibly to such a Pitch, as that we shall not be able to
stemm the Torrent’.67 The Orations were followed by a lavish publica-
tion of Dr Samuel Clarke’s edition of Caesar’s Commentaries (1712)
dedicated to the recently disgraced Duke of Marlborough.68 Clarke
was fast gaining inXuence as the theological spokesman for the group
of latitudinarians who were driving academic and political develop-
ments in post-Revolution Cambridge, and his role in this Kit-Cat
project very clearly links networks of Whig theological, political, and
literary patronage in this period.69 Clarke’s edition was published by
subscription, a form of publication that was particularly well suited to
Tonson’s range of interests and contacts.70 The Kit-Cat Club provided
Tonson with access to writers and also to a huge body of politically
inXuential and rich subscribers, who were eager to support, or be seen
University, who, along with Richard Bentley, re-established the Cambridge University
Press in 1696. Between 1696 and 1702 Tonson used the Press to produce his inXuential
series of Cambridge classics, a series of small-format editions of classical texts. Tonson’s
role in relation to the Press is the subject of Robert B. Hamm’s doctoral work on ‘The
Tonson Shakespeare Project’, Ph.D. thesis (Los Angeles, Calif.: UCLA, 2003). On the
history of the Press in this period see D. F. McKenzie, The Cambridge University Press,
1696–1712: A Bibliographical Study (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1966).
67 ‘K. C.’, ‘The Second Phillipick’, in Several Orations of Demosthenes, To Encourage the
Athenians to oppose the Exorbitant Power of Philip of Macedon (London, 1702), 111. The
translation was reissued in 1711 to coincide with the Tory peace negotiations.
68 The book was initially to be dedicated to James Butler, Duke of Ormonde, but in
December 1709 the Kit-Cat Club ordered Tonson to make Marlborough the dedicatee
(Lynch, Jacob Tonson, 47).
69 On Clarke’s role in post-Revolution Cambridge see Gascoigne, Cambridge in the Age
of Enlightenment, 115–41.
70 On the domination of subscription lists by the aristocracy in this period see W. A.
Speck, ‘Politicians, Peers, and Publication by Subscription, 1700–50’, in Isabel Rivers (ed.),
Books and their Readers in Eighteenth-Century England (Leicester: Leicester University
Press, 1982), 47–68.
to support, contemporary literature, particularly if it enabled them to

demonstrate political solidarity. In the case of the Commentaries an
overwhelmingly Kit-Cat-dominated subscription list was a way of dem-
onstrating Whig loyalty to the former general.
The Commentaries project was an ambitious one. Addison described
the grandeur of Tonson’s original plans for the edition in a letter to
Leibniz, telling him that ‘He [Tonson] intends to spare no cost in the
Edition of this Book which will probably be the noblest Volume that
ever came from the English press’.71 Tonson began working on the
publication in 1703, when he went to The Hague with the Duke of
Grafton to get type, paper, and illustrations for the book.72 The details
of the assembly of its select subscription list suggest that Tonson
intended it to be a high-cultural project endorsed almost exclusively
by a Whig elite. He spent nine years completing the list, yet at the end
there were only eighty-seven subscribers, who contributed three guineas
each. As a rough comparison, there were Wve hundred subscribers for
Milton’s works, and subscriptions to Dryden’s Virgil cost Wve guineas
each. However, the names that do appear on the Commentaries list
suggest that the time Tonson spent in Wnding subscribers, and their
limited number, were linked to its exclusivity.73 Addison told Leibniz:
‘The Book will be a large Folio and has for its subscribers the greatest of
the nobility in England with Prince Louis of Baden and Prince Eugene
at the head of ’em’.74 The selective nature of the list is also suggested by
Addison stating that the list was already full, despite the fact that it had
well under a Wfth of the subscribers that Tonson had secured for the
Milton edition in 1688.
In 1713 Tonson embarked upon another similarly ambitious project
that served to illustrate the status of contemporary Whig writing. From
1709 the Tonson house had been producing a series of vernacular
classics, a canon-deWning set of duodecimo editions of earlier English
poets, which included the works of Denham, Suckling, Cowley, Milton,
71 Addison to Leibniz, 10 July 1703, in The Letters of Joseph Addison, ed. Graham, 43.
72 Howells, ‘The Kit-Cat Club’, 249.
73 The elite included the House of Hanover, the Whig hero Prince Eugene of Savoy, and
Baron Cutts. There were very few Tories on the list—most notably, the Earl of StraVord
and Robert Harley. Catherine Howells points out that they were moderate in 1703
(Howells, ‘The Kit-Cat Club’, 252).
74 Addison to Leibniz, 10 July 1703, in Letters, 44. Thomas Hearne claims that Prince
Eugene gave thirty guineas as his contribution to the subscription (Hearne, Remarks and
Collections of Thomas Hearne, ed. C. E. Doble et al. (Oxford: Oxford Historical Society,
Clarendon, 1885–1921), iii. 329).
and Rowe’s edition of Shakespeare. Then in 1713, following the example

of the Dutch printing house of Elzevier, which had become famous in
the seventeenth century for its publication of small editions of the
classics, Tonson began to publish small-format, high-quality literary
works by contemporary authors. This new series was composed pre-
dominantly of literary texts by Whig authors. It included Addison’s
Cato, The Campaign, and Rosamond (1713), Thomas Tickell’s A Poem
. . . on the Prospect of Peace (1714), and, interestingly, a third edition of
Pope’s Essay on Criticism (1713). Writing of the set, David Foxon con-
cludes: ‘I Wnd it hard to escape the implication that, along with Milton
and Shakespeare, these were the English classics’.75 With their inexpen-
sive and portable format, the set would introduce the ‘classics’ of Whig
writing to a readership far beyond the elite of the Kit-Cat Club. Both the
Elzevier series and the Commentaries publication should be seen as
part of the wider movement to forge a distinct cultural identity for
Whiggism.
Liberty and artistic achievement
Through Tonson’s publications, and contacts, the Wnancial largesse of

the Kit-Cat Club was being used to fund a post-Revolution rebirth
of native artistic achievement. Richard Blackmore describes Tonson’s
literary endeavours with the Kit-Cats as fulWlling precisely such a
function:
Kit-Cats by their Discipline secure,
Preserv’d their well fram’d Constitution pure;
Soon from this warm well cultivated Bed
Letters came forward, Sense began to spread,
And Wit shot up apace its thriving Head.
The Languid Muses, now, new Life acquire,
And every Genius feels his native Fire.76
Blackmore’s description of the aims of the Club frames many of the

central themes of Whig poetry and criticism. The Club’s activities yoked
together patronage, genius, poetic Wre, and a modern native culture, all
of which were seen to stem from the establishment of modern political
75 David Foxon, Pope and the Early Eighteenth-Century Book Trade, ed. James
McLaverty (Oxford: Clarendon, 1991), 23–32 (28).

76 Blackmore, The Kit-Cats, 5.
liberty. The ambitions of the Kit-Kats seemed to justify the conviction

of many of their Whig contemporaries, who believed that the consti-
tutional freedom of post-Revolution Britain created the ideal political
context within which to develop native literary excellence. Writers
traced a cyclical history of the growth and decline of classical Greece
and Rome and used it to demonstrate a correspondence between
political liberty and literary achievement77—in Blackmore’s words,
‘Letters and Empire, whose confederate Pow’r | Mutual each others
prosperous Fate secure’.78 Drawing on Machiavellian arguments, prom-
inent Whig writers such as Blackmore and the third Earl of Shaftesbury
juxtaposed the image of the virtuous citizen, who thrived under liberty,
and who was associated with martial strength, independence, public-
mindedness, and frugality, with the luxury, eVeminacy, and excess that
thrived under a tyranny.79 The Whig commitment to military engage-
ment in post-Revolution Britain showed the revival of the martial
splendour associated with a liberty-loving people. All that remained
was for the war to establish the kind of domestic and international
stability that would guarantee a glorious new future for English arts and
letters. Shaftesbury’s Characteristicks oVered a vision of the new era
possible under an improved political order, in which he argued that
the nation’s political and cultural history was analogous to the history
of Rome. Shaftesbury observed that ‘ ’Tis with us at present, as with the
Roman People in those early Days, when they wanted only repose from
Arms to apply themselves to the Improvement of Arts and Studys’.80
However, while the Xourishing of Roman liberty and letters was short-
lived, Britain was set for a more enduring period of growth, as Shaftes-
bury proclaimed:
77 For a fuller study of the relationship between political liberty and aesthetic discourse
in the eighteenth century see Michael Meehan, Liberty and Poetics in Eighteenth-Century
England (London: Croom Helm, 1986). On concepts of progress, and its perceived
dependence on both patronage and liberty, see David Spadafora, The Idea of Progress
in Eighteenth-Century Britain (New Haven, Conn., and London: Yale University Press,
1990), 75.
78 Richard Blackmore, The Nature of Man. A Poem. In Three Books (London, 1711), iii.
74.
79 J. G. A. Pocock has drawn attention to the unlikely association of martial virtues with
devotion to the arts: early eighteenth-century Whigs believed that the imperial greatness
brought by liberty would extend to wider cultural achievement within an established and
peaceful context (Pocock, The Machiavellian Moment: Florentine Political Thought and the
Atlantic Republican Tradition (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1975) ).
80 Anthony Ashley Cooper, third Earl of Shaftesbury, Soliloquy: Or Advice to an Author
(1710), in Characteristicks of Men, Manners, Opinions, Times (1711), ed. Philip Ayres, 2 vols.
(Oxford: Clarendon, 1999), i. 118.
There is a mighty light which spreads itself over the world, especially in those
two free nations of England and Holland, on whom the aVairs of all Europe
now turn, and if Heaven sends us soon a peace suitable to the great successes
we have had, it is impossible but letters and knowledge must advance in
greater proportion than ever.81
John Dennis also oVers comparisons with Roman history, and in
particular with the reign of Augustus, which he says saw art, language,
and religion at their zenith. He explains the reasons for the advance-
ment of poetry at this time:
the Elevation that might spring from the Remains and the Appearances of
Liberty, and consequently, the Appearances of their being Masters of the
Universe; and lastly, the never-to-be-forgotten Bounty of a magnanimous
Prince82
Dennis’s explanation probably tells us more about his vision of his own
historical moment than it does about the reign of Augustus.83 He
counters the Augustan myths of the Restoration with a vision of imper-
ial greatness based on the political liberty and elite patronage estab-
lished with the Revolution, and outlines a magniWcent new future for
the arts, within which England has the opportunity to develop her own
classic culture.
The scale of Whig and particularly Kit-Cat designs for modern Britain
was recognized and often resented by contemporary commentators,
many of whom were critical of the Kit-Cats’ power and breadth of
ambition. In Examiner 6 of 7 September 1710 Matthew Prior declares
that ‘The Collective Body of the Whigs have already engross’d our Riches;
and their Representatives the Kit-cat, have pretended to make a Monopoly
of our sense’.84 In the Jacobite William Shippen’s satire on the Club,
Faction Display’d (1704), Tonson boasts to his fellow Kit-Cats:
I’ll print your Pamphlets, and your Rumours spread.
I am the Founder of your lov’d Kit-Kat,
A Club that gave Direction to the State. (ll. 388–90)85
81 Shaftesbury to Jean Le Clerc, 6 March 1706, in The Life, Unpublished Letters, and
Philosophical Regimen of Anthony, Earl of Shaftesbury, ed. Benjamin Rand (1st pub. 1900;
repr. London: Routledge/Thoemmes, 1992), 353.
82 Dennis, ‘Advancement and Reformation of Poetry’, in Critical Works, i. 247.
83 For a substantial analysis of Augustanism in this period see Howard Erskine-Hill,
The Augustan Idea in English Literature (London: Edward Arnold, 1983).

84 Examiner 6, 7 September 1710.
85 William Shippen, Faction Display’d (1704) in POAS vi. 668.
Shippen mocks the perceived hubris of the Club’s members, who have
such an inXated sense of their own inXuence that they attempt to ‘give
Direction to the State’. Here Shippen stresses that the Club is not the
same as the State, and should never be. Yet there were Whigs happy to
see Club and State as one and the same. In The Kit-Cats Blackmore
praises
BOCAJ [Tonson] the mighty Founder of the State [who]
Led by his Wisdom, or his happy Fate,
Chose proper Pillars to support its Weight.86
Tory concern over the cultural aspirations of the Kit-Cats is also evident
in Robert Harley’s sponsorship of a rival Tory club, the Brothers Club,
or ‘the Society’, which seems to have been intended to promote cultural
and social links to counter those fostered by the inXuential Whig club.87
Jonathan Swift describes the purposes of the new Tory group:
The end of our Club is to advance conversation and friendship, and to reward
deserving persons with our interest and recommendation. We take in none
but men of wit or men of interest; and if we go on as we begin, no other Club
in this town will be worth talking of.88
Swift’s vision of the prospective club as a source of patronage as well as a

social forum is explicit, and indicates that the Kit-Cat Club was recog-
nized by contemporaries as an organization that could couple cultural
support with sociability.
The major investment of Kit-Cat members in a wide range of artistic
projects is best understood in the context of this broader philosophy
relating political liberty and cultural regeneration. It has always been
unclear why the Club was so committed to providing places and
funding for writers like Congreve, Addison, Garth, and Budgell. At
one level investing in contemporary writing undoubtedly provided the
Whig establishment with an important supply of in-house propaganda
writers—for example, the Club raised the subscription list for Richard
Steele’s pamphlet on the Protestant succession, The Crisis (1713). Yet the
Kit-Cats were also involved in many projects that did not have a speciWc
86 Blackmore, The Kit-Cats, 5.

87 Members of the Club included Harley, St John, George Granville, Lord Orrery, Lord
Bathurst, John Arbuthnot, and Matthew Prior. For more detail on the formation and
activities of the Club see R. J. Allen, The Clubs of Augustan London (Cambridge, Mass.:
Harvard University Press, 1933), 76–82, 250–9.
88 Jonathan Swift to Esther Johnson, 21 June 1711, in Journal to Stella, ed. Harold
Williams, 2 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon, 1948), i. 294.

political agenda. These were a demonstration of their ambitious as-

sumption of cultural responsibilities. While the authors Wnanced by the
Kit-Cats were predominantly Whigs, the Club also endorsed the work of
a small number of Tory poets. Tonson’s inclusion of Pope’s Essay in his
Elzevier series certainly suggests a desire to include writers outside a
narrow political grouping. More prominently, Dorset, Garth, and Mon-
tagu’s role in organizing John Dryden’s funeral and burial in Poets’
Corner seems to have been designed to yoke the poet’s memorial and
literary afterlife to the Kit-Cats’ cultural programme.89
Perhaps the most public display of the Kit-Cat Club’s artistic patron-
age was its support of the theatre. In this, in many ways, the Club took
over the role that was perceived to have been played by the Restoration
court, and, like Charles II and his courtiers three decades before, they
frequented the theatre in a group.90 Yet the extent and generosity of the
Kit-Cats’ patronage meant that they were able to oVer cultural funding
on a scale the Stuarts had never been able to aVord. They sponsored the
construction of their own theatre, the Queen’s Theatre in the Haymar-
ket, which opened in 1705 with Vanbrugh and Congreve as joint man-
agers.91 The theatre, funded by a subscription list raised by Vanbrugh,
was created in order to assist Betterton’s company, whose previous
location in Lincoln’s Inn Fields had left it unable to compete with
Drury Lane. The Tory journalist Charles Leslie describes the new ven-
ture in his Rehearsal:
The Ki t -Ca t Clubb is now grown Famous and Notorious, all over the
Kingdom. And they have Built a Temple for their Dagon, the new Play-
House in the Hay-Market 92
89 On Dorset’s role in securing Dryden’s place in Poets’ Corner see Richard Terry, Poetry
and the Making of the English Literary Past, 1660–1781 (Oxford: Oxford University Press,
2001), 38. Montagu in particular became widely recognized as Dryden’s posthumous
patron: he is the dedicatee of the funeral collection The Nine Muses (1700), and the
irony of his role as Dryden’s new patron is noted in the dedication of the volume: ‘You
have been pleased already to shew Your Respect to his Memory, in contributing so largely
towards His Burial, notwithstanding He had that unhappiness of Conduct, when alive, to
give you Cause to Disclaim the Protection of Him’ (The Nine Muses: or Poems written by
Nine severall Ladies Upon the Death of the Late Famous John Dryden Esquire (London,
1700), sig. a1v ).
90 By 1700 the Kit-Cats were seen to be attending the theatre in a body (see John Loftis,
The Politics of Augustan Drama (Oxford: Clarendon, 1963), 40).

91 See Judith Milhous, ‘New Light on Vanbrugh’s Haymarket Theatre Project’, Theatre
Survey, 17 (1976), 143–61.

92 Charles Leslie, The Rehearsal, 41, 5–12 May 1705, in A View of the Times, Their
Principles and Practices: in the First Volume of the Rehearsals. By Philalethes (London, 1708).
Both the creation of a Whig playhouse and the scale of Kit-Cat patron-
age available to individual writers created a strong association between
the Whig party and drama in this period. In addition to plays written
on Whiggish themes of liberty, such as John Dennis’s Liberty Asserted
(1704) and his Appius and Virginia (1709), there was also a spate of plays
based around Marlborough’s successes in the war, such as Nicholas
Rowe’s Ulysses (1706), Mary Pix’s The Adventures in Madrid (1706),
and Addison’s Rosamond (1707).93 Moreover, dedications of plays
from Anne’s reign show a strong bias towards inXuential members of
the Club: Congreve, Gildon, and Rowe all dedicated plays to Halifax,
while Tom D’Urfey dedicated to the Earl of Wharton, and Susannah
Centlivre to Somers. In addition, Halifax instigated his own project to
promote a tradition of national drama by reviving the ‘Three Plays of
the best Authors’; namely, Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar, Fletcher’s The
King and no King, and a compilation play made up of the comic scenes
from Dryden’s Marriage-à-la-Mode and The Maiden Queen put to-
gether.94 Alongside this emphasis on native dramatic tradition, the
theatre built by the Kit-Cats also came to play a large part in the
introduction of Italian opera to England.95 In 1708 the castrato Nicolini
sang Alessandro Scarlatti’s Pyrrhus and Demetrius, paving the way for a
series of successful operas at the theatre. Not all the Kit-Cats approved
of Italian opera—there were attacks by Addison and Steele in the
Spectator on the use of Italian recitative and the rejection of native
musical traditions—but the lavish spectacles at the Haymarket were
funded through the subscriptions of the Club’s wealthy members.96
When interest in the opera dwindled in the following decade, the
Royal Academy of Music was founded to support it, again supported
by the Kit-Cat subscribers.97
Kit-Cat expenditure on the arts was not conWned to the metropolis.
The Wrst decades of the eighteenth century saw prominent Whig gran-
dees making their mark on the landscape with a series of grand country
houses. Between 1700 and 1720 Vanbrugh was their architect of choice,
and his baroque splendours became Wtting emblems of the optimism
and ambitions of post-Revolution Britain. As the palaces rose they
93 See Loftis, The Politics of Augustan Drama, 37–45, for a fuller account.
94 Colley Cibber, An Apology for the Life of Mr Colley Cibber (1740), ed. Robert W. Lowe,
2 vols. (London: J. C. Nimmo, 1889), ii. 4–5.
95 See Philip Olleson, ‘Vanbrugh and Opera at the Queen’s Theatre, Haymarket’,
Theater Notebook, 26 (1971), 94–101.

96 See in particular Spectators 18 and 29 for criticism of Italian opera in England.
97 See Foss, The Age of Patronage, 148–9.
shaped the nation in the image of the new establishment. Vanbrugh

began by designing Castle Howard for the Earl of Carlisle, and moved
on to Blenheim Palace for the Duke of Marlborough, Kimbolton Castle
for Lord Manchester, Claremont for the Duke of Newcastle, and the
gardens at Stowe laid out for Lord Cobham.98 He in turn was supported
by the Kit-Cat Club, helped into the comptrollership of the OYce of
Works by the Earls of Carlisle and Halifax, and brought back under
George I with the added title of Surveyor of the Gardens and Waters.
GeoVrey Webb, Vanbrugh’s editor, has remarked that his style ‘stands in
the same relation to orthodox classical architecture as the Heroic drama
stands to Classical tragedy. Indeed, Heroic architecture is as good a
description of his style as could be found’.99 For a generation convinced
of the heroic dimensions of contemporary public life, such a style was
the perfect idiom. Again, not all Whigs were of one mind: in the
Characteristicks Shaftesbury promoted Palladianism as the most Wtting
style for new architecture, and in time the Whig elite followed suit,
embracing a more restrained neoclassicism in the works of Colen
Campbell and William Kent.
The exterior splendour of the country house was only the outmost
sign of the lavish artistic expenditure of the Whig aristocracy. The Duke
of Chandos’s improvements at Cannons, his house in Middlesex, sug-
gest the scale of patronage aVorded by individual Kit-Cats.100 Chandos
had made his fortune in the post of paymaster during the War of the
Spanish Succession, and rose from there to become one of the richest
men in the country. Given a dukedom by George I in 1719, he retired at
the age of forty-Wve, and devoted himself to establishing a life of
aristocratic grandeur at his seat in Middlesex. The interiors were copi-
ously decorated with allegorical and historical paintings by James
Thornhill and Louis Laguerre, the artists who had made their reputa-
tions in the post-Revolution building boom. Chandos Wlled the newly
painted rooms with treasures including Raphael cartoons, carvings by
Grinling Gibbons, and paintings by del Sarto, Rubens, Vandyck, Lely,
and Kneller. And Cannons was also famed for its music, becoming no
98 On the changing relationship between patron and architect in this period see
Richard Wilson and Alan Mackley, Creating Paradise: The Building of the English Country
House, 1660–1800 (London and New York: Hambledon and London, 2000), 109–44.
99 GeoVrey Webb, introd. to Sir John Vanbrugh, The Complete Works of Sir John
Vanbrugh, ed. Bonamy Dobree and GeoVrey Webb, 4 vols. (London: Nonesuch, 1927–8),
vol. iv, p. xxiii.
100 See C. H. Collins Baker, The Life and Circumstances of James Brydges, First Duke of
Chandos, Patron of the Liberal Arts (Oxford: Clarendon, 1949).

less than a small music academy under Chandos’s largesse. The Duke
kept a band of thirty players, hired Dr Johann Pepusch as his director of
music for Wfteen years, and had two organs installed. In 1717 Handel
was appointed as composer, producing the Chandos Anthems during
his residence. Chandos, like other great houses of the period, was in
many respects a court in miniature. The scale and opulence of its
artistic projects mimicked the patronage previously associated with
the monarchy.
The cultural responsibility of the statesman
The most articulate spokesperson on the subject of the connection

between aristocratic patronage and the creation of a modern Whig
literary culture was the third Earl of Shaftesbury, who was not a Kit-
Cat himself but had many connections with members of the Club.101
Shaftesbury’s correspondence reveals the extent to which he discussed
many of his ideas about contemporary politics and the future of
Whiggism with founder members of the Kit-Cat Club, such as Stan-
hope, Halifax, Somers, and Sunderland. While he was suspicious of
what he perceived as the moral laxity of the leisure pursuits of some
Club members, he admired Stanhope and Somers, and hoped that they
would share the Whiggish philosophy outlined in the Characteri-
sticks.102
Shaftesbury claimed that the arts in Britain were well placed for
improvement because, following the Revolution, it was an age where
‘Liberty is once again in its Ascendent’. He believed that patronage was
central to this new cultural enterprise: in Soliloquy: or, Advice to an
101 While Lawrence E. Klein’s Shaftesbury and the Culture of Politeness (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1994) oVers an excellent account of Shaftesbury’s cultural

politics, Klein does not examine the important links between Shaftesbury and the Kit-
Cats, which I see as crucial to Whig literary culture in this period.
102 Somers’s inXuence on Shaftesbury’s thought is demonstrated by the fact
that Shaftesbury believed the Characteristicks should really have been dedicated to him
(Shaftesbury to Somers, 30 March 1711, in Philosophical Regimen, 430). The importance
of Stanhope’s contributions to Shaftesbury’s philosophy is demonstrated in a number of
letters, and in particular a letter of 7 November 1709, in which he cites the military
commander as the prime example of a statesman who is not afraid to occupy his leisure
time with philosophy and letters (Shaftesbury to Stanhope, 7 November 1709, Philosophical
Regimen, 413). On Shaftesbury’s relationship with Stanhope, Halifax, and Somers see
Robert Voitle, The Third Earl of Shaftesbury, 1671–1713 (Baton Rouge, La., and London:
Louisiana State University Press, 1984), 302–3, 367–8, 258.
Author (1710) he declared that with the assistance of responsible aristo-

cratic patronage the arts and sciences could at last attain ‘that Politeness
and Beauty, in which they wou’d soon appear, if the aspiring Genius of
our Nation were forwarded by the least Care or Culture’.103 Moreover,
he went on to emphasize that
’Tis expected that they who are high and eminent in the State, shou’d not only
provide for its necessary Safety and Subsistence, but omit nothing which may
contribute to its Dignity and Honour. The Arts and Sciences must not be left
Patron-less.104
His own patronage took a number of forms, most obviously in the Wne
arts: his commissioning of a series of emblematic engravings for the
second edition of the Characteristicks, and of a large history painting of
the Judgment of Hercules, by Paolo de Mattheis, are good examples.105
But he obviously thought poetry was important in consolidating a sense
of nation, writing of the poet’s role in recording and mythologizing
aVairs of state for future generations:
Le t a Nation remain ever so rude or barbarous, it must have its Poets,
Rhapsoders, Historiographers, Antiquarys of some kind or other, whose busi-
ness it will be to recount its remarkable Transactions, and record the Atch-
ievements of its Civil and Military Heroes.106
Shaftesbury saw the Kit-Cats’ largesse as an extension of the committed
support that was so central to his philosophy, and approved profoundly
of their generosity to contemporary authors. He writes to Charles
Montagu:
Perhaps there might have been none of this sort [scholars] left among us, had
not your lordship, even in your private character, been a patron to them,
when they had none left in the public. How they may multiply now your
lordship and your friends are coming into Court, I know not107

105 On the engravings see Felix Paknadel, ‘Shaftesbury’s Illustrations of Characteristics’,
Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes, 37 (1974), 290–312. There is also an
interesting discussion of his role in commissioning a portrait by John Klosterman in
Solkin, Painting for Money, 5–6.
106 Shaftesbury, Soliloquy, in Characteristicks, i. 119. This is not, of course, to say
that Shaftesbury was uncritical of contemporary panegyric. He adds to this recommenda-

tion of the genre the observation that ‘in reality the Nerve and Sinew of modern
Panegyrick lies in a dull kind of Satire; which [ . . . ] will appear to have a very contrary
EVect’.
107 Shaftesbury to Halifax, 16 December 1708, in Philosophical Regimen, 395–6.
Other Whig writers of this period echo his emphasis on the role of
patronage in post-1688 Whig literary culture. In the dedication of his
Dissertation Concerning . . . the English Language (1714) to the Duke of
Newcastle, Leonard Welsted identiWes the present glories of English
letters as dating from the reign of William III, and goes on to outline
the future for English, or Whig, literary culture:
Every Thing, my l o r d, our Trade, our Peace, our Liberty, the Complexion of
our Language and of our Government, and the Disposition and Spirit of the
Britons . . . all would conspire to make this Nation the Rival of the most renownd
among the Ancients for Works of Wit and Genius; could we but once see that
amiable Temper of Humanity, and that Love of Learning, which distinguish
your g r a c e, more generally prevail among persons of your rank.108
Shaftesbury and Welsted share an insistence on the role of patronage
not as a point of continuity with old literary traditions but as the
backbone of a new literary modernity. This helps to explain why there
is such an emphasis in Whig writing of this period on the modern
statesman as a rounded man, a man of ‘wit and business’, equally at
home with aVairs of state and the world of letters.109 This emphasis is
embodied in the inXuential poet-statesmen of the era, and in the
sociable marriage of culture and politics underlying the formation of
the Kit-Cat Club. If the Whig elite was to assume the role formerly
carried out by the court, and use its cultural authority and Wnancial
power to shepherd in a new age of unprecedented national literary
glory, then it was of paramount importance that its members were
more than competent bureaucrats.
A number of dedications of Whig texts are characterized by an
emphasis on such an ideal marriage of statesmanship and culture.
Eustace Budgell’s dedication of his Moral Characters of Theophrastus
(1714) to Halifax describes the great patron as ‘at once reWning and
mixing in all the polite Pleasures of the Age, and at the same time
animating the great Scene of publick Business [ . . . ] all that Wnishes a
Great Man, and makes an Agreeable one’.110 Similarly, John Hughes’s
108 Leonard Welsted, Dissertation Concerning . . . the English Language, Epistles, Odes etc
Written on Several Subjects (London, 1724), p. xv.

109 It is exactly this emphasis on roundedness that Klein describes as central to Shaftes-
bury’s vision of modern Whig culture. That culture was to be based on notions of
sociability and politeness, and polite learning, which was ‘generalist in its orientation,
tending to the development of the whole person and keeping the person and his social
relations in view’ (Klein, Shaftesbury and the Culture of Politeness, 5).
110 Eustace Budgell, The Moral Characters of Theophrastus (London, 1714), sig. a3v ---a5v .
dedication of his Works of Edmund Spenser (1715) to Somers plays on the

way his patron balances arts and politics, ‘with the same Authority
prescrib’d to the Counsels of the Wise, as to the Improvements of the
Polite’.111 For the Whig elite informed political patronage was clearly
not a thing of the past, but vital to the future of post-Revolution Britain.
Statesmen such as Somers and Halifax were seen to oVer new models
for men in public life, demonstrating a combination of political and
cultural responsibility. Their activities of course also oVered a jingoistic
challenge to the patronage of Louis XIV, countering the majestic pro-
jection of the Sun King with panegyrics, palaces, and plays celebrating a
Whig, and English, supremacy.
Club, court, or civil society?
The implications of Whig patronage for our broader understanding of

the development of early eighteenth-century culture are complex. In
one sense it appears that the activities of the Kit-Cats mimicked what
T. C. W. Blanning, following Jurgen Habermas, terms a ‘representa-
tional’ court culture; namely, a form of display directed at an essentially
passive public.112 The authority of the political elite was visibly demon-
strated in the poems they published, the theatre they constructed, the
palaces they built for themselves, and the famously lavish dinners that
they held. In these ways, then, the Kit-Cat Club really did take the place,
both politically and artistically, of an alternative court comparable with
the French model. However, the Club and its members can also be seen
as part of a diVerent cultural model. Numerous recent historians have
described the growth of a ‘public sphere’ in early eighteenth century
England, which Blanning deWnes as ‘the medium through which private
persons can reason in public [performing] the vital function of mediat-
ing relations between the essentially separate realms of civil society and
the state’.113 In some ways the Kit-Cat Club performed a similarly public
function: the Club represented a quasi-democratic forum of aristocracy,
gentry, and tradesmen, bound not by class but by a shared commitment
111 Edmund Spenser, The Works of Edmund Spenser in Six Volumes, (ed. John Hughes,
London, 1715), vol. i, p. 5. See also Steele’s dedication of the third volume of the Tatler to
Halifax. The widely recognized link between statesmanship and patronage was noted by
critics of the Club (see the satirical The Kit-Cat C——b Described (1705) ).
112 For a fuller discussion of representational culture see Blanning, The Culture of
Power, 7, 29–99.
113 Blanning, The Culture of Power, 8.
to political ideals. The convivial meetings of the Kit-Cat Club provided

an autonomous opinion-forming congress within which private indi-
viduals could meet for rational discussion. The Club was a source of
political and cultural debate and inXuence outside court and parlia-
ment. Moreover, the Kit-Cats’ involvement in projects like the Spectator
and the Tatler, which promoted a popular cultivation of moral and
cultural reWnement, can be seen as part of a shift away from an exclu-
sively royal and aristocratic monopolization of arts and manners, and
towards a cultural arena in which matters of taste and politics were
agreed on the basis of consensus and reasoned debate.
Both the models I have described here—the statesman-courtier and
the ‘homosocial’ Kit-Cat diner—reXect aspects of the ways in which
Whig writers participated in the political establishment. However, it is
less clear how far either model encompasses female writers, and much
research remains to be done on the role of women in Whig literary
culture. It is hard to see how the close relationship between public life
and poetry described above could accommodate female authorship, and
it is thus tempting to speculate that for the women on the margins of
such an elite the writing of poetry was necessarily a more private
occupation, or more dependent on the commercial market place. The
careers of Octavia Walsh and Susannah Centlivre may oVer some
examples of the options available to the Whig woman writer in this
period. Walsh, the sister of Kit-Cat William Walsh, produced largely
devotional verse in manuscript, while the dramatist Centlivre was a self-
deWned professional writer. Yet, as Sarah Prescott has recently argued,
the notion of women writers as either commercial professionals or
virtuous amateurs has obscured the ‘pluralist’ nature of much writing
in this period.114 Not only were the worlds of print and manuscript
more interpermeable than we are apt to think, but for many women
writers the guise of the respectable amateur could become a way of both
marketing books and articulating public statements. Prescott also cau-
tions against the assumption that homosocial literary networks neces-
sarily excluded women writers. As both she and Christine Gerrard have
emphasized, the literary circle around Aaron Hill in the 1720s included
Eliza Haywood and Martha Sansom alongside James Thomson, Richard
Savage, and John Dyer.115 And in the case of the Kit-Cat Club, while the
114 Sarah Prescott, Women, Authorship, and Literary Culture, 1690–1740 (Basingstoke:
Palgrave Macmillan, 2003).

115 Prescott, Women, Authorship, and Literary Culture, 26–30; Christine Gerrard, Aaron
Hill: The Muses’ Projector, 1685–1750 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), 61–101.
most visible role of women in the Club seems to have been as the
subjects of drinking toasts, it is clear from the accounts of the young
Lady Mary Wortley Montagu that the Club and its networks also
provided the opportunity for literary exchanges. Montagu was Wrst
introduced to the Club as a young girl, and later as a toast, but she
also established relationships with Addison, Steele, and Garth, and was
later to prove instrumental in the composition of Addison’s Cato.116
However, it remains to be said that few, if any, women could have
participated in the exchanges of writing for public services that charac-
terized Whig patronage in this period. It is signiWcant that where Aaron
Hill’s metropolitan circle styled itself along the lines of a provincial
coterie, the Kit-Cat Club was emphatic in its emphasis on the broader
public role of its patronage and cultural activities. In the case of Susan-
nah Centlivre it is clear that, while Centlivre evidently aimed to secure
some sort of Wnancial support from the Whig aristocracy with dedica-
tions to John Somers, as a woman she could not expect to enjoy the
diplomatic or bureaucratic career with which so many male writers
were rewarded.
The exposure of this patronage system clearly oVers insights into the
material print culture of Whig poetry, revealing a nexus of relationships
at the heart of political and literary life in the early eighteenth century.
The prominent writers and statesmen of the period were linked by party
and club aYliation, by education and sex. The reciprocal connections
between writers and patrons represent in material form the interweav-
ing of the political and the aesthetic at the heart of Whig literary culture.
But, more than this, the early Whigs’ commitment to broad and
generous cultural patronage was central to their self-deWnition. It had
a major inXuence on the forms and themes of writing in this period. It
determined perceptions of the relationship between literary and polit-
ical life, of the public role of the author, and of the cultural responsi-
bilities of the statesman. Although literary patronage in this period has
frequently been seen as a vestige of an older, court-based literary
culture, the great Whig patrons saw their support for the arts as
modern, not traditional. Through patronage they were attempting to
shape the future, and shape the nation’s culture in the image of their
own political ideology. They sought to promote a grand and optimistic
art to reXect their military and political triumphs, and in particular
116 On Montagu’s contributions to Cato see Isobel Grundy, Lady Mary Wortley Mon-
tagu: Comet of the Enlightenment (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), 63.
what they perceived to be the triumph of political liberty after the

Revolution. In supporting a wide range of prominent artistic projects,
many of which did not serve a speciWc topical agenda, Whig patrons
asserted the cultural authority of the new political elite.
Conclusion: Whig afterlives
I have argued in this book that Whig writing of the period between the
Exclusion Crisis and the Hanoverian succession was characterized by an
enormous optimism about the future of Whig poetry. Many poets
believed that the political liberties established after the Revolution,
coupled with the establishment of a Protestant succession, presented
an opportunity to create a vital new Whig literary culture. This project
took both theoretical and material form, through the production of a
substantial body of Whig poetry and literary criticism, underwritten by
a system of aristocratic patronage. However, the chronological limits of
the study have prevented me from exploring how this literary culture
developed in subsequent decades. What happened to Whig poetry after
1714?
I began by suggesting that the critical fortunes of Charles Montagu
oVer a paradigm for the occlusion of the Whig tradition from the
eighteenth century to the present. But literary history is clearly more
complicated than this, and the reception and afterlife of Whig poetry
consists of more than a sudden shift from enthusiasm to neglect. Even
while Montagu’s poetry declined in popularity, the tradition he repre-
sented continued to inXuence eighteenth-century verse. We can prob-
ably trace a trajectory from the early Whig poetry I have described in
this book through the court Whig verse of the 1720s and 1730s. There is,
however, no comprehensive account of this later literature, and I can
only speculate about possible areas of comparison.1 It is tempting to
suspect that the conclusion of the War of the Spanish Succession
marked the decline of the sustained military panegyric that had been
the dominant feature of the previous two decades.2 The poems on
George I’s accession suggest that trade became a major focus of Whig
panegyric, an emphasis exempliWed in later Whig and patriot Whig
works such as Edward Young’s Imperium Pelagi (1730) and Richard
1 On the politics of the period see Reed Browning, Political and Constitutional Ideas of
the Court Whigs (Baton Rouge, La.: Louisiana State University Press, 1982).
2 Dustin GriYn, Patriotism and Poetry in Eighteenth Century Britain (Cambridge:

242 Conclusion: Whig afterlives
Glover’s London, or, The Progress of Commerce (1739).3 Yet, as Dustin

GriYn’s recent account of patriotism and poetry reveals, poets con-
tinued to produce victory odes for later military successes at Porto
Bello, Dettingen, and Culloden, and the celebrated early Whig panegyr-
ics provided inXuential models for patriotic verse many decades after
their Wrst publication.4 Thomas Tickell’s The Prospect of Peace (1712) was
given pride of place in Robert Dodsley’s Wrst Collection of Poems by
Several Hands (1748), while poems written in celebration of the Battle of
Culloden in 1746 alluded to Addison’s The Campaign (1705). Moreover,
Hannah Smith’s analysis of the iconography of the Hanoverian mon-
archy has shown that the Wgure of the Protestant soldier-deliverer-king
continued to be central to the representation of George I and George II.5
Smith’s thesis oVers a persuasive counter to Linda Colley’s claims that
Jacobite verse dealt essentially in personalities and romance, and that
there was no equivalent for the Hanoverians, whose panegyrists dwelt
on the achievements of the monarchy, rather than their personal qual-
ities.6 She draws attention to a dynamic heroic idiom in Hanoverian
rhetoric, which can be seen as a continuation of the myths and iconog-
raphy established under William III. Recent work on the culture of the
Hanoverian courts also complicates the prevailing view that the Han-
overians were neglectful of the arts.7 Smith and others have demon-
strated the survival of a vigorous court culture well into the
mid eighteenth century. There is undoubtedly a shift in the nature
and quality of Whig literary patronage after 1714. Tone Sundt Urstad’s
account of Robert Walpole’s poets has shown that while Walpole spent
an enormous amount of money on contemporary writers, this support
took the form of individual payments, and writers were rarely given a
3 On trade and empire in later verse see Suvir Kaul, Poems of Nation, Anthems of
Empire: English Verse in the Long Eighteenth Century (Charlottesville, Va.: University Press
of Virginia, 2000).
4 GriYn, Patriotism and Poetry in Eighteenth Century Britain, 34–73.
5 Hannah Smith, ‘Georgian Monarchical Culture in England, 1714–60’, Ph.D. thesis
(Cambridge University, 2001), 26–52.

6 Linda Colley, Britons: Forging the Nation 1707–1837 (New Haven, Conn.: Yale

7 The potential of further research into this area was demonstrated at a conference on
‘Hanoverian Court Culture in Britain, 1714–1760’, Lady Margaret Hall, Oxford, 5 April
2003. See also Smith, ‘Georgian Monarchical Culture in England, 1714–1760’. On Queen
Caroline’s patronage see Joanna Marschner, ‘Queen Caroline of Anspach and the Euro-
pean Princely Museum Tradition’, in Clarissa Campbell Orr (ed.), Queenship in Britain
1660–1837: Royal Patronage, Court Culture and Dynastic Politics (Manchester: Manchester
permanent reward, so that they remained dependent on him for their

livelihoods. Moreover, Whig patrons of the 1720s and 1730s expected
more for their money: while the Kit-Cats had supported poets without
demanding that they produce solely party propaganda, by Walpole’s
time writers had become politically accountable, with little freedom in
relation to their patrons.8
The political hegemony secured by the Whigs after 1714 clearly
brought enormous beneWts to many of the writers discussed in this
book, who were rewarded for their eVorts on behalf of the Protestant
succession with places and pensions. However, while the accession of
George I established Whiggism as the dominant political culture, it also
threatened the unity that the party had found in opposition. The years
between 1716 and 1724 saw a fragmentation of political interests between
the Sunderland and Walpole factions, and the Robinocracy was to create
a body of inXuential Whig dissidents. It seems inevitable that this
fracturing of political culture had an impact upon the cohesion of
Whig literary culture. The ideological and Wnancial commitment to
poetry that is found in the 1690s and 1700s was generated by a party
united in opposition, and determined to consolidate their recent, and
precarious, political achievements through the creation of a distinctively
Whiggish cultural sphere. It is tempting to suspect that the excitement
and enthusiasm engendered by the prospect of a Whig Britain was
dissipated by its reality. This could be because of the division of the
party, Walpole’s emphasis on prose propaganda over poetic prestige, or
perhaps the fact that oppositional poetry can never retain its urgency
once it becomes the verse of the political establishment.
The continuing inXuence of early Whig writing can, however, clearly
be traced in the poetic style of later writers, and in particular in a
developing tradition of sublime religious verse. Aaron Hill’s poetry
reveals many points of comparison with early Whig writing, as Chris-
tine Gerrard’s recent biography of Hill has shown.9 In his preface to The
Judgement-Day (1721) Hill expresses the same desire to articulate the
inexpressible that we have seen in Montagu and Blackmore, describing
the way in which his subject matter evades authorial control and ‘bursts
from our very Approach, and overXows Humane Thought, when we
8 Tone Sundt Urstad, Sir Robert Walpole’s Poets: The Use of Literature as Pro-
Government Propaganda, 1721–1742 (Newark, Del., and London: University of Delaware

Press, 1999), 56–75.
9 Christine Gerrard, Aaron Hill: The Muses’ Projector, 1685–1750 (Oxford: Oxford

would draw it into Description!’.10 Later on, in Advice to the Poets (1731),
he was explicitly to endorse the freedoms of blank verse. James Thom-
son’s poetry can also be seen as a development of the Whig tradition.
The Seasons (1726–30) is derived from the physico-theological tradition
initiated by Blackmore’s Creation, and, like Blackmore, Thomson
stressed the divine origins of poetry. In the preface to Winter (1726) he
declaims: ‘let Po e t r y, once more, be restored to her antient Truth, and
Purity; let Her be inspired from Heaven, and in Return, her Incense
ascend thither’.11 It is possible to trace a trajectory of serious elevated
poetry through from Hill and Thomson to Young’s Night Thoughts
(1742–5) and Akenside’s Pleasures of the Imagination (1757). An import-
ant consideration in the revision of this line of inXuence would be the
evolving status of ‘poetic enthusiasm’. Jon Mee’s recent work has shown
that writers continue to negotiate the more radical resonances of the
notion of enthusiasm during the Romantic period.12 Exploring Thom-
son’s or Young’s debts to earlier Whig verse also raises important
questions about the formation of the eighteenth-century poetic
canon. Why did The Seasons and Night Thoughts become two of the
most popular poems of the century yet the elevated verse of writers
such as Blackmore and Montagu was forgotten? Adam Rounce has
suggested that Akenside’s odes continued a tradition of explicitly public
Whig poetry into the 1760s, but because of their political content they
were dismissed on aesthetic grounds.13 While the aesthetics of early
Whig panegyric were to achieve a lasting currency, perhaps the
commitment to the celebration of aVairs of state that accompanied
them was not.
Another aspect of the Whig literary project that undoubtedly con-
tinued to inform poetry in subsequent decades was the literary and
cultural criticism of the era. Joseph Addison’s essays on Paradise Lost
and on the pleasures of the imagination remained key critical works well
into the nineteenth century, while Shaftesbury’s Characteristicks was to
continue to inXuence religious, philosophical, and cultural debates in
10 Aaron Hill, The Judgement-Day. A Poem, 2nd edn., (London, 1721), p. iii.
11 James Thomson, Winter, 2nd edn., (1726), in The Seasons, ed. James Sambrook
(Oxford: Clarendon, 1981), 304.
12 Jon Mee, Romanticism, Enthusiasm and Regulation: Poetics and the Policing of Culture
in the Romantic Period (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003).

13 See Adam Rounce, ‘Akenside’s Clamours for Liberty’ in David Womersley (ed.),
Cultures of Whiggism: New Essays on Literature and History in the Long Eighteenth Century.
(Newark, NJ, and London: University of Delaware Press, forthcoming).
Britain and Europe.14 What has been less widely recognized is the legacy
of John Dennis’s aesthetic theories for later Romantic poets.15 Thomas
De Quincey wrote disparagingly of Wordsworth and Coleridge’s ‘absurd
craze’ for Dennis’s theories of poetic inspiration, but there seems to
have been more to it than this.16 Wordsworth cites Dennis on several
occasions in relation to the religious sublime in epic poetry and to
Dennis’s taxonomy of vulgar and enthusiastic passions.17 Moreover,
Dennis’s theory of the sublime oVered an important model for the
interconnection of passion, memory, and renewal that was so central
to Wordsworth’s conceptualization of poetic process. Such links further
trouble the notion of a shift from neoclassical to Romantic poetics in
the eighteenth century, and undermine some of the boundaries of
periodization across the century. However, my intention here is not to
pave the way for a reconsideration of Dennis et al. as precursors of
Wordsworthian Romanticism. Whig poetry and Whig literary criticism
are important in their own right. For too long ‘minor’ Wgures such as
Dennis have been required to play a supporting role to canonical
authors in order to gain entrance into modern criticism. Part of the
aim of this book is to disturb the distinction between canonical and non
canonical, and to demonstrate that it is only by historicizing relations
between ‘major’ and ‘minor’ poets, ‘good’ and ‘bad’ writing, that we can
begin to see the literary past in all its vibrant complexity.
The poetry written between 1678 and 1715 demonstrates that Whig
authors created a dynamic and ambitious body of writing which served
both to consolidate a sense of political unity and to celebrate the most
notable events of public life. This poetry was critically engaged with the
arguments of contemporary Tory writers, at both a topical and a
theoretical level. As such, it oVers an essential basis from which to
revise our understanding of the poetics and cultural politics of the
early eighteenth century. But its signiWcance also goes beyond that: in
14 On the reception and inXuence of the Characteristicks see Philip Ayres, introd. to
Shaftesbury, Characteristicks of Men, Manners, Opinions, Times, 2 vols. (Oxford: Claren-

don, 1999), vol. i. pp. xxii–xxxi.
15 Although see John Morillo, Uneasy Feelings: Literature, the Passions and Class from
Neoclassicism to Romanticism (New York: AMS, 2001); Theresa Kelley, Wordsworth’s Revi-
sionary Aesthetics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988); JeVrey Barnouw, ‘The
Morality of the Sublime: To John Dennis’, Comparative Literature, 35 (1983), 21–42.
16 Unpublished letter from Thomas De Quincey to Alexander Blackwood, 30 August
1842, cited by E. N. Hooker, introd. to Dennis, Critical Works, vol. ii, p. lxxiii.
17 On the relationship between the two writers see Morillo, Uneasy Feelings, 5, 16–18,
26–7, 29.
exploring the complexities of canon formation in a given historical

moment, in questioning the hierarchical relationship between canonical
text and non-canonical context, and in endeavouring to restore a
historical aesthetic it oVers insights into the study of early modern
literary culture that reach far beyond Whig poetry itself.
In his celebrated Epistle to Dorset of 1690 Charles Montagu had
claimed great responsibility for the contemporary writer, declaring that:
Poets have this to boast; Without their Aid;
The freshest Lawrels, nipp’d by Malice, Fade,
And Vertue to Oblivion is betray’d:
The proudest Honours have a narrow Date,
Unless they vindicate their Names from Fate.18
Subsequent literary history has inverted the relationship described here

between poetry and history. The historical events celebrated in the
Epistle and other poems have lost none of their fame over the centuries.
It turns out that ‘The freshest Lawrels, nipp’d by Malice’ have been those
of Montagu and his Whig contemporaries. This book, it is hoped, will
go some way to vindicate their names from fate.
Dorset and Middlesex (London, 1690), 3.

Biographical appendix
Jo s e p h Ad d i s o n (1672–1719), essayist, poet, and statesman. Educated, with

Richard Steele, at Charterhouse School, then went on to Queens College,
Oxford, and Magdalen College, Oxford. Encouraged by Charles Montagu, and
given a pension from John Somers. Travelled in Italy, publishing his Letter from
Italy (1703) on his return, and wrote his most celebrated poem, The Campaign,
on the victory at Blenheim in 1704. Made Under-Secretary of State, then
Commissioner of Appeals; MP for Lostwithiel in 1708. Lost oYce on fall of
Whigs. Contributed to the Tatler, and began the Spectator in March 1711.
Member of the Kit-Cat Club, he also presided over a group of young Whig
writers at Button’s. Produced Cato in 1713, and became engaged again with essay
writing with The Guardian in 1713. Returned to politics on the death of Queen
Anne, and became Secretary to the Lords Justices, then Secretary of State, along
with Stanhope, in 1717. Retired 1718, fell out with Steele, and died shortly after, in
1719.
Jo h n Ay l o f f e (d. 1685), poet. Educated at Trinity College, Cambridge.
Member of the Green Ribbon and King’s Head Clubs; executed in 1685 for his
part in the Rye House Plot.
Ap h r a Be h n (1640–89), poet and dramatist. Grew up in Surinam, returned
to England c.1658. Employed to spy for Charles II in Netherlands, then became
professional writer, with series of successful comedies and prose Wctions includ-
ing The Rover (1677) and Oroonoko (1688). Wrote political verse in celebration of
the Stuart monarchy.
Ri c h a r d Bl a c k m o r e (d. 1729), physician and poet. Educated at Westmin-
ster School, Trinity College, Oxford, and Padua, Fellow of the Royal Society of
Physicians. Rose to fame and some notoriety with his Williamite epic Prince
Arthur in 1695. Knighted and appointed physician in ordinary to William III in
1697. Attacked by Dryden, Garth, and Steele in debate over his Satyr Against Wit
(1700); received much praise for his physico-theological poem, Creation (1712).
Continued to write until his death in 1729, publishing medical treatises, pamph-
lets on the Arian controversy, and two more lengthy epic poems.
Th o m a s Br o w n (1663–1704), writer. Educated at Christ Church, Oxford.
Became headmaster of grammar school in Kingston-on-Thames, then left and
moved to London, producing series of satirical poems and translations. Associ-
ated with wits at Will’s coVee house.
248 Biographical appendix
Eu s t a c e Bu d g e l l (1686–1737), writer. Nephew of Joseph Addison, educated

at Trinity College, Oxford, and went on to the Inner Temple. Addison made him
a clerk in his oYce while employed as secretary to Lord Wharton. Contributed
to the Spectator. Became under-secretary to Addison when he was made secre-
tary to Sunderland following the accession of George I, and went on to become
Accountant-General of Ireland. Lost position as result of a quarrel; became part
of the opposition to Walpole. Contributed to The Craftsman, and started a
weekly periodical, The Bee (1733–5). Committed suicide in 1737.
He n r y Ca r e (1648–88), journalist and political writer. Editor of the exclu-
sionist Weekly Pacquet of Advice from Rome (1678–83). After accession of James II
wrote in support of catholicism and Dissent.
Su s a n n a h Ce n t l i v r e (?1669–1723), actress and dramatist. Produced nine-
teen plays between 1700 and 1722, and specialized in comedies of intrigue and
manners. The Busie Body (1709) and A Bold Stroke for a Wife (1718) among her
most successful works. Also acted outside London, as a strolling player. An
ardent Whig, and friend of Farquhar, Steele, Budgell, and Rowe, her Whiggish
politics are evident in several of the plays. She also published two long poems: ‘A
Poem to King George [ . . . ] upon his Accession to the Throne’, and ‘An Ode to
Hygeia’, which was included in an anthology of Verses upon the Sickness and
Recovery of the Right Honourable Robert Walpole.
Sa m u e l Cl a r k e (1675–1729), theologian. Educated at Caius College, Cam-
bridge, and went on to write in defence of Newton’s Principia. Took up
chaplaincy at Norwich, then rector of Drayton, near Norwich. Gave Boyle
lectures at Cambridge in 1704–5. Became leading metaphysician and adherent
of a priori philosophy, attacked as both deist and orthodox. Became intimate
with Queen Caroline, and had many followers among latitudinarians, especially
Bishop Hoadly. Published editions of Caesar’s Commentaries and Homer, in
addition to scientiWc and philosophical works.
Sa m u e l Co b b (1675–1713), poet and translator. Educated at Trinity College,
Cambridge. Taught at Christ’s Hospital. First publication a poem on Mary’s
death. Went on to produce a series of panegyrics on the War of the Spanish
Succession: Isaac Watts claimed that Cobb’s The Female Reign: An Ode (1709)
was ‘the truest and best Pindaric’ he had ever read.
Wi l l i a m Co n g r e v e (1670–1729), dramatist. Educated at Kilkenny Gram-
mar School and Trinity College, Dublin, contemporary with Jonathan Swift.
Began to publish plays from 1693, enjoying great success with Love for Love
(1695) and The Way of the World (1700). With support of Charles Montagu,
enjoyed a long career in government service, becoming commissioner for
licensing hackney coaches 1695–1705; commissioner of wine licenses 1705–14;
Secretary for Jamaica 1714. Member of Kit-Cat Club.
An t h o n y As h l e y Co o p e r , f i r s t Ea r l o f Sh a f t e s b u r y (1621–83),
statesman. Educated at Exeter College, Oxford, then Lincoln’s Inn. Switched
allegiances from Royalist to Parliamentary side in 1644. Military service as head
of Parliamentary forces in Dorset, member of Cromwell’s Barebones Parliament
1653. Opposed Cromwell by 1656, and led forces supporting Charles II’s entry
into Blackheath in 1660. Granted peerage at coronation, Lord Chancellor in
1672, when he made John Locke his secretary. Became part of the cabal on fall of
Clarendon, supported Second Dutch War, created Earl of Shaftesbury 1672. After
fall from oYce in 1673 became part of parliamentary opposition to court,
member of Green Ribbon Club, supported Exclusion Bill and became leader
of exclusionist cause. Arrested for high treason July 1681, acquitted November,
Xed to Holland and died 1683.
An t h o n y As h l e y Co o p e r , t h i r d Ea r l o f Sh a f t e s b u r y (1671–
1713), politician and philosopher. Under the guardianship of his grandfather,
the Wrst Earl of Shaftesbury, from the age of three. Educated at home by John
Locke, then at Winchester College. Elected MP for Poole 1695; staunch Whig
and member of country opposition in 1690s. After retirement from politics in
1698 remained at his Dorset house, and produced his inXuential Characteristicks
in 1711, for which he was attacked as a deist. Supported John Toland, much
inXuenced by Cambridge Platonists. Travelled to Naples to improve his health in
1711, and remained there until his death in 1713.
Na t h a n i e l Cr o u c h [Richard or Robert Burton] (?1632–?1725), publisher.
Author of popular histories, including History of the Lives of English Divines who
were Most Zealous in Promoting the Reformation (1709) and Martyrs in Flames:
Or a History of Popery (1695).
Sa m u e l Cr o x a l l (d. 1752), writer and cleric. Educated at Eton and St John’s
College, Cambridge. Took orders 1714; chaplain to the chapel royal at Hampton
Court 1715, and went on to attain a series of ecclesiastical preferments, reputedly
in recognition of his political services to the Hanoverians. Contributed to
Samuel Garth’s Metamorphoses (1717).
Jo h n Cu t t s , Ba r o n Cu t t s o f Go w r a n (1661–1717), soldier-poet and
military hero. Educated at Catharine Hall, Cambridge. Rose to prominence for
his bravery at the Battle of the Boyne, and earned the nickname ‘the Salaman-
der’ for his heroism at the battle of Namur in 1695. Employed Richard Steele as
his private secretary, who went on to publish some of his verses in the Tatler.
Continued to Wght under Marlborough in the War of the Spanish Succession;
third in command at Battle of Blenheim; appointed Commander-in-Chief in
Ireland 1716.
Da n i e l De f o e (?1661–1731), journalist and Wction writer. Nonconformist
family, educated at Newington Green Academy. Fought in Monmouth rebellion
in 1685, and joined William III’s army during his advance on London in 1688.
Appointed accountant to the commissioners of glass duty 1695. Published series
of works in defence of William III during last years of reign; most famously The
True-Born Englishman (1701). Tried and pilloried for his attack on the High
Church in The Shortest Way with the Dissenters (1702). Wrote for both political
sides during Anne’s reign: employed by Robert Harley, and later by Godolphin
and Sunderland. Published numerous historical and political works; later
famous for his Wctional works Robinson Crusoe (1719), Moll Flanders (1722),
and Journal of the Plague Year (1722).
Jo h n De n n i s (1657–1734), poet and critic. Educated at Caius College,
Cambridge, and mixed with a number of prominent writers at Will’s coVee
house on his arrival in London. Defended the Revolution, and wrote in support
of the War of the Spanish Succession, earning a place, through the Duke of
Marlborough, as a waiter in the port of London. Began a long quarrel with Pope
following the publication of the Essay on Criticism, and soon distanced himself
from the Addisonian literary circle, falling out with both Addison and Steele.
Produced a series of inXuential critical treatises on the nature of sublime poetry,
and continued to write critical and political essays into the 1720s.
We n t w o r t h Di l l o n, Ea r l o f Ro s c o m m o n (?1633–85), poet and pol-
itician. Founded an informal literary academy, which included the Earl of
Dorset, the Marquis of Halifax, and Dryden; produced his inXuential Essay
On Translated Verse in 1684.
Jo h n Dr y d e n (1631–1700), poet and dramatist. Educated at Westminster
School, and Trinity College, Cambridge. Published Heroique Stanzas (1659) in
celebration of Oliver Cromwell, but changed sides after 1660 and wrote pan-
egyrics on the Restoration of Charles II. Produced a series of popular rhymed
heroic tragedies during the 1660s and 1670s, including The Indian Emperor
(1667) and The Conquest of Granada (1670–2). Poet Laureate and Histori-
ographer Royal from 1670. Wrote the mock-biblical satire Absalom and
Achitophel (1681) in defence of king and government during the Exclusion Crisis.
Converted to catholicism under James II, justifying his conversion in The Hind
and the Panther (1687). Lost all his oYces under William III. Continued to
publish some drama, and several translations, including his celebrated Works of
Virgil (1697). Died 1700 and buried in Westminster Abbey.
La u r e n c e Eu s d e n (1688–1713), poet, later Poet Laureate. Educated at Trin-
ity, Cambridge. Secured patronage from Charles Montagu with his Wrst publi-
cation, a Latin translation of Montagu’s poem on the Boyne; contributed to the
Guardian, and to Garth’s Metamorphoses (1717); produced a panegyric on the
marriage of the Duke of Newcastle to Henrietta Godolphin, and was rewarded
with the laureateship after Nicholas Rowe’s death in 1718. Took orders in 1725,
and was appointed to a rectory in Lincolnshire.
Si r Sa m u e l Ga r t h (1661–1719), physician and poet. Educated at Peterhouse,

Cambridge. Fellow of the college of Physicians; dedicated his oration to the
college in 1697 to William III; produced a mock-epic poem, The Dispensary
(1699), about the apothecaries’ opposition to the establishment of a free dis-
pensary. Supervised Dryden’s funeral in 1700. Member of the Kit-Cat Club.
Knighted on the accession of George I, and became physician in ordinary to the
king. Edited inXuential translation of Ovid’s Metamorphoses in 1717.
Jo h n Ga y (1685–1732), poet and dramatist. Educated at Barnstaple Grammar
School, then brieXy apprenticed to a mercer in London. Became acquainted
with Pope in London, who encouraged the publication of Rural Sports (1713)
and The Shepherd’s Week (1714). Appointed secretary to the Duchess of Mon-
mouth in 1712, and then secretary to Lord Clarendon as envoy to Hanover.
Returned to England on the death of Queen Anne, had success with Trivia
(1715), and collaborated with Pope and Arbuthnot on the farce Three Hours After
Marriage (1717). Lost almost all his fortune in the South Sea bubble, but went
on to become a household name with The Beggar’s Opera (1728) and its sequel
Polly, which was banned by Walpole. Supported by the Duke and Duchess of
Queensberry for the last decade of his life. Died 1732 and buried in Westminster
Abbey.
Ch a r l e s Gi l d o n (1665–1724), poet and pamphleteer. Catholic, educated at
Douay School, later a deist. Produced The History of the Athenian Society (1691);
edited Langbaine’s Dramatic Poets (1699); attacked Pope’s Rape of the Lock
(1714), and became one of his dunces. John Dunton claimed that he was a
‘dependent of the Whigs’ in The Life and Errors of John Dunton (1705).
Ge o r g e Gr a n v i l l e , Ba r o n La n s d o w n e (1667–1735), poet and drama-
tist. Educated at Trinity, Cambridge. Keen to join the royal forces against
Monmouth in 1685, and to defend James II in 1688. Went into literary retirement
during the 1690s, and produced a series of imitations of Waller. Entered public
life at Anne’s accession; succeeded Walpole as Secretary of War 1710; created
Baron Lansdowne as one of twelve peers to see through peace negotiations;
removed from position 1714; suspected of complicity in Jacobite rising, 1715.
Lived abroad 1722–32; returned to publish collected works and become recon-
ciled with the Hanoverian monarchy.
Wi l l i a m Ha r r i s o n (1685–1713), poet and diplomat. Educated at New
College, Oxford, where he met Addison, who secured him a post as governor
to a son of the Duke of Queensberry. Continued the Tatler for Wfty-two issues
after Steele ceased to write for it. Through Swift acquired a position as secretary
to the ambassador at the Hague, and as Queen’s secretary to the embassy at
Utrecht. According to Edward Young, Addison said of Harrison’s Woodstock
Park: ‘This young man, in his very Wrst attempt, has exceeded most of the best
writers of the age’ (Joseph Spence, Observations, Anecdotes, and Characters of
Books and Men, Collected from Conversation, ed. James M. Osborn, 2 vols.
(Oxford: Clarendon, 1966), i. 339).
Ol i v e r He y w o o d (1630–1702), Presbyterian preacher. Educated at Trinity
College, Cambridge. Became preacher in West Riding. Excommunicated in 1662
after Act of Uniformity, but continued to preach, holding conventicles at homes
of Presbyterian gentry and farmers. Became itinerant evangelist in northern
counties; imprisoned 1685–6 for holding an illegal assembly.
Jo h n Hu g h e s (1677–1720), writer and translator. Educated at Thomas Rowe’s
Dissenting academy alongside Isaac Watts. Wrote a number of panegyrics on
William III, and was rewarded with a place in the Ordnance OYce; appointed
Secretary to the Commissions of Peace in the Court of Chancery in 1717.
Contributed to the Tatler, the Spectator, and the Guardian, and produced The
Lay Monk with Richard Blackmore.
Be n j a m i n Ke a c h (1640–1704), Baptist minister and writer. Imprisoned for
preaching in Buckinghamshire 1664. Moved to London, became Calvinistic
Baptist and preached at Goat Yard Passage in Southwark. His advocacy of
congregational singing and his issue of a hymn collection in 1691 caused a
rupture with the Church. Published a series of controversial pamphlets.
Ch a r l e s Mo n t a g u , Ea r l o f Ha l i f a x (1661–1715), poet and statesman.
Educated at Westminster School and Trinity College, Cambridge. Gained notice
as a poet with his burlesque (with Prior) of Dryden’s The Hind and the Panther
(1687). Signed letter of invitation to William III; elected MP for Maldon 1689.
Appointed Clark of Privy Council 1689; Lord of Treasury 1692. Established Bank
of England and system of public credit, and worked with Somers, Newton,
Locke, and Halley on the Recoinage Bill; Chancellor of the Exchequer 1694; First
Lord of the Treasury 1697. Impeached for his part in Partition Treaty 1701, and
out of oYce under Queen Anne, although appointed commissioner for negoti-
ating union with Scotland in 1706, and joint plenipotentiary to the Hague 1710.
Member of Kit-Cat Club, became famous for his patronage of contemporary
literature. Acted as one of the Lords Justices from the death of the queen to the
arrival of George I. After the accession appointed First Lord of the Treasury, and
invested with Order of the Garter 1714. Died suddenly in 1715; buried in
Westminster Abbey.
La d y Ma r y Wo r t l e y Mo n t a g u , née Pierrepont (1689–1762), writer.
Daughter of the Wfth Earl and Wrst Duke of Kingston; introduced to the Kit-
Cat Club at an early age. Educated at home, very widely read. Her Court
Eclogues was published, without her permission, by Edmund Curll in 1716.
Accompanied her husband Edward Wortley Montagu when he went to
Constantinople as ambassador in 1716, and wrote her Turkish Letters there.
Returned to England in 1718, continued to write poetry, little of which was

published in her lifetime. Friendly with Lord Hervey, and famously quarrelled
with Pope, attacking him in several satires. Produced a periodical, The Nonsense
of Common-Sense (1737–8). Left England in 1739 and lived for most of the rest of
her life in France and Italy. Died 1762.
Jo h n Ol d m i x o n (1673–1742), historian and pamphleteer. Early panegyrics to
the Duke of Portland and the Duchess of Marlborough; established The Muses
Mercury in 1707–8, a periodical containing verses by Steele, Garth, Motteux, and
others; translated Works of Boileau (1711–13), dedicated to Charles Montagu;
contributed to Arthur Maynwaring’s The Medley; published a series of secret
histories between 1712–16, exposing papist/Stuart conspiracies. OVered the post
of collector at the port of Bridgewater in 1716. Produced a Whiggish History of
England During the Reigns of the Royal House of Stuart (1729–39).
Am b r o s e Ph i l i p s (?1675–1749), poet and dramatist. Educated at St John’s
College, Cambridge. Secretary to the Whig Hanover Club; JP for Westminster
1715; commissioner for the lottery 1717; Secretary to the Lord Chancellor in
Ireland 1726. Started the Freeholder, with Thomas Burnet and Richard West, in
1718; nicknamed ‘Namby Pamby’ on account of his poems written to the infant
daughters of Lord Carteret.
Jo h n Ph i l i p s (1676–1709), poet. Educated at Christ Church, Oxford, under
Aldrich. Became known thanks to his mock-heroic poem, The Splendid Shilling
(1701), and was then introduced to Harley and St John.
Al e x a n d e r Po p e (1688–1744), poet. Born into Roman Catholic family
which lived in London until c.1700, then moved to BinWeld, in Windsor Forest.
Educated largely at home and by a local priest. Became friendly with William
Walsh, William Wycherley, and Sir William Trumbull, and the London wits
from an early age. Pastorals published 1709, followed by The Rape of the Lock
(1712) and Windsor Forest (1713). Increasingly distanced from Addison’s ‘little
senate’; member of the Scriblerus Club with Gay, Swift, and Arbuthnot. Made
his fortune and reputation with his translation of the Iliad (1715–20), which was
followed by the Odyssey (1725–6). Moved to Twickenham in 1718, where he lived
for the rest of his life. Published Dunciad Variorum (1729), Moral Essays (1731–5),
Imitations of Horace (1733–8), Dunciad in Four Books (1743). InXuential friend-
ships with Swift, Bolingbroke, and Warburton.
Sa m u e l Po r d a g e (?1633–91), poet. Former steward to Philip Herbert, Earl
of Pembroke, and son of John Pordage, astrologer and Behmenist. Wrote a
number of Restoration panegyrics, and went on to produce exclusionist propa-
ganda, including A New Apparition of Sir Edmundbury Godfrey’s Ghost (1681)
and The Medal Revers’d (1682). Attacked by John Oldham and Roger L’Estrange.
Ma t t h e w Pr i o r (1664–1721), poet and diplomat. Supported by the Earl of

Dorset from an early age, educated at Westminster and St John’s College,
Cambridge. Following the publication of his collaborative parody of
Dryden’s The Hind and the Panther (1687) he gained, through Dorset, a diplo-
matic position at the Hague; appointed secretary to the negotiations at the
Treaty of Ryswick 1697; voted for Montagu’s impeachment over the Partition
Treaty in 1701, and subsequently joined the Tories; friendly with Harley, Boling-
broke, Swift; sent to negotiate the Peace of Utrecht in 1711; impeached by
Walpole 1715.
Th o m a s Ro g e r s (1660–94), educated at Trinity College, Oxford. Took holy
orders and was given living at Slapton, near Towcester. Published anticatholic
satires and an attack on Robert Molesworth dedicated to William III.
El i z a b e t h Si n g e r Ro w e (1674–1737), poet. Daughter of a Nonconformist
minister. Published Poems . . . by Philomela 1696. Corresponded with The Athen-
ian Mercury in the early 1690s. Patronized by the Thynnes of Longleat. Friendly
with Isaac Watts and Matthew Prior. Went into retirement after her husband’s
death. Known for her pious epistolary verse.
Ni c h o l a s Ro w e (1678–1718), dramatist and Poet Laureate. Wrote a series of
popular plays including The Ambitious Stepmother (1700) and the Wercely
Williamite Tamerlane (1702), which was played annually at Drury Lane on
November the Wfth; appointed Poet Laureate at the accession of George I, and
made one of the surveyors of customs at the port of London.
Ch a r l e s Sa c k v i l l e , Ea r l o f Do r s e t (1638–1706), poet and courtier.
Renowned rake during the 1660s and 1670s. Friendly with Dryden, Butler, and
Wycherley, and oVered patronage to many contemporary writers. Withdrew
from court under James II, and publicly opposed the imprisonment of the seven
bishops; signatory of the letter of invitation to William of Orange, appointed
Lord Chamberlain of the Household 1689–97.
Ge o r g e Se w e l l (d. 1726), pamphlet writer. Educated Eton and Peterhouse,
Cambridge, and went on to study medicine at Leyden and Edinburgh. Pub-
lished numerous poems, translations, and pamphlets. Tory politics evident in
pamphlets of 1713–15, but became a supporter of Robert Walpole by 1718.
Contributed to William Harrison’s Wfth volume of the Tatler, and to the
Spectator.
El k a n a h Se t t l e (1648–1724), poet and dramatist. Educated at Trinity
College, Oxford. Wrote a series of heroic dramas in the 1660s and 1670s and
was attacked by Dryden, Shadwell, and Crowne over his tragedy The Empress of
Morocco (1671); produced poems and plays in support of the Whigs, but
recanted following the dissolution of the Oxford Parliament in 1681 and became
a Tory propagandist; after the Revolution attained the post of City poet;
continued to write plays, both for Drury Lane and Bartholomew Fair, and
poems on aVairs of state.
Th o m a s Sh a d w e l l (?1642–92), dramatist and later Poet Laureate. Educated
at Caius College, Cambridge; entered the Middle Temple. Self-proclaimed heir
of Ben Jonson and his humours comedy, and produced a series of successful
comedies during the 1660s and 1670s, including Epsom Wells (1672) and The
Virtuoso (1675). Famously feuded with Dryden, partly over dramatic theory, and
was attacked in MacFlecknoe (1682); he retaliated in The Medal of John Bayes
(1682) and The Tory-Poets (1682). Replaced Dryden as Poet Laureate and His-
toriographer Royal after the Revolution.
Jo h n, Ba r o n So m e r s (1651–1716), Statesman. Educated at Worcester
Cathedral School and Trinity College, Oxford; entered the Middle Temple.
Defended the seven bishops in 1688, and presided over the committee which
framed the Declaration of Rights. Knighted October 1689, Attorney General
1692, Lord Keeper of the Great Seal 1693, member of the Privy Council and Lord
Chancellor 1697. Along with Newton and Montagu introduced devaluation of
currency by clipping. Head of Junto Whigs in early years of Anne’s reign,
advocated vigorous prosecution of war. Member of Kit-Cat Club. Given place
in Cabinet at accession of George I.
Ja m e s , f i r s t Ea r l St a n h o p e (1673–1721), soldier and statesman. Edu-
cated Eton and Trinity College, Oxford. Volunteer in Flanders 1694–5; given
colonelcy of regiment, and elected MP for Isle of Wight and Cockermouth, 1702.
Brigadier General 1704, and minister to Spain 1706. Fought in Spain during War
of Spanish Succession and made commander-in-chief of British forces in Spain
1708. Member of Kit-Cat Club and friend of third Earl of Shaftesbury. Returned
1712, and was made a leader of the House of Commons. Led House of Commons
with Walpole after accession of George I, and was made First Lord of the
Treasury and Chancellor of the Exchequer 1717.
Ri c h a r d St e e l e (1672–1729), essayist. Educated at Charterhouse School,
where he Wrst befriended Joseph Addison, and went on to study at Christ
Church, Oxford. Entered military service under second Duke of Ormonde,
and was later taken up by John Cutts, colonel of the Coldstream Guards, who
employed him as his secretary. Associated with Sedley, Congreve, Vanbrugh, and
other London wits. Published his Christian Hero in 1701, dedicated to Cutts, and
wrote a series of comedies 1701–5. Appointed gentleman waiter to Prince George
of Denmark 1706, gazetteer in 1707. Began career as essayist with the Tatler in
1709, and afterwards contributed to Addison’s Spectator. Published a series of
anti-government political pamphlets 1712–14. On accession of George I was
appointed JP, and deputy lieutenant for county of Middlesex, then surveyor of
the royal stables at Hampton Court, and supervisor of the Theatre Royal in
Drury Lane. Continued to publish pamphlets and a series of short-lived
periodicals. Began a controversy with Addison in 1719; published his last play
The Conscious Lovers in 1722. Died 1729.
Jo s e p h St e n n e t t (1663–1714), Baptist and hymn writer. Pastor of a London
Baptist congregation in Old Broad Street, and lecturer to the general Baptist
congregation in the Barbican. Produced a version of the Song of Solomon in
1700.
Ge o r g e St e p n e y (1663–1707), poet and diplomat. Educated at Westminster
and Trinity College, Cambridge, where he met and became friends with Charles
Montagu. Supported the Revolution of 1688, and was rewarded with a series of
government positions (envoy to the Electors of Saxony and Brandenburg 1695;
commissioner of trade and plantations 1697; envoy to Vienna 1702; envoy to the
Hague 1706). Member of the Kit-Cat Club.
Jo n a t h a n Sw i f t (1677–1745), poet and clergyman. Educated at Kilkenny
Grammar School, along with Congreve, then Trinity College, Dublin. Moved to
England and lived with Sir William Temple, as his secretary, from 1688.
Ordained 1694, and then returned to live with Temple, whose involvement in
the ancients and moderns debate prompted Swift’s Battle of the Books, published
in 1704 with A Tale of a Tub. Appointed Vicar of Laracor 1700, although spent
much time in Dublin and London. While in London edited the Examiner and
produced various political pamphlets. Increasingly linked to Tory ministry.
Became Dean of St Patrick’s in June 1713, and returned to Ireland after death
of Queen Anne. Took up political writing again with The Drapier’s Letters.
Gullivers Travels published 1726, an instant success. Remained in Ireland after
1728, and continued to write Irish pamphlets, most famously A Modest Proposal
(1729). Ill health from 1733, and later mental illness. Died October 1745; buried in
St Patrick’s Cathedral.
Th o m a s Ti c k e l l (1686–1740), poet and statesman. Educated at Queen’s
College, Oxford. Appointed Professor of Poetry at Oxford 1711; contributed to
the Guardian and Steele’s Poetical Miscellanies 1713; produced a translation of the
Wrst book of Homer’s Iliad to rival Pope’s version in 1715. Appointed under-
secretary to Addison when Addison became Secretary of State in 1717; became
Addison’s literary executor after his death; appointed Secretary to the Lords
Justices in 1724.
Ja c o b To n s o n (?1656–1736), publisher. Son of a surgeon, apprenticed 1670,
made freeman of company of stationers 1677, and began own business in same
year. Began buying plays by Dryden, Otway, and Tate, and made huge proWts
from edition of Paradise Lost (1688). Published most of the major authors of the
day. Secretary of the Kit-Cat Club from 1700, appointed printer of parliamen-
tary votes 1714, and given grant of stationer, bookseller, and printer to principle
public oYces in 1720. Died 1736.
Jo h n Tu t c h i n (?1661–1707), pamphleteer. Descended from a family of Non-

conformist ministers. Took part in the Monmouth rebellion and was tried by
Judge JeVreys, but pardoned thanks to a bribe; produced a panegyric on the
Revolution, and earned a position in the victualling oYce in 1692; dismissed in
1695, and began to write anti-Williamite propaganda, most famously his attack
on the king and his Dutch ministers in The Foreigners (1700).
Is a a c Wa t t s (1674–1748), poet and hymn writer. Educated at Southampton
Grammar School and Stoke Newington Academy, under Thomas Rowe, where
he was contemporary with John Hughes. Became pastor of Stoke Newington,
but retired on grounds of ill health. Wrote a series of educational manuals, and
works of popular divinity, and became famous for his Hymns (1707) and
religious poetry, published in Horae Lyricae (1706).
Le o n a r d We l s t e d (1688–1747), poet. Educated at Westminster and Trinity
College, Cambridge. Acquired a position in the oYce of one of the secretaries of
state through the patronage of the Earl of Clare; went on to become clerk in the
Ordnance OYce (c.1722), and commissioner for managing the state lottery
(1731). Friendly with Theobald, Steele, and Hoadly.
Sa m u e l We s l e y (1662–1735). Educated at the Dissenting Academy at New-
ington Green with Defoe. Published his Wrst poems anonymously with John
Dunton, and later contributed to the Athenian Mercury. Acquired a curacy in
London, and became friends with Gilbert Burnet. Published a poem on the
Battle of Blenheim in 1705, and was rewarded by Marlborough with a chaplaincy
in his regiment. Father of the founder of Methodism, John Wesley.
Th o m a s Wh a r t o n , f i r s t Ma r q u i s o f Wh a r t o n (1648–1715), polit-
ician. Supported the Exclusion Bill and backed the invitation to William of
Orange in 1688; Lord Lieutenant of Buckinghamshire 1702; Commissioner for
Treaty of Union 1706; Lord Lieutenant in Ireland, with Addison his secretary,
1708–10; violently opposed to the Treaty of Utrecht. Was made Marquis of
Wharton in 1715. Member of the Kit-Cat Club.
Ch a r l e s Wh i t w o r t h (1675–1725), diplomat. Educated at Westminster and
Trinity College, Cambridge. Introduced to diplomacy by George Stepney, and
under William appointed to represent England at the Diet of Ratisbon; envoy to
Russia 1704, Poland 1711, and Prussia 1714. Created Baron Whitworth of Galway
in 1721.
Th o m a s Ya l d e n (1670–1736), poet. Produced some Williamite poetry in the
1690s, but openly adhered to the High Church party after Anne’s accession.
Appointed Dean of Divinity at Magdalen College, Oxford, in 1709. Questioned
for involvement in the Atterbury plot in 1723.
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Index
Achinstein, Sharon 191–2 Bayle, Pierre 218

Act of Resumptions 128–9, 130, 132–3 Beeston, Christopher 31
Act of Settlement 153 Behn, Aphra 25, 247
Act of Uniformity 64 City Heiress, The 72
Addison, Joseph 33, 40 n. 62, 130, 217, 218, Congratulatory Poem to Her Sacred
247 Majesty Queen Mary Upon her Arrival
Account of the Greatest English Poets 1–2, in England 123
5–9, 12, 17, 112 Pindaric Poem to the Reverend Doctor
Campaign, The 4, 141–2, 174, 192–3, 242 Burnet, A 103–5
on literary criticism 41–2 Bellon, Peter 111
on Milton 178, 193, 244 Bentley, Richard 36, 37
on Montagu 1, 6, 8, 9, 116, 117 biblical poetry 82, 125–6, 131–2, 182–3,
on A. Philips 151 190, 193
and politeness 159, 160 Blackmore, Richard 2, 141 n. 21, 177, 194,
Rosamond 144 215, 228, 247
in Spectator 41–2, 157–8, 184, 186–7, 193 Advice to the Poets 191
‘To His Majesty’ 219 Creation: A Philosophical Poem 175 n. 7,
To the King 195 186–7, 188–9
and Tonson 221–2, 226, 227 King Arthur 33
Akenside, Mark 244 Kit-Cats, The 34–5, 175 n. 7, 223, 227,
ancients and moderns controversy 36, 230
151–156 Paraphrase on the Book of Job 184
ancient constitution 70–71, 91, 96, 177 Prince Arthur 4, 33, 125, 174–5, 197
Anglican Church 24, 85–6, 87, 89–91 Satyr Against Wit 32–3, 175 n.7, 221
and Dissent(ers) 64–5 Wits, quarrel with 32–7
Mary II and 123–4 blank verse 177–8
Anne, queen of England: Blanning, T. C. W. 214, 237
and Addison’s The Campaign 141–2 Blenheim Palace 143–7
and Anglican Church 123 n. 87 Boileau, Nicolas 183
death of 169–70 Bolla, Peter de 194
and Elizabeth I, parallel with 137–8 Boyle, Charles 33, 34, 36–7
and Philips’s Blenheim 142 Breda, Declaration of 114
and war 136–40 Brewer, John 106
Arbuthnot, John 156–7 Brothers Club 44, 230
Aristotle 126, 185 Brown, Christopher 214
AshWeld, Andrew 194 Brown, Thomas 33, 35, 37, 247
authorship, professional 29 n. 20, 30, 205, Bucholz, R. O. 207, 213, 223 n. 61
206–7 Buckingham, George Villiers, 2nd Duke
AyloVe, John 247 of 58, 88–9, 209
Budgell, Eustace 157, 236, 248
Ballaster, Ros 111 Burnet, Gilbert 77, 212–13
Barash, Carol 137, 138 Burnet, Thomas 157
Baxter, Stephen 217 Bysshe, Edward 194
Index 297
Cannons Honse 233–34 Cooper, Anthony Ashley, see Shaftesbury,

Canon formation 7, 9–10, 18, 22–55, Wrst Earl of; Shaftesbury, third
173–75, 227 Earl of
Care, Henry 209, 210, 248 Corns, Thomas 83 n. 74
Carey, Henry 157 country opposition 74–80, 120–1, 128
Carretta, Vincent 167 n. 101 country rhetoric 74–80, 120
Catholicism 57, 87, 89–90, 109–10 Courthope, W. J. 3–4
Catling, Christopher 222 Cowley, Abraham 82–3, 179
censorship 13, 75–7, 126 Crouch, Nathaniel 249
Centlivre, Susannah 238, 239, 248 Crowne, John 28, 72
Chalmers, Alexander 10 Croxall, Samuel 149, 170, 249
Chandos, James Brydges, Duke of 233–4 Cummings, Robert 144, 165, 169 n. 111
Character of a Whig, Under Several Cutts, John, Baron Cutts of Gowran 82,
Denominations, The 30 124, 182, 249
Charles II, king of England 70
Declaration to all His Loving De Quincey, Thomas 245
Subjects 59 Declarations of Indulgence 85–6, 90–1
and patronage 207, 208 Defoe, Daniel 130–4, 250
promiscuity of 60 PaciWcator, The 32
depicted as hero, 114 True Born Englishman, The 130, 131, 132,
Chaucer, GeoVrey 144, 145–6 133–4
Churchill, John, Duke of Marlbor- Dekker, Thomas 31
ough 138–40, 148–9, 223 Denham, Sir John: Cooper’s Hill 39, 73–4,
and Addison’s The Campaign 141 145, 165, 167–8
Blenheim Palace 143–7 Dennis, John 2, 33, 149, 177, 250
in On the Prospect of Peace 164–5 Advancement and Reformation of
and Philips’ Blenheim 142–3 Modern Poetry, The 125, 183
in Whig poetry 148–9 Battle of Ramillia, The 139, 148
city drama 30–2, 45, 50 Court of Death, The 179, 196
Clark, J. C. D. 14, 94 n. 2 on enthusiasm 185–6
Clarke, Samuel 225–6, 248 Grounds of Criticism in Poetry, The 38,
classicism 8, 152, 154, 158, 180–1 40, 41, 125, 184, 190
Claydon, Tony 87 on literary criticism 38, 183
Cobb, Samuel 139, 177, 178, 195, 248 on national identity 130–1, 133
‘Of Poetry’ 217 and patronage 207, 220
‘Poetae Britannici’ 197 on poetry, reformation of 125–7, 180,
Codrington, Sir Christopher 33 229
Collection of the Newest and most Ingenious Pope on 42–3
Poems against Popery and Tyranny, on Pope 168–9
A 108–9 Remarks on a Book Entituled, Prince
Colley, Linda 17, 132, 242 Arthur 126, 185, 197, 198
Collier, Jeremy 126–7 Reverse, The 130, 131, 133
Collins, A. S. 11 and sublime 125, 173–4, 183–6, 191,
Commendatory Verses, on the Author of the 196–7, 198–9, 245
Two Arthurs and the Satyr against Wit; Desagauliers, John 187
by Some of his particular Friends 33–4 Dickinson, H. T. 12–13
commercialization of literature 205–6, Dillon, Wentworth, see Roscommon,
221 Earl of
Congreve, William 17, 138, 221, 231, 248 Dissent and Dissenters 13, 24, 25, 47, 53
Birth of the Muse, The 114 and Anglican Church 64–5
patronage 217, 219, 224 n. 64 and Declarations of Indulgence 85–6,
Conlon, Michael 61 90–1
298 Index
Dodsley, Robert 242 Exclusion Crisis:

Dryden, John 32, 208, 231, 250 literature of 57–74
Absalom and Achitophel 5, 58–63 opposition patronage during 208–12
Annus Mirabilis 72, 73–4 Ezell, Margaret 206 n. 4
Blackmore, attack on 34
Catholicism, conversion to 87 Fabricant, Carole 18
criticism 145–6 Fairer, David 50 n. 100, 193, 201
on Dennis 180 n. 27 Fontenelle, Bernard de 152
Hind and the Panther, The 87–8 Foxon, David 170, 227
MacFlecknoe 27, 31
Medall, A Satyre Agaisnt Sedition, Garth, Samuel 9–10, 251
The 63–9, 70, 72 Dispensary, The 32–3
Of Dramatick Poesie 25 Gascoigne, John 187 n. 57, 216 n. 41
on Roscommon 40 Gay, John 251
satire on 88–90 Captives, The 47
Settle, attack on 28–9 Trivia 10, 26, 46
Shadwell, attack on 27–8, 31 George I: poetry on accession of 170–2
‘To Kneller’ 119 as military hero 138
‘To my Dear Friend Mr. Congreve’ Gerrard, Christine 200–1, 238, 243
7, 17 Gildon, Charles 251
and Tonson 221 Complete Art of Poetry, The 152
and Williamite wars, criticism of Libertas Triumphans 147–8, 167
118–20 Gillespie, Stuart 29 n. 20
Duckett, George 157 Godolphin, Sidney, Earl of 223
dunces 19, 30–1, 52, 53: see also Pope: Goldie, Mark 95, 102
Dunciad Granville, George, Baron Lansdowne 45,
D’Urfey, Tom 72 166, 200, 251
Green Ribbon Club 209
Elizabeth I, queen of England 97–8, 121, GriYn, Dustin 11, 242
137–8 on commercialization of literature 205
England’s Triumph (anon) 137 n. 2, 206 n. 4
English civil war period and litera- Guardian 151, 158, 160
ture 23–5, 83, 126–7
enthusiasm 22, 23–4, 33, 40, 202 Hammond, Brean 18, 43
and commercialism 46 on 18th century literary market
cultural, development of 24, 25 place 205–6
dunces and 19 Harley, Robert 142, 230
literary and religious, relationship Harris, Tim 64
between 24, 25 Harrison, William 251–2
poetic 25, 50–1 Woodstock Park 145–6, 174
Pope on 50–2 Harth, Philip 59
and populism 24, 46 Hawes, Clement 47 n. 83
religious 23–4, 25, 26, 27, 34, 51 Herbert, Sir Percy 100
Shaftesbury, Wrst Earl of, and 67 Heyd, Michael 24
sublime and 185–6, 202–3 Heywood, Oliver 86, 98, 252
in Swift 51–2 Heywood, Thomas 31
and Whiggism 10, 48 Hill, Aaron 243–4
Epistle to Dorset (Montagu) 1–2, 6, 112–19, Homer 53, 202
215, 219, 246 Horn, Robert D. 139
and sublime 173–4, 190, 195 Howard, Sir Robert 74 n. 48
Erskine-Hill, Howard 18, 154 n. 62 Hughes, John 157, 217, 218, 220, 252
Eusden, Laurence 118, 250–1 Works of Edmund Spenser 236–7
Evans, John 80 Huguenots 71, 214
Index 299
Hume, Robert D. 25 n. 6 Pope on 202

Hunter, J. Paul 42, 173, 203 on sublime 191, 193–4, 195–6
Hutchinson, Lucy 23, 83–4 Louis XIV, king of France 136, 215
and Ottoman court 110–11
Israel, Jonathan I. 94 n. 2 and patronage 214
Loyal Satyr Against Whiggism, A 67
James II 57, 94 Lynch, Kathleen M. 208 n. 9
Declarations of Indulgence 85–6, 90–1
and reformation 85–92 Macaulay, Thomas Babington 163, 217
Johnson, Samuel 11, 141, 193 n. 79 McKeon, Michael 59 n. 7
on Blackmore’s Prince Arthur 197 Maltzahn, Nicholas von 91–2, 148
Lives of the English Poets 10, 197, 216–17 Marlborough, Duke of, see Churchill, John
Jones, Emrys 51 n. 104 Marot, Daniel 214
Jordan, Thomas 30–1 Marvell, Andrew 60, 89–90
Junto Whigs 9, 13, 15, 116–17, 128, 216, 220 Mary II, Queen of England 94
and Anglican Church 123–4
Keach, Benjamin 182, 252 and Elizabeth I 121
Kit-Cat Club 8, 34–5, 47–8, 162 patronage 213–14
function of 237–9 and propaganda 213
and national culture 227–34 and reformation 121–7
publications 224–7 Mee, Jon 244
and theatre 231–2 Memoirs of the life of Anthony Late Earl of
Tonson and 222–7 Shaftesbury 211
Klein, Lawrence E. 159, 236 n. 109 Mercurius Reformatus 106
Kliger, Samuel 200 militarism 2, 105–12, 128
Kneller, Godfrey 144, 146, 222–3 as source of criticism 118–21
Knights, Mark 63, 86 Milton, John:
Krey, Gary Stuart de 91 n. 94 Addison on 178, 193, 244
Dennis on 38
Laguerre, Louis 233 and Tonson 221, 226
Leslie, Charles 231 see also Paradise Lost
L’Estrange, Roger 72, 210 n. 17, 211, 212 moderation, rhetoric of 38–9, 59–60, 80
Letter from Scotland, A (anon) 60–1 modernity:
Levine, Joseph 36, 153 and Scriblerian satire 53–5
liberty and the Revolution of 1688 98–9
and poetic form 175–81, 203 and pastoral 153–6
and artistic achievement 227–31 and patronage 236
and politeness 159–60 Monmouth Rebellion 75, 78
literary commercialism 19, 22, 24, 45, Montagu, Charles, Earl of Halifax 6–7, 217,
46, 52 252
literary criticism 11, 53 and canon 9–12
Addison on 41–2 Hind and the Panther Transvers’d,
Dennis on 38, 183 The 88–90, 218–19
Pope on 38, 39, 41, 42, 49 ‘On the Death of His Most Sacred
Roscommon on 39, 42 Majesty King Charles II’ 114
Locke, John 218 and patronage 9, 10, 11–12, 218–19
London, City of: see also Epistle to Dorset
and country opposition 74–80 Montagu, Lady Mary Wortley 162, 239,
depiction of 69–74 252–3
and Nonconformity 64 More, Henry 51 n. 103
Longinus 185 Morris, David 42 n. 69, 182, 203
Peri Hupsous 175–6, 183, 188 Muddiman, Henry 210 n. 17
300 Index
Namier, Lewis 17 Pope and 53–4

national culture: Kit-Cat Club and 227–34 Shaftesbury, third Earl of, on 234–5
national identity 7, 128–34, 156–9 Stuart 45, 206–8
nationalism 7, 133, 158–9 Welsted on 236
native poetic tradition 38, 144, 145–6, Williamite 88, 213–20
147–8 women and 238–9
Navigation Acts 73 Patterson, Annabel 156
navy 120–1 Peace. A Poem (anon) 164
Netherlands: pedantry 37, 44
Anglo-Dutch Wars 129 Penn, William 77
anti-Dutch feeling 128–31, 133 Philips, Ambrose 2, 253
and Elizabeth I’s expedition 97–8 Epistle to . . . Charles Lord Halifax, An 118
and liberty 129–32 and pastoral poetry 151–6, 158
trade with 71 Pope, quarrel with 151–9
Newton, Isaac 219 Philips, John 178, 253
natural philosophy 186–8 Blenheim 142–3
Nine Years’ War 6, 106, 136 Pincus, Steven 27, 94 n. 2, 110 n. 44, 129,
Noggle, James 201 136 n. 2
Nonconformity 13, 24, 25, 47, 64–6, 71–72, Pindar and Pindaric ode 67, 69, 178–80
86, 210 Pittock, Murray 18
Norbrook, David 18, 175 Plumb, J. H. 17
Pocock, J. G. A. 228 n. 79
Oates, Titus 57 Poem upon His Highness the Prince of
Ode Occasion’d by the Death of Her Sacred Orange’s Expedition into England, A
Majesty, An 115 (J. D.) 109–10
Ode upon the glorious and Successful Poems on AVairs of State 84–5, 92, 170,
Expedition of his Highness, An 100, 101 199–200
Ogilby, John 31 politeness 23, 47, 163
O’Hehir, Brendan 167 n. 105 Pope, Alexander 144 n. 32, 253
Oldham, John 30–1, 32 Art of Sinking in Poetry 51
‘In Praise of Poetry’ 29 on bad poetry 47, 49–50, 52
‘Upon the Works of Ben Johnson’ 26, 30 on Dennis 42–3
Oldmixon, John 253 Dennis on 168–9
on pastoral 153, 156 Dunciad 5, 11, 26, 29, 49–55
Pastoral Poem on the Victories at Schel- on enthusiasm 50–2
lenburgh and Blenheim, A 149–50 Epistle to Arbuthnot 10
opera 232 Essay on Criticism 37–43, 46, 49, 201–2,
Owen, John 78 231
Essay on Man 201
Parker, Blanford 188 n. 59 in Guardian 158
pastoral 149–59 on literary criticism 38, 39, 41, 42, 49
Paradise Lost (Milton) 53, 161, 178, 184, 186, on Longinus 202
193 ‘Messiah’ 202–3
and battle poems 142, 148 on Montagu 10
patronage 3, 9, 11–12, 48 n. 90, 155–6, and pastoral poetry 151, 154, 155, 156
205–6 Peri Bathous 10, 29, 43 n. 70, 46, 47
criticism of 11–12, 205–6 A. Philips, controversy with 151–8
during Exclusion Crisis 208–12 on Roscommon 39, 42
Kit-Cats and 231–3, 235 on sublime 51, 201–3
Louis XIV and 214 and Tonson 227
Montagu and 9, 10, 11–12, 218–19 Windsor-Forest 4, 165–7, 168–9, 174
and national culture 206 Popish Plot 57
and political legitimacy 214 populism 22, 61–2
Index 301
and poetry 19, 24, 30, 46, 50, 52 Royal Academy of Music 232
and politics 60–64, 91, 133 Royal Society 37 n. 51, 219
Pordage, Samuel 253 Rumbold, Valerie 48 n. 92
Azaria and Hushai 58, 62–3 Rye House Plot 75, 78
Medal Revers’d, The 66, 68, 69 Ryswick, Treaty of 128, 136
Prescott, Sarah 238
Prior, Matthew 215, 217, 218–20, 221, 254 Sackville, Charles, Earl of Dorset 9, 116–17,
in Examiner 229 254
Hind and the Panther Transvers’d, Faithful Catalogue of Our Most Eminent
The 88–90 Ninnies, A 90
Ode 149 and patronage 217, 218, 219–20
see also Montagu: Epistle to Dorset
Queen’s Theatre, Haymarket 231–2 St John, Henry 142
Salzman, Paul 100
Ralph, James 223 Sandwich, Countess of 36
Rapin-Thoyras, Paul de 152 Satyr to His Muse 62
rationalism 67, 152 Saunders, Francis 173
Red Bull theatre 31 Schless, Howard H. 78 n. 59
reformation: Schwoerer, Lois 210, 213
James II and 85–92 Scriblerus Club and Scriblerians 10, 23,
literary 33, 80–85, 124–27, 159–63 43–9
and Mary II, queen of England 121–7 and critique of Whig literature 10, 23,
moral 80–1, 85–8, 121–4, 161 43–9, 54–5
Republicanism 14, 18, 46–7, 64, 65, 108, see also Arbuthnot; Gay; Pope; Swift
175–6 Sedley, Sir Charles 85
Restoration of 1660 24–5, 39–40, 114, Settle, Elkanah 254–5
207–8 Absalom Senior 58, 67–8
Revolution of 1688 93–9 Dryden’s attack on 28–9
justiWcations for 95–8, 133–34 Empress of Morocco 28
poetry on 96–105 Several Orations of Demosthenes 225
and propaganda 212–14 Sewell, George 117, 174, 254
Reynell, Carew 72 n. 41 Seymour, Edward 130
Roberts, Michael 107 Shadwell, Thomas 2, 62, 109, 212, 218, 255
Robins, Jasper 148 Congratulatory Poem on His High-
Rogers, Pat 38 n. 53, 50 ness 96–7, 98–9
Rogers, Thomas 254 Dryden’s attack on 27–8, 31
romance 99–105, 116, 149 Humorists 80–1
Roscommon, Wentworth Dillon, Earl Medal of John Bayes, The 70–1, 73
of 29, 40, 250 Ode on the Anniversary of the Queen’s
Essay on Translated Verse 25, 26, Birth 121
39, 201 Ode to the King on His Return from
and literary criticism 39, 42 Ireland 110
on sublime 201 ‘Protestant Satire, The’ 78–9
Røstvig, Maren-SoWe 77 Tory-Poets: A Satyr, The 76–7, 81, 83
Rounce, Adam 244 Shaftesbury, Anthony Ashley Cooper, Wrst
Rowe, Elizabeth Singer 254 Earl of 211, 249
‘Pindarick Poem on Habbakuk, imprisonment and trial of 58, 64
A’ 189–90 Shaftesbury, Anthony Ashley Cooper, third
Poems on Several Occasions 182 Earl of 15, 137 n. 6, 249
on sublime 189, 195 Characteristicks 228, 233, 234–5, 244–5
Rowe, Nicholas 254 on patronage 234–5, 236
Tamerlane 110–11 and reformation 12, 159–60, 228–9
302 Index
Shaftesbury, Anthony Ashley Cooper, third Roscommon on 201

Earl of (cont. ) secular 189–92
on sublime 190 Shaftesbury, third Earl, on 190
Shakespeare, William 148–9, 177, 178, 227 sporadic nature of 192–5
Shapin, Steven 37 n. 51 Welsted on 178, 199
Shippen, William 229–30 succession, Protestant 153–4
Shirley, James 31 Swift, Jonathan 99, 256
Shute, James 139 Battle of the Books 26, 32
Sidney, Algernon 129 n. 107 on Brothers Club 230
Sidney, Sir Philip 82 on enthusiasm 51–2
Sitter, John 43 ‘History of Vanbrug’s House, The’ 144
Smallwood, James 139 ‘On Poetry: A Rapsody’ 45, 46–7, 48
Smith, Francis 210 n. 17 Tale of a Tub 10, 26
Smith, Hannah 242
Smith, Nigel 18, 175 Tatler 117 n. 67, 127, 160–1
sociability 23, 36, 49, 162–3 Steele in 149, 151, 163, 192
Solkin, David 162–3, 222–3 Temple, Sir William 74 n. 46, 97, 129–30
Somers, John, Baron Somers 15, 141, 217, ‘Essay on Heroick Virtue’ 130
218, 219, 255 Terry, Richard 7
Spadafora, David 181 n. 33 theatre and theatres 28, 75–6, 208 n. 9
Spanish Succession, War of 136, 138 attacks on 122–3, 126
Speck, W. R. 94 n. 2 Kit-Cat Club and 231–2
Spectator 117 n. 67, 127, 151, 160 Queen’s, Haymarket 231–2
Addison in 41–2, 157–8, 184, 186–7, 193 Red Bull 31
Spenser, Edmund 149 Thomas, Claudia 52
Sprat, Thomas 67 Thompson, M. P. 101–2
Stanhope, James, Wrst Earl Stanhope 255 Thompson, Thomas 73
Starkey, John 209 Thomson, James 244
Steele, Richard 130, 149, 157, 218, 255–6 Thornhill, James 162–3, 233
Christian Hero, The 108, 110 Tickell, Thomas 2, 9–10, 256
Crisis, The 230 in Guardian 157, 158
development of Whig periodicals 159, on A. Philips 151–5
160 Prospect of Peace, The 4, 152, 164–5, 166,
in Guardian 160 174, 242
on A. Philips 151 and Tonson 227
in Tatler 163, 192 ‘To His Highness’ (M. S.) 102
Stennett, Joseph 256 ‘To the Queen’ (T. J.) 123
Stepney, George 9–10, 122, 217, 219, Tonson, Jacob 17, 145, 174, 218, 256
221, 256 and Addison 221–2, 226, 227
sublime/sublimity 46 Elzevier series 227, 231
and apocalypse, visions of 192–3 and Kit-Cat Club 222–3
and bathos 195–6 and Kit-Cat publications 224–7
classical 178–9 and Milton 221, 226
Dennis and 173–4, 183–6, 191, 196–7, Poetical Miscellanies, The Sixth Part 151,
198–9, 245 152
and enthusiasm 185–6, 202–3 topographical poetry 39, 73–4, 145–7, 165,
false 51, 195–9 167–8
and liberty 175–6, 180 trade 71
Longinus on 191, 193–4, 195-6 London and 71, 72–3
Montagu on 11 Nonconformity and 71–2
Pope on 51, 201–3 Treadwell, Michael 210
and propaganda 191 Triumph of Virtue, The 164
religious 181–9, 203 Tutchin, John 83, 84, 130–4, 177 n. 14, 257
Index 303
‘Discourse of Life’ 77–8 Wharton, Thomas, Wrst Marquis of

Foreigners, The 130, 131, 133 Wharton 91, 220, 257
‘Satire against Vice, A’ 81–2 Whitworth, Charles 257
Tyrrell, James 96 Wilkes, John 214–15
William III of Orange 2
Urstad, Tone Sundt 242 accession of 93–7, 100–2
Utrecht, Treaty of 157, 164, 165 and Catholicism 109–10
Elizabeth I, identiWcation with 97
Vanbrugh, Sir John: England, invasion of 93–4, 101, 105
architecture of 232–3 and France 127–8
Blenheim Palace 144 anti-French foreign policy 105–6,
Provok’d Wife, The 123 114–15, 136
at Queen’s Theatre 231 Irish expedition 2, 113
Verrio, Antonio 214 masculine qualities 113–16
Verse epistles 49, 117–18 militarism of 2, 105–12, 118–21, 128
Virgil 53 opposition to 103–5, 108, 118–21, 128–33
patronage 88, 213–20
Waller, Edmund 38–9, 73–4, 199 and propaganda 103, 122, 129, 212–13
Walpole, Horace 214 Will’s CoVee House 32, 33, 151, 158
Walpole, Robert 242–3 Windsor Forest 166–69
Walsh, Octavia 238 Windsor Prophecy. Found in Marlborough
Warton, Joseph 168 Rock, The (anon) 166
Wasserman, Earl 166 Winn, James 27 n. 12, 59
Watts, Isaac 184, 257 wit 68–9, 81, 83, 163
Webb, GeoVrey 233 Wits, Blackmore’s quarrel with 32–7
Welsted, Leonard 52, 113, 157, 257 Womersley, David 18, 112–13, 180
Dissertation Concerning . . . the English Woodman, Thomas 48 n. 90
Language 236 Worden, Blair 76
Epistle to Mr Steele, on the King’s acces- Wordsworth, William 245
sion to the Crown, An 118 Wotton, William 36
on George I 170, 171 Wycherley, William 161
on patronage 236
Peri Hupsous 175, 176 Yalden, Thomas 257
on A. Philips 151–2 York, Duke of 57: see also James II
Remarks on the English Poets 151–2 Young, Edward 244
on sublimity 178, 199
Wesley, Samuel 217, 257 Zwicker, Stephen 5, 69, 95
Western, J. R. 94 n. 2

Abigail Williams - Poetry and The Creation of A Whig Literary Culture, 1681-1714 (2005)

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Poetry and the Creation of a

Whig Literary Culture 1681–1714

List of abbreviations viii

Introduction: Rereading Whig poetry 1

1. The Tory critique of Whig literature 22

2. Moderation, fanaticism, and ‘the people’ 1681–1688 56

3. Legitimacy and the warrior king 1688–1702 93

4. Poetic warfare 1702–1714 135

5. The sublime and the liberty of writing 173

6. Patronage and the public writer in Whig literary

Conclusion: Whig afterlives 241

Biographical appendix 247

In 1694 Joseph Addison, a young scholar at Magdalen College, Oxford,

republished numerous times over the next two decades, continuing to

imaginative challenges of post-Revolution England with enthusiasm

A reappraisal of this poetic tradition oVers a more balanced literary-

Joseph Addison, the Account of the Greatest English Poets, and

As a way of introducing some of the consequences of a reappraisal of the

NY: Cornell University Press, 1993), 7.

Poets, where Addison expands upon the merits of Charles Montagu’s

Many of the characteristics of early Whig poetry and the implications of

literary achievement, establishing both the conditions and the

Dealer’ (1694), in Dryden, Works, iv. 433.

debated the relevance and authority of pre-existing literary forms in

mondsworth: Penguin: 1997), p. xviii.

Wgure: ‘To Dorset he directs his artful Muse, | In numbers such as

Montagu’s afterlife: Pope, patronage, and the formation of

Charles Montagu’s heroic verse provided evidence to his peers of the

and Thomas Tickell, were being published only in collections such as

Montagu’s was relentlessly mocked for its aspirations to the sublime.12

Patronage in England 1650–1800 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 220–45.

man of letters, but as a narcissistic potentate surrounded by a bevy of

Whigs and Whiggism

The interdependence of political and literary concerns at the heart of

Whig Ascendancy: Colloquies on Hanoverian England (London: Edward Arnold, 1981),

those who would rather be in opposition than be accused of having

identiWed with a dynamic and in many ways revolutionary project to

Politics and literature

The reconsideration of the Whig poetic tradition involves the analysis

cruder, less sophisticated, than that which is less politically explicit. A

Macmillan, 1929); J. H. Plumb, The Growth of Political Stability in England 1675–1725

Walpole, and Tone Sundt Urstad’s re-examination of Walpolian propa-

It is a central argument of this book that we cannot understand early

As writers from both sides oVered their respective representations of the

understand how a now-forgotten poetic tradition could have enjoyed

Twenty-Wrst-century readers of literature are unlikely to be familiar

The Royalist inheritance

The tradition of literary criticism which Tory writers inherited and

(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1973), 44.

characteristic of Puritanism: the claim to personal inspiration by an indwelling spirit,

ill-educated and dangerously populist, while their style, as Michael

barbarism. In the essay Of Dramatick Poesie (1668) Dryden famously

Wguration of the contemporary literary scene conformist or Tory poetry

evident in the Dryden–Tonson Miscellany Poems of 1684, in which Dryden’s MacFlecknoe

Dryden’, Review of English Studies, 20 (1944), 29–44.

Strier (eds.), Religion, Literature and Politics in Post-Reformation England (Cambridge:

sity Journal, 75 (1983), 25–30.

a degraded literary market place. In this world avaricious booksellers

Dryden draws on all the associations established in caricatures of

16 John Dryden, Mac Flecknoe (1682), in Works, ii. 56.

(1674), in Works, xvii. 182.

Yet Dryden’s charge of illiteracy had no actual basis. Settle’s creden-

Character of a Popish Successor (London, 1682), 1.