English Clandestine Satire

English Clandestine Satire
1660–1702
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English
Clandestine Satire
1660–1702
HAROLD LOVE
1
3
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Acknowledgements
My interest in scribally transmitted clandestine satire began in the

mid-1960s at the time when it was first opened for serious scholarly
study by the publication of David M. Vieth’s Attribution in Restor-
ation Poetry, John Harold Wilson’s Court Satires of the Restoration,
and the early volumes of the Yale Poems on Affairs of State series, all
of which have remained foundational to the subject. At a later date I
profited from the published scholarship and personal encourage-
ment of Peter Beal, John Burrows, Andrew Carpenter, Nicholas
Fisher, Paul Hammond, Robert D. Hume, Hilton Kelliher, Arthur
Marotti, and Timothy Raylor, to all of whom I am indebted. The
death of Keith Walker while this book was in the press deprived me
of an unfailing source of knowledge, friendship, and encouragement.
Many other friends and colleagues have contributed useful sugges-
tions and help in locating sources and I have also received a great deal
of assistance over the years from librarians, among whom I particu-
larly need to mention Stephen Parks and Earle Havens, of the Osborn
Collection at the Yale University Library. Among my Monash
colleagues Wallace Kirsop and Clive Probyn have been generous
with time and knowledge.
While preparing the first edition of The Penguin Book of Restor-
ation Verse (1968) I acquired microfilms of a number of the primary
sources for clandestine satire, which were added to across the years.
A simple first-line index of this material proved invaluable in investi-
gating connections between sources and allowing me to frame ques-
tions about the nature of transmission, authorship, and reception. A
chapter on ‘Restoration Scriptorial Satire’ in my Scribal Publication
in Seventeenth-Century England (1993) was my first attempt to syn-
thesize this material; however, this did not address the problem of
how to identify authors, which, over a much broader field, is the sub-
ject of my Attributing Authorship: An Introduction (2002). Work
for my edition of Rochester (1999) deepened my practical acquaint-
ance with every aspect of scribal culture and demanded the acquis-
ition of more microfilms. A three-year grant by the Australian
Research Council allowed me to employ Meredith Sherlock to
vi Acknowledgements
prepare detailed indexes of all the major sources then known to me

(several through the agency of Peter Beal). Her invaluable, meticu-
lously prepared lists were then used to generate a much improved
first-line index, a version of which is included in this book as the Ap-
pendix. Further indexes were prepared by Felicity Henderson who in
2001–2 also reviewed the entire body of indexes. My debt to both of
them is great, as will be that of all future scholars who make use of
their indexes, which it is hoped can eventually be made available for
reference through the Monash English Department website. A sub-
stantial proportion of the sources themselves are to be published in
2005 in a microfilm edition by Adam Matthew Publications. I must
also thank Anthony Butler and Tracey Caulfield for their assistance
with the final checking of the typescript. I am deeply grateful for the
support of Oxford University Press in publishing what has turned
out to be a trilogy of studies, the first the general survey of scribal
publishing, the second the edition of a major author who worked in
the medium, and now the extended survey of the literary genre in
which that author made his most important contribution.
Finally, as always, my thanks and gratitude to my wife Rosaleen,
our children and grandchildren, and our dog, the all-too-aptly
named Wilmot, for providing the perfect antidote to so many years
of absorption with a world of the imagination not notable for its cul-
tivation of the finer human feelings.
H.L.
Monash University
Clayton, Victoria
Contents
Abbreviations viii
A Note on Texts and Citations ix
1 Origins and Models 1
2 The Court Lampoon 21
3 The Town Lampoon 66
4 State Satire 99
5 Lampoon Authorship 151
6 The Lampoon as Gossip 191
7 A Poetics of the Lampoon 218
8 Transmission and Reception 248
Appendix: First-Line Index to Selected Anthologies

of Clandestine Satire 303
Select Bibliography 415
Index 421
Abbreviations
CSP (Dom) Calendars of State Papers (Domestic Series)

CSR John Harold Wilson (ed.), Court Satires of the Restor-
ation (Columbus: Ohio State UP, 1976)
Dorset, Poems The Poems of Charles Sackville, Sixth Earl of Dorset,
ed. Brice Harris (London: Garland, 1979)
Dryden, Works The Works of John Dryden, ed. Edward Niles Hooker,
H. T. Swedenberg Jr., and Alan Roper, 20 vols.
(Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California
Press, 1956–89)
POAS (1702–7) Poems on Affairs of State, 4 vols. (London, 1702–7)
[Case 211 (1) (e) 1702; (2) (a) 1703; (3) (a) 1704; 211
(4) (a) 1707]
POASY George deF. Lord (gen. ed.), Poems on Affairs of State:
Augustan Satirical Verse 1660–1714, 7 vols. (New
Haven: Yale UP, 1963–75)
Rochester, Works The Works of John Wilmot, Earl of Rochester, ed.
Harold Love (Oxford: Oxford UP, 1999)
SPISCE Harold Love, Scribal Publication in Seventeenth-
Century England (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993)
A Note on Texts and Citations
Some anomalies in the citation of sources require explanation. Wherever

possible clandestine satires are quoted from the annotated, modern-spelling,
edited texts in POASY and CSR, where they can easily be located for refer-
ence. Where a satire is cited from a manuscript source, the text and title are
given in the exact spelling and punctuation of that source except for com-
mon contractions being silently expanded; however, the first line, which is
used throughout this book as the primary identifier, will be in the standard-
ized form found in the Appendix (pp. 303–414), and therefore in modern
spelling and without punctuation. Where no first line is cited it is because the
first line is already contained in a quoted passage. In that case it will be in the
version and spelling of the source of that quotation, which may differ in
some particulars from that of the Appendix, but not to the extent of making
it unlocatable. All quotations are cited to a source. When a satire not directly
quoted is identified by a first line but not a source, the Appendix should be
referred to for locations.
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1
Origins and Models
George Villiers, second Duke of Buckingham (1628–87) has not had

a good press. A still current view would have him a glamorous
lightweight with an unrealistic estimate of his military and political
capacities whose attempts at great achievements all ended in failure.
Accounts routinely narrate the sordid incidents of what looks at first
sight like an entertaining but futile existence.1 He followed the king
into exile and then deserted him in order to make peace with the Pro-
tector. Having smarmed his way back into favour at the Restoration,
he used his talent for ridicule to undermine devoted patriots such as
Clarendon, Arlington, and Sir William Coventry. He developed an
absurd crush on the king’s sister and chased her to Paris when she
was already engaged to the brother of Louis XIV, thus sparking an
international incident. He associated with revolutionary sectaries
without suspecting their evil designs. He was a bisexual rake who
was prosecuted for sodomy. He ruthlessly killed the husband of his
mistress while she was present disguised as a boy and slept with her
afterwards in the shirt stained with her murdered husband’s blood.
When his wife complained about the relationship he told her to pack
her things and go back to her father. Plays and poems attributed to
him were largely written by others. He was the dupe of alchemists
and foolishly believed he could restore his health and fortune by find-
ing the philosopher’s stone. Charles II sent him on sham embassies,
when the real negotiations were in other hands. Having been dis-
missed from his ministerial post for incompetence, he petulantly
joined the Whigs but was never taken seriously even by them. He
made foolish speeches in parliament which led to his being sent to the
Tower. His ears, as Samuel Butler put it, ‘were perpetually drilled
with a Fiddlestick’. He squandered a vast fortune through being
1
For the life see Winifred, Lady Burghclere, George Villiers, Second Duke of
Buckingham (London: John Murray, 1903), Hester Chapman, Great Villiers
(London: Secker and Warburg, 1949), and John Harold Wilson, A Rake and his
Times (New York: Farrar, 1954).
2 Origins and Models
‘Begger’d by Fools’, as Dryden put it, and died a miserable death, as

Pope put it, in ‘the worst inn’s worst room’.2
Not much of this is supportable. Buckingham’s misfortune was to
have lived at a time when there was little reliable information about
events at the upper reaches of power. Court politics was premissed
on exclusivity—kings were not accustomed to take their subjects
into their confidence. Newspapers only appeared relatively late in
the century and at most periods prior to 1694 were subject to state
censorship. An indiscreet pamphlet might send its author and printer
to prison or the gallows. The enormous information vacuum thus
created was filled by gossip, correspondence, and clandestine satire,
each (as we will see) feeding off the others. Buckingham’s life as it is
told today is essentially one that has been compiled from satires—a
process as likely to yield a balanced account as if the lives of present-
day political leaders were to be written from newspaper caricatures
or impersonations by stand-up comedians. In Buckingham’s case the
satires would fill a book. The opening of one of them, not altogether
implausibly attributed to Dryden, will indicate the style. It begins
with a distillation of what earlier satires had said about Bucking-
ham’s famous father.
I sing the Praise of a Worthy Wight,
Whose Father King Jemmy that never wou’d fight
For his Face, but more for his Arse made a Knight;
With a fa, la, la, la.
This Knight soone after a Duke became,
And got at the Island of Rhee such Fame
That all true English curse Buckingham.
This Idoll Duke, to that greatnesse did swell,
That Honours, and Riches, before him fell,
Till Felton, the Brave, sent his Grace to Hell
And now shall heare how mighty the Son
With that very small Sin of Incest begun
And then to Treason and Bugg’ry went on
2
Butler, Characters, ed. Charles W. Daves (Cleveland: Case Western Reserve UP,
1970), 67; Dryden, Works, ii. 22; The Poems of Alexander Pope, ed. John Butt
(London: Methuen, 1963), 583.
Origins and Models 3
For the Incest Old Richmond, can tell when and where,
For the Treason, the papers of Old Oliver;
And Kenistons Arse, knows his Buggerer
Now he who soe bravely, and Nobly begins,
Must afterwards thinke (when such glory he wins)
Adult’ry and Treason, but triviall Sins . . .3
The poem was circulating in manuscript by 1680, together with a

parody of the Anglican litany to be sung to the same tune, which
recounts in compressed form every accusation made against Buck-
ingham its writer could remember.
From a sensual, proud, atheistical life,
From arming our lackeys with pistol and knife,
From murd’ring the husband and whoring the wife,
Libera nos.
From going ambassadors only as panders,
From re-killing dead kings with monstrous slanders,
From betraying the living in Scotland and Flanders,
Libera nos.
From a wild rambling nowhere abode,
Without day or night, nor at home nor abroad,
From a prince to unhorse us on Dover road,
Libera nos.
From crowning the hearse of our babe of adultery,
Interr’d among kings by a lord of the prelacy,
Whom we got cashier’d for carnal arsery,
Libera nos.
From selling land, twice ten thousand a year,
All spent, no mortal can tell how or where,
And then reform kingdoms as a sanctifi’d peer,
Libera nos . . .4
And so on to a total of sixty lines, not counting ‘Libera nos’. What is

telling about this passage is that its writer is able to assume that each
of his highly compacted biographical allusions will be intelligible to
3
‘A New Ballad to an Old Tune Call’d Sage Leafe’, Yale MS Osborn b 105,
pp. 369–71. ‘Sage Leaf ’ is unrecorded in Claude M. Simpson, The British Broadside
Ballad and its Music (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers UP, 1966) but the lines go well to
‘Cavalilly Man’ (pp. 87–9).
4
POASY, ii. 192–3.
readers—in other words, that they had access to a detailed life his-
tory not obtainable from any printed source, but only from gossip
and earlier lampoons. The papers of ‘Old Oliver’, if they survived at
all, were not available for the asking, nor would ‘Old Richmond’, the
duke’s sister, so called to distinguish her from a younger, concurrent
bearer of the same title, have been willing to answer questions about
putative incest. The lampoon genre was the bearer of a vast secret
history of the times with which politically active members of society
were assumed to be familiar. Further attacks on Buckingham will be
cited later in this book.
The question that immediately arises is ‘Why Buckingham?’ He
could not have had the career he did at the centre of English politics
if even a fraction of the accusations made against him were true. A
long satire on his enthusiastic reception in 1677 by the mayor and
aldermen of Oxford gives the game away
Now when as the Duke he appeared in sight
They all march’d out in their scarlet so bright,
And Carfax bells they did ring out right,
For the Duke was come to the town-a,
For the Duke was come to the town-a.5
Could it be that he was much more formidable than we imagine: a

dangerous political opponent who had to be stopped by any means?
In any case most of the accusations recorded in the opening para-
graph are demonstrably untrue. The civil war desertion sprung as
much from fundamental policy differences within the royalist court
in exile as personal disloyalty. Buckingham championed accommo-
dation with the English and Scottish Presbyterians as a means of re-
gaining the throne, a policy resisted by both the Anglicans around
Clarendon and the crypto-Catholic king. He pursued that goal after
his return to England by allying himself with Fairfax against
Cromwell, and remained a lifelong advocate of toleration. His repu-
tation for promiscuity was very likely exaggerated and, in any case,
was nothing unusual for his time, or ours. His relative Brian Fairfax
insisted that ‘He was the onely person in a vicious age and Court that
was publicly censured for Weomen; not so much out of hatred to the
Crime, as the Person. He lay under so ill a name for it, that if he was
5
‘A Proper New Ballad Concerning the Reception of his Grace the Duke of Buck-
ingham by the Right Worshipful the Mayor and Aldermen of the City of Oxon. 1677’,
ll. 36–40, ibid., i. 432.
shut up with a Fox hunter, a Chymist, a Poll, or Poet, it was sayd to

be with a woman.’6 His pursuit of the Duchess of Orléans, almost an
adoptive sister, was so far from causing an international incident
that Louis XIV regarded it as a great joke at the expense of his un-
pleasant brother—which may have been how Buckingham meant it.
The prosecution for sodomy (with a female not a male) was a
trumped-up one engineered by the notorious Colonel Blood in which
Buckingham was vindicated by the court and his accusers punished.
If he had a homosexual relationship with the actor Edward Kynaston
(a claim made only in ‘Sage Leaf’), they were both consenting adults.
He fought a duel with the Earl of Shrewsbury because he could not
honourably refuse it, and wounded but did not kill him. Shrews-
bury’s unexpected death was the result of septicaemia. The countess
was in France at the time. Buckingham’s life with his duchess had its
ups and downs like many marriages but she always stood by him
when loyalty was called for, including an episode when she raced a
king’s messenger in her coach to warn him of an impending arrest.
Fairfax records that they lived ‘loveingly togeather, she patiently
bearing with those faults in him which she could not remedy’.7 His
interest in chemistry was a perfectly serious one: a volume of scien-
tific notes prepared for him is preserved at Alnwick Castle.8
Dramatic writing was a recreation which he liked to pursue
collaboratively in the company of friends but it can hardly be ques-
tioned that the principal works—The Rehearsal, Sir Politick Would-
be, The Country Gentleman, and the adaptation of Fletcher’s The
Chances—are informed by his distinctive spirit of urbane mockery.
Far from being bubbled out of his estate, he shrewdly put it into the
management of sympathetic City bankers who paid off his debts and
gave him a guaranteed income of £5,000 a year—a princely sum for
those days. This device—the origin of today’s family trusts—also
protected the estate from seizure by the crown.9 He was a founder
not a follower of the Whig party and its principal public face in
parliamentary and municipal election campaigns. Anthony Wood
bitterly resented his influence among the townspeople of Oxford.10
6
‘Account of the Family of Fairfax’, BL MS Harl. 6862, fos. 21r–v.
7
Ibid. fo. 24r. 8
MS 609.
9
See Frank T. Melton, ‘A Rake Refinanced: The Fortune of George Villiers,
Second Duke of Buckingham, 1671–1685’, HLQ 51 (1998), 297–318.
10
The Life and Times of Anthony Wood, ed. Andrew Clark (Oxford: Oxford
Historical Society, 1891–1900), ii. 391, 516.
He died after falling ill far from home at the end of a day’s hunting.
He was taken to the best not the worst house in the nearest village—
Pope’s squalid room is entirely imaginary.11 Buckingham certainly
had his faults but the highly coloured picture that has been conveyed
to us by means of clandestine satire is one that was concocted by his
enemies for the purpose of countering his political influence. Had he
lived a few months longer to see the triumph of his cause in the Revo-
lution of 1688, history and poetry would probably both have come
to kinder verdicts. Instead, his reputation was mortally wounded by
satire in exactly the way he had wounded the reputations of others
through his own satires.
Having said that, we must also acknowledge that the ‘Bucking-
ham’ created by the satirists is a fascinating figure in its own right,
and one that reveals a great deal about the dreams and nightmares of
the Restoration political imagination. The lampoon lived by the
hyperreal and fantastical, and it was in hyperreality and fantasy that
early modern subjectivities were founded. The virtuosi who gathered
at Gresham College to inaugurate a new way of modelling the world
through number and exact measurement; the political arithmeticians
who debated with Sir William Petty and Gregory King, with uneasy
glances over their shoulders at Hobbes, whether the same mechan-
istic principles might yield an account of the operations of society; and
the philosophers who followed Locke in his rejection of the figura-
tive from the operations of thought in favour of a regulated discourse
of corporeal reason, could at any time have exploded the narratives
of the actions of great persons presented to them through satire and
gossip; but as far as we are able to tell they swallowed them whole.
Pepys, who was one of their number, certainly did. Perhaps Hobbes
had predisposed them to accept that the lowest common denomin-
ator of human motivations was likely to yield the most accurate ac-
count of any given action. The ever-extending reach of scepticism
spared the lampoon. Politics at all its levels from that of the village to
that of the nation was to remain something perceived in mythic
terms, with its real-life performers encased behind masks of their
own or someone’s else’s imposing.
11
See Stuart Gillespie, ‘ “The worst inn’s worst room”: Pope’s Setting for Buck-
ingham’s Death’, N&Q 235 (1990), 306–8. This and other matters raised are con-
sidered in fuller detail in the biographical introduction to the forthcoming OUP
critical edition of Buckingham, edited by Robert D. Hume and Harold Love.
modes and origins
Clandestine satire is satire written for circulation through means

other than the licensed press, which is to say by oral recitation,
manuscript transcription, or surreptitious printing. Of these, the first
two predominated in both volume and authority. It arises from
poetic traditions independent of and often actively hostile to those
fostered by the metropolitan book trade. Clandestine satires are usu-
ally referred to in this book as ‘lampoons’, but this is purely a matter
of convenience, which involves some stretching of the contemporary
meaning of that term. In their own day they would have been lumped
under the umbrella term ‘libels’. The view of both private and public
life given by clandestine satire was distorted, irreverent, and partial;
but where many important events and issues were concerned it might
be the only written commentary available. Irrespective of one’s sym-
pathy with its viewpoints, one had to consult it for clues to what was
likely to befall the nation, and when one did so some of its mud was
bound to stick. So much for Buckingham!
The richness of this verse repertoire is demonstrated for the period
1660–1714 by the admirable seven-volume Yale University Press
Poems on Affairs of State series, which borrows its title from a series
of collections published between 1689 and 1707 of satirical and also
non-satirical verse, much of which had formerly circulated only in
manuscript.12 However, political satires were only one part of the
huge body of verse lampoons written, and even of these only a pro-
portion has ever been available in print. For the period before 1660
the best current guide is Arthur Marotti’s in the second chapter of
Manuscript, Print and the English Renaissance Lyric.13 The carry-
over of themes and forms from one period to the other was consider-
able, yet, curiously, the many manuscript anthologies of Restoration
lampoons that survive contain very little pre-1660 material. The
world the later satirists addressed and the social and political ques-
tions that stirred them to verse were both different from those of
12
Cited in this study as POAS (1702–7), from the last and most comprehensive
collection, issued in four volumes of which the first reprints two separate, earlier
collections, each with its own pagination. The Yale collection (gen. ed. George deF.
Lord) is cited as POASY.
13
(Ithaca, NY: Cornell UP, 1995), 75–133. See also Harold Love and Arthur F.
Marotti, ‘Manuscript Transmission and Circulation’, in David Loewenstein and Janel
Mueller (eds.), The Cambridge History of Early Modern English Literature (Cam-
bridge: Cambridge UP, 2002), 55–80.
their parents’ generation. Robert D. Hume has argued that scholar-

ship should always avoid ‘dangerously generalized contexts’ such as
‘the seventeenth century’ and ‘the Victorian frame of mind’, warning
that ‘the context that does not come from within the decade at issue
is unlikely to be anything but misleading’.14 In what follows I will be
examining a number of contexts for the writing and reading of lam-
poons which stretch for as long as forty years—a procedure whose
risks have always been vividly present. In order not to worsen the situ-
ation even more, I have chosen to reduce my coverage of the pre-
Restoration lampoon to the minimum of information necessary to
begin the study of its successor. Timothy Raylor’s invaluable study
of mid-seventeenth-century burlesque and satire and future accounts
promised by Andrew McRae of the earlier seventeenth century and
Steven May of Elizabethan clandestine satire will help in establishing
longer continuities, discontinuities, and recurrences; but even then
we may well find that we are dealing with the pursuit of different
goals by similar means.15
From very early times, individuals who behaved in ways that were
displeasing to a community have been mocked in verse, often to the
accompaniment of music and mimicry. One form of this was the
‘rough music’ of the traditional British skimmington but related
forms of shaming can still be observed in any schoolyard.16 Horace
believed that stage comedy and literary satire had arisen from such
rituals, which in Roman Italy were associated with the gatherings of
farm families after the harvest:
Through this custom came into use the Fescennine licence, which in alternate
verse poured forth rustic taunts; and the freedom, welcomed each returning
year, was innocently gay, till jest, now growing cruel, turned to open frenzy,
and stalked amid the homes of honest folk, fearless in its threatening.17
14
Reconstructing Contexts: The Aims and Principles of Archaeo-historicism
(Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1999), 60, 139–40.
15
Timothy Raylor, Cavaliers, Clubs, and Literary Culture: Sir John Mennes, James
Smith and the Order of the Fancy (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1994).
16
For the skimmington, see in particular Douglas Gray, ‘Rough Music: Some
Early Invectives and Flytings’, YES 14 (1984), 21–43; Martin Ingram, ‘Ridings,
Rough Music and Mocking Rhymes in Early Modern England’, in Barry Reay (ed.),
Popular Culture in Seventeenth-Century England (London: Routledge, 1985),
166–97; and James Grantham Turner, Libertines and Radicals in Early Modern
London: Sexuality, Politics and Literary Culture, 1630–1685 (Cambridge: Cam-
bridge UP, 2002), 32–7, 47–73.
17
Epistles 2. 1. 145–50, from Horace, Satires, Epistles, Ars Poetica, trans.
H. Rushton Fairclough (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard UP, 1955), 409.
At various stages in the ancient world versions of this improvised

folk poetry made the transition to literate culture, as in abusive
verses inscribed on walls at Pompeii and Herculaneum. In Greece
and Rome this eventually gave rise to the satirical epigram as prac-
tised by Martial and Catullus, the versified curse, as exercised in the
iambics of Archilochus and the Ibis of Ovid, and, most prestigiously,
the extended verse satire and satirical epistle of Lucilius, Horace,
Persius, and Juvenal. In Celtic societies, the duties of a court bard
might include the ritual cursing of enemies and the giving of licensed
criticism to rulers, as in the rhymes of Lear’s fool.18 The Scots
Dunbar and Kennedie drew in their famous ‘flyting’ on an indigenous
tradition of competitive excoriation similar to that described by
Horace.19 Early modern England possessed a similar folk heritage of
orally composed communal satire which passed over first into liter-
acy and then literature.
Examples of shaming verse composed in small towns and villages
have been discussed by C. J. Sisson, David Underdown, Alastair
Bellany, and Adam Fox.20 Underdown found that organized shaming
behaviour was likely to be strongest in the ‘regions of arable cultiva-
tion covering much of southern and Eastern England’ where villages
were ‘nucleated, tightly packed around church and manor-house
(often with a resident squire), the whole structure firmly bound by
neighbourhood and custom’, as opposed to more dispersed wood-
land and pastoral communities.21 The arable community was also
more likely to resist the attempts of the godly to suppress seasonal
revelry. In Sisson’s main example the victim was a Puritan vicar of
Stratford-upon-Avon. Yet, shaming behaviour could just as easily be
provoked by simple violations of the moral code, especially through
unchastity. Moreover, there is no need to believe it was restricted to
18
One of the themes of Robert C. Elliott, The Power of Satire: Magic, Ritual, Art
(Princeton: Princeton UP, 1960).
19
‘The Flyting of Dunbar and Kennedie’, in The Poems of William Dunbar,
ed. James Kinsley (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1979), 76–95, and on its background
pp. 282–6.
20
C. J. Sisson, Lost Plays of Shakespeare’s Age (Cambridge: Cambridge UP,
1936), 186–203; David Underdown, Revel, Riot, and Rebellion: Popular Politics and
Culture in England 1603–1660 (Oxford: Oxford UP, 1985); Alastair Bellany,
‘Railing Rhymes and Vaunting Verse: Libellous Politics in Early Stuart England,
1603–1628’, in Kevin Sharpe and Peter Lake (eds.), Culture and Politics in Early
Stuart England (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford UP, 1993), 285–310; Adam Fox, Oral and
Literate Culture in England 1500–1700 (Oxford: Oxford UP, 2000).
21
Revel, Riot, and Rebellion, 5.
villages. When, in Beaumont and Fletcher’s Philaster (first acted

c.1611), the maid of honour, Megra, is caught in bed with Phara-
mond, the poltroonish suitor to the princess, her punishment is
depicted as a subjection to various forms of ridicule:
I dare my lord: your whootings, and your clamors,
Your private whispers and your broad fleerings . . .
on which the king elaborates:
and all the Pages,
And all the Court, shall hoote thee through the Court,
Fling rotten Oranges, make ribal’d rimes,
And seare thy name with candles upon walls:22
The rotten oranges (an expensive import) would not have penetrated
far down the social ladder but the hooting, the pelting, and the pursuit
were regarded by the dramatist as being as likely to occur at court as in
the country. The ‘ribal’d rimes’ are here presented as a just vengeance
on a transgressor. Megra responds in the play with an untrue accusa-
tion that the princess has been unchaste with a page-boy, which is im-
mediately believed. This will trigger the same process of insult:
The Princesse, your deare daughter, shall stand by me
On walls, and sung in ballads, any thing:23
We know about the circumstances of composition of several such
impromptu ballads because their texts are preserved in the records of
court cases for slander. Fox, Underdown, and Laura Gowing all cite
examples.24 By the sixteenth century it had become common for such
pieces to be written out and ‘posted’ in some public place. While the
ostensible aim of this was to give publicity to the accusations, it may
also have been felt to possess a magical function like the ancient
depositing of written curses at wells, where they were thought to be
more accessible to the gods of the underworld.25 It was then a short
step for them to be circulated in manuscript copies and for new
22
The Dramatic Works in the Beaumont and Fletcher Canon, ed. Fredson Bowers
(Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1966–), i. 429–30.
23
Ibid. 430.
24
Fox, Oral and Literate Culture, 299–334; Underdown, Revel, Riot, and Rebel-
lion, 29, 57, 84, 115, 121, 127, 143, 280; Gowing, Domestic Dangers: Women,
Words, and Sex in Early Modern London (Oxford: Oxford UP, 1996), 84, 108, 121,
126. See also SPISCE, 232–3.
25
There is a Latin example from Bath illustrated in Simon Hornblower and
Antony Spawforth (eds.), The Oxford Companion to Classical Civilization (Oxford:
Oxford UP, 1998), 201.
pieces of the same kind to be written for scribal circulation. A good

deal of later English written lampooning was a straightforward
transference of oral models to new social circumstances and a more
refined mode of expression.
Such satire is always personal. By contrast, most admonitory verse
of the Middle Ages and early Renaissance had prided itself on at-
tacking the vice in generalized terms rather than the vicious individ-
ual. John Peter distinguished reprobations of this kind as ‘complaint’
from what was subsequently known as satire, which is normally held
to have come into existence as a recognized literary mode with the
naturalization of the classical Roman satire and epigram during the
1590s by Donne in manuscript and Hall, Marston, and Sir John
Davies in print.26 These writers drew on a Humanist classical heri-
tage and the particular examples of Horace, Juvenal, and Martial;
but where the folk lampoon had spoken on behalf of its commu-
nities, the new manner of verse reprobation foregrounded the per-
sonality, or persona, of the satirist, often representing him as an
alienated railer. Victims too might be personalized, though under the
disguise of type names, since printed satire was public, not clandes-
tine.27 Hall and particularly Marston favoured an esoteric vocabu-
lary that was about as far removed as it could be from the directness
of the folk lampoon. At v. i. 464–528 of Jonson’s Poetaster, mod-
elled on Lucian’s ‘Lexiphanes’, Crispinus, representing Marston, is
made to vomit up a series of such excesses, beginning with ‘retro-
grade’, ‘reciprocall’, ‘incubus’, ‘glibbery’, ‘lubricall’, and ‘defunct’
and concluding with ‘obstupefact’.28 The experiment was brought to
a halt by the ‘Bishops’ ban’ of 1599. Its influence on later satire
was small, though some of its features survive in Cleveland and it
probably encouraged the writing of invectives in pentameter
26
Complaint and Satire in Early English Literature (Oxford: Clarendon Press,
1956). Marston’s and Hall’s claims to have founded a new verse genre should not be
taken too seriously; but they had certainly created a new performative identity for the
satirist and a new urban orientation for satire.
27
Discussed in Peter, Complaint and Satire; O. J. Campbell, Comicall Satyre and
Shakespeare’s ‘ Troilus and Cressida’ (San Marino, Calif.: Aderaft Press, 1938);
Anthony Caputi, John Marston, Satirist (Ithaca, NY: Cornell UP, 1961); and Alvin
Kernan, The Cankered Muse: Satire of the English Renaissance (New Haven: Yale UP,
1959). The social context of the new satire is illuminated by Lawrence Manley in the
closing section of his ‘Literature and London’ in Loewenstein and Mueller (eds.),
Cambridge History of Early Modern English Literature, 399–427.
28
Ben Jonson, ed. C. H. Herford and Percy Simpson (Oxford: Clarendon Press,
1932–52), iv. 312–13.
couplets rather than in Goliardic tetrameters or stanzas sung to a

broadside ballad melody.
The reigns of James I and Charles I saw both the couplet and the
stanzaic kinds of literate clandestine satire engendering formal sub-
traditions of some complexity. As well as the straightforward lam-
poon pattern of either sustained invective directed at a single person
or a series of separate, epigram-like attacks on several, verse libels
made frequent use of parody, especially the mock-epitaph, the mock-
encomium, and, as we have seen, the mock-litany. Lampoons in pen-
tameter couplets would sometimes mimic the gravity of the classical
grand style, in anticipation of Augustan mock-heroic though with-
out the polish. A lighter form of burlesque, written in octosyllabic
couplets, had as one of its inspirations a centuries-old tradition of
rhymed Latin satirical verse most signally represented by Richard
Braithwaite’s Barnabae Itinerarium (1638), which was actually an
extended stanzaic lampoon meant for singing. The Latin is presented
side by side with an English version, describing how the eponymous
Barnabas visits town after town (usually at a rate of one per stanza)
and immediately heads for a tavern or vinous friend:
Tenens cursum et decorum, Holding on my journey longer,
Brickhill, ubi Juniorem Streight at Brickhill with Tom Younger.
Veni, vidi, propter mentem I arriv’d; one by this cheese-a
Unum octo Sapientum; Styl’d the eighth wiseman of Greece-a,
Sonat vox ut Philomela, Voice more sweet than Prognes sister,
Ardet nasus ut candela. Like a Torch his nose doth glister.29
Either version can be read singly but the real pleasure lies in the in-
genuity with which effects in one language have been recreated in the
other. There was also some awareness of English forebears: Sir John
Mennes admired Chaucer and James Smith praised Skelton. Tim-
othy Raylor suggests a closer influence from Herrick:
Mennes and Smith were familiar with Herrick’s sack poems . . . The fairy
poems were well known and exhibit many features found in earlier travesties
and burlesques as well as in the drolling manner of Mennes and Smith: these
features include competitive composition, the use of comic octasyllabics
with absurd rhymes, the debunking of mythology through the filter of rustic
domesticity, the juxtaposition of the charming and the grotesque, and a tone
of knowing and playful irony.30
29
(London, 1638), K4v–5r.
30
Cavaliers, Clubs, and Literary Culture, 128. For the history of the style in
English see pp. 124–8.
Burlesque and travesty were separate genres from the lampoon, in

the sense that neither demanded that attacks be made on persons
rather than literary modes; yet they contributed much to its charac-
teristic tone and language. As with lyric verse circulated in manu-
script, a lampoon often provoked a reply which then circulated along
with it.31 The genre was characterized from the start by sexual ex-
plicitness, portraying its victims as either monsters of lust or ludi-
crously ineffectual aspirants to that status.32 As these aspects of the
lampoon will be copiously illustrated in the following chapters, ex-
amples will not be given at the present time.
A crucial transition was that by which the popular forms, having
emerged from orality to literacy, were then accommodated to the
more discerning tastes of educated and courtly readers. Smith’s The
Loves of Hero and Leander (London, 1651, but written perhaps two
decades earlier) is described by Raylor as ‘an extended collage of
proverbs, ballads, idioms, and colloquialisms’, illustrating the poet’s
intense awareness of the world of orally transmitted texts, but using
them ‘with a gently ironic affection’ that reveals a ‘developing aware-
ness among the elite of a distinction between their own and popular
culture’.33 But Smith had no pretensions to elegance. Suckling was
one of a number of poets of the court of Charles I who helped bestow
polish and literary respectability on clandestine satire. Two of his
poems stand at the head of enduring traditions. The ‘Ballad upon a
Wedding’ is not itself a satire but was used as the basis of several later
parody lampoons, while the model of ‘A Sessions of Poets’ was re-
peatedly reaccommodated to new generations of writers as well as
being extended to other groups of victims in the sub-tradition of
what will be referred to as ‘sessions satire’. The term ‘lampoon’
seems itself to have emerged about this time, as a refrain word to be
sung after each verse of a stanzaic libel. In its French derivation
(‘lampons’ from ‘lamper’) it means simply ‘let us drink’. Among the
Cavalier poets, the lampoon was one of a number of genres to which
acknowledged wits would be expected to turn their hands and
through which they could demonstrate their abilities. It is often diffi-
cult to judge whether a particular piece was written to display its
writer’s talent, to utter an unwelcome but necessary truth, or out of
gratuitous malice: the effect need not be much different. Stanzaic
31
Cf. Marotti, Manuscript, Print and the English Renaissance Lyric, 159–71.
32
For the prevalence of bawdy verse in manuscript collections see ibid. 76–82.
33
Raylor, Cavaliers, Clubs, and Literary Culture, 140.
lampoons emanating from the court were still almost always written
to a ballad melody, even when this was not declared in the title. In its
movement from being part of a social ritual of popular shaming to
being an element in the written culture of the educated, the lampoon
also became a constitutive practice of communities based on the pro-
duction and exchange of documents, such as the universities, the
Inns of Court, and the Church of England. Erudite libels (often in
Latin) were a commonplace of university life. On the occasion of the
contested entry of Sir Thomas Clayton in April 1661 to the warden-
ship of Merton College, Anthony Wood wrote:
All seniors, that had known what Thomas Clayton had been, did look upon
him, as the most impudent fellow in nature to adventure upon such a place
(the wardenship of Merton coll.) that had been held by eminent persons.
They knew him to have been the very lol-poop of the University, the
common subject of every lampoon that was made in the said university, and
a fellow of little or no religion, only for forme-sake. They knew also, that he
had been a most lascivious person, a great haunter of women’s company and
a common fornicator.34
Wood’s assuredness over the last-raised matter may, of course, have

been dependent on the lampoons themselves. Inns of Court satire
numbered the court among its targets, as the satirical verse of Donne
and Sir John Davies shows. Within such closed communities, libels
performed a homeostatic function, confirming members’ sense of
their own institutional identity, providing a sanctioned way of deal-
ing with deviations from agreed norms of behaviour, and offering an
outlet for otherwise irremediable dissatisfaction.35 As long as they re-
stricted themselves to these functions, they were not seen as socially
disruptive.
Yet by early in the reign of James I a new kind of verse libel was in
circulation whose intended audience was general rather than com-
munal or institutional and which instead of attacking local authority
figures directed its often considerable venom at the political and reli-
gious leaders of the nation. The immediate, though not the sole, cause
of this mutation was the accession of a king with poor communica-
tion skills, inflexible ideas about the power of the prerogative, and a
34
Life and Times, i. 394. For further references to Oxford lampoons see i. 487–9,
ii. 44, 150, 391, 496, 550, iii. 138.
35
These functions are explored for university and Inns of Court clandestine satire
in Felicity Henderson, ‘Erudite Satire in Seventeenth-Century England’ (Monash
University Ph.D. thesis, 2003).
preference for ruling through favourites. The great seventeenth-

century outburst of clandestine satire was in a real sense an outcome
of the Stuart phenomenon and the particular vision of modernity that
dynasty tried to impose. What were later to be called ‘state poems’
had existed in the past but never in such numbers, nor had they ever
been so eagerly sought after; moreover, their circulation was almost
impossible to control. Archbishop Whitgift had been able to ban the
print publication of satires and epigrams, but at his funeral in 1604
the manuscript of a Puritan lampoon was found pinned to his hearse-
cloth.36 Clandestine state satire provided a steady stream of unin-
hibited commentary on court scandals and unpopular ministers.
Marotti lists some of its targets:
The falls of ambitious or highly placed individuals in the Elizabethan,
Jacobean, and Caroline periods attracted much attention in the manuscript
collections of the period, which contain poetry (and prose) related to the
treason and execution of the earl of Essex; the trial, long imprisonment, and
eventual execution of Sir Walter Raleigh; the political eclipse and death of
Robert Cecil, earl of Salisbury; the murder trial and conviction of Robert
Carr, earl of Somerset (and of his wife Frances Howard); the impeachments
of Sir Francis Bacon and of Lionel Cranfield, earl of Middlesex; the career
and assassination of George Villiers, duke of Buckingham; the political fall
and execution of Thomas Wentworth, earl of Strafford; and the trial and
execution of the earl of Castlehaven for sexual crimes.37
Thomas Cogswell has described this early body of state satire as

providing ‘as close to a mass media as early Stuart England ever
achieved’.38 The death of Cecil in 1612 was the occasion for an
extraordinary outburst of libels, which has been studied by Pauline
Croft.39 In The Politics of Court Scandal in Early Modern England:
News Culture and the Overbury Affair, 1603–1660, Alastair Bel-
lany has traced the operations of an amazingly rich body of orally
36
Alastair Bellany, ‘A Poem on the Archbishop’s Hearse: Puritanism, Libel and
Sedition after the Hampton Court Conference’, Journal of British Studies, 34 (1995),
137–64.
37
Marotti, Manuscript, Print and the English Renaissance Lyric, 94.
38
‘Underground Verse and the Transformation of Early Stuart Political Culture’,
in Susan D. Amussen and Mark A. Kishlansky (eds.), Political Culture and Cultural
Politics in Early Modern England: Essays Presented to David Underdown (Manches-
ter: Manchester UP, 1995), 277–300.
39
‘The Reputation of Robert Cecil: Libels, Political Opinion and Popular Aware-
ness in the Early Seventeenth Century’, Transactions of the Royal Historical Society,
6th ser. 1 (1991), 43–69. See also Marotti, Manuscript, Print and the English Renais-
sance Lyric, 101–2.
and scribally communicated texts, including lampoons, in broad-

casting and interpreting the events that culminated in the trials of
the Earl and Countess of Somerset for the murder of Sir Thomas
Overbury.40 Overall, ‘approximately twenty five different poems
and two libellous anagrams survive, about half in multiple copies’.
One collector, William Davenport, possessed ten, one of which he
might have written himself.41 Verses on the Castlehaven case
were almost all short, cheap and public, drawing their authority from
humour and an alleged immediacy to their subject matter. They appeared (or
at least this is where later copies claim that they appeared) affixed to hearses,
statues, or anything available where a literate person might find, read, and
recite them.42
Milton’s friend Alexander Gill was lucky to escape with his life after
being found in possession of ‘libels and letters . . . touching on the late
Duke of Buckingham’.43
The older style of personal invective associated with seasonal fes-
tivities had not given rise to political anxiety because it was seen as
communally contained. Objections were rather to the festivities
themselves, with their temptations to heavy drinking, promiscuity,
and riot. Only the dissident productions of militant Catholics on one
side and extreme Puritans on the other had given any real cause for
concern and, since it was hard to disguise one’s membership of these
communities and the bare possession of such a text might be judged
treasonable, fear had inhibited their free circulation. Public out-
breaks of personal abuse, such as the Martin Marprelate and
Nashe–Harvey controversies or the so-called ‘war of the theatres’,
were dealt with through established legal mechanisms. Yet, with the
wide circulation of manuscript libels directed at leading figures in
Church and state, there was a change of view by which all forms of
criticism, slander, and defamation came to be regarded as a corrigible
threat to public order. The response of the legal system to this chal-
lenge has been summarized by Lindsay Kaplan, who quotes a telling
passage from Ferdinando Pulton’s De Pace Regis and Regni (1609),
in which the libeller is described as a ‘foule puddle that ouzeth from
the same corrupt quagmire’ of slander but does so not by open words
40
(Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2002), 74–135.
41
Ibid. 97, 102, and on verse libels generally, pp. 107–11.
42
Cynthia B. Herrup, A House in Gross Disorder: Sex, Law and the 2nd Earl of
Castlehaven (New York: Oxford UP, 1999), 120.
43
CSP(Dom) 1628–9, 338–9.
but ‘seeming to sit quietly in his study’.44 In 1593 the Privy Council
authorized the use of torture to discover the authors of libels. In the
early years of the following century the Star Chamber, as the judicial
arm of the Council, made use of the new notion of criminal libel in a
series of prosecutions of which that of William Prynne in 1632 was
the most momentous. Under a judgement of the same year, anyone
encountering a written libel was legally required to burn it if its target
was a private person or to bring it to ‘the Kings Councell or some
competent judge’ if it touched on matters of state.45 To compose one,
according to the resurrected principle scribere est agere, was to en-
gage in constructive treason.46 Lampoons, as a subset of the wider
category of libel, might be dealt with under any of three jurisdictions.
Where no temporal loss was involved, the matter was traditionally
left to the ecclesiastical courts. Where damage to a reputation re-
quired restitution, the injured party would seek it through the com-
mon law. However, a libel that threatened a breach of the peace
became a matter for the Star Chamber, which steadily expanded its
criteria of relevance to the point where it was eventually dealing with
humble cases of village insult that would previously have been han-
dled by one of the other two jurisdictions.47 While the severity of this
court is notorious, it could not apply the death penalty. It was the
passing of its jurisdiction after 1660 to the court of King’s Bench that
was to prove fatal in 1683 to Algernon Sidney. Yet, whether judicial
intervention had any effect on the writing and communication of
lampoons is doubtful. It should rather be seen as evidence of sharply
escalating official anxiety over their ubiquity and influence.
Needless to say, not all satire was directed towards the crown and
high-placed favourites: there was a strong counter-tradition of loyal
satire whose targets were Puritans and parliamentarians. Andrew
McRae has explored one phase of its development in a study of
Richard Corbett as both a panegyrist of the court and excoriator of
its enemies.48 But even royalist satire had its problems in a society
44
The Culture of Slander in Early Modern England (Cambridge: Cambridge UP,
1997), 20–4; Pulton, De Pace, fo. B1v.
45
S. R. Gardiner (ed.), Reports of Cases in the Courts of Star Chamber and High
Commission, Camden Society, ns 39 (London, 1886), 152.
46
See David Sandler Berkowitz, John Selden’s Formative Years (Cranbury, NJ:
Folger Books, 1988), 79–80.
47
As in Skipwith’s case, 1622, discussed in SPISCE, 232–4.
48
‘Satire and Sycophancy: Richard Corbett and Early Stuart Royalism’, RES 54
(2003), 336–64.
where the very right to criticize was under attack. A personal libel,
according to Sir Edward Coke, was likely to disturb the peace be-
cause it provoked revenge. Libelling also undermined the moral
standing of the individual, leading to ‘1. Prauitatis incrementum, in-
crease de lewdnes: 2. Bursae decrementum, euacuation del burse et
beggerie. 3. Conscientiae detrimentum, shipwracke de conscience.’49
Erudite and literary quarrels were to be regretted because they dis-
tracted participants from their proper task of encouraging order and
obedience. Shortly before his death James was considering the estab-
lishment of a historical Academy of eighty-four appointed members
as ‘an institution for policing the realm of ideas’.50 Gowing examines
insult and slander as expressions of conflict between households in
the urban environment of London with its huge population of immi-
grants from the country. It is still widely believed that married
women could not go to law in their own right in early modern Eng-
land; but this only applied to the secular courts, not the ecclesiastical
ones, where women comprised a majority of plaintiffs in cases of
slander. The records of these cases yield a good haul of street insults
which we can measure against those of the verse libellers, as well as
revealing a number of cases where verse libels were used as an
element in disputes between households, families, or neighbour-
hoods.51 But their significance to a contemporary would have lain in
their potential to disrupt social cohesion at its most fragile level, that
of the overcrowded metropolitan streets and tenements with their in-
cessant turnover of population. Unlike the punitive Star Chamber,
the church courts that heard these cases sought wherever possible to
promote reconciliation.
Cavalier attempts to support Sunday sports and seasonal revelry
against Puritan criticism had as one offshoot a strong tradition of
libertine lampooning in which attacks on the opponents of festive
liberty were accompanied by unashamed celebrations of sexual and
bacchanalian excess. Théophile de Viau and the poets of Le Parnasse
satyrique offered models for this which may have influenced the lib-
ertine verse of Charles Cotton and later Rochester. Théophile had
himself spent time in England in the entourage of the first Duke of
Buckingham. One striking body of libertine verse associated with the
royalist wits of the ‘Order of the Fancy’ has been studied in Raylor’s
49
Quinta pars relationum Edwardi Coke (London, 1612), fo. 126r.
50
Berkowitz, John Selden’s Formative Years, 82–3.
51
Domestic Dangers, passim.
Cavaliers, Clubs, and Literary Culture. The two leaders of this

group, Mennes and Smith, had both been present in 1627, along
with D’Avenant, Herrick, and Suckling, on the disastrous military
expedition to the Île de Ré. They became the literary stars of meetings
at which doggerel, travesty, and the improvisation of meaningless
speeches were the approved modes of displaying wit. During the
interregnum, clandestine satire made an important contribution to the
maintenance of Cavalier solidarity and the spread of opposition to
military rule. Mennes has left an account in exuberant tetrameters of
an entertainment given in 1654 at Cologne by Lord Chancellor Hyde
at which all the participants got hopelessly drunk; however, it would
be incorrect to call this a lampoon: rather it exploits the ancient
comic topos of the repas ridicule.52 The Mennes–Smith circle also
cultivated the no less ancient topos of the paradoxical encomium, in
which ironic praise was lavished on something intrinsically un-
worthy of it. There is a Restoration successor to this in Oldham’s
prose ‘Character of a Certain Ugly Old P——’.53 The burlesque and
lampoon verse of the Cavalier poets, after initial oral and manuscript
circulation, came to wider knowledge through such printed ‘drolleries’
as Musarum Deliciae (1655), Sportive Wit (1656), and Choyce
Drollery (1656), the latter two of which were seized and destroyed
by the interregnum government.54
The lampoonists of the Restoration were, therefore, the inheritors
of several well-cultivated prior traditions. That of oppositional anti-
court satire fell out of favour for a while after 1660 but was to ex-
perience a spectacular revival following the failures of the second
Dutch War. A predictable early vogue for anti-Puritan satire was sus-
tained by the success of Butler’s Hudibras, not in this case a clandes-
tine work but the result of ‘a lengthy process of generic transmu-
tation, as the gentlemanly drolling style of the 1630s was applied to
the horrific events of the 1640s’.55 Court satire from the days of
Charles and Henrietta Maria offered models for a new, less idealistic
generation installed at Whitehall, which Dorset, Buckingham,
Sedley, and Rochester were to develop in remarkable ways. The
52
Text in Raylor, Cavaliers, Clubs, and Literary Culture, 242–5. For the tradition,
see Olga Rossettini, Les Influences anciennes et italiennes sur la satire en France au
XVIe siècle (Florence: Institut français, 1958), 204–13 and Harold Love (ed.),
Restoration Literature: Critical Approaches (London: Methuen, 1972), 158–9.
53
Remains of Mr. John Oldham in Verse and Prose (London, 1684), 109–30.
54
Raylor, Cavaliers, Clubs, and Literary Culture, 202–7.
55
Ibid. 187.
Jacobean experiments of Hall and Marston had been forgotten but

models for how moral verse of a classicizing kind might be written
were available in Donne, Lovelace, and Cowley on one side of the
channel and Regnier and his successors on the other.56 How to write
outrageous invective could be learned from Cleveland: Oldham
was one of his pupils-at-a-distance. Burlesque and travesty not only
appealed enormously to the spirit of the age but could draw on con-
temporary French models, especially that of Scarron, with which the
returned Cavaliers were thoroughly familiar—Charles Cotton
proved the English master of Scarronian travesty. Most important of
all, the native tradition of satirical rhymes set to familiar broadside
ballad tunes continued to be practised in villages and towns, in the
streets and taverns of London, in university colleges and legal inns,
and even by the frequenters of Presbyterian and Anabaptist meeting
houses. There was a heady mix of possibilities all of which would be
taken further as clandestine satire advanced to its greatest, and most
deplorable, period of achievement. But while much had been in-
herited, the ground under the satirists’ feet had shifted irrecoverably.
As Raylor puts it: ‘The tone of Restoration society, conditioned by
the long years of exile and poverty, involved an obscenity more
vulgar, a cynicism more bitter, and a vandalism more fundamental
and skeptical than anything ever dreamt up by the Order of the
Fancy.’57 The case of the second Duke of Buckingham, discussed
at the beginning of this chapter, illustrates the correctness of this
opinion.
56
Consultable in the collection Fernand Fleury and Louis Perceau (eds.), Les
Satires françaises du XVIIe siècle, 2 vols. (Paris: Garnier, 1923).
57
Cavaliers, Clubs, and Literary Culture, 210.
2
The Court Lampoon
Like Restoration comedy, the Restoration lampoon took several

years to mature into a distinctive genre. The resumption of monar-
chical rule in 1660 was rejected root and branch only by extreme Pur-
itans; most other republicans were prepared to bide their time and
see how the new order of indemnity and oblivion promised under the
Declaration of Breda worked in practice. In any case open oppos-
ition would have been dangerous: Milton came close to losing his
life for having persevered in the good old cause when it was already
lost. Savage satire was to be encountered everywhere but it was
directed at Puritans, not the restored monarchy, and followed well-
established models. The verse collected in such much-reprinted col-
lections as J. Cleveland Revived (1659) and Ratts Rhimed to Death,
or, the Rump Parliament Hang’d up in the Shambles (1660) exhibits
the same tauntingly vengeful spirit as John Tatham’s theatrical bur-
lesque The Rump; or the Mirrour of the Late Times (February 1660)
in which the Commonwealth leaders are brought on as characters in
an Aristophanic farce. The publication in 1663 of the first part of
Samuel Butler’s Hudibras was the high point of anti-Puritan satire,
after which it mutated into a stock reflex of attacks on citizens, Non-
conformists, and eventually Whigs.
The verse of the royalist drollery poets could now be printed with
impunity in such collections as Merry Drollery . . . The First Part
([1661?]) and an enlarged reprint of the 1656 Wit and Drollery.
These poets were inheritors of a time when alcoholic and sexual ex-
cess had in itself been a form of political loyalism. In ‘Timon’ (1674)
. . . mine Host
Had beene a Collonell, wee must heare him boast
Not of Townes won, but an Estate he lost,
}
For the Kings service; which indeed he spent,
Whoreing and drinking, but with good intent. (ll. 95–9)1
1
Rochester, Works, 261. The poem is also attributed to Sedley.
22 The Court Lampoon
Deprived of its validating political context, the drollery tradition

also lost its good intent by being absorbed into the general current of
Anacreontic and libertine verse represented by the work of Charles
Cotton and Alexander Radcliffe. If there were catcalls to be heard
among the hurrahs, they were those of old Cavaliers, ruined by the
wars, who saw that their sacrifices had gone unrewarded, while
turncoats and time-servers of the ‘phanatical crue’ had
. . . got so much wealth,
By their plunder and stealth,
That they creep into profit and power:
But even these grumblings were decently muted: Alexander Brome’s

bill of complaints is followed by reassurance:
Yet we will be loyal still,
And serve without reward or hire,
To be redeem’d from so much ill,
May stay our stomacks, though not fill;
And if our patience do not tire,
We may in time have our desire.2
The theme of Brome’s poem was to resurface among ‘country’ criti-

cisms of crown policies in the 1670s. An inflammatory speech of
1671 by Charles, Lord Lucas deplored royal bounty ‘poured out into
the Purses of private men’, many of whom ‘att his Maties returne were
worth little, or nothing’, but who now kept ‘their Coaches, and sixe
Horses, their Pages, and Lacqueys’ while loyal Cavaliers had ‘scarce
sufficient left, to buy them Bread’.3 Yet, those established wits who
had retrieved their estates or found profitable niches under the new
regime were disinclined to bite the hand that fed them. Sir John
Mennes was reinstalled as an admiral in Charles’s navy, James Smith
received church preferments, Denham became surveyor of works,
and D’Avenant and Killigrew patentees of theatre companies.
Waller, having blotted his copybook during the interregnum, re-
turned to a new and fruitful career as a court poet for Charles II,
whom he outlived.
It is only from the mid-1660s that we begin to encounter satires ex-
pressing open hostility to the new regime. The spirit of opposition
engendered by the great ejection of Nonconforming ministers which
2
Alexander Brome, Songs and Other Poems, 2nd edn. (London, 1664), 50.
3
Bodleian Library, MS don. b 8, p. 198.
The Court Lampoon 23
took place on 24 August 1662 was initially conveyed through sur-

reptitiously printed pamphlets and sermons. The idea that a few jest-
ing stanzas circulated in manuscript might be just as effective in
manipulating public attitudes took time to catch on. A good propor-
tion of the satire of the 1670s was to be concerned with the religious
question or political issues that flowed directly from it; but the foun-
dations of a new tradition of ‘state’ satire could not be laid until pub-
lic opinion had been further alienated by the incompetence displayed
in the conduct of the second Dutch War (1664–7). Charles II was
quicker to squander the contents of his treasury than the huge fund
of goodwill engendered by his Restoration but eventually he man-
aged that as well. Apart from this erosion of support, there were two
other preconditions for a restoration of the verse libel—a rejuven-
ation of poetic forms and the creation of a repertoire of easily identifi-
able targets. As regards the first, it should not be assumed that,
because lampoon-like poems had been written for many decades, it
was a simple matter to crank out more of the same, or that the older
manner was still acceptable to a self-consciously ‘polite’ age. Despite
a degree of continuity in verse forms and structural principles, the
Restoration lampoon has a characteristic tone, even a characteristic
kind of viciousness, that was foreign to its Caroline and interregnum
precursors briefly discussed in Chapter 1. Before the lampoon could
reassume its centrality to the communication of opinion it had to be
remade in ways that will be considered shortly.
It also needed a cast. Few things fall flatter than a satire written
about people about whom nobody knows or cares. What is not so
obvious is that even before well-known people can be used effect-
ively as butts of satire there have to be instantly recognizable signs
by which they can be identified, and stock accusations against them
that are universally known and accepted. Satire does not have time
to explain: it must get straight to the business of vilification. The
charges do not have to be true; indeed, in order to satisfy the strange
needs served by the genre it is often a good idea if they are not true,
or no better than half-true. Rochester insisted to Burnet that ‘the lyes
in these Libels came often in as Ornaments that could not be spared
without spoiling the beauty of the Poem’.4 The untrue accusation is
also likely to be especially wounding to its victim. Shadwell, aware
4
Gilbert Burnet, Some Passages of the Life and Death of John, Earl of Rochester,
in V. de Sola Pinto (ed.), English Biography in the Seventeenth Century (London:
Harrap, 1951), 106.
that his plays had been as successful as Dryden’s, was as irritated as

much by the inaccuracy of MacFlecknoe as by its abuse:
the Author of Mack-Fleckno reflects more upon himself than me; where he
makes Fleckno commend Dullness, and chuse me for the Dullest that ever
writ; and repeats dull, dull, &c. over and over . . . and has no more reason
for that, than for giving me the Irish name of Mack, when he knows I never
saw Ireland till I was three and twenty years old, and was there but four
Months.5
A character in satire was as much a conscious artistic construction as

a character in comedy and might bear as little relationship to the real
world. Once an accusation was given currency it would stick, re-
gardless of truth. Jane Middleton, a beauty of the court of Charles II
who was also a gifted painter, was pursued throughout her long car-
eer as a subject of lampoon satire by the accusation of unpleasant
body odour. Mordaunt’s ‘The Ladies’ March’ (1681) includes the
quatrain
Middleton, where’er she goes,
Confirms the scandal of her foes;
Quelled by the fair one’s funky hose,
Even Lory’s forced to hold his nose.6
‘Lory’ was Laurence Hyde, Earl of Rochester: that he was Middle-

ton’s lover at the time was another convenient assumption by the
lampoon writers for which we have no objective evidence. Pepys is
our witness to gossip circulating as early as 1665 that ‘the fine Mrs
Middleton is noted for carrying about her body a continued soure
base Smell that is very offensive, especially if she be a little hot’.7
From the moment this rumour first circulated, the lampoon poet had
both a stock character and a stock accusation to fill up a stanza
whenever required, as will be demonstrated in what follows.
The technique of turning real-life individuals into satirical icons is
familiar to us from visual caricature, which customarily begins from
the exaggeration of one or two prominent physical features. At the
5
Dedication to The Tenth Satire of Juvenal (1687), in The Complete Works of
Thomas Shadwell, ed. Montague Summers (London: Fortune Press, 1927), v. 292.
6
(‘Stamford’s countess led the van’), CSR, 57. For the attribution to Mordaunt,
see Harold Love, ‘Charles, Viscount Mordaunt and “The Ladies’ March” ’, RES
(forthcoming).
7
The Diary of Samuel Pepys, ed. Robert Latham and William Matthews, 11 vols.
(London: G. Bell & Sons, 1970–), vi. 251 (3 Oct. 1665).
present day when a new celebrity becomes a subject of newspaper

cartoons, there is often an introductory phase in which the portraits
do not immediately declare the identity and may differ from artist to
artist; but in a short space of time, through a process of professional
complicity or mutual plagiarism, an iconography is created which
makes that person immediately recognizable. It is only by this means
that caricature, as a language of elementary signs that need to deliver
their meaning instantaneously, becomes possible. These people are
not always the most important figures of their time; rather, they
belong to a class of publicly emergent zanies or stock butts around
whom an endless variety of comic inventions can be generated. The
British fortnightly magazine Private Eye has made notorious use of
such repetition, often choosing marginal public figures almost at
random, or because of some transient dislike, and then recycling
their names, appearance, or opinions for years or decades. Behind
this technique lies the perception that a good joke can be repeated
for ever and that satire, so conducted, does not destroy its victims
but nurtures them up to continued life. The original moral or
political purpose of such attacks is quickly lost sight of in the
pleasure of the repetition. A certain arbitrariness in the selection of
victims may also be a way of magnifying the apprehensiveness
inspired by the journal or the medium.
The Restoration lampoon did all these things and could not have
developed as it did before it had spawned instantly recognizable
stock figures who could be assailed over and over again in a kind of
satirists’ shorthand that dispensed with any need for explanation. At
times this extended to whole classes of individuals, such as the ladies
of honour and gentlemen of the bedchamber at court, the royal bas-
tards, or the aldermen of the City of London. Some later verse libels
seem to have been written solely around collections of these stock fig-
ures, without any other detectable point of view or animus: they
were simply games with the lampoon-writers’ Lego set. As the num-
ber of recognizable butts grew, the lampoons became easier to write
and therefore longer. Attacks on completely new targets were most
likely to work when they were inserted into populations of old ones.
When Marvell in the ‘Third Advice to a Painter’ tried to make a lam-
poon protagonist out of the Duchess of Albermarle, it failed to work
because there was no hinterland of previous representations to give
point to this ambitious new one. Not even the author seems quite
sure where the joke lies or how it should be elaborated and he ends
up over-prolonging it. Yet, it should not be thought that the writing

of these pieces, any more than the writing of a modern newspaper
gossip column, was an effortless process: one needed contacts, a re-
tentive memory, and opportunities for research. Rochester hired a
spy disguised as a sentinel to lurk about the court at night in order to
discover who was paying nocturnal visits to whom. Jack Howe was
briefed by his sisters.8
These shorthand methods of characterization were part of a wider
simplification in which all human actions were reduced to matter in
motion under the influence of irresistible instinct. Mordaunt’s ‘The
Ladies’ March’ (1681) brings on what John Harold Wilson describes
as ‘a procession of twenty-three Court ladies marching across a
stage, as if seeking erotic preferment and applause’.9 The opening ten
lines will give the flavour:
Stamford’s countess led the van,
Tallest of the caravan,
She who ne’er wants white or red,
Or just pretense to keep her bed.
Lofty Richmond followed after;
Richmond scorns to hold her water,
Piqued that Stamford should take place
For height or lewdness of her grace.
She distills her heavenly dew
On all that swear they will be true.10
Wilson’s description does not do justice to the kinaesthetic force of

the poem’s trochaic tetrameter couplets (formally anticipatory of
contemporary rap lyrics) in turning the unfortunate ladies into sexu-
ally possessed automata. In its concluding portrait of Moll Howard,
it moves from couplets to the repetition of a single rhyme:
Courteous Mall would fain pass by her,
Lined by duke, lord, knight, and squire,
And eke by her confessing friar.
All trades help to quench the fire,
Pricks as tall as Sarum spire,
Daily plunged into her mire,
All too short to satisfy her.
8
Gilbert Burnet, Bishop Burnet’s History of his Own Time (London, 1724–34), i.
264; Wilson, CSR, 42.
9
CSR, 56. 10
Loc. cit.
This is the original ending; however, one unsatisfied reader, was

driven to rewrite the last four lines:
Yet still she burns, or men belie her;
Mall is scratched by every briar,
Hers is no common low desire,
If you wont believe me, try her,
Ask her but once, and she’ll retire.
Nay, she’ll beg, who can deny her?
Though to plunge into the mire.
Pricks as long as Sarum spire
Most devoutly, daily ply her,
All not enough to satisfy her.
Mall, adieu; you’ve lost your squire.11
The rhyme repetitions seem meant to mimic the motions of orgasm,

with the ‘loss’ of the squire representing the speaker’s inability to
continue with either the verbal or the (analogized) sexual perform-
ance. The vision of human nature which informs this unflattering
picture, and the twenty-two that precede it, recalls the monomania
which Jonson, at the beginning of the century, had made the founda-
tion of his dramatic characterizations; but Jonson’s method was no
longer a usable one for Restoration topical satire. Where the words
and actions of Jonson’s characters were expressions of a diseased
subjectivity, the characters of the Restoration verse libel exist purely
as material bodies engaged in a Hobbesian pursuit of material ob-
jects of desire, whether these are other bodies or such tangibles as
money, land, white staffs, letters patent, and coronets. In the case of
‘Courteous Mall’ and her flock of lovers (the males as machine-like
in their rutting as herself), the subjective is reduced to a raw succes-
sion of sensations and the universally shared passions which are trig-
gered by these. Or as Rochester (paraphrasing Hobbes) put it:
What ever is to come is not:
How can it then be mine?
The present moment’s all my Lott
And that as fast as it is gott
Phillis is wholly thine.12
11
Ibid. 62.
12
Rochester, Works, 25. As Jeremy Treglown was first to point out in The Letters
of John Wilmot, Earl of Rochester (Oxford: Blackwell, 1980), 12–13, this passage
is directly derived from Leviathan, ch. 3 (Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan, ed. C. B.
Macpherson (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1968), 97).
Rochester has at least paused to consider the cognitive basis of

desire. The libellers concern themselves only with the externals of
dress, manners, and motions, as these become manifest in the eter-
nally present moment, leaving them in the happy position of simpli-
fying a simplification.
Satire has always operated through simplification; but in the period
with which we are concerned there seems to have been a widespread
conviction that the imagined world of all-compelling desire in which
the only allowed motivations were those of vanity, lust, and acquisi-
tiveness, pursued behind a screen of dissimulation, was being lived out
in real life by the new power elite of the Restoration court. Moreover,
this pursuit could hardly be, as Jonson would have had it, a form of
mania, for no one could deny that these material things were, by any
rational assessment, well worth possessing. Alan Marshall correctly
describes the court as a ‘Hobbesian world of all against all, where trust
was never given freely and life was always lived on the edge’.13 James
Grantham Turner summarizes even more sensationally:
As Stallybrass and White observe, ‘the Restoration court projected a collect-
ive image of living in ironic and even defiant incompatibility with its in-
herited forms of public representation . . . The Court was both classical and
grotesque, both regal and foolish, high and low.’ ‘The Practise of their Lives’,
as Margaret Cavendish would say, was ‘not answerable to the Degree of
their Dignities.’ To Pepys, and indeed to every eager consumer of gossip and
lampoon, the Court presented a monstrous spectacle of ‘wanton talk’ and
obscene writing, drunken brawling, riot, injury, outrage, window-smashing,
and wife-snatching—a general state of warfare, both verbal and physical,
in which sexuality and disease are the weapons. The age that coined the
‘noble Savage’ also produced the savage noble.14
Within this world nothing, naturally, was to be taken at its face

value; indeed it was safer to assume that realities were the diametric
opposite of appearances:
Wherever too much sanctity you see,
Be more suspicious of hid villainy.
Whoever’s zeal is than his neighbor’s more,
If man think he’s a rogue, if woman whore . . .15
13
The Age of Faction: Court Politics 1660–1702 (Manchester: Manchester UP,
1999), 92.
14
Libertines and Radicals in Early Modern London (Cambridge: Cambridge UP,
2002), 166.
15
‘Rochester’s Farewell’, POASY, ii. 225.
All was subjugated to ‘a perpetuall and restlesse desire of Power after

power, that ceaseth onley in Death’—in Hobbes’s famous phrase—
or, at least, a pursuit of the appearance of power, for Charles’s
system of government by divide and rule was designed to leave no
minister, or mistress, in unthreatened possession of their place.16 If it
is true, as Halifax judged, that Charles had ‘as little mixture of the
Seraphick part as ever Man had’, it is possible that it was only in
satire that he could truly be represented.17 By the same token, writers
who agreed with Hobbes that ‘Life it selfe is but Motion, and can
never be without Desire, nor without Feare, no more than without
Sense’18 would find it difficult not to write satire.
Yet, even when strong provocations to topical satire appeared in
the mid-1660s the Restoration lampoon required time to respond to
them. The materials, the tool-kit, the cast, the universe, the psych-
ology, and the physiology all had to be fine-tuned before the genre
was ready to set off on its triumphant progress. There also had to be
an apparatus for the distribution of verse libels, another matter to
be considered elsewhere: a libel that did not travel was defeated of its
purpose. For all these things to come together, experiments had to be
performed in a laboratory, which in this case was the court.
t h e c o u rt a n d c o u rt l a m p o o n
The Restoration lampoon, as a kind distinct from its precursors, first

took shape at the court of Charles II as an instrument of factional
warfare within that court. That it should have become a nationwide
phenomenon probably surprised no one as much as its first expon-
ents. Many of the key texts for a discussion of this evolution are
fortunately available in John Harold Wilson’s superbly annotated
Court Satires of the Restoration and the Yale Poems on Affairs of
State series; however, the definition of a ‘court’ satire used in this
book is a more restricted one than that of Wilson, who includes a
number of what I would call ‘Town’ satires. A court satire, for pres-
ent purposes, is a satire written within the court by a court author
about court personalities for a court readership: if it happened to be
16
Leviathan, 161.
17
The Works of George Savile, Marquis of Halifax, ed. Mark N. Brown, 3 vols.
(Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989), ii. 490.
18
Leviathan, 130.
read outside the court that was a secondary and unanticipated con-
sequence. The moment satire began to be written by court insiders
which envisaged outsiders as its primary audience it ceased to be
court satire and became something different. Court satire also has to
embody the views and values of the court or of a faction within the
court: satire written from an erudite humanistic perspective or from
a religious one was by definition invoking a different value system
from the court’s Hobbesian criteria for assessing human worth. The
court lampoon, as here defined, was a highly specific product of a
highly idiosyncratic institution, which we will need to understand.
Only historians these days are likely to have a clear idea of what a
court really was and how it worked; and even they may be hazy
about the details of a court like that of Charles II, in which carefully
reinstalled ancient structures were buckling under the weight of in-
novative modern content.19 It will therefore be necessary to describe
some institutional fundamentals. Though principally located at the
palaces of Whitehall and Windsor, the court of an English monarch
was a portable affair which might be set up anywhere. Charles took
his with him to Bath, Tunbridge Wells, and Newmarket. It served
two sometimes concordant, sometimes conflicting roles as the royal
household and as the headquarters of the national administration. In
the late seventeenth century these functions were still not clearly sep-
arated. Fundamentally, the court was a structure of spaces arranged
in a hierarchy of exclusiveness and of appointments attached to
those spaces. The most exclusive space was the bedchamber. It had a
staff of gentlemen (all nobles) and grooms (highly placed common-
ers), who took turns at ‘waiting’, as well as more mundane func-
tionaries. One of the tasks of the gentleman of the bedchamber was
to sleep the night on a truckle bed close to the royal four-poster
which stood in an ‘alcove’. Rochester’s graphic portrait of what sup-
posedly went on in that most sacred of spaces (‘This to evince wou’d
be too long to tell yee | The painefull Tricks of the laborious Nelly, |
Imploying Hands, Armes, Fingers, Mouth and Thighs | To raise the
Limb which shee each Night enjoyes’20) could well rest on actual
19
Marshall’s The Age of Faction is a sound introductory study. See also Eveline
Cruikshanks (ed.), The Stuart Courts (Stroud: Sutton, 2000); R. Malcolm Smuts (ed.),
The Stuart Court and Europe: Essays in Politics and Political Culture (Cambridge:
Cambridge UP, 1996); and for the earlier heritage David Starkey et al., The English
Court from the Wars of the Roses to the Civil War (London: Longman, 1987).
20
Works, 86.
overheard dialogue. External to the bedchamber was the privy

chamber, with its own staff of gentlemen and grooms, but of a lower
rank and with lower emoluments. Least exclusive was the presence
chamber, where the king made his public appearances. Any com-
moner of some standing and suitably attired could gain entrance to
this third space. Being seen there regularly was the accepted way for
a newcomer without powerful friends to make a beginning at court.
A well-filled, splendidly dressed presence chamber was an outward
sign of successful monarchy and while Charles, unlike Louis XIV,
never made such attendance compulsory, one might easily be drawn
to the chamber in order to make use of the court’s other public
areas—the long and the stone galleries for strolling, the groom
porter’s lodgings for gambling, the great withdrawing room for ex-
changing gossip, and the court theatre for plays. Pepys’s accounts of
his visits to these areas are a good guide to their atmosphere.21 When
the king dined in state he would be surrounded by respectful by-
standers under the same principles that governed his appearances in
the presence chamber. The motive for attending is made clear by an
exchange in Wycherley’s The Country-Wife:
Harcourt. Pray, first carry me, and reconcile me to her.
Sparkish. Another time, faith the King will have sup’t.
Harcourt. Not with the worse stomach for thy absence; thou art one of those
Fools, that think their attendance at the King’s Meals, as necessary as his
Physicians, when you are more troublesom to him, than his Doctors, or his
Dogs.
Sparkish. Pshaw, I know my interest, Sir . . .22
Sparkish is present to be seen as much as the monarch is. His hope is

that assistance in adding to the glitter of such occasions will translate
itself into an offer of preferment.
The Stuart tradition of government through favourites was con-
tinued intermittently by Charles, giving rise to two distinct kinds of
power, one of which came from office and the other from physical
closeness to the monarch. A highly placed administrator without
direct access to the king could only put forward policies through pre-
senting them at Privy Council meetings (at which the king was
notoriously inattentive) or invited interviews, and otherwise had to
21
See Diary, ii. 239 (27 Oct. 1662); iv. 75 (16 Mar. 1663); iv. 360 (2 Nov. 1663).
22
The Plays of William Wycherley, ed. Arthur Friedman (Oxford: Clarendon
Press, 1979), 291.
make use of intermediaries with freer access. The holder of a bed-

chamber appointment, by being close to the king in his private mo-
ments, had the capacity to insinuate policies in subtle ways: there is a
sense in which Clarendon and later Arlington were laughed out of
office. However, the most influential of all denizens of the household
were the court mistresses, who came to assume a position similar to
that of the court eunuchs in imperial China. Those wishing to influ-
ence the king when he was most impressionable had to work through
these women and reward them accordingly. Charles seems to have
been perfectly happy with this arrangement: the women both
screened him from importunity and allowed him to communicate on
his own terms with those whom they represented. As a result, as
Halifax reminds us, ‘It was resolved generally by others, whom he
should have in his Arms, as well as whom he should have in his
Councils.’23 The Duchess of Portsmouth throughout her long career
at court remained a loyal agent of influence for Louis XIV. Factions
would intrigue to install their own candidates in this post.24
As can be imagined, the court was a fiercely competitive environ-
ment. Acquiring a position was difficult enough; retaining it could be
no less so. Many positions were purchasable under a system which
allowed a retiring incumbent to retrieve the investment or to accept
money for the ‘reversion’ while continuing to occupy it; others were
virtually heritable; but many were held purely by royal favour and
could be ended on a whim, as a punishment, or as part of a political
deal. Uncertainty was institutionalized. An acceptable level of social
performance was an important qualification for success. Inability to
reach required standards of conversational wit or elegance in dress
could make one the subject of humiliating ridicule. Rochester in
‘A Ramble in St James’s Park’ displays insider’s malice at an aspirant
who could only perform an imperfect imitation of these arts:
The First was of your Whitehall Blades,
Near Kin to th’ Mother of the Maids,
Grac’d by whose favour he was able,
To bring a Friend to th’Waiters Table;
Where he had heard Sir Edward Sutton
Say how the King lov’d Bansted Mutton.
23
‘A Character of King Charles II’, in Works, ii. 491.
24
As Buckingham, and his sister, the Duchess of Richmond, tried to do with
Elizabeth Lawson in 1680. See POASY, ii. 189–91; CSR, 259–60.
Since when he’d ne’er be brought to eat,

By’s good will any other Meat.
In this, as well as all the rest,
He ventures to do like the best.
But wanting common Sence, th’ingredient,
In choosing well, not least expedient,
Converts Abortive imitation,
To Universal affectation;
So he not only eats, and talks,
But feels, and smells, sits down and walks;
Nay looks, and lives, and loves by Rote,
In an old tawdrey Birth-Day-Coat.25
Samuel Butler’s character of ‘A court-wit’ offers an outsider’s view of
the reigning court manner: ‘They have agreed on a mode of repar-
tees, as well as a demeanour of faces, legs and elbows; and he that is
unaccomplished that way is as ridiculous as he that wears the colours
of his garniture out of season, or is trail’d by an old-fashion’d
scent.’26 Marshall sees court life as comprising ‘a series of mini-
dramatic performances’ allowed to unfold ‘before a select audience,
in a form of politics by other means’. A successful courtier ‘was the
sum of many calculated poses’.27 The training that royal and aristo-
cratic children received in deportment, walking, sitting, rising, and
dancing was designed to ensure that every action had an arresting
balletic ease. Dean Spence remembered that when Buckingham
entered the presence chamber ‘it was impossible not to follow him
with your eyes, he moved so gracefully’.28 Even the deadly art of
fencing was to be performed with a hypnotic grace. To shine in such
an environment required not only personal virtuosity but the ability
to unsettle others. Hamilton’s narrative of Gramont’s sojourn at
court in the early 1660s contains numerous accounts both of
dazzling acts of self-advertisement and of practical jokes designed to
embarrass and humiliate.29
Heads of factions used every stratagem available in order to insert
their own candidates into household positions and to displace those
25
ll. 45–62, in Works, 77–8. See below p. 34 and n. 31.
26
Characters, ed. Charles W. Daves (Cleveland: Case Western Reserve UP, 1970),
261–2.
27
Age of Faction, 28, 76.
28
Joseph Spence: Observations, Anecdotes and Characters of Books and Men, ed.
James M. Osborn (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1966), i. 276.
29
Anthony Hamilton, Memoirs of the Count de Gramont, ed. Henry Vizetelly
(London: Vizetelly & Co., 1889).
of their rivals. A lampoon, as stated, could be an effective weapon in

such campaigns. Rochester’s role was for many years that of a poet-
ical gladiator for the powerful faction headed by the Duke of Buck-
ingham. In a satire of the early 1670s Buckingham is portrayed
giving an account of the membership of his faction as it then stood:
The party I have made are brave and strong.
First Rochester next envy’d Arlington
And next Albermarle’s Debauched Sonn.
Next Buckhurst, Sidley and their wenching Traine,
And Mulgrave soe belov’d of Castlemaine.
Our p<ar>ty in the house are numerous,
Wee hate all those who seeme religious.
Nay, to make sure wee’ve gott the Speaker too,
Then name the thing that wee han’t power to doe.30
Rochester returned the compliment in lines 120–5 of ‘An Allusion to

Horace’ by including Buckingham among the inner audience of his
scribally circulated verse:
I loath the Rabble, ’tis enough for me
If Sydley, Shadwell, Shepheard, Wicherley,
Godolphin, Butler, Buckhurst, Buckinghame
And some few more, whome I omitt to name
Approve my sence, I count their Censure Fame.
}
The second of these passages needs to be read in the light of the first.
The satires of these courtier poets were never disinterested: probe
them hard enough and there will nearly always be a factional occa-
sion. Rochester’s attack quoted above on the ‘Whitehall blade’, who
was probably Charles Blount, is coloured by the fact that he had
gained his entrée through a member of the queen’s court, not the
king’s.31
Rochester, Buckingham, and their close friend the Earl of Dorset
(previously Lord Buckhurst, as above, and Earl of Middlesex) held
appointments as gentlemen of the bedchamber, and were therefore
always in a position to influence the king or to annoy him, as also some-
times happened—these were high-risk appointments, interrupted in
30
Yale University, Beinecke Library, MS Osborn fb 140, p. 98. Compare the par-
allel list of members given in Marshall, Age of Faction, 41–5. Arlington’s presence in
the lampooner’s list is a mystery.
31
Blount was a nephew by marriage of Lady Sanderson, the ‘Mother of the Maids’
referred to.
Rochester’s case by at least two banishments and in Buckingham’s by

a long sojourn in the Tower. Politically, on both the court and the na-
tional scale, they constituted an Erastian Protestant faction to balance
the supporters of the Catholic faction headed by the king’s brother,
James, Duke of York and the Church of England faction founded by
Clarendon and resuscitated in the mid-1670s by Danby; but their pri-
mary objective in court politics was simply to maintain themselves in
wealth and office. (It should be noted here that court factional politics
and national politics, while often closely aligned, were not identical.
The long career of Sunderland, which makes no sense at all with ref-
erence to national politics, and may even be seen as a series of disas-
ters rather than the splendid success it really was, is perfectly
comprehensible in terms of court factional politics, to which it is a
valuable index.) The king had been glad of Buckingham’s services in
getting rid of Clarendon, which was performed as much through wit
as through policy; however, bedchamber influence alone proved in-
sufficient to maintain him in power after the failure of his toleration
policies and the setbacks of a new Dutch War and an unpopular
French alliance.32
James, as heir to the throne, had his own separate court, smaller in
size than the king’s but with a similar hierarchy of spaces and ap-
pointments. His personal political following was largely constructed
out of trusted courtiers and the officials of his household. Pepys’s ad-
ministrative career was pursued as client of the duke. Conflict be-
tween the king’s and the duke’s courts was intense, especially after
James’s acknowledgement of his conversion to Catholicism. In the
late 1670s a Yorkist group of writers, with Dryden as its star, was as-
sembled by John Sheffield, Earl of Mulgrave to ensure that the duke’s
court did not lose out in the game of wit; however, the members
of this group were mostly professionals rather than courtiers.33
Rochester responded with a series of savage attacks on Mulgrave as
‘My Lord All-pride’. Mulgrave hit back in ‘An Essay upon Satyr’
with a scarifying portrait of Rochester for which he probably had the
assistance of Dryden. Administratively distinct courts were also cre-
ated for the queen, the queen mother, Prince Rupert, and the two
successive Duchesses of York and their children. Hamilton records
how the first duchess, the former Anne Hyde, ‘in order to form her
32
For the unseating of Clarendon see Marshall, Age of Faction, 100–5.
33
A kind of roll-call of them is given by the contributors to the group enterprise
Ovid’s Epistles Translated by Several Hands (1680).
new Court, resolved to inspect all the young persons that offered
themselves, and without any regard to recommendations, she chose
none but the handsomest’ and the difficulties that flowed from
choices made under this principle in an environment where mental
endowments were also essential.34
The structure of the court of Mary of Modena, the second duchess,
as it stood in 1677, will suggest something of its more fully staffed
counterparts. The senior functionary was the Groom of the Stole
(i.e. close-stool), Lady Peterborough, who managed the bedchamber.
Under her were two ladies of the bedchamber, four maids of
honour, and six bedchamber women (all gentlepersons). There were
also a starcher, a seamstress, a lacemender, a secretary, two gentlemen-
ushers, four gentlemen waiters, four pages of the back stairs, a
master cook, a necessary woman, eighteen watermen, a master of the
horse (the Earl of Roscommon), two equerries, eight footmen, four
coachmen with postilions and helpers, five grooms, and two chair-
men.35 Many of the households of the great aristocrats were organ-
ized along similar lines. So, to take one example, the elderly dowager
Countess of Devonshire lived ‘in the style of something more than a
great princess’, setting ‘a sumptuous table every day’.36 The senior
royal mistresses also presided over court-like establishments. When
the Duchess of Portsmouth went to take the waters at Bath in 1674
she dined in state every night and expected other noble ladies present
in town to wait on her on these occasions. She also had her own mu-
sical establishment of French virtuosi, whose performances were par-
ticularly relished by the king. When her position as premier mistress
was threatened in 1676 by Charles’s departure with the Duchess of
Mazarin for holidays at Windsor, Louis XIV reinforced this body
with singers from the Paris opera, from whose performances Charles
found it impossible to remain absent.37 Mazarin in due course set up
a mini-court at Chelsea, of which Saint-Evremond and the composer
Jacques Paisible were ornaments, financing it with rigged gambling.
34
Memoirs, ii. 90.
35
Edward Chamberlayne, Angliae Notitia: or, The Present State of England. The
First Part (London, 1677), 205–6.
36
Lorenzo Magalotti at the Court of Charles II: His Relazione d’Inghilterra of
1668, ed. and trans. W. E. Knowles Middleton (Waterloo: Wilfrid Laurier UP, 1980),
117.
37
For a detailed account of this highly revealing episode, see John Buttrey, ‘New
Light on Robert Cambert in London and his Ballet et Musique ’, Early Music, 23
(1995), 199–220.
Being prepared to lose money at cards seems to have been a kind of

entrance fee to the more interesting minor courts.
The queen’s and the two Duchesses of York’s courts, in addition
to their domestic staff, each had an allowance of maids of honour
and ladies of the bedchamber. These were the most prominent court
appointments reserved for women. Each group of maids had a
gouvernante known as the ‘Mother of the Maids’ but she possessed
little real authority. The position of the maids was not a happy one.
Their expenses, particularly in dress, were heavy and their emolument
light: in May 1674, when the queen’s maids were refused subvention
for their annual journey to Windsor, they actually went on strike, ap-
pointing Frances Sheldon their negotiator.38 Those of them who did
not take lovers, especially royal lovers, were accused routinely of
being lesbians. (Elizabeth Harvey apparently was.) But at least they
had recognized appointments, whereas the mistresses (unless they
were simultaneously maids or matrons of honour, a matter of some
delicacy) held their positions by courtesy alone: there was no
establishment position of maîtresse en titre. Appreciating this, the
Duchess of Cleveland badgered Charles until he forced the queen,
after violent protests, to accept her as one of her ladies. The lives of
the mistresses were perpetual theatre: they were the target of all eyes,
and the gossip of all tongues. Most difficult of all were their appear-
ances in ‘the circle’ at court, where their dress and appearance would
be subjected to hostile scrutiny. It is with this trial by ordeal that
Dorimant threatens Harriet in The Man of Mode:
Dor. Though you are obstinate, I know ’tis capable of improvement, and
shall do you Justice, Madam, if I chance to be at Court, when the Critiques
of the Circle pass their judgment; for thither you must come.
Har. And expect to be taken in pieces, have all my features examin’d, every
motion censur’d, and on the whole be condemn’d to be but pretty, or a
Beauty of the lowest rate. What think you?
Dor. The Women, nay the very lovers who belong to the Drawing-room will
malitiously allow you more than that; they always grant what is apparent,
that they may the better be believ’d when they name conceal’d faults they
cannot easily be disprov’d in.39
‘Conceal’d faults’, like Middleton’s body odour or Harvey’s ‘long
clitoris’, whether real or imaginary, are a dominant theme of the
38
Henry Stubbe to the Earl of Kent, [20 May 1674], BL MS Add. 35838, fo. 274v.
39
iv. i. 135–47, in The Dramatic Works of Sir George Etherege, ed. H. F. B. Brett-
Smith (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1927), ii. 248–9.
court lampoon.40 Seeing that the mistresses, despite their insecurity

of tenure, were always the wealthiest and most powerful group
among the court women, male courtiers of the king’s court were keen
to cultivate them. One way of doing this was to write ribald satires
on their behalf against their despised, tenured rivals of the queen’s
and duchess’s courts.
Court factional politics also had its territorial element concerned
with the possession of privileged living space within the palace of
Whitehall. The group-authored lampoon ‘Seigneur Dildoe’ contains
a joke at the king’s expense put into the mouth of the Duchess of
Portsmouth whose lodgings (three times demolished and recon-
structed before she was satisfied with them) were at the end of the
Long Gallery, the upper storey of the main north–south range of the
palace:
Great Sir, I pray, what doe you intend,
To fumble soe long att the Galleryes end?
If you Fuck mee noe better, I’le have you to know,
I’le lay you aside for Seignior Dildoe.41
Her predecessor Cleveland had occupied apartments above the

king’s with an interconnecting staircase. Less favoured invitees to the
bed in the alcove had to make their way through the famous back
stairs which led up from the Stone Gallery, the lower storey of the
Long Gallery. Courtiers’ ‘apartments’ should not be seen as elements
of a classically designed palace like Versailles. Apart from its major
east–west range and north–south gallery, Whitehall was more like a
crowded medieval town, in which one’s personal rooms might be in
the form of a detached or semi-detached building or a lean-to erected
against the side of some larger structure. Status was determined
partly by the amount of space assigned and partly by proximity to
the bed royal and privy chambers; insignificance was measured by
their opposite, as in ‘The Ladies’ March’:
Behold a dame too old to chancre ’em,
Vulgarly called my Lady Ancram,
Lodged in a garret at Whitehall,
Hard by the Countess of Fingal.42
40
For the latter see ‘Oh! what damn’d Age do we live in’, l. 7, in Rochester, Works,
279 and ‘Colin’, l. 45 (CSR, 25), where Middleton and Harvey are represented as
lovers.
41
Rochester, Works, 250 (ll. A69–A72). 42
CSR, 57.
Both the women mentioned belonged to the queen’s court. There was
keen competition for favoured locations. Court lampoons often have
an implicit geography, unperceived by modern readers—a matter fur-
ther discussed in Chapter 5. Their writers and readers would have
been well aware of places of waiting and residence within the palace.43
So, conflict at court was never a simple matter. To factional com-
petition for status and privilege within the king’s court, rivalries be-
tween official and supernumerary place-holders, and competition
between the four official courts and a number of unofficial ones, we
have to add acute competition for favoured pieces of territory within
the palace. The other major form of conflict was generational. The
early Restoration court was still dominated by elderly survivors,
headed by the Earl of Clarendon and the Duke of Newcastle, from
the pre-interregnum courts and the court in exile. The exiled court
had already seen tension between the old Cavaliers and those of the
young king’s generation, such as Buckingham and his allies. These
came to a head while plans were being made for the invasion from
Scotland of 1651. The 23-year-old Buckingham had successfully
opposed Clarendon by advocating an alliance with Argyle and the
Covenanters at the expense of the Scottish royalists under Montrose,
a decision which led inevitably to Montrose’s execution. Once away
from Clarendon’s direct influence Buckingham became even more
peremptory towards the king, pursuing him on horseback when he
attempted to escape to the royalists. The failure of the expedition left
Clarendon in unchallenged control of policy. Unable to match the
older generation at statecraft, Buckingham resorted to ridicule.
Clarendon wrote about him that
His quality and condescensions, the pleasantness of his humour and conversa-
tion, the extravagance and sharpness of his wit, unrestrained by any modesty
or religion, drew persons of all affections and inclinations to like his company,
and to believe that the levities and vanities would be wrought off by age . . .44
Burnet saw the situation in darker terms:
The man then in the greatest favour with the king was the Duke of Bucking-
ham; he was wholly turned to mirth and pleasure; he had the art of turning
43
For one application of court geography to a text created for court performance,
see my ‘Was Lucina Betrayed at Whitehall?’ in Nicholas Fisher (ed.), That Second
Bottle: Essays on John Wilmot, Earl of Rochester (Manchester: Manchester UP,
2000), 179–90.
44
Selections from the History of the Rebellion . . . and the Life by Himself, ed.
G. Huehns (Oxford: Oxford UP, 1955), 471.
things into ridicule beyond any man of the age; he possessed the young king
with very ill principles both as to religion and morality, and with a very mean
opinion of his father, whose stiffness was with him a frequent subject of
raillery.45
Charles, however, greatly preferred Buckingham’s personal style to

Clarendon’s and so, following the Restoration, did a new generation
of place-holders who were too young to have had any meaningful ex-
perience of the civil wars but were formed by the triumphalism and
the rapidly succeeding cynicism of the Restoration. The wits of this
generation, who included Rochester, Dorset, and Sedley, used a
three-pronged method to unseat their elders, exploding their moral-
ism with flagrant assertions and performances of its opposite, under-
mining their seriousness with unrelenting frivolity, and countering
their formal antiquated manners with the new ‘easy’ elegance. The
lampoon contributed to all three processes.
This intergenerational strategy also poised the lampoon on a deli-
cate balance between elegance and vulgarity which could easily tip
over in either direction but which, when it is successfully maintained,
produces a characteristic tone which has been admired in the satir-
ical lyrics of Rochester, Dorset, and Sedley. It will be convenient to
use one of Rochester’s grossest poems to illustrate this point since it
is, in a sense, one that only a virtuoso of the genre could have brought
off. The lyric ‘By all Loves soft, yet mighty Pow’rs’ is short enough to
quote in full:
Song
By all Loves soft, yet mighty Pow’rs
It is a thing unfit,
That Men shou’d Fuck in time of Flow’rs
Or when the Smock’s beshit.
Fair nasty Nymph, be clean and kind,
And all my joys restore;
By using Paper still behind,
And Spunges for before.
My spotless Flames can ne’re decay,
If after ev’ry close,
My smoaking Prick escape the Fray,
Without a Bloody Nose ;
45
Burnet, History, i. 33; see also i. 69.
If thou wou’dst have me true, be wise,

And take to cleanly sinning;
None but fresh Lovers Pricks can rise,
At Phillis in foul linnen.46
The achievement of the poem resides in a perfect matching of the

form and cadences of the Cavalier lyric, as perfected by Waller and
Suckling, with wholly incongruous content. This in itself brings about
a further complication of tone, which arises in the piece’s double
quality as a knowing and irreverent dislocation of the elements of the
Wallerian genre and an expert and even deferential tribute to it.
Great skill was required to sustain such a balance without tumbling
over into burlesque or parody, and yet this does not happen: what we
have instead is a perfectly poised piece of vers d’occasion. The poem
does not convey dislike of the woman addressed and expresses nei-
ther repugnance nor unseemly arousal at the manifestations of her
bodily functions; rather, it constitutes a good-humoured recommen-
dation how intercourse, like other relationships of court civility,
could be made more decorous for both of them, or, if we like, that
Butler’s agreed ‘demeanour of faces, legs and elbows’ might be ex-
tended to other bodily parts. Phillis would hardly be flattered by
being the recipient of this poem, and would be even less pleased by
the revelation of her ‘conceal’d faults’ to all its other readers; and yet
it is also a compliment to her presumed savoir faire and even an act
of friendship in that it is alerting her to a handicap affecting her per-
formance in the universal battle for wealth and status. (No rival
would warn her of this!) A contextual reading would suggest that
Phillis was a woman of wit and address but new to the refinements of
court civility, which would be exactly the case if, as seems likely, she
was Nell Gwyn.47
The poem also clarifies to the modern reader that, while there was
nothing in any way mystificatory about courtly sex, it was always an
intensely theatrical transaction in which attention had to be paid to
every detail of self-presentation. If it shocks us today it is not because
of its images (though divorced from a particular kind of generic con-
trol these would certainly shock) but because of a threatened trans-
gression of both social and poetic decorum which, in the event,
proves not to have taken place. What first presents itself as a piece of
Works, 37–8.
46
See my ‘Nell Gwyn and Rochester’s “By all Love’s soft, yet mighty Pow’rs” ’,
47
N&Q 247 (2002), 355–7.

impertinent malice has persuaded us by its close that it was almost

well-meaning. It is this reconciliation of vulgarity of content with
polished assurance that is the distinctive achievement of the Restor-
ation court lyric and the best of the lampoons. It is not always
achieved, and it must be acknowledged that many of the poems dir-
ected at women are blatantly misogynistic; and yet at its best such
verse stays in touch with the canons of civilized conversation, in the
gladiatorial sense in which these were then understood. The origin of
this discordia concors lay in the intergenerational politics of the early
years of the Restoration. The young needed to display their contempt
for the idealism of the older generation of court Platonics, while sim-
ultaneously demonstrating that they exceeded them in the arts of
courtliness which had been so prized in the last age. A lyric like ‘By
all Loves soft, yet mighty Pow’rs’ performs both tasks; however, this
represents an achievement of the 1670s that was still to be secured in
the early 1660s when the lampoon and the lyric traditions both
began. We need now to return to these beginnings.
t h e e a r ly c o u rt l a m p o o n
It is from the rivalries enumerated, as they took form around 1663,

that we can identify the birth of the Restoration court lampoon. Its
first recorded manifestations are partly generational but also arise
from a state of endemic rivalry between the male courts and the
female ones. Early in 1663 the Earl of Chesterfield, learning of an
affair between his countess and the Duke of York, had the bad taste
to remove her to the country. Hamilton’s account of this is as follows:
It was certainly some evil genius that induced Lord Chesterfield to distin-
guish himself from his patient countrymen, and by making a ridiculous fuss
to afford the world an opportunity of examining into the particulars of an
adventure, which would perhaps not have been known beyond the Court,
and would have been everywhere forgotten in a month’s time. As soon as
ever he had turned his back, to start on the march with his prisoner, and the
ornaments she was supposed to have bestowed upon him, God knows what
a terrible attack was made upon his rear. Rochester, Middlesex, Sedley,
Etherege, and the whole band of wits, produced a number of ballads which
diverted the public at his expense.48
48
Memoirs, ii. 41–2.
There are problems with this narrative, written decades after the
events described and in a form that was intended for the diversion of
ladies at the courts of Hanover and France rather than to give a faith-
ful account of historical facts.49 Rochester was only 15 at the time and
absent from England on the Grand Tour; moreover, no verse libels on
this subject are known to survive. Nonetheless, Hamilton’s narrative
is plausible as a confused memory of one such occasion overlaid with
memories of others of the same kind for which corroborating records
do survive.50 Chesterfield was transformed into a stock butt partly
because of his refusal to be a compliant cuckold in a court where old-
fashioned values of that kind and those who maintained them were
under constant attack, but principally, one suspects, because of his
position as Lord Chamberlain to Catherine of Braganza, who headed
the staidest and least fashionable of the three major female courts.
George deF. Lord’s comment that ‘Except for The Queen’s Ball, the
unfortunate Queen Catherine is hardly mentioned in Restoration
satire’51 is misleading, since she was continually under attack by proxy
through her ladies and maids. (Any direct assault might have compro-
mised the king.) There were also to be hysterical Whig attacks during
the Popish Plot agitation. By contrast the Chamberlain of the queen
mother’s establishment at Somerset House was the rakish Henry
Jermyn, an elderly favourite of the younger wits.
Conflict between the male and female courts certainly underlies
another surviving satire of 1663, which exists in two forms, the first
beginning ‘Cary’s face is not the best’ and the second ‘Roger told his
brother clown’. It consists of seventeen six-line stanzas using a dis-
tinctive trochaic opening to the first line and with the fourth and fifth
only half the length of the others, suggesting that it was written to a
pre-existing tune. The tone can be gathered from the two opening
stanzas of the shorter version:
Cary’s face is not the best,
But sh<e’s> as useful as the rest,
Though not so much alluring;
She’s near as good
As Madam Wood
For pimping and procuring.
49
The origins of Hamilton’s text are described in Paule Koch, ‘Trajectoire eu-
ropéenne d’une œuvre sans passeports: les “Fragments de la vie du comte de Gramont” ’,
in Giovanni Crapulli (ed.), Transmissione dei testi a stampa nel periodo moderno
(Rome: Edizioni dell’Areneo, 1987), ii. 207–54 + 8 pp. plates.
50
Cf. Rochester, Works, 92, 424. 51
POASY, i. 421.
Strangely pleasant were their chats,

When Mayne and Steward played at flats,
Their marriage night so taught them;
Till Charles came there
And with his ware
Taught how their fathers got them.52
The second stanza illustrates the way in which the lampoon both fed
off and was dependent on pre-existing gossip. Without knowing the
story involved one would not be in a position to identify ‘Mayne’ as
the Countess of Castlemaine (later Duchess of Cleveland) nor have
any chance of decoding the very elliptical narrative of a female same-
sex mock-marriage ceremony in which she was the bridegroom and,
after taking Frances Stuart to bed, allowed the king to take her place,
a story which Pepys records as ‘said to be very true’ (8 February
1663).53 More to the point is that all of the women libelled in the first
five stanzas were members of the queen’s court: Simona Cary, a maid
of honour, Castlemaine, a lady of the bedchamber, Stuart a maid of
honour, Winifred Wells, a maid of honour, Ellen Warmestry, a maid
of honour, Katherine Boynton, a maid of honour, and Bridget
Sanderson, the Mother of the Maids.54 Stanza 8 brings in Sir William
Killigrew, Vice-Chamberlain to the queen, and his daughter Eliza-
beth, one of the queen’s dressers, and stanza 16 Elizabeth Livingston,
a maid of the privy chamber to the queen. The remaining stanzas,
some of which may have been additions tacked on in circulation,
deal with other court figures; however, there can be little doubt that
the satirist’s initial aim was to libel women of the queen’s court and
that any other attacks were secondary to that. While making use of
already circulating gossip, the poem is emphatically the work of an
insider writing for other insiders. Its trochaic metre was to recur in
such later satires on court ladies as Dorset’s ‘Colin’ (1679), Mor-
daunt’s ‘The Ladies’ March’ (1681), and ‘On the Mayds of Honor
1689’ (‘Franklyns beauty does surprize’).55 It should be noted that
the queen’s appointees were mostly Catholics or Catholic sympa-
thizers, as were the duchess’s after her conversion. In the early 1660s
this was unlikely in itself to have been a source of antagonism but
52
CSR, 3, slightly relineated. See also Elmer L. Brooks, ‘An Unpublished Restora-
tion Satire on the Court Ladies’, ELN 10 (1973), 201–8.
53
Diary, iv. 38. 54
For these identifications see CSR, 6–9.
55
First two ibid. 23–31; 56–62.
was soon to become so. Attacks on the female courts are increasingly
coloured by sectarian bitterness.
That we do not have a richer harvest of court lampoons from the
early 1660s may in part be owing to the absence at the time of any
effective mechanism for collecting and recording scribally circulated
clandestine satire. For this to happen there had to be a recognition
that such pieces were worth preserving in written form (within the
court they may well have travelled memorially or by being read
aloud rather than retranscribed), so ensuring that a large enough
pool of copies emerged to offset the inevitable vulnerability of fugi-
tive ‘separates’ passed from hand to hand. By the late 1670s this task
was being performed by professional copyists who prepared both
single copies and anthologies of libels for sale, and by compilers of
private commonplace books who would make copies for their per-
sonal records; but for the early 1660s we have only one known manu-
script source, Yale MS Osborn fb 140, ‘A Collection of Poems,
Sayters and Lampoons’. The manuscript as we have it was written
during the mid-1670s but incorporates a number of earlier linked
groups of poems of varying date and theme encountered as already
formed collections. The volume begins with a sequence of pre-
Restoration drollery poems and anti-Puritan satires which are fol-
lowed by a ‘state’ satire of 1670, ‘The King’s Vows’. Next comes a
group of early court satires beginning with ‘On the Duke’s Servants’
(‘Charles Berkly talks aloud’) and the first two stanzas of ‘The Court
Ladies, a Lampone’ (‘Cary’s face is not the best’ in the ‘Roger’ ver-
sion). The following nine leaves have been excised; however, the
index reveals that, besides the rest of ‘Cary’s face’, they contained
three satires whose titles were ‘A Lampoon’ commencing on p. 22,
‘Upon the Dks: Maids of Honour’ commencing on p. 38, and ‘A Lam-
poon’, commencing on p. 40. These are followed by an attack on a
group of male courtiers ‘Young gallants of the town leave whoring I
pray’ of which the larger part survives.56 It is possible that among the
excised pieces were lost poems by Rochester referred to in two anec-
dotes recounted by Hamilton:
Saying this, the perfidious Hobart showed her friend half a dozen shameful
couplets [i.e. stanzas], which Rochester had made against the former maids
of honour. It was Miss Price whom he mainly assailed with the most bitter
56
For sources of the full version see Appendix.
shafts, anatomizing her person in the most hideous manner imaginable. Miss
Hobart had merely substituted the name of Temple for that of Price, which
she made to agree with both the measure and tune of the song.
***
Upon this discourse, Talbot thought it right to begin the recital of his suffer-
ings and fidelity, when Miss Temple, with a paper in her hand, entered the
room. This was a letter in verse, which Lord Rochester had written some
time before, upon the intrigues of the two Courts; wherein, upon the subject
of little Jennings, he remarked that Talbot had struck terror among the
people of God, by his gigantic stature; but that Jermyn, like a little David,
had vanquished the great Goliath.57
Rochester made his first formal appearance at court on Christmas

Day 1664, immediately following his return from the Grand Tour.
The ‘Satire on the Duke’s Servants’, taken together with the lost
satire on the duchess’s maids of honour, might have constituted the
satire on ‘the intrigues of the two Courts’ remembered by Hamilton.
The male-directed lampoon uses the same tetrameter couplets as
‘Cary’s face’, distinguished from the Hudibrastic kind by the pre-
dominant trochaic metre:
Never Prince was soe provided
Of things more fitt to be derided
Here’s a Stock would make one Cry
Coxcombes for th’ whole Family58
Suspect though Hamilton’s accounts may be in matters of date and
fact, there is no need to reject his testimony that libels were fre-
quently transmitted by being read aloud and that they could be
rewritten in transmission to change their application. The textual
history of two well-documented later court lampoons, ‘Seigneur
Dildoe’ and ‘In the Isle of Brittain’, show each being supplemented,
revised, and interpolated as they passed from scribe to scribe.59 From
the early 1670s court lampoons were much more likely to be
57
Memoirs, ii. 106, 168. For further commentary on these passages see Harold
Love, ‘Hamilton’s Mémoires de la vie du comte de Grammont and the Reading of
Rochester’, Restoration, 19 (1995), 95–102 and Rochester, Works, 474. Brooks, ‘An
Unpublished Satire’, 201 records an advertisement for a printed version of ‘A Satyr on
the Court-Ladies’ by Rochester which either never appeared or has failed to survive.
58
Yale MS Osborn fb 140, p. 22.
59
See my ‘A Restoration Lampoon in Transmission and Revision: Rochester’s(?)
“Seigneur Dildoe” ’, Studies in Bibliography, 46 (1993), 250–62; ‘A new “A” text
of “Signior Dildo” ’, Studies in Bibliography, 49 (1996), 169–75; and ‘Rochester’s
“I’ th’isle of Britain”: Decoding a Textual Tradition’, English Manuscript Studies
1100–1700, 6 (1997), 175–223, as well as Rochester, Works, 596–9.
preserved, largely because they had come to be eagerly sought by col-

lectors outside the court. ‘Seigneur Dildoe’, written late in 1673 as an
unofficial set of Fescennine verses for the marriage of James II to
Mary of Modena, is a series of highly abusive stanzas directed chiefly
at Catholics and with a strong representation of the women func-
tionaries of the queen’s court.60 In this respect the hostilities under-
lying ‘Cary’s face’ remained unchanged, though it would be fair to
say that Catholic faith was much more of a political issue now that
the heir to the throne had declared himself a Catholic and married a
Catholic duchess.
Rivalry between the women of the king’s, the queen’s, and the
duchess’s courts seems also to have inspired a complex satire of
1674, ‘Say Heav’n-born Muse’, which is one of the most unpleasant
examples of its genre, a fact that has led some editors of Rochester to
demote it from the canon.61 However, the piece deserves attention
for the sheer brilliance with which, by deploying a tissue of allusions
to Virgil, Milton, Spenser, Shakespeare, Homer, and the New Testa-
ment, it marries the materials of the court lampoon to the formal
tradition of classical burlesque, anticipating in this respect the
mock-heroic method of Dryden’s MacFlecknoe, written three or
four years later. In my edition of Rochester I argue for its being an au-
thentic work, despite the fact that Rochester himself appears in a not
very flattering light as a character in the poem; but in view of David
M. Vieth’s rejection I will simply refer readers to the evidence for and
against presented there.62 The action of the poem (a competition,
parodying that over the Homeric apple of discord, between three
aristocratic ladies for the ownership of a dildo donated by
Rochester) is set in Bath. The latest datable event referred to in it
took place on 23 April 1674. Rochester’s presence in Bath in the fol-
lowing July is proved by a letter of Henry Stubbe, which also estab-
lishes that he was in attendance on the king’s maîtresse en titre,
Portsmouth. Stubbe’s letter indicates that she had set up a miniature
court of her own, that she regularly dined in state with ‘all people . . .
admitted to see her, as were she Queen’, and that the aristocratic
ladies of the district had reacted to this presumption by not ‘visiting’
60
For identification see Rochester, Works, 475–81.
61
See in particular David M. Vieth, Attribution in Restoration Poetry: A Study of
Rochester’s ‘Poems’ of 1680 (New Haven: Yale UP, 1963), 174–7.
62
Works, 414–15.
her.63 The queen’s partisans in Bath would naturally have given their
support to the boycott even if they did not organize it. The satire
gives every sign of having been written from within Portsmouth’s ret-
inue in order to revenge the snub. There is an additional slur at the
expense of the Earl of Mulgrave, whose adherence to York had re-
cently secured him the Garter. The poet has, therefore, aligned him-
self with Portsmouth’s faction within the king’s court against the
representatives of the queen’s and the duke’s courts.
The next problem is to identify Portsmouth’s enemies. This proves
difficult because the poem gives every sign of having been revised in
order to change the identities of its subjects. These are four women
(Tall-boy, Kill-prick, Suck-prick, and ‘the mother of the maids’) and
a clergyman. The first three named are living in the same house in
Bath, where they are ‘Wanton in Bed, and Riotous at Board’. The
clergyman seems to have been intended in the first version for a
Catholic, possibly the queen’s almoner, Father Patrick, a stock figure
of such lampoons: the field of candidates is a restricted one owing to
the stringent laws then in place against Catholic worship. There are
jokes about ‘the man of God’ singing te deum, his devotion to ‘Holy
Church’, and his advocacy of intercession to saints. But the portrait
has been overwritten to apply to the rector of Bath, Joseph Glanville,
an Anglican cleric of Puritan inclinations who is pointed to by an ob-
scene joke about the title ‘rector’ and a pun on the title of his philo-
sophical treatise, Plus Ultra. The first of the women, Tall-boy,
appears to be a similar composite of the queen’s maid of honour
Philippa Temple and one of the queen’s ladies of the bedchamber,
Mary Berkeley, Countess of Falmouth. Jokes about ‘Gigantick’ size,
drunkenness (a tallboy was a drinking glass), and affairs with clergy-
men were the lampooners’ stock accusations against Temple. In
‘Seigneur Dildoe’ she is ‘Temple soe tall’. In ‘The Ladies’ March’
(1681) she is ‘Manton’s spouse’ (referring to the Presbyterian divine
Thomas Manton) and a devotee of ‘ale and cheese’. In ‘An Essay of
Scandal’ (1681) a repetition of the ‘ale and cheese’ taunt is combined
with an accusation of her having been sodomized by the Bishop of
London. In ‘An Heroic Poem’ (1681) she is pilloried for her
grotesque appearance and susceptibility to ‘some spread pampered
63
Henry Stubbe to the Earl of Kent, 18 July 1674, BL MS 35838, fo. 276r–v,
reprinted in James Jacob, Henry Stubbe, Radical Protestantism and the Early En-
lightenment (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1983), 135–6.
stallion robed in black’.64 In ‘A Ballad’ (‘To honourable court there

lately came’) she is accused of an addiction to ‘bottle ale’.65 However,
the fact that Tall-boy was a widow skilled at the ‘Cornish hug’ points
at another frequent butt in Falmouth.66 In this case it is not clear
which portrait is the overwritten one; but there may have been a
good reason for removing Falmouth, who in June 1674 had secretly
married Rochester’s friend the Earl of Dorset. Kill-prick and Suck-
prick, a mother and a daughter, are still unidentified, probably be-
cause a similar overwriting has produced a confusing mixture of
features; but they may be one (or both) of two mother-and-daughter
pairs introduced in the slightly earlier satire on the Catholic nobility,
‘Seigneur Dildoe’.67 ‘The mother of the maids’ is Lady Sanderson, the
gouvernante of the queen’s maids of honour. While there is an elem-
ent of speculation to all these identifications except the last, collec-
tively they identify the poem as directed at the queen’s supporters.
It might well be asked whether the portraits could have been con-
structed on a scattergun principle to catch as many victims as pos-
sible; but, if so, it would be against the overwhelming tendency of
Restoration court satire to be extremely precise in its targeting.
Indeed, it was rare not to give names directly. Wilson in his Court
Satires seldom has to look far for an identification. Even Rochester’s
more literary satires will often when probed reveal particular iden-
tities behind supposedly general portraits—Charles Blount and Lady
Sanderson again in ‘A Ramble in St James’s Park’, Isaac Barrow in
‘Against Reason and Mankind’, Nell Gwyn in ‘By all Loves soft, yet
mighty Pow’rs’.68 It must again be stressed that lampoons, like Pri-
vate Eye and stand-up comedians today, depended on a small num-
ber of stock figures, who would be recognized immediately by
readers. The key assumption is that of revision. Let us hypothesize,
without making any assumptions about Rochester’s involvement,
that ‘Say Heav’n-born Muse’ had been drafted as a Whitehall not a
Bath lampoon by a member of the king’s court as a contribution to
an already established genre of attacks on members of the queen’s
64
CSR, 16, 19, 57, 60, 64, 72, 75. She was a different person from the Miss
Temple mentioned in the Gramont passages quoted earlier.
65
BL MS Harl. 6913, fo. 59r.
66
The port of Falmouth is in Cornwall. The countess had been a widow since
1665, but not according to the lampooners a chaste one. Temple was single.
67
ll. A25–36, A73–6, in Rochester, Works, 248–50.
68
See Works, 412, 388 and Love, ‘Nell Gwyn and Rochester’s “By all Love’s soft,
yet mighty Pow’rs” ’.
court. An awkward aspect of the narrative is that ‘Rochester’ has to

return from Bath to Whitehall in order to consult the Mother of the
Maids: this would have been avoided if the whole action had been set
at the palace. There is even a possibility that not Rochester himself
but another ‘Spiney Lord’ may have been the protagonist of the earl-
ier version: the most likely substitute would be a Catholic member
of the queen’s or the Duke or Duchess of York’s households. Let us
hypothesize further that having been brought to Bath, the poem was
then hastily revised to apply to supporters of the queen involved in
the snubbing of Portsmouth. Rochester may have been the author of
the original version, the Bath revisions, or both. He must certainly be
a very strong candidate for the Bath revisions. In adjusting an exist-
ing verse libel to new circumstances he was doing no more than what
was done, as Hamilton records and the textual history of ‘In the Isle
of Brittain’ verifies, to his own writings. Information yet to be dis-
covered may help confirm or confute this hypothesis but can hardly
disqualify this unpleasant piece from being one of the masterpieces
of Restoration court satire. It is also fairer than most in its allocation
of abuse to male and female: ‘Rochester’ is moved by exactly the
same Hobbesian, corporeal impulses as the three women, and is
forced in the end, despite his display of prodigies of fornicatory
valour, to relinquish them to his superior in virility, the parson.69
c o u rt sat i r e b e c o m e s n at i o n a l
‘Say Heav’n-born Muse’ is a particularly pure form of its genre. Its

centring on a set of conflicts that were very much internal to the court
meant that it would have had very little interest or meaning outside
the court, or even outside Bath, and it is not surprising that it comes
down to us via a single manuscript and one printed source.70 It also
affirms the mystique of the court as an institution constituted out of
rules of behaviour that were unintelligible to outsiders. Nonetheless,
from the mid-1670s other, less hieratic kinds of court satire were be-
ginning to find a double audience through being read both inside the
court, as in-house communications, and outside it as accounts of the
69
Another argument for Rochester’s authorship: compare ‘Against Reason and
Mankind’, ll. 202–9 and ‘A Ramble in St James’s Park’, ll. 90–6 for two other ex-
amples of clerical stallions.
70
Works, 594.
circumstances under which the state was being ruled. One channel of
transmission was through the Inns of Court, whose members, while
generally hostile to the younger male courtiers, were also fascinated
by them and secretly aspired to join their ranks.71 A considerable
amount of copying of court lampoons seems to have taken place in
the Inns and further copies to have accompanied communications to
legal clients in the country.72 The effects of this external rereading
were sensational. Accusations of sexual misconduct routinely made
in the course of factional rivalry under a figurative substitution in
which, as we will see, they stood as metaphors for power relation-
ships were now given a new literal force as an index of the corruption
of the whole system of monarchical government. The impact of these
pieces can be compared with that of the Nixon and Clinton White
House scandals: in both cases deeply treasured images of the dignity
of supreme power were shattered beyond restitution. The difference
between the reading practices of the two audiences soon came to be
reflected in the appearance of new state lampoons written outside the
court, attacking the court mistresses, which have none of the polish
and playfulness that redeem the grossness of the true court lampoons,
but display an almost hysterical misogyny. Consider the title alone of
a performance directed at the Duchess of Portsmouth: ‘The Downfal
of the French Bitch, England’s Metropolitan Strumpet, The three
Nation’s Grievance, The pickled pocky Whore, Rowley’s Dalilah, all
in a word, The damn’d dirty Dutchess.’73 Under the same influence
genuine court lampoons began to appear which had more than half
an eye on the wider national audience. It will be helpful to look
quickly at a few of these in their relationship to the parallel genre of
state satire, concentrating on those which are available for consult-
ation in Wilson’s Court Satires and the Yale POAS collection.
Dorset’s ‘Colin’ stands firmly in the tradition of the satires on the
court women we have already considered. It is linked directly with
‘Cary’s face’ not only through its strong admixture of trochaic lines
71
On the hostility, see Brice Harris, Charles Sackville, Sixth Earl of Dorset, Patron
and Poet of the Restoration (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1940), 51–2.
72
For one example of legal involvement in the transmission of satires see my
‘Scribal Texts and Literary Communities: The Rochester Circle and Osborn b. 105’,
Studies in Bibliography, 42 (1989), 219–35. John Hoyle and Godfrey Thacker were
among legal figures involved in the transmission of court satires.
73
(‘What down in the dirt by St Leonard her grace’), POAS (1702–7), iii. 211.
Even this piece has to yield in point of grossness to an attack on Queen Catherine,
‘Thou worst of flesh in superstition stewed’.
but by the device of the pastoral introduction. In the ‘Roger’ versions

of the earlier poem this takes the form of a single introductory
stanza:
Roger told his Brother Clowne
Such newes as hee heard in the Towne
Just as they came from ringing
Soe they sat downe upon the ground
And thus they fell a singing74
No more is then heard of the pair. In ‘Colin’ the corresponding

introduction runs as follows:
As Colin drove his sheep along
By Whitehall there was such a throng
Of early coaches at the gate,
The silly swain was forced to wait.
At this point Colin too effectively disappears until the concluding

So they adjourned,
And Colin to his flock returned,
Swearing there was at every fair
Blither girls than any there.75
Likewise each lampoon is constructed round a series of abusive pen-

portraits of court ladies, those of ‘Colin’ being more extended but
essentially the same mixture of received scandal and revelations of
‘conceal’d faults’. Wilson calls ‘Colin’ a ‘sessions’ satire, comparing
it with the two Restoration ‘Sessions of the Poets’, modelled on Suck-
ling’s original,76 and other lampoons in which malefactors are
brought before an imaginary court; but it is equally suggestive of a
parallel tradition in which the victims are introduced in a march or
procession. ‘The Ladies’ March’ (1681; CSR, 56–9) is a poem of a
very similar kind to the two under discussion, which also makes free
use of the trochaic tetrameter. The pattern reminds us that real-life
courtiers did quite a deal of processing, in strict hierarchical order.
But in other ways ‘Colin’ stands outside this tradition: for a start it is
not concerned with rivalry between the courts or even within the
king’s court but with the malign influence of the office of maîtresse
en titre on the king’s governance of the realm.
74
Yale MS Osborn fb 140, p. 22. 75
CSR, 23.
76
POASY, i. 327–37, 352–6. See also below pp. 80–1.
The situation presented is one in which Portsmouth is imagined as

having offered her position for sale through a bidding process in
which Charles was to choose the winner. The bidders enter one by
one, are described, present their proposal, and are dismissed, with no
final decision being made. Dorset’s position at the time of the poem’s
composition was an ambiguous one. As a gentleman of the bed-
chamber he was still involved in court ceremonial and factional pol-
itics on a day-by-day basis but at a national level he was opposing
court policies in the Lords. The Buckingham faction, of which he had
been a leading member, had been driven from political power by
Danby and were now doing their best to destabilize Danby’s admin-
istration. Danby was simultaneously under attack from the Yorkist
faction who were even more violently opposed to the Bucking-
hamites. A short lapse of time would see Danby in the Tower and the
Yorkists on the defensive in the state against a concerted Whig par-
liamentary and popular movement to have the succession altered to
debar the duke from becoming king. Dorset writes as a court poet
whose attention is now diverted towards political action outside the
court rather than intrigue within it. His poem reflects this tension
and as a result invites different readings not by accident but by design
from two differentially envisaged audiences. As a court poem it
works by recycling time-honoured gossip about love affairs and
‘conceal’d faults’, such as Jane Middleton’s body odour.
Next Middleton appeared in view,
Who soon was told of Montague,
Of baits of Hyde, of clothes from France,
Of armpits, toes, and sufficance. (ll. 34–7)77
There is a certain routine quality about the retailing of this and other
court lampoon clichés, suggesting that the genre was beginning to
live off its past. As a national poem, on the other hand, its aim is to
strip the court of its glamour. There is nothing particularly erotic
about the women, as the poem presents them, or about the appeals
they offer the king which, since this is a formal sale of a place, have
to be monetary as well as sexual.
And Morland fair enters the list,
Husband in hand most decently,
And begs at any rate to buy.
77
CSR, 24. ‘Sufficance’ here has its secondary French sense of vanity or bump-
tiousness.
She offered jewels of great price

And dear Sir Samuel’s next device,
Whether it be a pump or table,
Glass-house or any other bauble. (ll. 47–53)
Charles’s own motives are also primarily economic:

This hour from French intrigues, ’tis said,
He’ll clear his Council and his bed.
Portsmouth, he now vouchsafes to know,
Was the cast miss of Count De Soe,
Each night with her dear as a sessions
Of the House, and fuller of petitions . . . (ll. 11–16)
He has decided in favour of ‘retrenching’ and ‘would no more of

costly wenching’. In other words he is behaving exactly as the parlia-
mentary Whigs wished him to behave. The materials of this poem are
drawn from court life and Dorset’s voice is still recognizable as that
of a court factional satirist; but the perspective of appraisal and con-
demnation is external to the court.
The sense of court life being represented for the amusement or in-
struction of another constituency becomes even more strongly evi-
dent in satires of the next few years. Even so unmistakable a court
satire as ‘Ignis Ignibus Extinguitur’ (1682) feels the need to make a
concession to possible women readers outside the walls of Whitehall.
The main theme of the poem is that Charles (who is directly ad-
dressed in court style as ‘sacred Sir’) should dispose of Nell Gwyn.
Protect this Drab no more;
If you must have One, have a handsome Whore.
Of such foul Hags there ne’r can be a Dearth;
O send her to her Dunghil, Mother Earth!
Old, Wrinckled, Ugly, Loathsome as a Grave,
She’d turn the Stomach of your meanest Slave.78
The objection is, again, primarily aesthetic: Nell no longer looks

good enough to hold her position at Whitehall, and is in any case of
low birth. (She was also of course a Protestant, though this is not
explicitly raised: the lampoon could well have originated from the
retinue of one of the Catholic mistresses.) However, the author is un-
certain enough about his audience to preface the piece with a general
apology:
78
Your pardon then, you Fairest ones, (for all

Under that Universal notion fall),
If what I paint, you construe for ill Nature.
The wise will Kindness see in every Feature;
Ungovern’d Lewdness wou’d I fear Traduce
The pleasing Sport, and shame it <out> of use.79
This is not the tone of court satire, which had always been totally un-
apologetic about its misogyny and totally frank about the prevalence
at court of ‘ungoverned lewdness’. The poem’s concern for the sens-
ibilities of female readers is a ‘Town’ one.
‘Rochester’s Farewell’ (‘Tired with the noisome follies of the age’;
late 1680 and present in twenty MS sources) is a diatribe written
from what appears to be a moderate Yorkist factional position.
Mulgrave is ridiculed for seeking military glory in Tangier, while
Monmouth, Buckingham, and the inevitable Mazarin and Portsmouth
are treated much more roughly. The opening expresses a general hos-
tility towards the court as an ‘Augean stable’ which is impossible to
clean, and there is a vividly dismissive depiction of the departing
Tangier officers at a court ball:
First at her Highness’ ball he must appear,
And in a parting country dance learn there
With drum and fife to make a jig of war.
What is of soldier seen in all the heap
Besides the flutt’ring feather in the cap,
The scarf, and yard or two of scarlet cloth
From Gen’ral Mulgrave down to little Wroth? (ll. 57–63)80
But what follows is a series of personal attacks with no evident the-

matic connection. It is as individuals rather than as courtiers that the
satirist’s victims are brought to judgement and the faults for which
they are castigated are moral ones not violations of courtly decorum.
‘An Heroic Poem’ (1681), which survives in thirteen MS sources,
is superficially easy to categorize as a court poem because of the large
number of court functionaries and hangers-on named in its short,
barbed attacks.81 A passage of particularly gross, visually specific
abuse directed at the long-suffering Philippa Temple indicates that
hostility towards the queen’s maids of honour was still a motivating
force:
79
Fos. 109v–110r. 80
POASY, ii. 221.
81
Texts in CSR, 68–75 and POASY, ii. 228–34.
First Temple shall forbear t’admire the back

Of some spread pampered stallion robed in black,
She who so long a fallow land has laid,
And brought a scandal on the name of Maid,
Who while before the other nymphs she walks,
And with her hanging dugs like dewlaps stalks,
As some milch cow that leads the tender mulls,
Licks up and goads the cods of slouching bulls;
So, drunk with lust, she rambles up and down
And bellows out, ‘I’m bulling round the town.’
Not Felton’s wife was in her youth more lewd,
Or on the rising cud has oft’ner chewed,
Nor Nell so much inverted nature spewed.82
Having conceded the grossness and no doubt unfairness of this por-

trait, we should also acknowledge it as evidence of the point made
earlier about the arbitrary nature of lampoon accusations. Once
Temple had been set up as a stock butt, the accusation of her being a
seductress of clergymen became an automatic reflex.
So far the poem is firmly anchored in court life and appearances;
yet, there is no strong sense of factional animus and the victims seem
to have been chosen merely because they irritated the satirist person-
ally. Like ‘Rochester’s Farewell’ ‘An Heroic Poem’ is written in
heroic couplets of a sententious neoclassical kind. Opening with a
mock-Virgilian statement of topic followed by a burlesque invoca-
tion, it constitutes polished writing by the standards of the genre.
Consider this:
He was a vermin that stuck fast to bite;
Put sullen virtue on to cloak his sin,
Scipio without, but Catiline within.83
or this, with its ironical echo of Othello in the closing line:

Victorious dullness sits upon his brow,
And in each line of his notorious face,
As in its proper indisputed place.
In full defiance to pretense of wit,
In broad Scotch characters, Fool, Fool is writ.84
The Homeric simile of the milch cow leading the mulls has Spenser-
ian analogues. It comes as no surprise to find the poem ascribed to
82
CSR, 72. 83
Ibid. 69; also POASY, ii. 229.
84
CSR, 70; also POASY, ii. 231.
Dryden in one manuscript source nor that stylometric tests con-

ducted by John Burrows point to Dorset as the author.85 Its neoclas-
sical polish would suggest that it was not intended for court readers
alone, who had little appreciation of such things, but the wider con-
stituency of the wits of the Town, the Inns of Court, and the univer-
sities. A later poem by Dorset, ‘A Faithful Catalogue of our Most
Eminent Ninnies’, shows a further stage in the colonization of court
satire by neoclassicism. While ‘Say Heav’n-born Muse’ and ‘An
Heroic Poem’ move the court lampoon into the territory of the
mock-heroic, it is the 481-line ‘Faithful Catalogue’ (discussed in de-
tail in Chapter 7) that represents its most determined genuflection
towards the Juvenalian model of formal verse satire.
s e x a n d t h e s i n g l e c o u rt i e r
Since the lampooners’ hostile treatment of Philippa Temple has been

instanced several times in this chapter, there is an obligation to make
some kind of sense of it. The satirists’ vision of her ‘bulling’ around
the court is unlikely to bear any relation to reality. Temple’s vulner-
ability to insult is more likely to have resulted from her being unusu-
ally tall and attached to the least fashionable of the sub-courts, that
of Queen Catherine. That she was an alcoholic and a compulsive
seducer of clergymen is most unlikely. Her much-ridiculed fondness
for ale probably indicates no more than that, following traditional
English custom, she made small beer her table drink in a court of
Gallophile winebibbers. (The queen herself drank only water.) For
the second accusation to arise required only that she should display
a degree of religious commitment which, while unusual among
Protestants at court, was common in society at large. In any case we
would hardly blame a woman in her situation for wishing to distance
herself from the Catholics of the queen’s court during the dangerous
Popish Plot years when Catherine herself became the object of accus-
ations by Titus Oates which were much worse than any directed at
her maid of honour.86 The writer of another lampoon on the maids
85
From a database of major poets of the period, he is strongly preferred. The ques-
tion then arises whether an unrepresented minor poet could have been capable of so
virtuosic a piece.
86
These included her involvement in the murder of Sir Edmund Berry Godfrey and
planning to poison her husband. Oates went too far here: despite his many infidelities
Charles was always totally loyal to Catherine in her position as his consort.
of honour, ‘To honourable court there lately came’, can find nothing
worse to say about her than
Pious Temple who has long been musty and stale
By her dayly devotion and hope to prevail
To gaine . . . kind creddit for more bottle Ale87
Allowing that she may have had affairs, she could hardly have been
the monster of lust depicted by the lampooners and simultaneously
held her position as a maid of honour to the queen for over twenty
years.88
So how are we to interpret such descriptions as the following from
‘An Essay of Scandal’ (1681) in which Charles is urged to cashier the
expensive Portsmouth and Gwyn in favour of ‘cheap, wholesome
whores’. To achieve this he should
Take Temple, who can live on cheese and ale,
Who never but to bishop yet turned tail;
She’s seasoned, fit to bear a double brunt,
In her arse London, Rowley in her cunt.
Bishop and King, choose (handy-dandy) either;
They still club votes, why not club seeds together?89
The author has the grace to concede that Temple is only a putative
lover for Charles and no one would for a moment have believed the
accusation directed against Henry Compton, the Whig Bishop of
London—indeed, it is explicitly conceded that she was ‘wholesome’
(i.e. free of venereal disease). What we are actually given is an alle-
gory of the political alliance (clubbing of votes) in which the bishops
in the Lords had unanimously supported Charles’s anti-exclusionist
policies in the cycle of parliaments recently completed. ‘Temple’ in
this description is the surrogate for those parliaments, corrupted
simultaneously by the king’s gold and the more subtly disbursed
patronage of the Church of England hierarchy. We have to read past
this sexual narrative for its political core in the same way as Lois Pot-
ter has instructed us how to read through the more decorous narra-
tives of royalist writers of the interregnum.90
87
‘Ballad’, BL MS Harl. 6913, fo. 59r.
88
Temple was still a maid of honour in the absent queen dowager’s residual
English court as late as 1700.
89
CSR, 64.
90
Secret Rites and Secret Writing: Royalist Literature 1641–1660 (Cambridge:
Cambridge UP, 1989).
Sodomy, with both sexes, was ineradicably associated in the

minds of Protestant Britons with the Roman Catholic clergy and
with Catholicism generally.91 In the obscene play Sodom, Charles’s
Declaration of Indulgence of 1672, which gave Catholics a measure
of religious freedom, is parodied as a universal legitimization of
buggery.92 Elsewhere, Rochester, in a morbid piece of self-parody,
announces that he has
. . . swiv’d more whores more ways then sodoms walls
E’re knew or the Colledge of Romes Cardinalls.93
It was also tacitly assumed that those members of the Church of Eng-
land who had to endure enforced celibacy, which included the
fellows of Oxford and Cambridge colleges, were addicted to the
Roman vice, while their Nonconformist counterparts were por-
trayed as ‘stallions’ to ‘holy sisters’. The association of Catholicism
with sodomy recurs in a verse lampoon comparing Portsmouth with
Nell Gwyn:
Have you not heard how our Soveraigne of late
Did first make a Whore then a Dutches Create
A notable Wench of the Catholick kinde
A Whore not onely before, but a Bugger behinde
Poor Protestant Nell, well were it for thee
Wert thou a Whore of a double Capacity
Alas the Royall Pintle never yet went
Into thy Maiden Lach or Fundament
Thou art Resolv’d, what e’re on it come
Protestant like to keep Chast thy Bum.
Thou nobly scorns’t, by such base Arts to thrive
But let the best French Whore that’s now alive
Meet if she dare, and fairely with thee swive.94
Taken together, these examples and the Temple satires point at a

more general analogy through which sexual subjection stands as a
metaphor for the subjections enforced at every level of court behav-
iour by the assertion of absolute power. Either the male or the female
91
On the history of this prejudice see Alastair Bellany, The Politics of Court Scan-
dal in Early Modern England (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2002), 257–61.
92
On this point see Richard Elias, ‘Political Satire in Sodom’, SEL 18 (1978),
423–38.
93
‘To the Post Boy’, ll. 5–6 (Works, 43).
94
‘A Satyr’, Yale MS Osborn fb 140, p. 173. For Portsmouth, cf. Turner,
Libertines and Radicals, 259–60.
might be dominant in such relationships: the point at issue was

whether the person who was sexually dominant was also dominant
in the ‘natural’ hierarchy of the state. If this was the case both the rela-
tionship and the lust it aroused might be seen as laudable; but in situ-
ations where the power gradient of the relationship was opposed to
that of the established hierarchy we would expect to discover con-
structive treason, which would express itself through irregular forms
of sexual activity. So, while there could be no objection to Temple’s
submitting to the king, there clearly was to her submitting, in explicit
violation of Erastian principles of statecraft, to the bishop. The un-
naturalness of Portsmouth’s sexual domination of the king is a per-
petual theme of both the court and the state lampoon. By a
symbolism most memorably encapsulated by Rochester, the woman
who had control of the king’s penis was in control of the state:
Nor was his high desire above his Strength:
His Scepter and his Prick were of a length,
And she may sway the one who plays with t’other95
Because Portsmouth’s intercourse with the king reverses the consti-

tutional delegation of power, it cannot count as fair swiving and
must, therefore, be depicted as sodomy. Nell on the other hand, who
offers the king pleasure without in any way wishing to encroach on
his prerogative, becomes a champion not only of Protestantism but
of orthodox intercourse. In such ways the sexual invective endemic
to the lampoons often asks to be construed as political allegory. I be-
lieve this was sensed by at least some of the writers of these pieces and
that in their narratives of scandal they were interrogating problems
in the exercise of power that could not at that period be addressed in
any more satisfactory or intelligent way.
One consequence of this emblematic use of sexual insults is that
accusations of sodomy, whether heterosexual or homosexual, made
in lampoons cannot, when they belong to the language of political al-
legory, be taken as a guide to actual patterns of sexual behaviour at
the court or elsewhere. (It should also be noted that ‘arse’ will often
be used as a metonym for vagina in couplets where it is needed as a
rhyme word for ‘tarse’ and ‘bum’ when it has to rhyme with ‘thrum’.)
The same naturally applies to heterosexual behaviour attributed as
95
Works, 85–6. The theme of Portsmouth’s power over the kingdom exercised
through her sexual control of the king is most fully developed in a state satire, ‘The
Looking Glass’, BL MS Harl. 6913, fos. 51r–52v.
part of the same hermetic language to men and women who were
real-life homosexuals. While the lampoon tradition, taken collec-
tively, contains much otherwise unobtainable evidence about
Restoration homosexuality its purpose was never sociological. One
of several lampoon references to Anne, Lady Freschville, accusing
her of being a lesbian, adds the anatomical detail:
It once was my fortune to turn up her Cloths,
Three Inches of P—k hard by her C—t grows.
You Ladies who yet have not heard of her Name,
At her House may be sped with a Man or a Dame.96
The notion that lesbians had large clitorises comes from folk legend,
while its introduction as a ‘concealed fault’ is patently generated by
the medium, not any personal knowledge of the lampooner. The pol-
itical subtext of the reference is to be sought in Freschville’s pos-
ition as a gentlewoman of the bedchamber to Princess Anne at a time
of hostility between her and her sister Queen Mary, one of the issues
of which was Anne’s infatuation with Sarah Churchill.97
These decodings of sexual insults are not meant to absolve the
lampooners of their habitual, often brutal misogyny, something ex-
plicitly proclaimed in the opening lines of ‘Essay on Scandal’:
Of all the plagues with which this world abounds,
Our discords causes, wid’ners of our wounds,
Sure woman is the lewdest can be guessed;
Through woman, mankind early ills did taste;
She was the world’s first curse, will be the last.98
Patriarchal prejudice could not be more nakedly displayed. Homo-

phobia is just as routine and unthinking. Surprisingly little lampoon
verse openly adopts a gay perspective.99 In other cases, the pornopol-
itics of the lampoon betrays a very ancient and persistent moral pos-
ition in which sex itself is seen as inherently corrupt. There is little
uncomplicated celebration of the pleasures of copulation to be found
among the writers of scribally circulated verse, and when this is at-
tempted, as in Mulgrave’s ‘The Perfect Enjoyment’ (‘Since now my
96
‘Satyr, on the Ladys of Honor’, Bodleian Library, MS Firth c 16, p. 213.
97
For this see POASY, v. 339–44 and the attack on the ‘Princess’ ladies’ at v. 351,
which accuses them of being prudish and malicious.
98
CSR, 63.
99
That which does is considered in Paul Hammond, Figuring Sex between Men
from Shakespeare to Rochester (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2002).
Sylvia is as kind as fair’), it often strikes a strangely unpersuasive

note. Instead, the governing equation is one between sexual
performance and physical decay. Lust is a fire that not only corrupts
the soul but distorts the body, especially those parts of the body most
directly engaged in it. Penises are deformed, chancred, or become too
‘limber’ to execute their function; clitorises ‘mount in open day’;
vaginas become monstrously enlarged or congested with ‘whites’:
Besides her other charming qualities,
As dewlaps hanging down her tawny thighs
And ever moistened with congenial glue,
Just like the bull that fierce Almanzor slew;
Besides an odoriferous perfume,
Which yet, like strength of cordials, may o’ercome.100
The comic exaggeration of decay at the conclusion of Sodom is dif-
ferent only in degree from the habitual representations of the court
lampoon.
The Pr—s are eaten off the womens parts
Are witherd more then their dispareing hearts
The Children harbour heavy discontents
Complaineing sorely of their fundaments.
The old doe curse and envy all that swiue
And yet in spight of impotence will striue
And Fuck and bugger tho’ they stinke aliue101
}
These descriptions, for all their comic bravura, reinscribe an ancient
body-hating morality inherited from the medieval Church and the
attendant medical doctrine, also embraced by Donne, that orgasm
was a dissipation of vital powers that were essential for the pro-
longation of life and health. For all their impropriety, their moral
lesson is actually a very conservative one—a matter to be considered
further in Chapter 6.
t h e r e i g n s o f J a m e s a n d W i l l i a m a n d M a ry
The accession of James II in 1685 saw a serious attempt to suppress

the sexual excesses of Charles’s time, a campaign that became even
more marked as Protestant functionaries were replaced by Catholic
100
‘On Three Late Marriages’, ll. 65–9; CSR, 78.
101
Rochester, Works, 330.
ones, including those holding orders. This should have led to a decline
in the older style of court lampooning but its effect was the reverse, in
that much had now come to depend on the new reforms being proved
to be as hypocritical as those formerly made by the Puritans. To be
godly in either form was to provoke an immediate suspicion of insin-
cerity. How the court was now seen from outside is indicated by a re-
vealing passage in ‘The Town Life’ (‘Once how I doted on this jilting
town’), a ‘Town’ lampoon of 1686 describing a typical day spent in
the new pleasure city of the West End. Viewed from this perspective
the court is no longer the fons et origo of values and styles but simply
one of the sideshows of the Town to be visited in the normal course of
the day. It was still of course the centre of the national administration
but actual power, as the events of 1688 were to show, was steadily
slipping out of the hands of that administration.
But now for cards and play they all propose,
While I who never in good breeding lose,
Who cannot civilly sit still and see
The ladies pick my purse and laugh at me,
Pretending earnest business drive to court,
Where those who can do nothing else resort.
The English must not seek preferment there,
For Mac’s and O’s all places destin’d are.
No more we’ll send our youth to Paris now—
French principles and breeding once would do—
They for improvement must to Ireland sail,
The Irish wit and language now prevail.
But soft my pen, with care this subject touch,
Stop where you are, you soon may write too much! (ll. 116–29)102
The court so reconstructed was no longer central in any meaningful

way to the cultural and intellectual life of the metropolis but had be-
come an outpost of an alien minority. This siege predicament had the
effect of muting factional conflict within the court itself, even though
important differences certainly existed at the political level, even
among Catholics. A large portion of the old functionary class simply
withdrew from active participation in the ceremonial life of the court
or kept their appearances to a minimum. Unlike Charles, who had
liked to keep factions at each other’s throats in order to prevent any
single one from gaining an ascendancy, James wanted a court that
102
POASY, iv. 67.
was unified in politics and, if possible, also in religion. The copious

satire directed at his priests, the old Catholics, and the new converts
came from outside the court. Much of it had its origin in a kind of dis-
persed, Protestant court in exile who were perfectly acquainted with
the life of the palace.
The coming to the throne of William and Mary brought yet an-
other set of relationships between the court and the outside world.
William was contemptuous of court ceremonial and was no more in-
clined than James to tolerate the older kinds of flagrant immorality.
He restricted himself to a single discreet mistress, and though the
Jacobites never ceased to accuse him of homosexual relationships with
his closest Dutch male advisers there is a sense of a desperate raking
for scandal to these attacks. Mary’s female court was relatively free
of the kind of scandal which had stigmatized its predecessors. Both
of them disliked the old palace of Whitehall (which in 1698 was de-
stroyed by fire), preferring to spend their time at other residences, es-
pecially Hampton Court. The only competing court on English soil
was that of Mary’s sister, the future Queen Anne, the two being dis-
tinguished in one satire as ‘Kensington Court and the Court of
Bantam’, but neither provided much occasion for lampoons.103 Despite
this superficially unpromising atmosphere, poems about court life,
largely from the pens of Dorset and his circle of protégés, continued
to appear, circulated in manuscripts written by the ‘Cameron’ scrip-
torium.104 However, the bulk of the lampoons on court topics do not
constitute court poetry in the sense given to the term at the beginning
of this chapter. Instead we encounter work by exiles from the court
writing about the court for an external audience, total outsiders writ-
ing about the court, and political satire with no connection with the
court using the language and tropes of court satire as a way of at-
tacking the great. All these will be considered shortly under other
headings. As a sign that an era was at an end, the period also saw the
consolidation of the court satire of the previous two reigns into vast
manuscript anthologies, some of which, arranged in chronological
order, constituted a kind of secret history of past events in the inner
recesses of power.105 But little of the new, genuine verse had either
103
POASY, v. 369.
104
W. J. Cameron, ‘A Late Seventeenth-Century Scriptorium’, Renaissance and
Modern Studies, 7 (1963), 25–52.
105
Collections of this kind include BL MS Harl. 7319; Victoria and Albert Mu-
seum MS Dyce 43 and its near twin Österreichische Nationalbibliothek, Cod. 14090.
the savagery or the vivid particularity of the old. Rather it recounted,

with urbanity and amusement, the kind of day-to-day altercations
and impertinencies that might have arisen in any large settled com-
munity. In some cases, represented by the two poems ‘The Nine’ and
‘The Female Nine’, the occasions arose during William’s frequent
absences in Ireland or to campaign in the Netherlands when the con-
duct of the state was left in the hands of a council.106
It is doubtful how far the considerable body of vituperative verse
that emerged from the court in exile at Saint-Germain should be al-
lowed to count as court poetry: for the most part its motivation is
undisguisedly national and political. The cultural life of the exiled
court was a richer one than is normally realized and it had its distin-
guished writers as well as its great musicians (including François
Couperin); but it remains beyond the consideration of this study.
Court satire was to revive at several points during the eighteenth
century but by 1700 the particular heteroform composition of the
Restoration court, and the fierce energies released within that un-
stable compound, were largely neutralized. It is time now to consider
what the court invention had contributed to the broader field of
satirical writing beyond its walls.
106
See POASY, v. 195–201, 202–10 and pp. 163–4 below.
3
The Town Lampoon
In the epilogue to Aglaura (1638), Suckling divides up the Blackfriars

audience into five juries, each of which is to give its separate opinion
of the play. The first is a ‘Grand Jurie . . . of Towne-wits’. The second
is a ‘Jurie of the Court’. The third and fourth are composed of the
‘Ladies of the Towne’, and ‘their servants’. The fifth is that of ‘the
Citie’.1 This indicates that there was already a clear conception of
the ‘Town’ as something distinct from the older urban entities of the
court and the city—a matter that has been perceptively explored by
Lawrence Manley.2 In the prologue to Marriage A-la-mode (1671)
Dryden speaks more specifically of the theatre’s ambition ‘T’oblige
the Town, the City, and the Court’ (l. 39). This triform division of the
metropolis, which is also made by several other Restoration drama-
tists, reflects a distinction that by that time was geographical and
demographical as well as cultural.3 Geographically the City was the
old London within the medieval walls and its ancient suburbs beyond
them, and was governed by its mayor, aldermen, and livery com-
panies. The court was identified with the palace of Westminster at
what was then the southern extremity of the metropolis, facing open
fields on the opposite bank of the Thames. The Town was the new west-
ward and south-westward extension from the City that was rapidly
1
The Works of Sir John Suckling: The Plays, ed. L. A. Beaurline (Oxford: Claren-
don Press, 1971), 95.
2
Literature and Culture in Early Modern London (Cambridge: Cambridge UP,
1995), 481–97.
3
For further examples of this tripartition, see the epilogue to Shadwell’s The Sullen
Lovers (1668), l. 8, in The Works of Thomas Shadwell, ed. Montague Summers
(London: Fortune Press, 1927), i. 92; Buckingham’s ‘A Familiar Epistle to Mr Julian,
Secretary to the Muses’, l. 61, in POASY, i. 390; the epilogue to Nathaniel Lee’s
Theodosius (1680), l. 29, in The Works of Nathaniel Lee, ed. Thomas B. Stroup and
Arthur L. Cooke (New Brunswick, NJ: Scarecrow Press, 1954–5), ii. 304; v. i. 489–90
of Otway’s The Soldier’s Fortune (1681), in The Works of Thomas Otway, ed. J. C.
Ghosh (Oxford, 1932), ii. 186; and ii. iii. 25 of Crowne’s The English Frier (1690), in
The Comedies of John Crowne: A Critical Edition, ed. B. J. McMullin (New York:
Garland, 1984), 522.
The Town Lampoon 67
filling the space between it and the palace. Dryden makes no refer-
ence to the Southwark area of the south bank, although half a cen-
tury earlier this had been the primary site of theatrical performance.
The pull of the court and the Town had drawn the players and
dramatists northwards. At the time he wrote, one house, Drury Lane,
stood in Covent Garden, and the other, specializing in spectacular
drama, was operating within the boundaries of the City at Dorset
Garden. The geographical Town is usually designated by that name;
however, since ‘town’ continued to be used in its old general sense of
the entire conurbation, it was also common to speak of ‘this end of
the town’ or ‘t’other end of the town’, with the import of the phrase
varying with the social allegiance of the speaker. One also encounters
‘t’other-end-of-the-town’ and ‘this-end-of-the-town’ as compound
adjectives.4 Characters in Ravenscroft’s The London Cuckolds i. i
contrast ‘that damn’d lewd other end of the Town’ with ‘this sober
end of the Town’ (i.e. the City).5 Though terminology wavered, there
was an acute sense of a cultural difference which is reflected in the
styles of lampooning characteristic of court, City and Town.
T ow n v e rs u s c o u rt
While the Town lampoon and the court lampoon use a similar verse
manner to attack many of the same members of the ruling elite, and
while ‘Rochester’s Farewell’, ‘An Heroic Poem’ and the ‘Faithful
Catalogue’, already discussed, might, depending on one’s personal
orientation, have been read as either, there is usually little problem in
categorizing particular works as being written from a court or a Town
perspective. A court satire is of the court, courtly: it is written for a
court readership about court concerns of status, factional striving for
power, and corporate style. It arises from a sense of the special iden-
tity of the court as a community and sets out to reinforce that com-
munity’s sense of exclusiveness. A Town satire speaks to a new social
formation which was still in the process of fashioning its identity.
4
e.g. in Behn, The City Heiress, ii. i. 87–8, The Revenge, i. i. 30, and Sir Patient
Fancy, iv. iii. 92–3, in The Works of Aphra Behn, ed. Janet Todd, 7 vols. (London:
Pickering and Chatto, 1992–6), vii. 23, vi. 167, vi. 57; and Cibber, The Double Gal-
lant, iv. i. 314–15, in Colley Cibber’s ‘ The Double Gallant’: A Critical Old-Spelling
Edition, ed. John Whitley Bruton (New York: Garland, 1987), 130.
5
(London, 1682), 2, 7.
68 The Town Lampoon
Satire was a means of asserting this community’s independence from

the older, competing pair, of training its members in acceptable
modes of deportment, and of articulating shared values. The Town
looked to its lampooners, along with its dramatists, to explain to it
what it was and what it might become. This applied even when
writers and readers were technically members of more than one com-
munity, since individual allegiances might easily vary to suit the
environment of the moment. An analogy today might be the kind of
change in attitude that takes place when a member of the community
of pedestrians gets behind a wheel to become a member of the com-
munity of drivers or vice versa, switching one variety of road rage for
an entirely different one. Rochester ‘was wont to say that when he
came to Brentford the devill entred into him and never left him till he
came to the country again’ but he might well have had a similar ex-
perience in moving between Whitehall and Covent Garden.6 However,
before attempting to discover what distinguished a Town mindset
from a court one, it will be necessary to give some attention to the
urban dynamics of the metropolis during the Restoration decades.
In the reign of Charles I, when government policy was firmly op-
posed to the development of the West End for housing, much of it
was still fields. This anti-development policy was prompted by a fear
that, if the opportunity were available, the better-off gentry families
would abandon their responsibilities as landlords, justices of the
peace, and manipulators of parliamentary elections in favour of
spending the greater part of the year in London. During the interreg-
num, with political priorities reversed, this was exactly what began
to happen. After 1660, squares and terraces, many bearing the
names of Restoration courtiers, marched steadily westward and
south-westward from the City into the parishes of St James, St Paul,
St Anne, St Giles, and St Martin. The Fire of 1666, which destroyed
the City, spared the West End. In the decades that followed many
families who had formerly been renters during short winter resi-
dences became householders, only returning to their estates for the
summer. This alteration was particularly agreeable to the females of
those families, for whom the country regimen of agriculture and
hunting was less congenial than to their menfolk and who, being less
mobile, were more affected by the isolation of rural existence. They
6
John Aubrey, Brief Lives, ed. Andrew Clark (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1898),
ii. 304.
The Town Lampoon 69
took to Town life and its attendant freedoms with enthusiasm. The
presence in this newly settled area of the metropolis of a continually
growing body of wealthy countrypersons come to Town brought
with it a migration of professionals to serve their practical needs and
entertainers and shopkeepers to minister to their pleasures.7
The new arrivals brought new forms of sociability, initially built
around county affiliations. There was an annual Kentish feast, and
Jeffrey Boys inaugurated a Kentish Club in 1671 which met for a
number of weeks at the Greyhound Tavern.8 Yorkshire gentry, meet-
ing in 1690 for their annual feast, commissioned an ode from Pur-
cell.9 But the most important changes were in modes of interpersonal
communication. Court sociability was structured around the hier-
archical relationships of the levee, in which those of lower rank would
‘wait’ upon those of higher rank in a display of conspicuous clientage
which has already been glimpsed, at its highest level, in the descrip-
tions of waiting and dining at Whitehall but which was imitated at
the subordinate strata of an extended culture of deference. In oppos-
ition, the new arrivals developed a kind of sociability based on ‘vis-
iting’, which quickly acquired its own rules and exclusivities but was
essentially an adaptation of a freer country practice to the new op-
portunities of the metropolis.10 Visiting was performed by coach
among near equals and, while not free of hierarchical constraints,
represented a conscious reaction against court formality. Many
scenes in Restoration comedy are constructed as visits. In Act I of
Etherege’s The Man of Mode (1676), Dorimant, an aristocratic
7
For some of the consequences of this see my ‘Dryden, Rochester and the Inven-
tion of the Town’, in Claude Rawson (ed.), John Dryden (1631–1700): His Politics,
his Plays, and his Poets (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2003), 36–51 and
‘Dryden’s London’, in Steven Zwicker (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Dryden
(Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2004), 111–28. This second migration was opposed by
the City, which wished to keep crafts and trades housed within the walls where they
were under the legal jurisdiction of the respective companies. Emigration of crafts-
and tradespersons into the newly settled parishes, where they were free of City super-
vision, undermined the anti-competitive aspect of the guild system.
8
See H. R. Plomer, Kentish Feast: Being Notes on the Annual Meetings of the Hon-
ourable Society of Natives of the County of Kent, 1657–1701 (Canterbury: Cross &
Jackman, 1916) and G. J. Gray, ‘The Diary of Jeffrey Boys of Gray’s Inn, 1671’, N&Q
159 (27 Dec. 1930), 452.
9
‘The Yorkshire Feast Song’ (‘Of old when heroes thought it base’, Z333).
10
For the visit, see Hannah Woolley, The Gentlewoman’s Companion; or, a Guide
to the Female Sex (London, 1675), 48–50 and, for an invaluable modern account,
Susan E. Whyman, Sociability and Power in Late-Stuart England: The Cultural
Worlds of the Verneys 1660–1700 (Oxford: Oxford UP, 1999), esp. 87–109.
70 The Town Lampoon
libertine, receives news of Town happenings from his friends Medley

and Bellair. That the meeting is a visit, not a levee, is made clear by
bonhomie and mutual kissing. Earlier Dorimant had chatted ami-
ably to Swearing Tom, the shoemaker, and Orange Nan, the fruit
woman and bawd, neither of whom shows any particular deference.
His own later visit in the persona of Mr Courtage to Lady
Woodville’s house requires more formal manners but is still por-
trayed as part of a relaxed coming together of near equals, which is
to say as a Town rather than a court occasion. Visits might often in-
clude the exchange and discussion of lampoons: one satirist, who
will be quoted again, complains:
A man can make no visitt now but his Caresse
Is a Lewd satyr shewn which Pray sir Guess
whose still [style] it is:11
At other times the Town gathered to fare la passegiata on foot in the
Mall, to parade by coach in Hyde Park, to converse in the ordinaries
and coffee houses that now proliferated, to shop in the New Ex-
change and the India houses, to visit dressmakers, tailors, wigmak-
ers, booksellers, and portrait painters, and to see and be seen in the
dress circle and pit of the theatres, especially Drury Lane.
Southerne’s The Wives’ Excuse (1691) shows us the Town en-
gaged in several of its social rituals. The play opens with a scene set
in the antechamber to the concert room at York Buildings, in which
footmen and pages gossip about the love affairs of their employers in
a manner very similar to that of the lampoon writers. We are then
taken inside the concert hall to see the Town engaged in two of its
principal diversions, music and sexual intrigue. When the concert-
goers emerge there is a busy interlude of calling for chairs and
coaches and arranging meetings, an attempt to pass a billet-doux,
and a stage-managed quarrel. Act II begins with a description of
visits hosted by Mrs Witwoud, ‘an old blown-upon she-wit’:
you’re never to be seen in your Lodging at any other time of the day; and
then, too, as soon as you’re out a Bed a morning, you Summon a Congrega-
tion of your Fellows together, to hear you prate by the hour, flatter every
body in the Company, speak ill of every one that’s absent, and scatter about
the scandal of that day.12
11
‘ The Visitt’ (‘Pox on the rhyming fops that plague the town’), Lincolnshire
Archives Office, MS ANC 15/ B/4, p. 20.
12
The Works of Thomas Southerne, ed. Robert Jordan and Harold Love (Oxford:
Oxford UP, 1988), i. 289.
The Town Lampoon 71
In real life such meetings might also be research sessions for lam-
poons. iii. ii is a Mall scene. Group after group pass over the stage
absorbed in the various concerns of the Town. Act IV shows us the
closing stages of a fashionable dinner party during which the guests
drink tea, intrigue, and settle to cards and a raffle. Southerne mocks
the endemic consumerism of the Town, when Mr Friendall launches
into catalogues of his rare wines, snuffs, and teas. The last and
grandest scene is a masquerade. Though the principal characters are
all from the beau monde, they are not ostensibly connected with the
court (Mr Friendall boasts of his influential friends in the City who
are the source of his rare consumer goods). Their lives are wholly de-
voted to the pleasures of the Town and an unending round of sexual
pursuit and resistance. What the play sets out to tell us is that this life
is never simple to live and that dangers to status, reputation, and, for
the few who possess it, integrity lurk everywhere. One of these dan-
gers is poetical: after, as he imagines, being stood up at an assigna-
tion, Mr Friendall snarls, ‘There are Lampoons, Sir, I say no more;
But I may do my self reason in one of ’em, and disappoint her yet of
her disappointment.’13 While the inexperienced and the overconfi-
dent lurch from disaster to disaster, those with more understanding
are occupied with schemes either to ruin them entirely or to rescue
them from the consequences of their folly. The only wisdom that
matters is the wisdom of the Town, and even that is a dubious entity
whose governing rules are never clear, though by the end of the play
one of them—that fidelity to an unfaithful spouse is ipso facto ridicu-
lous—has at least been called into question. What is never ques-
tioned is that this new, pleasure-centred Town life is the best that can
rationally be hoped for. Even those who despise it have no desire to
escape from it.
Insofar as the Town had a central meeting place for the assertion
of its collective identity, it was the theatre. It is at the King’s House in
Drury Lane that Wycherley’s Horner in The Country Wife must pres-
ent himself to establish his new status of eunuch by surgery and to
discover how he is to be treated by society at large. In i. i. 166–89 he
interrogates his friends about the judgements which have been
passed on him. In The Wives’ Excuse Mr Friendall chooses ‘the Side-
box, before the Ladies’ as the place where he is to receive a public
apology for an affront.14 The Restoration comedy of manners is in a
13
v. iii. 138–9 (ibid., i. 335). 14
Ibid., i. 302.
72 The Town Lampoon
fundamental sense Town comedy, concerned with teaching practical

lessons about how to distinguish between prudent and imprudent
behaviour—lessons which had to be assimilated by new immigrants
from the country if they were to enjoy the Town rather than being
destroyed or corrupted by it. This holds particularly for ‘comedies of
manners’ written for Drury Lane. Dorset Garden favoured a more
populist style directed at its City audience; however, The Man of
Mode was performed at Dorset Garden. Of the three plays just men-
tioned, The Wives’ Excuse contains fifty occurences of the word
‘town’, The Country Wife sixty, and The Man of Mode a remarkable
115. The Country Wife deals explicitly with the collision of country
spontaneity and Town dissimulation in its two models of naivety, the
sophisticated but incorrigibly trusting Alithea and the ignorant but
quick-to-learn Margery.15
Marriage was placed under particular stress as country husbands
encountered the artful operators of the Town sex industry, with con-
sequences described in the history of Corinna as narrated in
Rochester’s ‘Artemiza to Chloe’, and wives found themselves sub-
jected to the flattering attentions of predatory Town rakes. Neither
class of temptation had been prevalent in the shires. That marriage in
its country conception had a hard time bearing up under this new lib-
erty is the explicit theme not only of The Wives’ Excuse but of South-
erne’s darker The Maid’s Last Prayer, Cibber’s Love’s Last Shift,
Vanbrugh’s The Relapse, and Farquhar’s The Beaux’ Stratagem and
The Recruiting Officer. The governing assumption of the Town, as
presented in these plays, is that regulated adultery was a satisfactory
substitute for an unsatisfactory marriage (the lampoon being one of
the modes of regulation), but some playwrights go further to suggest
that an institution which in its country sense was essentially a con-
tract between families needed to be revised to take account of indi-
vidual needs for love and fidelity.16 Congreve’s three mature
comedies experiment warily with this possibility, but only Love for
Love could be said to embrace it unreservedly. Here a male dupe of
Town consumerism, having exhausted his money, finds he is still
15
For this aspect of the plays see my ‘Restoration and Early 18th-Century Drama’,
in The Cambridge History of English Literature 1660–1780 (forthcoming). D’Urfey’s
The Fool Turn’d Critic (1676) and Squire Oldsapp (1678) present a broader, farcial
version of the theme of the Town tyro.
16
Historically these represent a development, charted by Laurence Stone in The
Family, Sex and Marriage in England 1500–1800 (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson,
1977), towards a new ‘companionate’ ideal of marriage.
The Town Lampoon 73
valued as a marriage partner because he is constitutionally generous.

The other side of the coin is shown by the two marriages in The Way
of the World, in one of which the partners agree to be ‘as well bred as
if we were not marri’d at all’ while the other gives rise to the plaintive
complaint ‘Why did you make me marry this Man?’ and the Machia-
vellian Town reply ‘To save that Idol Reputation. If the familiarities
of our Loves had produc’d that Consequence, of which you were ap-
prehensive, where could you have fix’d a Father’s Name with Credit,
but on a Husband?’17
The daily round of pleasures depicted in the comedies is also the
topic of ‘The Town Life’, cited in Chapter 2. The male speaker has
grown jaded with the ‘jilting town’, finding its beauties ‘artificial’
and its pleasures ‘but a short and giddy round’, and has retired to, of
all places, the country.18 Nonetheless, he continues to relive its activ-
ities vividly in remembrance. Town ‘sparks’ begin their day by get-
ting dressed ‘with much ado’ by noon. They then walk in the Mall in
the hope of snaring some ‘flutt’ring, gaudy butterfly’. Next comes
dinner at Locket’s ordinary, where they take their fill of gossip, and
then the theatre, where neither the faces nor the performance—‘a
tragic farce of Banks’—yield much enjoyment. Now comes a coach
journey to Hyde Park, where the occupants take part in a ritual
known as ‘side-glassing’ in which an exchange of ogles from vehicle
to vehicle may provoke a pursuit of one by another. Another satirist
gives us a gloss:
In vain the Coachman turns about,
And whips the dappl’d Greys;
When the old Ogler looks out,
We turn away our Face19
Since it is too early to drop in at court, the next activity is to ‘visit

where the beaux in order come’.
17
iv. i. 209 and ii. i. 263–9, in The Complete Plays of William Congreve, ed.
Herbert Davis (Chicago: Chicago UP, 1967), 450, 417.
18
Text in POASY, iv. 61–7.
19
‘Advice to the Old Beaux’, The Poetical and Dramatic Works of Sir Charles Sed-
ley, ed. V. de Sola Pinto (London: Constable, 1928), i. 35. Cf. also the speech of Laura
in Crowne’s The English Frier (London, 1690), iii. ii. 32–7: ‘When I go to Hide Park,
my motions seem to turn the world, for as I turn, all the coaches i’ the Circle turn to
meet mine, the ladies to see my dresses, the men to see me. There do I ride i’ my shin-
ing chariot, like the moon on a bright cloud, while all the little beautys move round
beneath me, like fairys’ (Comedies, 536).
74 The Town Lampoon
Flatt’ring the present, the absent they abuse

And vent their spleen and lies, pretending news;
Why such a lady’s pale and would not dance,
This to the country gone, and that to France,
Who’s marri’d, shipp’d away, or miss’d at court;
Others’ misfortunes thus afford them sport.
A new song is produc’d, the author guess’d,
The verses and the poet made a jest . . .
After a while the company turn to cards, upon which the ‘spark’,
who has by now become an ‘I’, not wishing to ‘civilly sit still and see
| The ladies pick my purse and laugh at me’, finally leaves for court,
though this too is to prove a wasted journey as there is no company
in the reformed drawing room of James II except ‘Mac’s and O’s’ in
whose presence it is dangerous to speak. The poem concludes with a
review of the various destinations of the night. His is his ‘peaceful
home’; some ‘May have, but oft pretend, a close intrigue’; others
head for the tavern, while the rest ‘Must see an easy mistress ere they
sleep’. Although the poet sneers at this lifestyle, his progressive
movement from the third to the first person shows he is still in thrall
to it. In his withdrawal to the country he is not only identifying him-
self as part of an emigration of influential Protestant gentry and aris-
tocracy that was to prove politically fatal to the king, but
temporarily reversing the migration that had created the Town in the
first place. Returned to the active leadership of their local commu-
nities, these families were soon involved in anti-centrist conspiracy.
The lampooners also share comedy’s concern with the problemat-
ical state of marriage. Country notions of honour and ‘that Idol Repu-
tation’ still needed to be sustained at least as a façade. Otherwise
this new kind of urban society based on leisure, pleasure, and con-
spicuous consumption would inevitably succumb to its own ex-
cesses. Whether the perspective from which this critique was made
was the libertine ethic of following nature, espoused in Rochester’s
‘Against Reason and Mankind’, or a more traditional moral
rigourism, inherently suspicious of the body, its immediate function
was that of pillorying those of either sex in the Town who were in-
sufficiently attentive to the health of their reputations not to trans-
gress discreetly. It is true that such attacks also served the contrary
function of advertising the prevalence of the behaviour they casti-
gated, but this was no surprise to a generation whose notion of so-
cial order was deeply influenced by Hobbes. The problem articulated
The Town Lampoon 75
by Hobbes and re-explored by Mandeville of how to construct a

working society out of the materials of a human nature energized by
desire for pleasure and power required the striking of a delicate
balance between acceptance and inhibition that was best pursued
through the vivid depiction of negative examples. There being no
easy way of explaining what was right with the Town—an entity still
imperfectly understood by those who composed it—there must be no
mistake about what might go wrong. This was particularly so for the
reason that the pursuit of pleasure easily became a distraction from
the pursuit of power and necessary corrective reactions to that pur-
suit by its potential victims. Historical retrospect suggests that the
circle of Town pleasures had until the date of the reverse migration
described in ‘The Town Life’ exercised a politically anaesthetizing ef-
fect, and that Charles II may have been wiser than he is given credit
for in encouraging members of the ruling class to come to Town,
with one sex devoting its time to the pursuit of wine and drabs and
the other to ratafia and sparks.
With these demographical points in mind, we are able to refine our
distinction between court satires and Town satires. The central dis-
criminant is that a Town satire is concerned with a new kind of iden-
tity and new patterns of behaviour which are associated with the life
of urban pleasure as it was lived in the newly settled squares of the
West End and with the hedonistic social round of the parks, the Mall,
the coffee and chocolate houses, the ordinaries, visits, bookshops,
and theatregoing. A further mark of a Town satire is a way of re-
garding the court as just another of the sideshows of the Town to be
included in the regular round of its sights and pleasures but not con-
ceded any overriding authority in questions of style, manners, or wit.
To become besotted with the court was a kind of treason to the
Town. Melantha in Dryden’s Marriage A-la-mode is characterized in
i. i. 182 as ‘a Town-Lady, without any relation to the Court’ who
nonetheless insists on being ‘seen there three or four times a day’. Her
ideal life is described in ii. i. 73–5: ‘you shall be every day at the
King’s Levé, and I at the Queen’s; and we will never meet, but in the
Drawing-room’.20 At iii. i. 107 she asserts that ‘nothing can be so
ridicule, as a meer Town-Lady’, without realizing that she is one her-
self. Doralice and Artemis, two of the princess’s maids of honour,
gently convey this to her by ridiculing the behaviour of Town ladies
20
Works, xi. 244.
76 The Town Lampoon
who ‘crowd and sweat in the Drawing-room’ so that they can ‘write
Letters into the Countrey’ about what they see. The passage cuts
both ways: the courtier would presumably read it as an affirmation
of the exclusivity and cultural pre-eminence of the court while the
Town viewer or reader would draw the very different message that
the court was never to be taken at its own exaggerated valuation.
Melantha’s fault in this larger view would be to have neglected the
greater good of belonging to the Town for the lesser one of nourish-
ing an obsession with the court. Harcourt’s ridiculing of Sparkish in
The Country Wife for his ‘attendance at the King’s Meals’ asserts a
robust Town perspective on the court, while Sparkish’s reply that he
goes to court merely to pursue his ‘interest’ concedes the point with-
out argument.21 As the Town gathered confidence in its own central-
ity to the life of the nation the court slowly dwindled to a marginal
club for ‘Mac’s and O’s’ and after them for Dutchmen. This point is
further made in a body of Town lampoons whose aim is simply to deni-
grate the court as an institution. How this might be done had been
shown by the court lampooners themselves in satires intended for in-
ternal court consumption which were very differently read when
they circulated outside the court.‘Rochester’s Farewell’ opens with a
Jeremiad against the court on the grounds of its vice and hypocrisy:
Tir’d with the noisome follies of the age,
And weary of my part, I quit the stage;
For who in life’s dull farce a part would bear
Where rogues, whores, bawds all the chief actors are?
Long I with charitable malice strove,
Lashing the Court these vermin to remove;
But thriving vice under the rod still grew,
As aged lechers, whipp’d, their lust renew.
Yet though my life has unsuccessful been
(For who can this Augean stable clean?)
My gen’rous end I’ll still pursue in death,
And at mankind rail with my parting breath.22
Nothing in this satire quite lives up to its induction; but to classify it

as a court lampoon would be misleading. Although its author clearly
possessed an insider’s knowledge of the court, the assault is directed
from the hostile perspective of the Town.
21
iii. ii. 133–6, in The Plays of William Wycherley, ed. Arthur Friedman (Oxford:
Clarendon Press, 1979), 291.
22
POASY, ii. 218–19.
The Town Lampoon 77
A widely copied satire of 1681, ‘The Quarrel between Frank and

Nan’ (‘Nan and Frank two quondam friends’) is useful evidence for
the dismissive, even patronizing, way in which the court might be
viewed from a Town perspective.23 The subject was an altercation
which had taken place between a court functionary, Francis, Lord
Newport, and a well-known Town identity, Nan Capell, who as well
as holding the concession for the sale of oranges in the theatres was
also a bawd. She was the original of the Orange Nan who makes an
appearance in Act I of The Man of Mode. What actually happened
on this occasion is undiscoverable. Possibly Nan had asked the
notoriously mean Newport for what was owed to whores provided
for him by her and been peremptorily reminded that the court was a
sanctuary zone in which dunning was not permitted. Whatever the
case, words were exchanged and Newport is reported as having
broken his white staff of office over Nan and then used his authority
to have her committed to the Gatehouse and whipped. Newport, as
first Comptroller and then Treasurer of the Household, was a figure
of fun even at court, as in ‘An Heroic Poem’, ll. 65–6:
At thee, old Newport, who can choose but laugh.
With thy white wig, white gloves, and thy white staff?24
He was also a Whig which made him doubly unpopular in an in-

creasingly Tory court.25 In the poem the quarrel becomes a Hudi-
brastic narrative in which Newport at first welcomes Nan, thinking
she is going to provide him with a whore, and then reacts adversely
when she professes her own desire for him. Nan is presented in fine
mock-heroic style:
Majestic wrinkles deck her brow,
And goodly glaring eyes below,
That still with maudlin kindness shine,
The soft effects of brandywine.
Rich carbuncles adorn her nose,
The envy of her sober foes;
And from her lips discourses fall
That make her welcome at Whitehall.26
23
Text ibid. 235–41. 24
CSR, 70.
25
The style of the piece is suggestive of Etherege’s later verse letters to Middleton,
though Dryden in his reply written on Middleton’s behalf showed that he was capable
of the same manner.
26
POASY, ii. 239.
78 The Town Lampoon
However, Newport’s hostile reaction provokes her to an act of what

can only be described as lingual rape:
Quoth Frank in rage, ‘Avaunt, you bitch!
Have I for this through all my life
Kept civil distance with my wife?
Studi’d fine speeches from romances,
And in my age led country dances?
Do I for this e’en at this hour
Cheat ev’ry creature in my pow’r;
Gripe the poor the utmost farthing
To keep my credit up at carding?
Do I for this affect a grace
And paint my old John-apple-face,
Only to have a bawd adore me?
No I’ll have virgins fall before me.’
‘Virgins!’ quoth Nan, and then she hung
A tongue out full two handfuls long,
And with desire or malice stung,
Lick’d o’er the thickest painted place,
And spoil’d entirely that day’s face.27
‘Virgins’ should clearly be uttered with the same cantar di sbalzo em-
ployed by Lady Bracknells of all stages in intoning ‘A handbag?’ This
is comic verse of high competence, which while statedly written in
tribute to the recently deceased Samuel Butler, is as self-consciously
‘polite’ as Hudibras is abrasively Rabelaisian. Rather than being a
send-up of a single, unpopular court figure for a readership of
courtiers, this is a polished piece of Covent Garden verse written for
a coffee house readership in which it is the court itself that is ridiculed
through the gross affront offered by the Town intruder.
Other lampoons only treat the court briefly and dismissively be-
fore moving on to more interesting topics. ‘A Ballad to the Tune of
Cheviot Chace’ (‘Come all ye youths that yet are free’, 1682) issues
warnings to those contemplating marriage about a string of potential
‘London wives’, the first part covering single women and the second
part widows. The court is brought in stanza 6 of the first part:
Hyde’s not yet tapped, but bred at Court,
And all within those doors,
Where none but knaves and bawds resort,
Or are, or will be, whores.28
27
POASY, 240. 28
Wilson, CSR, 103.
The Town Lampoon 79
After a couple more court examples, the satirist returns to the wider
sphere of the Town. Or consider ‘Quem Natura Negat’ (‘I who from
drinking ne’er could spare an hour’):
But must I find Patch’d up at every Wall
Stuff none can bear, who starves not at Whitehall?29
The manner of these pieces is often closely modelled on that of the

court lampoons, and leading courtiers take their place among the
victims, but their concern is with the beau monde in general, not
the court in particular.
sat y rs o n t h e p o e t s
The influence of the court was also contested in a tradition of lam-

poons reviewing the agents through whom the Town digested and
communicated its identity: theatre personnel, professional authors,
and the transmitters and (generally) amateur writers of lampoons
themselves. Theatre performers are attacked in the scabrous ‘Satyr
on the Players’ (‘The censuring world perhaps may not esteem’) and
Robert Gould’s ‘The Play-House’.30 ‘Of Three Late Marriages’
(‘Three nymphs as chaste as ever Venus bred’), which Wilson dates
to the summer of 1682, includes violent abuse of the performers Eliza-
beth Barry and Charlotte Butler; Barry is also assailed in the vilest
terms in ‘Satire on Benting’ (‘Long had my pen lain dull and useless
by’, 1688/9).31 Satires on writers belong to a tradition established
long before the civil wars and which rapidly reasserted itself after.
They may be read productively as tracing a struggle on the part of the
Town professionals to escape the dominance of court amateurs, a
number of whom were also patrons.
This history ran parallel to that already considered of the Town’s
search for alternatives to court models of sociability. In the early
Restoration years court patronage was the logical avenue to prefer-
ment. The elderly Duke of Newcastle, a patron in the last reign of
Jonson, Shirley, and D’Avenant, reinstated himself at the Restoration
as a kind of unofficial minister for culture, assisting the careers of
29
BL MS Harl. 7319, fo. 114v.
30
‘ The Play-House. A Satyr’ in Poems Chiefly Consisting of Satyrs and Satyrical
Epistles (London, 1689), 161–95.
31
CSR, 76–80, 217–25.
80 The Town Lampoon
Shadwell, Flecknoe, and for a time Dryden. Dryden’s MacFlecknoe

has the duke’s circle as one of its covert targets.32 The duke and his
these days much better known duchess were both themselves volumin-
ous writers. Newcastle, however, was an old man and his mantle was
soon allowed to pass to the partnership of his former pupil, Buck-
ingham, and Buckhurst, later sixth Earl of Dorset. With this inher-
itance went a connection with the ‘Tribe of Ben’, of which Newcastle
had been a member and which Dorset was to emulate in meetings at
the Poets’ Parlour at Knole. The perpetuation of Jonsonian principles
was part of the artistic programme of the group, which encouraged
Shadwell’s attempt to revive a form of Jonsonian comedy and in 1669
supported a revival of Jonson’s rarely performed Catiline. Bucking-
ham was a friend of writers, including Cowley, Sprat, Martin Clif-
ford, Samuel Butler, and Waller, and, from his own court faction,
Rochester, Sedley, and Dorset; but was less reliable in his bounty and
assiduousness than Dorset, who deserved the compliment often be-
stowed on him as the Maecenas of the age.33 Rochester’s glamour and
brilliance as a poet led many writers to seek him as a patron but he
was never rich enough to support them properly and proved even
more capricious in his favours than Buckingham.
The progress of the campaign to impose court discipline on the un-
ruly tribe of professionals can be demonstrated from satires of 1668
and 1676 which use the ‘Sessions of Poets’ format borrowed from
Suckling’s Caroline satire. The earlier of the two (‘Apollo, concerned
to see the transgressions’)34 adopts a genially erudite tone that sug-
gests a poet of an older generation, albeit one with much inside
knowledge of the playhouses. The declared occasion of the sessions
is to punish ‘the abuses of wit’. Virtually all active poets of the time
are included in the roll-call, with no particular deference exhibited
towards the courtiers. In the outcome the laurel is given to two
actors, Lacy and Harris, on the grounds that ‘they alone made the
plays go off ’.35 By contrast, the 1676 poem (‘Since the sons of the
muses grew numerous and loud’) has a clear court perspective and
distinguishes sharply between the gentlemen poets, Etherege and
32
For this connection see my ‘Shadwell, Flecknoe and the Duke of Newcastle: An
Impetus to MacFlecknoe’, Papers on Language and Literature, 21 (1985), 19–27.
33
Brice Harris, Charles Sackville, Sixth Earl of Dorset, Patron and Poet of the
Restoration (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1940), esp. 173–214.
34
POASY, i. 327–37.
35
Both actors had some standing as writers, with Lacy associated with the widely
circulated lampoon ‘Preserved by wonder in the oak O Charles’ (ibid. 425–8).
The Town Lampoon 81
Wycherley, and the mere traders, the intervening years having seen a
consolidation of the latter category, and the withdrawal from the
craft of the older amateurs of the Cavalier generation.36 In this case
the imaginary meeting has been called to establish a ‘government,
leader and laws’ of the writing community. Dryden is treated with
consideration but hardly respect: in any case it is assumed, incor-
rectly, that he was on the verge of abandoning the Town for the
Church. Shadwell is represented as a buffoon and Lee as a drunk.
Settle is dismissed as a ‘great boy’. Otway is abused as the ‘scum of a
playhouse’. Crowne is branded with dullness. Behn is chided for
being too old to secure conquests with her ‘black ace’. Once more, an
actor, this time Betterton, is declared the winner, the ground being
that ‘he had writ plays, yet ne’er came in print’. This last detail re-
flects the court wits’ preference for the more prestigious scribal cir-
culation. In allusion to a recent print controversy, Settle brings with
him ‘an Ibrahim with the preface torn out’, while Crowne is ar-
raigned ‘for writing romances and shiting of plays’. Betterton does
indeed rule the stage but authority over the realm of letters is clearly
left with the court. A later poem linked to the ‘Sessions’ tradition,
‘Advice to Apollo’ (‘I’ve heard the muses were still soft and kind’,
1677), frames itself as a defence of true poetry against the rising
vogue of lampoon satire.37 Dryden is once again treated with some
measure of consideration, Dorset and Rochester are praised, and
Rochester’s enemies Scroope and Mulgrave are severely criticized.
The poem concludes with a curt dismissal of ‘saucy Sheppard, with
the affected train | Who satires write, yet scarce can spell their name’.
This satire seems to come from an admirer of the Whig court wits
rather than from within the group itself, of which Sheppard was a
core member. No professionals apart from Dryden are mentioned.
The attempt to assert court hegemony through satire as well as pat-
ronage had begun circa 1670 with a series of mock-commendatory
verses directed at Edward Howard’s narrative poem The British
Prince and his comedy The New Utopia.38 One of these poems,
Dorset’s ‘Come on ye critics! Find one fault who dare’, survives in
numerous manuscript and printed sources. Howard stood in this in-
stance as a surrogate not for the professional poets (he was the fifth
son of the Earl of Berkshire) but for the older group of Cavalier
36
Text ibid. 352–6. 37
Ibid. 392–5.
38
Complete series in Bodleian MS Eng. poet. e 4, pp. 188–99; see also POASY, i.
338–41.
82 The Town Lampoon
poets, who were assailed as part of the generational antagonism de-

scribed in Chapter 2. At a later date, relations between the Bucking-
ham circle and the Howard family, most of whom were Catholics,
were further worsened by religious difference; however, Edward
Howard and his brother Sir Robert were Protestants, and Sir Robert
became a close political ally of Buckingham. Dryden was married to
their sister. In Rochester’s ‘An Allusion to Horace’ (1675) the main
weight of the attack falls on Dryden but lesser lashings are meted out
to Lee and Otway, while Shadwell and the court poets of the Buck-
ingham faction are solemnly commended. Dryden replied on behalf
of the professionals in the preface to All for Love (1678).
The contestation of court and Town within the sphere of letters re-
veals itself with particular clarity through the career of Dryden. In the
1660s he was an assiduous seeker after court preferment, obtaining a
marginal household position when in 1668 he succeeded D’Avenant
as poet laureate. During these years he actively supported the view of
the court as the fountainhead of national values, whether expressed as
gallantry in war by the Duke of York or elegance in impromptu con-
versation by Dorset and Rochester. In the dedication to Marriage A-
la-mode, he addresses Rochester in very different terms from those
used in the preface to All for Love: ‘Wit seems to have lodg’d it self
more Nobly in this Age, than in any of the former: and people of my
mean condition, are onely Writers, because some of the nobility, and
your Lordship in the first place, are above the narrow praises which
Poesie could give you.’39 Responding to Rochester’s letter of thanks
for the dedication he added: ‘I find it is not for me to contend any way
with your Lordship, who can write better on the meanest Subject than
I can on the best.’40 In Dorset’s case, he was prepared to supplement
praise with the more practical help of pimping.41 But there was always
a tension in these relationships, arising on Dryden’s side from his con-
sciousness of superior talent and the attendant realization that it was
only regular professional work, not aristocratic amateurism, that
would permit talent to be honed and extended. His real opinion is
hinted at in a note to his translation of the first satire of Persius (1693)
in which he refers to ‘the Noblemen and their abominable Poetry,
39
Works, xi. 223.
40
The Letters of John Wilmot, Earl of Rochester, ed. Jeremy Treglown (Oxford:
Blackwell, 1980), 87.
41
See The Letters of John Dryden: with Letters Addressed to him, ed. Charles E.
Ward (Durham, NC: Duke UP, 1942), 13.
The Town Lampoon 83
who in the Luxury of their Fortune, set up for Wits, and Judges’.42 On
the courtiers’ side we find contempt for the ‘saturnine’ Dryden’s
backwardness in their own highly prized art of witty, impromptu con-
versation, which for them was also a standard for measuring the ex-
cellence of writing.43 Already in Of Dramatick Poesie (1668) Dryden
had boldly placed himself in dialogue with Dorset and Sedley over
fundamental questions of literary value. There was also the question
of political allegiance, with Dryden aligned with the Yorkist faction at
court and most of the poetical court wits following Buckingham.
Satire, including Buckingham’s The Rehearsal (1672) and Rochester’s
‘An Allusion to Horace’, were one means used to keep the laureate in
his place. In print, the debate was carried on in a series of prefaces by
Shadwell, which were replied to in kind by Dryden. This particular
contest climaxed in the sublime character assassination of Mac-
Flecknoe, written as a challenge to the hegemony of the wits of the
Buckingham faction, who had supported Shadwell throughout his
career, but also a pointed demonstration that Dryden could write
clandestine satire even more brilliantly than they did.
By this time Dryden had entered into league with John Sheffield,
Earl of Mulgrave in the writing of at least one additional lampoon, the
notorious ‘An Essay upon Satyr’, and in the recruitment of a group of
mostly professional Tory and Yorkist poets to oppose the Whigs of
the Buckingham faction. The ‘Essay’, while concentrating its fire on
the Whig wits, did not spare ‘saunt’ring Charles, between his beastly
brace’ of Portsmouth and Nelly.44 Representing itself as a critique of
lampoon culture, which it dismisses as ‘the loose-writ libels of the age’
(l. 37), it is actually a continuation, masking its actual court faction-
alism behind a veneer of Town disinterestedness. In acknowledging
the failure of a series of ‘loyal libels’ (l. 68) to inform Charles of the
true state of affairs at court, it also tacitly concedes that effective court
satire could only be written from the external perspective of the
Town, and with the assistance of a Town professional. The subse-
quent history of this conflict between Yorkist and Whig poetical
factions belongs to the history of state rather than Town satire and
will be dealt with under that heading: its significance for the present
42
Works, iv. 257.
43
On this issue see my ‘Shadwell, Rochester and the Crisis of Amateurism’, in
Judith Slagle (ed.), Thomas Shadwell Reconsider’d, published as Restoration, 20
(1996), 119–34.
44
POASY, i. 396–413 (l. 65).
84 The Town Lampoon
discussion is that it marks one in a series of stages in which authority

over polite letters moved from the Great Withdrawing Room at
Whitehall to the professionals’ meeting place in the upper room of
Will’s coffee house in Covent Garden in the heart of the Town.
This change also brought a supplementation of the older style of
‘plain natural chit-chat’ to include a proto-Augustan neoclassicism of
the kind illustrated in Chapter 2.45 Classicizing lampoons begin to
appear from the late 1670s onward, competing for space in the
scribal anthologies with the more colloquial kind of couplet and stan-
zaic lampoons. Scroope’s ‘In Defence of Satyr’ (‘When Shakespeare,
Jonson, Fletcher ruled the stage’, 1677), ‘Rochester’s Farewell’
(1680), ‘Barabara Piramidum Sileat Miracula Memphis’ (‘Of all the
wonders since the world began’; 1680?), and ‘An Heroic Poem’
(1681) are all distinguished by learned allusions, antithetical wit of
the Popean kind, and self-conscious use of rhetorical figures.46 The
second of these learnedly compares Mulgrave’s being awarded the
Garter with the contention between Ajax and Odysseus for the shield
of Achilles:
Ulisses with stout Ajax did contend
And by his crafty cunning gain’d his end
Yet ’twas thought strange that in the bloody Field
He shou’d obtain the fam’d Achilles shield
But here’s the prize of honour stole away
By one who yet ne’re saw a scarlett day
But represented in some Tragick Play.47
The readership that would be swayed by the aptness of this allusion

was that of the literary coffee house not the presence chamber. The
authority claimed by these neoclassical lampoons rests on an urban
naturalization of erudite culture, begun in France, whose arrival in
England was revealed by a spate of translations and imitations of
Boileau.48 Although Rochester was responsible for some influential
experiments with the classicizing style, it had little vogue at court,
nor did the new Town preoccupation with smooth numbers hold
45
Lamb’s description in ‘The Genteel Style in Writing’ of Temple’s prose (Last
Essays of Elia, in The Works of Charles Lamb, ed. Thomas Hutchinson (Oxford:
Oxford UP, 1940), 719).
46
Among the allusions, Scroope’s first line is adapted from the third of Suckling’s
prologue to The Goblins.
47
48
By Rochester, Oldham, and Crowne among others.
The Town Lampoon 85
much attraction for him.49 For the professionals, on the other hand,
the couplet lampoon offered a natural avenue for applying the
lessons learned from their other classicizing experiments, the Town
prologue and epilogue and the heroic play. Dryden’s growing con-
cern with translations from Latin and Greek and his enrolment of
younger writers in these projects actively furthered this stylistic ten-
dency. The new Horatian elegance he had given to the art of the pro-
logue was soon extended to the lampoon.
Prologues and epilogues, regularly delivered at the Town’s key
point of assembly and usually heard with attention, even if the inter-
vening play was not, were the professionals’ main means of reply to
their court censurers. Courtiers might also write such pieces but had
in such cases to accommodate themselves to the expectations of the
Town. Only in the very specialized body of ‘stage orations’ written
for the court’s own theatre in Cardinal Wolsey’s old hall at the palace
or for royal appearances in state in the commercial theatres could
they freely assert court values. Vital texts for any study of the evolu-
tion of a distinctive Town identity, stage orations also contain some
of the finest satire of the time; however, they are not included among
the subjects of this book because they were the reverse of clandestine,
being publicly performed and nearly always printed. While often
taken up with presenting the Town with unflattering images of its
bad behaviour, they also contain many pleas for the rights of drama-
tists to be assessed fairly and respectfully by the Town audience as a
whole, rather than being judged by the prejudiced representatives of
the court. An epilogue of 1673 sets its scene in a coffee house:
Lord how they wait a Wit that’s fam’d in Town!
He lookes about him with a scornful frown,
Then picks his Favourite out and sits him down.
Take me how is’t? Have you seen our new Play?
Yes faith; and how? a half Crown thrown away,
Pox on’t he cries, I Droll’d and Slept it out;
’Twas some Raw Fop: Then proudly stares about;
Then shrugs and whispers, laughs, then swears aloud.
The whilst there’s silence kept by all the Croud.
At length he nods and cocks, is heard to say,
D—— me ’tis true, and thus he damns the Play,
Rises, lookes big and combs, then goes his Way.
49
See in this connection Dryden’s damning critique of the ‘Allusion to Horace’ in
the preface to All for Love.
86 The Town Lampoon
Date and context both suggest that this is a courtier throwing around
his literary weight rather than an overweening professional (who
would not have had to pay for his ticket). The exhortation to
the Town audience is prefaced by the assurance ‘Come, we’re
amongst our selves’. Its message is one of revolt: the audience is
told that
By such like Arts they rule the stage and you,
And what was Favour first, now claim as due.
In a re-enactment of the Restoration the Town should free itself

‘from these usurpers Tyranny’.50
The evident uncertainty of the Town audience over its capacity to
judge plays, and deference to those who appeared to know, is re-
flected in a parallel deference which allowed poets to be censurers of
personal behaviour through the medium of the lampoon. The only
difficulty concerned which group of poets were to undertake this re-
sponsibility. In the end both the professionals and the courtiers were
displaced by a body of self-elected poetical vigilantes who will be
introduced in a subsequent chapter. The qualifications for entering
this group were amateur status, some degree of recognition as a
writer, and profound knowledge of the Town and its secrets, with
the last the most important. It was also necessary that the lampooner
knew how to get his or her work into circulation through networks
that were increasingly dominated by commercial copyists. This will
also be considered.
t h e s o c i a l a i m s o f T ow n l a m p o o n i n g
While important for matters of definition, Town lampoons con-

cerned with denigrating the court or standing up for professionals
against court amateurs are not the most characteristic of the genre as
a whole. The Town lampooners’ main concern was with the Town’s
own and, like the court satirists, they quickly built up a gallery of
iconic targets and an armoury of stock accusations. But the field avail-
able to them was a much larger and continually growing one, with the
consequence that the Town lampoon is often much longer than its
50
Joseph Arrowsmith, The Reformation (London, 1673), 80. See also Pierre
Danchin (ed.), The Prologues and Epilogues of the Restoration 1660–1700, 7 vols.
(Nancy: Presses Universitaires de Nancy, 1981–8), i/2. 535–7.
The Town Lampoon 87
court counterpart. The stanzaic lampoon written to a familiar ballad

tune was particularly well adapted to rattling through a long list of
targets, linked only by their common membership of the Town. Take
for example ‘The Lovers’ Session’ (‘A session of lovers was held
t’other day’), dated by Wilson to June 1687, and therefore close to the
high tide of the Town lampoon.51 Following the by now familiar con-
ventions of sessions satire, it introduces a series of pretenders to a
prize, to be awarded in this case by Venus to the one ‘who did least
deserve’. Anticipating Dunciad IV, it brings in its pretenders first in
tribes (‘fools of the flute and fools of the pen’, ‘sour fanatics’, ‘Cits
apeing Court fops’, and so on), then as groups of named victims four
or more to a stanza, and finally as individuals deserving a more ex-
tended treatment, the first part of which, in each case, is their personal
plea, and the second the judgement of Venus. Eighty-three four-line
stanzas (probably meant to be sung two at a time to ‘Packington’s
Pound’) are expended before the prize, in the person of ‘young Luck’
is awarded to a rich old lawyer. The judicial framing is mirrored in the
social authority claimed for the satirist’s carefully articulated ver-
dicts. This is no irresponsible railer but an aroused social critic who
assumes that right-thinking members of the Town will concur with
his evaluations. Its success led irresistibly to the writing of a parallel
satire on the women, ‘The Session of Ladies’ (‘A session of ladies was
held on the stage’), dated by Wilson to April 1688.52 This presents a
group of Town ladies competing for the actor Carlell Goodman, who
is the prize in a competition awarded this time by Cupid. As before,
the early stanzas introduce groups of women, first generally
There were monkeys in top-knots and owls in settee,
High jilts in sultana and bulkers in crepe,
Who flocked from each quarter Adonis to see,
Admiring his beauty, his person and shape. (ll. 25–8)
and then more particularly

There was pockey lewd Hinton and Howard’s pert Mall,
With Grafton’s chaste widow of Worcester Park,
Fantastical Brandon and her sister Doll,
Who had many a bout with his grace in the dark. (ll. 29–32)
Each of these brief accusations rests on an item of gossip decipher-

able from other lampoons. As the poem proceeds its subjects acquire
51
Text and annotations in CSR, 175–98. 52
CSR, 204–16.
88 The Town Lampoon
whole stanzas to themselves in which they make their claim for the
prize and are answered antiphonally by Cupid.
Chaste Norfolk the first was that put in her claim,
A privilege due to her person and place.
The court had respect to her title and name,
And was at the point to comply with her grace.
But Cupid, recalling the German to mind,
Said ’twas pity Adonis should e’er be her prize,
Whose lust the Town stallions, though never so kind,
And all the whole family could not suffice. (ll. 53–60)
The casual reference to ‘the German’ (the duchess’s lover, and later,
after one of the rare divorces of the period, her husband, John Ger-
maine) and the veiled reference of the last line indicate that this is a
poem for readers and hearers who were already familiar with current
gossip. The tone of the piece is more lubricious and its language more
obscene than its predecessor. The sense of considered reproofs de-
livered to deserving targets is replaced by one of gratuitious libertine
malice. Where the men have been abused as fools and cullies the
women are without exception arraigned as whores. It would be nice
to be able to excuse this as the effect of a subtle shift in genre, but the
real reason is the engrained misogyny of the Town lampoon. Where
the poem directed at the males points through its bad examples at a
reform of manners, that against the females presupposes an endemic
and therefore unreformable devotion of the whole sex to lust.
Such incessant character assassinations of the ruling elite have
generally been received with either embarrassment or distaste: the
dispassionate attention given by Wilson and the Yale POAS editors
has had no sequel prior to the present study. Literary qualities, which
might have been respected if they had been exercised in texts
defending the powerless against the strong, become devalued when it
is a question of members of the leisured classes bickering with each
other or blatant vilification of the defenceless. Town satire was often
factional in the same way that court satire was, and, as the century
progressed, increasingly politicized; yet court factions were at least
concerned with issues of real significance for the nation. This can
hardly be claimed for poems attacking actresses, self-opiniated
poets, syphilitic rakes, cuckold husbands, or barely distinguishable
Town beauties, even if we were to assume, uncharitably, that many
victims were only marginally better than they were painted. Since it
The Town Lampoon 89
is undeniable that much of this material is the undissimulated prod-

uct of spite, lubricity, misogyny, and other unadmirable aspects of
human nature, it is a genuine issue why it should be looked at in any
other light than the pathological. This point of view was frequently
expressed in the satirists’ own time, as in ‘The Visitt’:
The Ta[vern] was the next reso[r]t, where I
Quite weary of there Tipling company
went home a Cursing of this wretched age
That Couples each old Lady with her Page
And whores the Chastest virgin with her dog
And Calls the best of Kings a senceless Log.53
The author of ‘Quem Natura Negat’ (‘I who from drinking ne’er
could spare an hour’) regards men as fair game but bridles at the in-
cessant attacks on women:
Just now, methinks, I hear some Critick Wit,
Censure aloud, all I’ve already writ:
Dam me says he what does this Blockhead mean?
The Women’s faults become a Satyr’s Pen.
But I, who all the charming Sex adore,
And daily their Compassion must implore,
For Panegerick keep their sacred Names.
Libel attend all those who wrong their Fames.54
Nobody, as we will see again in Chapter 5, has a good word for

lampooners.
The most common defence against these charges was the correct-
ive one. The lampooners themselves frequently make the familiar
neoclassical point that these poems, malicious and unfair as they fre-
quently were, provided an effective kind of social regulation in a so-
ciety in which, for what seemed good reasons at the time, older forms
of regulation had become ineffective. Consider the following from
‘Ignis Ignibus Extinguitur’ (‘But why this fury all that e’er was writ’):
These from the many, and the chosen few
My Indignation has expos’d to view,
As Beacons to the rest, who now I’ll spare,
In hopes they’l mend by what I’ve Blazon’d here
For oft I’ve seen (not quell’d by other force)
Houses blown up have stopt a Fire’s Course.55
53
Lincolnshire Archives Office MS ANC 15/ B/4, p. 20.
54
BL MS Harl. 7319, fo. 119r. 55
Ibid., fo. 114v.
90 The Town Lampoon
In this view, which invokes attempts to halt the Great Fire of 1666,
the lampoon was a means by which the Town dealt with nuisance-
makers. Another lampooner uses the country metaphor of hanging
up the bodies of predators:
Mark a bold leading Coxcomb of the Town,
And single out the Beast and hunt him down;
Hang up his mangl’d Carcass on the Stage,
To fright away the Vermin of the Age.56
A moderate ‘neoclassical’ version of the same case was argued by

Carr Scroope in ‘In Defence of Satyr’:
And (without doubt) though some it may offend,
Nothing helps more than Satyr, to amend
Ill Manners, or is trulier Virtues Friend.
Princes, may Laws ordain, Priests gravely Preach,
But Poets, most successfully will teach.57
and by Rochester in his conversations with Burnet:

He would often go into the Country, and be for some months wholly em-
ployed in Study, or the Sallies of his Wit: Which he came to direct chiefly to
Satyre. And this he often defended to me, by saying there were some people
that could not be kept in Order, or admonished but in this way.58
To Burnet’s advocacy of a ‘grave way of Satyre’ that spared person-

alities and did not make untrue accusations, Rochester replied that
‘A man could not write with life, unless he were heated by Revenge’
and that to do otherwise would be ‘as if a man would in cold blood,
cut mens throats who had never offended him’ (p. 26), thus defend-
ing not only the lampoon but its undisguised personal malice to-
wards its victims as a case of private vices producing public benefits.
So far this is no more than a commonplace: satire makes vice
ridiculous and ugly and therefore those who would otherwise have
become vicious are deterred. No one would doubt that this occa-
sionally happened, even with lampoons. But when this question is
rephrased in terms of the particular needs and interests of the Town
it becomes a much more interesting one. Here satire becomes part of
56
‘Prologue’ [by Edmund Ashton], POAS (1702–7), i. 2215.
57
58
Harrap, 1951), 105–6.
The Town Lampoon 91
the creation of a new kind of urban civility in which the companion-

ship of the visit would replace the stilted deference of the levee, and
in which the polished cit would sit down at the same coffee house
table as the intelligent squire and the complaisant lord—a civility
which was to find its realization in the social world of the Scribler-
ians and in Augustan epistolary culture as it has been charted by
William C. Dowling.59 An attack on the misdoings of those in high
places was also one on the way in which the assertion of rank
distorted sociability. Dignity was ruthlessly stripped from those
who claimed high birth as a means of enforcing deference, something
especially evident in the lampooners’ depictions of John Sheffield,
Earl of Mulgrave.60
From this perspective, the lampoon can be seen as a necessary in-
strument for the regulation of the Town as a functioning society or-
ganized around the sociable pursuit of pleasure. Once it became a
settled society with thoroughly internalized rules and conventions
such means would no longer be necessary, but during the stage of
construction a kind of rough, vigilante justice was in order. Satire of
this kind arises not from the invocation of a more admirable past,
like that of Juvenal’s unkempt Roman wife and acorn-belching hus-
band, but from an engagement with a world whose values were still
contested and provisional and which required simple rules of thumb
while it worked out better ones. The ‘soft Hobbesian’ vision of the
human being as a pleasure-seeking animal is accepted by the lam-
pooners even in their castigations of the results of taking that pursuit
to an extreme. When individuals are presented as monsters of greed
and lust it is not in order to reject the pleasure principle but from
impatience (mixed at times with an imperfectly concealed envy) at
those who were unable to enjoy their pleasures temperately. The
Town lampoon’s visions of ‘normality’ are themselves hedonistic. ‘I
who from drinking ne’er could spare an hour | But what I gave to
some obedient whore’ begins the author of ‘Quem Natura Negat’,
confident of our approving of his savoir vivre.61 It might as well be
Oldham’s claret drinker speaking or Johnson from The Rehearsal,
59
The Epistolary Moment: The Poetics of the Eighteenth-Century Verse Epistle
(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1991).
60
Attacked by Rochester on these grounds in a series of satires (Works, 92–101).
Similar accusations too numerous to specify may be located from the indexes to CSR
and all seven volumes (a record?) of POASY.
61
92 The Town Lampoon
another Town gentleman held up as the epitome of sound, common-

sense, male judgement:
Smi. Well; but how dost thou pass thy time?
Johns. Why, as I use to do; eat and drink as well as I can, have a she-friend to
be private with in the afternoon, and sometimes see a Play:62
In reducing all things to appetite, and making the rational satisfac-

tion of appetite the measure of a worthwhile existence, the lampoon
acknowledges desire and acquisitiveness as the two great motive
forces of society. It is suspicious, needless to say, of inordinate money-
grubbing, as practised by the despised cits, but not because this is an
irrational activity considered in terms of its goals, merely because it
is one that is more agreeably accomplished through the pursuit of
heiresses than by labouring behind a counter or trading to the Indies.
The claret and the convenient whore, the coffee, the chocolate, the
silks, the perfumes, and the Turkey leather of the coach lining were
all brought to the speaker by the mighty engine of trade. The Town,
rightly seen, was a machine for turning cash into pleasure in order to
finance further investment in the raw materials of pleasure. The lam-
pooners, if we are to judge from their real-life financial problems and
incessant fortune-hunting, were perfectly aware of this.
Yet the enjoyment of pleasure, as the case of Rochester shows, was
not a simple matter for a generation still coming to terms with the
risks and possibilities of leisured urban living. Mrs Friendall in The
Wives’ Excuse defends her husband’s masquerade as an ‘innocent
diversion’ only to be reminded that it is equally an institution for
‘bringing the young Wenches into the Mystery of Matrimony before
their time’.63 The possibilities for innocent diversion offered by the
Town existed side by side with others which were destructive, even
fatal both to individuals and to the extended families out of whom
the Restoration oligarchy was interwoven. Rochester’s ‘Artemiza to
Chloe’ presents a potent fable of this double-sidedness. The squire
come to Town is deceived by the whore Corinna’s affectation of rail-
ing at the pursuit of pleasure into putting his life and property into
her hands, with the result that the life is snuffed out and the property
removed from the possession of his ancient family. The story is told
62
The Rehearsal (London, 1672), 2; John Oldham, ‘The Careless Good Fellow’
(‘A pox of this fooling and plotting of late’), The Poems of John Oldham, ed. Harold
F. Brooks and Raman Selden (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1987), 237–8.
63
v. iii. 192–206 (Southerne, Works, i. 336).
The Town Lampoon 93
equably enough: neither the fine lady who narrates it nor Artemiza
who recounts the narration expresses any feeling that this is an un-
usual or particularly outrageous outcome. Corinna is doing no more
than take back what the Town has taken from her as a failed
professional from the sex industry, while the squire, presented as
overtrusting rather than stupid, suffers for not having sufficiently
mastered the Town’s codes of dissimulation. Artemiza deplores the
way in which the Town has made love an ‘arrant trade’ and lovers
are chosen for status rather than affection, but will not be off to join
Chloe in the country. Knowing the ways of the Town and having
mastered its necessary lessons she seeks no other existence.
Rochester, if we can trust Burnet, probably wrote in the country, but
his soul had never departed from the Town and ‘Artemiza to Chloe’
is written in an attempt to define the special kind of prudence
required for its opportunities to be enjoyed to the full.
The lampoon’s near monopoly of privileged information about
the private lives of leading figures of the Town also made it influen-
tial in the establishment of celebrity status. The Town needed a hier-
archy of its own to balance the established hierarchies of the state
and court. Status in this conception arose from being talked about.
To be assailed in a lampoon confirmed that one was a recognized ob-
ject of public envy. In Thomas Baker’s Tunbridge-Walks (1703) we
are told that ‘Sparks’ held that ‘Raillery from a Lady’ was ‘as great a
mark of Esteem as they think a Lampoon is of being considerable
enough to be taken notice of’.64 Mirabell in The Way of the World
pursues his sham addresses to Lady Wishfort ‘by having a Friend to
put her into a Lampoon, and complement her with the Imputation of
an Affair with a young Fellow’.65 One of the Tunbridge lampoons
(‘Since I came last I’ve seen a lampoon here’) represents the ladies of
the place as avid readers of scandal written about themselves.66 By
contrast, not to be mentioned in a lampoon might be regarded as a
sign one was not an object of attention. In Lansdowne’s The She-
Gallants (1696) Lady Dorimen speaks of ‘certain Ladies, who think
themselves neglected to be left out of a Lampoon; and are proud to
have their Names publish’d, and to be known, and enquir’d after by
the whole Town’.67 Prudence, in Betterton’s The Amorous Widow,
laments the fate of ‘a young Lady that pin’d to a Consumption,
64
(London, 1709), 2–3. 65
i. i. 71–3 (Congreve, Complete Plays, 397).
66
Further quoted at pp. 209–12, 295. 67
(London, 1696), 38.
94 The Town Lampoon
because she Liv’d Three Years about the Court, and never had the
Honour to be Lampoon’d’.68 Another such in the ‘Essay upon Satyr’
. . . missed her name in a lampoon
And griev’d to see herself decayed so soon (ll. 47–8)
From this perspective the lampoon becomes a kind of PR outlet.

On occasion one encounters lampoon attacks which are so mildly
hostile as to encourage speculation that they were included purely as
a means of giving prominence to a particular individual (or disguis-
ing an association with authorship). Lampoons such as ‘Satire’ (‘This
way of writing I observed by some’), ‘A Ballad to the Tune of Cheviot
Chace’ (‘Come all ye youths that yet are free’), and ‘Julian’s Farewell
to the Coquets’ (‘Give o’er, ye poor players, depend not on wit’)
crowd in the names to such an extent that there is little space for real
abuse.69 They might even be seen as denoting a kind of Town A-list.
In some cases, being noticed in a lampoon might be positively ad-
vantageous. The repeated slights at Sir George Hewitt for his pre-
occupation with dress were at least maintaining his reputation as a
leading arbiter of style in a way that could hardly have displeased
him. The less flattering remarks that accompanied these barbs were
sufficiently answered by his reputation as a soldier, a duellist, and a
court administrator. The Town madams who feature so extensively
in lampoons can hardly have suffered much in their professions from
such pictures as
In the Side-box Moll H——n you may see,
Or Coquet Moll, who is as lewd as she:
That is their Throne; for there they best survey
All the salt Sots that flutter to the Play.
which is almost an advertisement.70 For others being abused in lam-

poons was a useful lightning rod for envy or a means by which they
might come to be underrated by their opponents in the intrigues of
court and Town, which for those with the cunning to exploit it might
confer a valuable advantage. It was those without standing who had
most to lose from being pilloried in lampoons. For those who wanted
to be known as sexually available it functioned as the equivalent
of leaving a card in a phone box or advertising in a relationships
68
(London, 1706), 5; first performed c.1670.
69
CSR, 81–5, 102–11, 199–203.
70
Robert Gould, ‘The Play-House’, 169.
The Town Lampoon 95
column. For those who did not there were ways, no doubt, of sig-
nalling that one regarded oneself as untouched by such aspersions.
Lady Betty in Cibber’s The Careless Husband reassures Lady Easy
that lampoons, far from being a threat to reputations, ‘are only
Things to be laughed at’.71
Thomas D’Urfey’s The Richmond Heiress (1693) introduces
Madam Squeamish, ‘A young fantastical Creature of Richmond,
horribly afraid of being Lampoon’d, and yet perpetually doing some-
thing or other to deserve it’.72 Squeamish enters in ii. i in a state of
shock over ‘an odious Lampoon, and the most nauseous filthy thing
that ever was heard’ that has come to her that morning folded as if it
were a billet-doux (p. 12). Her companion Mrs Stockjobb and Stock-
jobb’s lover Hotspur turn out to be among the subjects of the lam-
poon, which leads to bloodthirsty threats by both against the
unknown author. In Act V Squeamish, whose catchphrase ‘as I’m a
Virgin’ clearly involves an element of wishful thinking, reappears
with another lampoon in which her activities have been ‘publish’d
. . . in so particular a manner . . . and in so filthy a stile’ that she is
‘asham’d to read it’ (p. 60). She is happy, however, to concede the ac-
curacy of the information. Set against her is the truth-speaking
Sophronia, a female version of Wycherley’s plain-dealing Manly,
played in the original by Elizabeth Barry. In Act II she delivers what
in effect is a stage lampoon in the form of a description of the life of
Town rakes:
Come, Sir, for once I’ll be a little satyrical, and venture to describe the course
of life of all you Men of the Town: In the Morning the first thing you do is,
to reflect on the debauch of the Day before; and instead of saying your
Prayers as you ought, relate the lewd Folly to some other young rakehelly
Fellow, that happens to come to your Leve: The next thing is to dine, where
instead of using some witty or moral Discourse that should tend to improve-
ment, you finish your Desert with a Jargon of senceless Oaths, a relish of
ridiculous Bawdy, and strive to get drunk before ye come to the Play. . . .
Then at the Play-House ye ogle the Boxes, and dop and bow to those you do
not know, as well as those you do. Lord! what a world of sheer Wit too is
wasted upon the Vizard-Masks! who return it likewise back in as wonderful
a manner. You nuzzle your Noses into their Hoods and Commodes, just for
all the world like the Picture of Mahomet’s Pigeon, when he gave the false
Prophet his ghostly Instructions. Fogh! how many fine things are said
there, perfum’d with the Air of sour Claret! which the well-bred Nymph as
71
(London, 1705), 53. 72
p. A2v.
96 The Town Lampoon
odoriferously returns in the scent of Lambeth-Ale and Aqua-vitæ . . . Then

at Night ye graze with the hard-driven Cattel you have made a purchase of
at the Play, and strut and hum up and down the Tavern with a swashy Mien,
and a terrible hoarse Voice, which the Lady (to engage your liking) returns
with some awkward Frisks, instead of Dancing, and a Song in a squeaking
Voice, as untunable as a broken Bagpipe. Then supper coming in, the Glasses
go about briskly. The Fools think the Wenches heavenly Company; and they
tell them they are extream fine Gentlemen; ’till at last few Words are best; the
Bargain’s made, the Pox is cheaply purchas’d at the price of a Guinea, and no
repentance on neither side. What think ye, Sir, am I not a rare Picture-
drawer? (p. 14)
The comedy validates both the Town lampoon and its own brand of
theatrical satire on the basis that what is stated, whether generally or
personally, is a fair account of the reality. The issue of the invented
and unjustified accusation is pushed to one side. The lampooner,
whatever his or her motives, is presented as performing a valuable
and praiseworthy office. In Squeamish’s case the effect of being lam-
pooned has been to encourage a mode of behaviour which, while en-
tirely hypocritical, is at least supportive of the outer forms of virtue.
If there is fault to be found, it is with men for their compulsive brag-
ging about relationships that women at least have the wit to keep se-
cret. The aspiring Don Juan Tom Romance carries a collection of
material souvenirs about with him which he is happy to produce and
catalogue on request (pp. 8–9). Squeamish’s complaint that ‘A
Woman can’t enjoy her Youth in a degree a little above the Vulgar,
but, oh horrid! she’s presently popp’d into a Lampoon’ (p. 12) is
hardly an advertisement for virtue, but it does emphasize the merits
of discretion.
I kept my self so reserv’d, Cousin, all this Summer to avoid censure, that I re-
fus’d to receive visits from any Man under the Age of sixty nine, nor never
went any whither but to Church, and if they did not Lampoon me for that
too, I’m no Christian. (p. 32)
The Town lampoon could hardy be expected to suppress vice but it

might have some effect in forcing it underground. Curiously the
name ‘Sophronia’ had been used in a broadside poem of 1681, whose
full title is ‘Sophronia. Verses written occasionally by reading a late
scandalous libel designed, an aspersion upon the Lady G——’.73 This
is a defence of Mary, Lady Grey, inaccurately described as an
73
The British Library copy is dated ‘19. Octob. 1681’.
The Town Lampoon 97
Angel fair, and wise and chast;

Blest Genius of a happy Husband’s Life,
The softest, mildest and the truest Wife;
Whose Vertue like the God of the gay Morn,
Serenely shone, and love did more adorn.
Lady Grey may or may not have been Monmouth’s mistress, but was
soon discarded by her husband for her younger sister Henrietta
under circumstances that provided the plot for Behn’s Love-Letters
of a Nobleman to his Sister. The piece would seem to have been writ-
ten at Grey’s instigation, with D’Urfey possibly the hired pen.
The two works just considered represent a tribute by the print
medium, and in the first instance also the stage, to the power of clan-
destine satire. Yet this power ultimately depended on its semi-secret
nature. Alongside its other functions, the Town lampoon was also
constituting its readers as a document-based culture, for which the
procurement, exchange, and discussion of lampoons provided both
an integrating social ritual and a badge of identity. If as Brown and
Duguid have argued ‘a sense of community arises from reading the
same text’, the reader of the manuscript lampoon had the additional
incentive of knowing that those without access to privileged chan-
nels of communication would be prevented from reading that text.74
Entry into circles where one had continuous access to new lampoons
could not be achieved without the cooperation of those who were al-
ready part of them or of professional scribes who always kept them-
selves at a distance from the public market place.
So the Town lampoon filled a number of functions. In the evolu-
tion of public morality it represented a defence of the rights of pleas-
ure against the repressions of both Geneva and Rome, and yet one
that, by a not unprecedented paradox, was often reinscribing a dis-
placed form of the body-hating attitudes it opposed. It both con-
demned and asserted the new sexual freedoms of the age; but its
central repeated message was that these freedoms were as funda-
mental a fact of Town life as they were of court life. At a simple, prac-
tical level it was a way of dealing with public pests including that
signal body of pests, the authors of lampoons. It communicated valu-
able information to the Town about the actions and status of its
74
John Seely Brown and Paul Duguid, The Social Life of Information (Cambridge,
Mass.: Harvard Business School Press, 2000), 199 as part of a wider discussion of
the ways in which the consumption of documents helps structure communities
(pp. 189–200).
98 The Town Lampoon
members, being in this respect a distillation of the vital medium of

gossip—a matter to be considered in Chapter 6. Behn in the prologue
to The Rover (1677) cites ‘Lew’d Lampoon’ and ‘Bawdy Song’ as
evidence that
. . . the only Witt that’s now in Fashon,
Is but the gleenings of good Conversation.75
In a more complicated way it was part of the process by which new

forms of sociability were moulded and defined that were to govern the
lives of the newly reinforced leisured class of the metropolis. New-
comers from the country could learn essential lessons of survival from
it or, if that was their preference, new ways of pursuing pleasure. The
visit as a social institution drew on lampoons both as an object of ex-
change and for providing endless matter for conversation. They
helped foster a culture of celebrity in which to become a lampoon star
was often a recognition of stardom in the wider firmanent of the
Town or might help in creating it. Participation in circulating lam-
poons was itself a community-building activity. At its best the Town
lampoon can be vigorously ribald or adopt an Augustan suavity. It
has left not only a gallery of brilliant personal caricatures but a sense
of the current of daily life in the places of assembly of the beau monde.
It could also, as goes without saying, be mean-minded, spiteful,
pornographic, misogynist, cruel, and woundingly untruthful.
75
Works, v. 453.
4
State Satire
Court satire, as described in Chapter 2, dealt with the behaviour of

individuals directly known to its readers and addressed those readers
intimately, insolently, and with a complete assurance of the satirist’s
aristocratic superiority (which was often the real thing). It countered
the court’s public enactments of monarchical dignity, in which both
writers and readers were themselves regular participants, with exag-
gerated images of private greed, lust, and deformity. Its governing
context was ceremonial and its ruling spirit parodic. Its involuntary
‘stars’—the royal family, the mistresses, and the maids of honour—
were sufficiently fixed to rob the satirical act of any revolutionary
potential: to destroy them would have been to dislodge the hierar-
chical matrix within which the satirist’s own identity was composed.
Town satire adapted the court model to accommodate new social
purposes and to address a larger and more diverse audience, which,
instead of inhabiting an assured social matrix, was still in the process
of inventing one. Stardom in this context was likely to be fragile and
temporary: like modern tabloid journalism the Town lampoon both
loved its celebrities and conspired to destroy them. Its authorial as-
sumption of power over both victim and reader was more patently a
pretence than was the case with the court lampoon and will some-
times be acknowledged as such. Much of its energy was consumed in
border wars against court, country, and City.
State satire, our third category of convenience, covers satire con-
cerned with national, political, and religious questions, and was
played for higher stakes on a larger board. Even more so than the
Town, the Restoration state was never a settled entity. The utility, let
alone the sanctity, of monarchical government remained a subject
of debate and nowhere more than in the writings of the lampooners.
While learning useful lessons from the court tradition, state lam-
pooners were in touch with much older traditions of verse critique
and with the memories of earlier conflicts that these transmitted: its
100 State Satire
world had not begun de novo in 1660. In this respect, state satire falls
under a particular arc of the circumference of the ‘state poem’, it
being under that title that bowdlerized versions of Restoration polit-
ical verse of all kinds were published in printed anthologies from the
late 1690s onward.1 This wider genre embraces the licensed as well
as the clandestine: much of Dryden’s pre-1688 verse can be so char-
acterized. Absalom and Achitophel (1681), while chiefly valued
today for its brilliant satirical portraits, is actually an amalgam of
several distinct genres of state poetry, among them panegyric, polit-
ical narrative, allegory, invocation of the deity to aid the nation, the
verse address to a patron, the ceremonial ode, and the verse political
treatise. Work in these non-satirical forms could usually find a
printer, if the poet so desired, though it was often more advanta-
geous to make it an object of presentation in the more privileged
medium. The Beinecke Library holds a remarkable bound collection
of complimentary poems in manuscript presented at various times to
the Duke of Ormonde.2 For panegyrics the preferred medium was
the Pindaric ode, pieces which are often, in the judicious words of
John McVeagh, ‘static, overblown effusions, almost empty of con-
tent’.3 There is a special room in hell in which super-refined critics
and theorists are condemned to an eternity of composing commen-
taries on the Pindarics of D’Urfey and Tate. Even Oldham sags when
he attempts the genre. State satire might also be printed when it sup-
ported the cause of the government or when the grip of the censor
was weak, as happened during the turbulent years of the Exclusion
Bill crisis; but its primary circulation, under other circummstances,
was oral and through manuscript.
Clandestine state satire aspired to transcend the separate con-
stituencies of Town, court, country, and City. While still addressing
the landed ruling class as its primary audience, it had to take into ac-
count that individual members of that class now possessed Town,
and possibly court, as well as country identities, and that they might
view matters in different ways depending which of these was dom-
inant at any given time. The same reader might identify with both the
1
Culminating in the four-volume Poems on Affairs of State of 1702–7, discussed
below.
2
Described in Andrew Carpenter, ‘A Collection of Verse Presented to James
Butler, First Duke of Ormonde’, Yale University Library Gazette, 75 (2000), 64–70.
3
Thomas D’Urfey and Restoration Drama: The Work of a Forgotten Writer
(Aldershot: Ashgate, 2000), 148.
State Satire 101
Smith and the Johnson of Buckingham’s The Rehearsal—the plain-

speaking no-nonsense country gentleman and the streetwise Town
sophisticate—or the Margery Pinchwife, the Alithea, or even the
Lady Fidget of Wycherley’s The Country Wife. This widening of the
audience meant that satire had to explain more, leading to portraits
which, like Dryden’s in Absalom and Achitophel, were designed to
make the victims vivid and believable to readers who had no previ-
ous knowledge of them. Yet the desire to transcend did not extend to
politics itself, which is always pursued in a partisan and divisive
spirit. Philosophical detachment and mere amusement at the passing
show are wholly absent from the state lampoon, unless as a pose to
inveigle the reader. In the earlier decades of the period, state satire
speaks on behalf of not always clearly defined factions, but from the
early 1680s it is increasingly aligned to modern notions of party, a
concept that it assisted in clarifying. This development will be con-
sidered alongside more technical ones in what follows, within a
broadly chronological framework.
m a rv e l l i a n sat i r e
With drastic simplification, the political history of the later phase of

Stuart monarchy can be modelled in terms of two versions of modern-
ity at war both with each other and with ingrained traditionalism,
with each formation enjoying periods of triumph and eclipse. The
first version of modernity was one whose ideal was a strong, central-
ized, monarchical state, with a standing army and a form of decision-
making under which, while new taxes had to be approved by
parliament, laws passed by it might be modified or even overridden by
royal decree. The template was Louis XIV’s France, and exponents
tended to be pro-French in foreign policy and sympathetic to Roman
Catholicism. The favoured economic model was the Colbertian one
of a state-regulated mercantilism financed by the acquisition of
colonies. The reign of James II saw a determined effort to put this
policy into practice, but Charles was moving close to it in the closing
years of his own reign and it is envisaged in the secret treaty he signed
with Louis in 1670. Its political heirs were the post-1688 Jacobites.
Ranged against it was a rival version of modernity advocating
strong, regularly summoned parliaments with the power to counter-
mand royal decrees and in one version to alter the succession,
102 State Satire
religious toleration for all Protestants but not Catholics, a pro-

Dutch, anti-French foreign policy, and state support—chiefly
through maintaining a strong navy—of a self-regulating business
sector. For this, despite some imprecision, the traditional term Whig
will be used.
The version of conservatism to which both modernizing tenden-
cies were opposed was that advocated first by Clarendon and later
Danby, in which the supremacy of the state Church was to be upheld
by denying freedom of worship and certain other civil rights to both
Catholics and Dissenting Protestants. France and the Netherlands
(England’s main trade rival) were each regarded with suspicion, but
France more so, and parliament, while continuing to assert its an-
cient rights, would allow itself to be managed by a trusted first min-
ister—the social hierarchy of the parish writ large in the nation.
Agricultural prosperity was to be sustained by tariffs on imports and
direct taxation was to be kept to a minimum. Supporters of this view
constituted the mainstream Tories of Charles II’s reign, though the
political alliance then known by that name also included a strong
contingent of Yorkists from our first formation. Clarendon and
Danby both lost the support of their followers by succumbing to the
king’s Gallophilia. The price of office under Charles, as Shaftesbury
and Buckingham also found, was assent to his desire for a mutually
supportive relationship with his cousin and paymaster Louis.
Summing up the first two reigns of our period, we find that the trad-
itionalists had the early running, that the Protestant modernists
gained power in the late 1660s in an uneasy alliance with Catholic
Yorkists, that the traditionalists then resumed control, that the
Protestant modernists made a strong bid for power during the
Exclusion Bill years of 1678–82, that the traditionalists regained
the initiative from 1682, only to be superseded during the brief reign
of James by the Catholicizing modernists, and that the Protestant
modernists secured a decisive advantage with the Revolution of
1688. The reigns of William and Mary and William saw a belated
resurgence by the traditionalists but in a context where the power of
parliament was greatly enhanced and that of the prerogative
weakened. Expensive and generally popular foreign wars meant that
taxes had to be raised to unprecedented levels and administration
professionalized and bureaucratized.
In making such distinctions, and in assigning individuals to
one tendency or another, we need to recognize that a great deal of
State Satire 103
personal behaviour was wavering, inconsistent, or simply oppor-

tunistic; that access to office and its spoils was a much more powerful
incentive than ideological consistency; and that the actual texture of
affairs, at all but a few brief periods of clear-cut conflict, was usually
a matter of compromise, alliances, and confused allegiances, in
which family and personal affiliations might well outweigh other
loyalties. While being a Jacobite or a Dissenter was a matter of con-
viction, support of the Whig or the Tory programme at any particu-
lar juncture was often temporary and strategic or arose from anxiety
over the behaviour of current power-holders. The state lampoon is an
invaluable guide to these changes, not least because it often preserves
public perceptions which have been lost sight of owing to modern,
triumphalist ironings-out of past uncertainties. It also, needless to
say, allows much more direct expression to individual views than the
closely controlled press or the private letter, always likely to be
opened in transit.4 With Andrew Marvell, the most important poet to
write on behalf of the Protestant modernists, what may seem like in-
consistency is the effect upon a remarkably consistent mind of a
sharp awareness of what could not be publicly uttered.5 It is therefore
to his clandestine works (insofar as they can confidently be identified)
rather than his print-published ones that we need to look for the
clearest articulation of his political programme.
Much as court poetry had Rochester and Dorset and Town poetry
Dryden to supply it with models and standards, national poetry owes
a huge debt to the founding influence of Marvell, whether acting as
an author of satires, a promoter of oppositional writing, or a Protest-
ant ideologue. This posture has always been an embarrassment to
admirers of the self-aware subjectivity and celebration of with-
drawal which characterize his lyrical and reflective verse—the qual-
ities praised in T. S. Eliot’s 1932 tercentenary essay. Eliot’s recipe for
reading Marvell was ‘to squeeze the drops of the essence of two or
three poems’ in order to isolate ‘a quality of a civilization, of a trad-
itional habit of life’.6 He had no interest in the Marvell he dismissed
as ‘the former member for Hull’. Marvell criticism, whether in the
4
For the insecurity of letters, see N. H. Keeble, ‘ “I would not tell you any tales”:
Marvell’s Constituency Letters’, in Conal Condren and A. D. Cousins (eds.), The
Political Identity of Andrew Marvell (Aldershot: Scolar Press, 1990), 111–34.
5
Ibid. 128–9.
6
‘Andrew Marvell’, in Selected Prose of T. S. Eliot, ed. Frank Kermode (London:
Faber, 1975), 161.
104 State Satire
Eliotan or New-critical line, is still overwhelmingly directed towards

a handful of lyric poems and the political verse of the civil war period
and protectorate, but even the latter is approached in terms of its the-
atrical presentation of personality rather than for any light it sheds
on the actual politics of its own time or ours. Critical interest in the
Restoration state satires has been further inhibited by real uncertain-
ties over attribution; but even ‘The Last Instructions to a Painter’,
which has always been accepted as by Marvell, and which is his
longest and most complex single poem, has received surprisingly
little discussion, perhaps because its views are regarded as too patent
and outspoken for a poet otherwise admired for his ‘ambivalently
suspended meanings’.7
George deF. Lord, in the first volume, published in 1963, of the
Yale POAS series, was the first scholar to take an informed look at
the attribution problems and to present the poems he regarded as by
Marvell in a context that allowed them to be read with a full under-
standing of their political aims. His reward for this was to be snapped
at by Elizabeth Story Donno in the introduction to her misleadingly
titled Complete Poems, who winds up a very long list of ‘Other
Attributions’, which includes several accepted by Lord, with the
comment ‘Margoliouth’s observation made in 1927 remains a sound
guideline: “it seems to me a great mistake to continue to print among
Marvell’s poems inferior stuff which has long been considered spuri-
ous” ’—thus disposing of the question of quality and that of authen-
ticity together.8 One aspect of this privileging of the lyrical Marvell
was a tacit assumption that undatable ‘Metaphysical’ poems must all
have been written before the Restoration forced the ‘forward youth’
to transmogrify into the member for Hull. It came as a shock when
Allan Pritchard presented strong evidence that ‘The Garden’, to look
no further, belonged to the 1660s, a discovery that is still strangely
disregarded.9 Critics in the Eliotan line have pointedly refused to
argue their exclusions on scholarly grounds, preferring to appeal to
personal taste and a historically quite recent consensus.
The question of which among the many poems to which Marvell’s
name has been attached were written by him, which partly written
or revised by him, and which the work of other hands may never be
7
Keeble, ‘ “I would not tell you any tales” ’, 129.
8
Andrew Marvell: The Complete Poems (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books,
1972), 218.
9
‘Marvell’s “The Garden”: A Restoration Poem?’, SEL 23 (1983), 371–88.
State Satire 105
answered; but one important attribution—that of the second and

third ‘Advices to a Painter’—which was supported by Lord but re-
jected both by Donno and by John M. Wallace in his 1968 study of
Marvell’s political verse must now be accepted as valid.10 The in-
ternal and external evidence for Marvell’s authorship, which was
persuasively marshalled by Annabel Patterson, has since received
powerful support from stylometric tests conducted by John Bur-
rows.11 They are also the poems by Marvell that were most widely
read during his lifetime. Beyond the attributable canon lies a much
larger body of ‘Marvellian’ verse possibly circulated by him or in-
spired by his example as a writer, Protestant, and patriot. (John
Ayloffe and John Freke were two active disciple poets.) Marvell was
a known friend of Milton, whose Paradise Lost he praised to readers
in 1674 on the unlikely ground of its ‘easiness’, and there had never
been any doubt about Milton’s politics. Writers of oppositional verse
recognized Marvell’s primacy in the field in the same way as writers
of erotic verse did Rochester’s. Both assumptions gave rise to wrong
attributions but in neither case was the broader estimate unfounded.
Marvell was perfectly placed to perform this function of enabler and
publicist for oppositional polemic, since his long-standing connec-
tion with Buckingham gave him a direct link to the court and its
writings, while his work as a parliamentarian and parliamentary
newsletter-writer put him at the heart of the deliberative process.
Simultaneously, his religious position (never fully acknowledged in his
print-published writings) allowed him to move freely in Dissenting
circles where forbidden writings were actively circulated.12 Roger
L’Estrange, in a report of 23 August 1678, connected him with sur-
reptitious printing and copying of subversive texts by Anne Brew-
ster.13 The term ‘Marvellian’ will be used in what follows for state
satire that was either attributed to Marvell at the time, written under
his influence, or reflects views with which he probably concurred.
10
John M. Wallace, Destiny his Choice: The Loyalism of Andrew Marvell
(Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1968), 152–63.
11
Patterson, ‘Lady State’s First Two Sittings: Marvell’s Satiric Canon’, SEL 40
(2000), 395–41. Burrows’s findings are to be presented as part of a joint paper by
himself, Christopher Wortham, and the present author.
12
William Lamont’s reading of Marvell’s religious position in Condren and
Cousins (eds.), Political Identity, 135–56 as that of a Baxterian comprehensivist is
persuasive.
13
Transcript in Hilton Kelliher (comp.), Andrew Marvell: Poet and Politician
(London: British Library, 1978).
106 State Satire
While the authorship of much ‘Marvellian’ satire remains uncer-

tain, there is no doubt about its occasion. Charles’s return to the
throne had been greatly aided by Presbyterians and moderate
Independents who desired incorporation into the national Church
without rigid enforcement of the Anglican liturgy or too condign a
submission to the re-enthroned bishops. Charles, though personally
inclined to Rome, may have intended to meet this expectation, but
his chief minister, Clarendon, the Cavalier parliament, and the
bishops, with their twenty-six votes in the Lords, had different ideas,
which found expression in the series of bills collectively referred to as
the Clarendon code. The most severe of these, the Uniformity Act,
which came into operation on St Bartholomew’s Day 1662, led to the
departure from their livings of all ministers who refused to accept
Anglican orders. The Five-Mile and Conventicle Acts, which fol-
lowed, were designed to prevent Nonconformists, as they were now
called, acting collectively for either religious or political purposes.
Strong opposition to pro-Church policies was evident from the time
of their implementation but had no way of expressing itself organ-
izationally as a national popular movement. Rebellion was hardly a
practical option when the lessons of its outcome were so vividly in
remembrance and the state so vigilant against it. A couple of at-
tempts by armed Fifth Monarchists at one extreme and sexually hyper-
active apprentices at another were quickly quashed.14 A resentful
quietism remained the dominant posture of Nonconformism until
the resurgence of open anti-crown polemic in the late 1670s. Instead,
oppositional activity moved to the House of Lords, which contained
significant minorities of both Catholic and Puritan peers, and to the
court itself, where functionaries opposed to Clarendon worked on
the king’s personal impatience with the Chancellor to obtain his dis-
missal. The fact that Clarendon’s daughter was married to the Duke
of York, and that the two princesses of that marriage were third and
fourth in line for the throne, would have strengthened his position
had it not been that the Catholic duke was himself opposed to Angli-
can supremacy and prepared, as his later career showed, to forge an
alliance with the Dissenters to overthrow it. In the end it was the dis-
asters of the ill-advised second Dutch War, so vividly recorded in
14
For the case for seeing the apprentice riots of 1668 as a significant political event,
see James Grantham Turner, Libertines and Radicals in Early Modern London
(Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2002), passim.
State Satire 107
Marvell’s three ‘Advices’, and fears of the growing power of France,

that were to defeat Clarendon and his policies.
The first and most accomplished phase of oppositional state satire
is directed at royal conduct under Clarendon. Its other themes are the
king’s weak leadership, suspected Catholicism, and libertinism; the
court’s extravagance and debauchery; and the corruption and inept-
ness of the bureaucracy. Lord’s first POASY volume reprints all the
most widely circulated anti-Clarendonian lampoons. Poetical sup-
port for the Chancellor in the months preceding his fall was virtually
non-existent; even those satirists who continued to belabour the Pur-
itans had little to say for him. Our concern in this chapter will be with
the method rather than the substance of this satire—the ways in
which it modified the precedents of Cleveland, Lovelace, Wild, But-
ler, and the court lampoonists in order to address new issues and audi-
ences. Court satire was a strong influence but court satire as it was
read outside rather than within the walls of Whitehall. State satire, in
addressing a much broader and less predictable audience than the
courtiers, sought ways of combining court satire’s assurance of su-
periority and lightness of touch with an insistence on the momentous
nature of the issues addressed. This may have been one reason for the
satirists’ preference for the pentameter couplet over the stanzaic
forms generally favoured at court or the Butlerian tetrameter. When
the anti-Clarendonian satirists do write stanzaically, as in several of
the Marvell dubia, the poems have a weight and solidity of develop-
ment wholly uncharacteristic of court stanzaic lampoons: Freke’s
densely epigrammatic ‘A History of Insipids’ (‘Chaste pious prudent
Charles the second’) is a good example.15
t h e pa i n t e r p o e m s
The best-known examples, both in our time and then, of anti-

Clarendonian satire are the long sequence, contributed by several
hands, of ‘Advices to a Painter’.16 Our concern will be with the way in
which they helped establish a voice for a new kind of state satire, dis-
tinct from court and Town satire, though drawing lessons from both.
The genre was set in motion by Waller’s Instructions to a Painter for
15
Text in POASY, i. 243–51.
16
For the genre, see Mary-Tom Osborne, Advice-to-a-Painter Poems, 1663–1856
(Austin: University of Texas Press, 1949).
108 State Satire
the Drawing of the Posture and Progress of His Majesty’s Forces at

Sea, under the Command of His Highness-Royal; together with the
Battle and Victory, Obtained over the Dutch, June 3, 1665 (London,
1665).17 The importance of this panegyric, derived from Gian
Franceso Busenello’s La prospettiva del navale trionfo riportato dalla
Republica serenissima contra il Turco (Venice, 1656), lay in the poet
as well as the subject: Waller was second only to Cowley in the pan-
theon of his time, despite being a double turncoat, having abandoned
the royal party during the interregnum to write in praise of Cromwell
and then reconverted his muse to monarchism at the Restoration.
Marvell, on the other hand, had never renounced the old cause. He
had also written a better poem on the death of Cromwell, though one
that, unlike Waller and Dryden, he prudently declined to publish.
Waller’s first ‘Instructions’ presents a stirring vision of York as a
military hero:
Make him bestride the ocean and mankind
Ask his consent to use the sea and wind;
While his tall ships in the barr’d channel stand,
He grasps the Indies in his armed hand. (ll. 25–8)
No one, of course, was ever going to take this seriously, though it may
have contributed to the curiously unrealistic view of James’s military
prowess and personal courage that was to be so brutally shattered by
the events of 1688–90. In the closing lines the focus of the poem shifts
to Charles as an equally improbable Jove-like ‘Thunderer’ receiving
homage from a grateful Commons. Marvell pays tribute to Waller in
the opening couplet of the ‘Second Advice’ but does not fail to remind
the reader that the poem’s hyperbolic Stuartism was a ‘penance . . . for
Cromwell’s epitaph’ (l. 337). To place Waller’s panegyric and ‘The
Second Advice’ side by side is to encounter a difference similar to that
between Corelli and Purcell in music. Where Waller is polished,
effortless, transparent, cosmopolitan, sweeping the reader along by the
sheer effrontery of his praise; Marvell deploys a quirky, multilayered
wit and calculated instability of tone that continually check the
onward movement of the verse by forcing the reader to pause in order
to work out what is really going on.18 Another difference is that
17
The text for all poems in the painter series here cited is that of POASY, i. 20–219
passim.
18
The musical contrast is further explicated in Harold Love, ‘Constructing
Classicism: Dryden and Purcell’, in Paul Hammond and David Hopkins (eds.), John
Dryden: Tercentenary Essays (Oxford: Oxford UP, 2000), 92–112, esp. 102–3.
State Satire 109
Waller’s poem presents a reasonably straightforward narrative, while

Marvell’s progresses through discrete, loosely linked, portrait-like
sections, each with its own introduction and concluding rhetorical
flourish, like this to his long, savage portrait of the embezzling
Secretary Coventry:
Muscovy sells us hemp and pitch and tar,
Iron and copper, Sweden; Münster, war;
Ashley, prize; Warwick, customs; Cart’tret, pay;
But Coventry sells the whole fleet away. (ll. 37–40)
The ‘Second Advice’, while rejecting the substance of Waller’s pan-

egyric, does not reject its epideictic manner: when bravery is to be
praised Marvell does so with great eloquence, as in the eulogy of the
third Earl of Marlborough at lines 215–26—a passage that must
surely have been in Dryden’s mind when he inserted his elegiac lines
on Ossory into Absalom and Achitophel. Outright sarcasm is re-
served for appropriate occasions, such as the mordant account
quoted below of the death of Falmouth. The sting lies rather in the in-
ability of the courtiers who have blundered into the battle to live up
to the nobility of the poem’s predominant rhetoric: without excep-
tion they are presented as fearful, inept, and corrupt, the climax of
their baneful influence being Brounker’s order, given in the duke’s
name, that allowed the Dutch to escape. Lines 135–54 are an inter-
polated execration by a courtier against ships and gunpowder, which
also manages to incriminate Clarendon for propelling the speaker
from the comforts of Whitehall to ‘fight with Hans’. The lesson to
Waller is not that he chose the wrong verse medium to praise the duke
but that it should have been allowed to cut both ways—ennobling
those persons and events who deserved it and diminishing the rest.
York, Waller’s hero and Marvell’s anti-hero, is a cut above his
craven underlings but represented as holding back in situations that
required boldness. Waller’s account of the death of Falmouth, struck
by a cannonball as he stood at the duke’s side, presents the event as an
example of York’s undaunted courage. Marvell is more down to earth.
The Duke himself (though Penn did not forget)
Yet was not out of danger’s random set.
Falmouth was there (I know not what to act—
Some say ’twas to grow duke, too, by contact);
An untaught bullet in its wanton scope
Quashes him all to pieces and his hope.
110 State Satire
Such as his rise such was his fall, unprais’d:

A chance shot sooner took than chance him rais’d.
His shatter’d head the fearless Duke distains
And gave the last-first proof that he had brains. (ll. 179–88)
The ‘fearless’ of the second-last line has already been undercut by

Marvell’s charge that Admiral Penn, at the instigation of the duchess,
was deliberately keeping the duke away from danger. ‘Random’ ap-
plied to the cannon fire here has the technical meaning of shots fired
at a gun’s longest possible range. The duke is not boldly facing a dir-
ect broadside. Examining Waller’s account we find that he too con-
cedes that the ships were a good way apart but turns it into a
compliment by implying that it was the Dutch who were evading the
duke rather than vice versa.
The tall Batavian in a vast ship rides,
Bearing an army in her hollow sides,
Yet not inclined the English ship to board,
More on his guns relies than on his sword;
From whence a fatal volley we receiv’d:
It miss’d the Duke, but his great heart it griev’d;
Three worthy persons from his side it tore
And dy’d his garment with their scatter’d gore. (ll. 141–8)
Marvell omits the duke’s subsequent involvement in much hotter

action, presumably because he was aware that, as Waller also con-
ceded, other ships quickly interposed themselves between him and
the approaching Dutch. His final judgement on the battle is that
‘Nine only came to fight, the rest to see’ (l. 232), a charge echoed at
line 598 of the ‘Last Instructions’, where the courtiers arrive at the
scene of battle ‘To be spectators safe of the new play’ and flee as soon
as they hear the guns. Once again, Waller, in the continuation of the
passage just quoted, had also used the theatrical image but with a
favourable twist
Happy! to whom this glorious death arrives,
More to be valu’d than a thousand lives!
On such a theatre as this to die,
For such a cause, and such a witness by!
The most damning contrast between the two comes in their respect-
ive accounts of the end of the battle. Waller concludes his story with
uproar and fireworks as York storms the Dutch coast:
State Satire 111
His cannons’ roar, forerunner of his fame,

Makes their Hague tremble, and their Amsterdam.
The British thunder does their houses rock,
And the Duke seems at ev’ry door to knock.
His dreadful streamer, like a comet’s hair,
Threat’ning destruction, hastens their despair,
Makes them deplore their scatter’d fleet as lost
And fear our present landing on their coast. (ll. 265–72)
None of this had actually happened. Instead, in Marvell’s accurate

version:
Now all conspires unto the Dutchman’s loss:
The wind, the fire, we, they themselves, do cross,
When a sweet sleep the Duke began to drown
And with soft diadem his temples crown.
But first he orders all besides to watch,
That they the foe (whilst he a nap) might catch. (ll. 233–8)
An order to shorten sail supposedly brought from the napping duke

allowed the Dutch fleet to escape. As well as differing in their repre-
sentation of the action, the two poems found their readers by differ-
ent routes. Waller’s poem was printed first as a broadsheet and later
in editions of his works; Marvell’s irreverent response was initially
circulated in manuscript and (despite its appearance in two surrepti-
tious printed editions) continued to be copied into scribal antholo-
gies of lampoons for the rest of the century. Print is thus figured as the
medium of lies, manuscript as that of truth. Poetry itself has been
revalidated by the ‘Second Advice’s’ reprimand to its mendacious
predecessor. Marvell’s judgement that ‘Nine only came to fight’ is
qualified by a promise to add the name of anyone who has unjustly
been omitted. His depiction of the battle, unlike Waller’s, rests on a
careful survey of the available evidence (ll. 227–32).
Lacking a direct model, then, the painter poems proceeded by de-
molishing the materials of panegyric and reconstructing them in a
spirit of urbane mockery learned from the court lampoonists but
now applied to grander themes. This gives us one clue to the audience
for which they are intended: an audience that was aware of Waller’s
praise and could enjoy the way in which it was inverted in some cases
and redistributed in others; also one that regarded itself as know-
ledgeable and sophisticated, and was to be laughed rather than hec-
tored into agreement; yet one that could be relied on to recognize
112 State Satire
that matters of pressing importance were being addressed through a

manner at once florid and jokey. There can be little doubt that the
primary readership envisaged for the painter series was that whose
assent was necessary to the crown’s request for supply—Marvell’s
(and Waller’s) fellow members of the Cavalier parliament and those
who were directly able to influence their votes. The authors of anti-
Clarendon satire, addressed to a house effectively controlled by the
court and strongly Anglican in its sympathies, would have seen little
point in trying to browbeat their readers. Instead they used black
comedy to create awareness of disturbing realities and of the conse-
quences that would flow from the continuation of those realities.
The poem aspires to be read for its wit by those predisposed against
its politics.
Marvell’s perfect mastery of the easy insolent manner of the court
satirists reappears in The Rehearsal Transpros’d (1672–3), which so
delighted the king; but in other respects he is clearly not the court in-
sider. When he comes to write the ‘Last Instructions’, it is evident he
does not have a courtier’s intimate knowledge of the individuals—
the Earl of St Albans, the Duchess of York, and the Duchess of Cleve-
land—with whom he is poetically so familiar. Marvell presents them
with a density of realization and a degree of visual particularity that
was quite foreign to Rochester and Dorset, who would have assumed
they were already perfectly well known to the intended readers.
Moreover, Marvell has to do this as much to make them real and
credible to himself as for the benefit of his projected audience. His
conception of the operation of power is also very different from the
court institutional one. These points can both be demonstrated from
the account of Cleveland’s seduction of the footman (ll. 81–104).
That Cleveland liked sex with lower-class men (including an acrobat
named Jacob Hall) is the topic of a number of court satires, which
may be represented for the present discussion by Rochester’s ‘Quoth
the Dutchess of Cleveland, to Counsellor Knight’.19 To Rochester
the spectacle of the Duchess going to a ‘Cellar in Sodom’ in order to
purchase ‘a douzen of Pricks, for a douzen of Ale’ is gross enough
but does not violate the courtly axiom discussed in Chapter 2 by
which the higher placed member of the hierarchy of state power is
entitled to make use of the bodies of those lower in the hierarchy for
his or her own gratification, providing that the institutional power
19
Works, 90.
State Satire 113
relationship remains undisturbed. The striking thing about the por-

trait of Cleveland in the ‘Last Instructions’ is the way in which hier-
archy itself is first reversed and then dissolved. What fascinates
Marvell is not the duchess’s lust for the footman but the inversion
of the role of mistress and servant by which she degrades herself to
minister to his body when he should be serving hers:
Great Love, how dost thou triumph and how reign,
That to a groom could’st humble her disdain!
Stripp’d to her skin, see how she stooping stands,
Nor scorns to rub him down with those fair hands,
And washing (lest the scent her crime disclose)
His sweaty hooves, tickles him ’twixt the toes. (ll. 91–6)
Titania and Bottom may lurk somewhere in the background of this

remarkable picture; but, as Steven Zwicker has pointed out, its fla-
grant reversal of power gradients is also a parodic allusion to an ex-
emplary example of female submission in Magdalen’s washing the
feet of Christ, as celebrated in lines 29–32 of Marvell’s own ‘Eyes
and Tears’ and its Latin contrafactum:
So Magdalen, in tears more wise
Dissolved those captivating eyes,
Whose liquid chains could flowing meet
To fetter her Redeemer’s feet.20
Marvell must have known that Cleveland had been painted by Lely
in 1662 as the penitent Magdalen, since the image was widely repro-
duced and imitated.21 To juxtapose the two passages is to become
aware of both the veiled eroticism of the earlier poem and the pres-
ence of a form of Christian self-subjection in the later one, under
which it might be perfectly proper for a duchess to wash the feet of a
servant. But not at the court of Charles II!
Returning to Rochester’s poem from Marvell’s, one recognizes
that it too is engaged in biblical parody, with the rounding up of the
dozen of pricks reflecting Christ’s calling of the twelve disciples, and
the term ‘Counsellor’, applied to Knight, eliding her with the Holy
Spirit (the unmentioned third person would be Charles, the father);
20
Works, i. 16; Steven Z. Zwicker, ‘Virgins and Whores: The Politics of Sexual
Misconduct in the 1660s’, in Condren and Cousins (eds.), Political Identity, 98.
21
For this influential painting and its biblical resonances, see Catharine MacLeod
and Julia Maciari Alexander, Painted Ladies: Women at the Court of Charles II
(London: National Portrait Gallery, 2001), 33–4.
114 State Satire
but in this case one does not find any comparable blurring of the
structure of power.22 Rochester’s duchess always remains in charge.
While Marvell’s Cleveland and St Albans passages have certainly
learned lessons of tone and urbanity from the court lampoon, and
Marvell may well have set out, as Dryden does in MacFlecknoe, to
show the courtiers how much better he was at their own mode of
indecent burlesque, in other respects he is observing the court
through alien eyes.
The originality of Marvell’s enterprise becomes clearer when we
read the second and third advices and the ‘Last Instructions’ not as
self-sufficient commentaries on current events but as a single, pro-
gressive, satirico-comic epyllion in three books or ‘sittings’—his
Caroliad. There is a precedent for such a tripartite structure in Waller’s
‘The Battle of the Summer Islands’. Marvell may not have foreseen
the structure when he began the ‘Second Advice’ but he must have
been fully aware of the sequential nature of his enterprise by the time
he composed the indicatively titled ‘Last Instructions’. The model for
an ongoing chronicle of public events would have been present to
him in the recently inaugurated Intelligencer and Gazette. That the
new manner was a difficult one to master is evident from the lessons
learned during its creation. The ‘Second Advice’ and the opening sec-
tion of the third are too clogged with specialized topical references
(some of which still baffle their modern editors) to be easy going.
Even in their own time they must only have been fully intelligible to
a relatively small circle of informed readers with access to the news
organs just mentioned. Marvell had not yet grown out of the scribal-
publishing poet’s habit of writing ‘difficult’ poetry for a coterie audi-
ence, however much the nature of the coterie might have changed.
This is partly remedied in the ‘Third Advice’ by sheer comic bravura.
As The Rehearsal Transpros’d shows, Marvell had a strong interest
in the drama, and had already, in ‘Flecknoe: An English Priest at
Rome’, written a satire which has the quality of a mime or plotless
droll. (The same could be said of ‘Tom May’s Death’, which is an
Aristophanic mythological mime, but has yet to have its Marvellian
authorship confirmed.) The long monologue of the Duchess of
Albermarle, structurally reminiscent of that of Ben Jonson in ‘Tom
May’s Death’, is a comic routine in drag performed by an imaginary
22
Anti-Trinitarian burlesque, which is common at this period, is not necessarily
blasphemous since Deists, Unitarians, and even some otherwise orthodox Protestants
regarded the doctrine, like that of the real presence, as a ‘Popish’ innovation.
State Satire 115
Nokes or Angel. It is also an experiment with a new satiric voice, stri-

dent, demotic, and vulgar, that was already familiar from stanzaic
lampoons of the folk tradition but had to be framed and controlled,
as it is here, for use in the more prestigious couplet variety. Signifi-
cantly 234 lines of raw truth-telling yield at the poem’s conclusion to
a reassertion of the high style in the delicacy of the Philomel simile.
That the monologue slightly outstays its welcome is the result of an
artistic miscalculation that was remedied in the superbly controlled
‘Last Instructions’, where vividly realized scene follows scene in the
manner of a compacted history play. By this time, as we have noted,
Marvell had perfected a technique by which the major victims are so
fully presented to the readership that prior knowledge is not neces-
sary. Dryden clearly had this achievement in mind in Absalom and
Achitophel, one of whose lasting achievements was that the repre-
sentation completely obliterated the reality. Marvell has also re-
treated from his experiment with the demotic to his earlier
alternation of sarcastic comedy with perfectly serious versions of the
Wallerian sublime and Ovidian pastoral.23
Space forbids a wider exploration of anti-Clarendonian satire but
the anonymous ‘Fourth Advice’ demands attention for its able hand-
ling of a plainer and less exuberantly comic mode of satire than
Marvell’s Caroliad.24 This is a bitter, disillusioned account of the
events covered in fuller detail in the ‘Last Instructions’. It displays an
undisguised contempt for Charles which is foreign to Marvell, who
always seems to have the king in mind as a potential reader—perhaps
his primary one (each of his three advices ends with a personal ad-
dress to him)—and to respect his intelligence even while deploring his
character. The ‘Fourth Advice’, written from and for the parliamen-
tary opposition, makes no concession to winning over loyalists.
Despite his ability to skewer knavery with a single lunging line,
Marvell’s dominant perspective is comic and Horatian: he sets out to
erode the respect claimed for his victims by activating the reader’s
sense of the ridiculous, remaining aesthetically distanced even when
politically most engaged. The author of the ‘Fourth Advice’ plays
Heraclitus to Marvell’s Democritus: politics for him is not a laughing
matter. The ‘Fifth Advice’ (also 1667) is different again in being more
self-consciously witty, in an ornate somewhat academic manner
strongly contrasting with the plain-man directness of the fourth.25
23
On the latter see Zwicker, ‘Virgins and Whores’, 85–110.
24
POASY, i. 140–6. 25
Ibid. 146–52.
116 State Satire
Although it records Clarendon’s fall, no sense is conveyed that things

are likely to change for the better. The unknown author seems to
stand apart, as a jaundiced observer, from the political struggle.
t h e 1670 s
The fall of Clarendon eased the way for the ascent of Buckingham
who, after having being excluded from effective power since the
Scottish expedition of 1650–1, became the ‘B’ of the Cabal ministry
(1667–73), the other members being Clifford, Arlington, Ashley,
and Lauderdale. Lauderdale was primarily concerned with Scottish
affairs. Arlington was closest in his policies to Clarendon and was to
maintain his grip on power the longest: Charles was increasingly
dependent on his financial and diplomatic skills. Clifford was a
Catholic and the king’s confidant in the negotiation of the secret
Treaty of Dover with France, of which the other members were kept
ignorant. Ashley and Buckingham pursued a policy of toleration for
Dissenters which was put into effect through the Declaration of In-
dulgence of 1672 but only at the price of extending the same liberty
to Catholics. This enterprise came to grief over another mismanaged
Dutch War and, in a return to Clarendonian, pro-church policies,
Charles placed the principal direction of affairs in the hands of
Thomas Osborne, Earl of Danby. Two phases of satirical writing
were involved in this development, the first anti-Cabal and the sec-
ond anti-Danby, the latter overlapping with the Popish Plot furore
and the Exclusion Bill crisis.
The brief ‘Further Advice’ of 1671 reflects impatience at the re-
duced role of parliament, seldom called under the Cabal and likely to
be managed by flagrant bribery when it was.26 Charles is represented
in its opening lines as an irresponsible playboy: leadership cannot be
expected from that quarter. The three members of the Treasury
Commission, Clifford, Duncombe, and Ashley, divide ‘the spoils of
England’ among themselves, while the bribe-hungry parliamentar-
ians resemble ‘Falstaff’s regiment of threadbare coats’ (ll. 18–24), an
image familiar from Betterton’s production at the Duke’s Theatre.
The members of the cabal empty ‘Capacious bowls’ at Arlington’s
while the French king ‘Frightens all Christendom with fresh alarms’
26
POASY, i. 163–7.
State Satire 117
(l. 36). Meanwhile Sir Richard Temple, a hero of the opposition, has
allowed himself to be bought off by preferment. Yet the governing
attitude of this short piece is one of ironic condescension rather than
implacable hostility. Not so ‘The Dream of the Cabal’ (1672), a
much longer satire that claims to report, by supernatural means, on
a meeting of that fabled body, here enlarged to seven by the inclusion
of the king and the Duke of Ormonde.27 The ministers are presented,
despite their varying backgrounds and interests, as united in a desire
to allow the king to rule independently of parliament through the un-
controlled exercise of the prerogative. Only Ormonde of the king’s
close advisers speaks up for liberty under the laws and only Lauder-
dale against accommodation with Rome: the first is commanded to
be silent and the second laughed at. The meeting agrees that ‘France
shall be lov’d and Holland hated be’ (l. 380); yet, it is possible that
Ormonde will have the last word, and
Those country gentry with their beef and bacon
Will show how much you courtiers are mistaken. (ll. 279–80)
The coming decade was to show the truth of that prognostication.

The writer of ‘A Dream of the Cabal’ does not seem to speak from
first-hand involvement in the political process, preferring mythic im-
ages of villainy to hard data. The envisaged readership is clearly an
unsophisticated one, no doubt including the ‘beef and bacon’ squires
and their families. Yet that the poem was regarded seriously is shown
by the care taken by Dryden, a decade later, to counter the argument
it imputes to the cabalists. The passage concerned is at Absalom and
Achitophel, lines 801–8:
If ancient Fabricks nod, and threat to fall,
To Patch the Flaws, and Buttress up the Wall,
Thus far ’tis Duty; but here fix the Mark:
For all beyond it is to touch our Ark.
To change Foundations, cast the Frame anew,
Is work for Rebels who base Ends pursue:
At once Divine and Humane Laws controul;
And mend the Parts by ruine of the Whole.28
The image is a favourite one among conservative thinkers, having
gained a particularly powerful hold on the imagination of Burke.29
27
Ibid. 191–203. 28
Works, ii. 29.
29
As at Reflections on the Revolution in France, ed. Conor Cruise O’Brien
(London: Penguin, 1968), 375–6.
118 State Satire
The opposed view is advanced in the earlier poem by Buckingham

(the Zimri of Absalom and Achitophel but here a more sinister figure):
Great Sir, your government for first twelve years
Has spoiled the monarchy and made our fears
So patent on us that we must change quite
The old foundations and make new, wrong or right. (ll. 23–6)
The ‘ark’ in this case is Mount Sinai, representing the parliament,
which the Cabal would like the king to suppress. Ormonde objects
. . . for so much
Our ancestors secur’d it, that to touch,
Like sacred Mount, ’tis death . . . (ll. 43–5)
The demand for ‘new foundations’ is repeated at line 84 and once
more resisted by Ormonde at lines 187–90:
Old buildings to pull down, believe it true,
More danger in it hath than building new,
And what shall prop your superstructure till
Another you have built that suits your will?
If, as seems probable, Dryden was specifically addressing these pas-
sages, it was a telling acknowledgement of the power of the scribal
medium from an author whose own preference was strongly for print.
From the perspective of a later period in which Ashley (as the first
Earl of Shaftesbury) and Buckingham were the heroes of the Whig
parliamentary opposition, it requires an effort to appreciate how
much their actions in office offended all parties in the nation. The at-
tempt to achieve a general liberty of conscience was resented for the
same reasons as the similar attempt under James II: neither Dis-
senters nor Catholics really wanted a toleration that accommodated
the other, nor were the Protestants in any doubt that the measure was
for the benefit of Catholics rather than their own. Charles, still con-
scious of a debt of gratitude to the Presbyterians for his Restoration,
and Buckingham, who seems genuinely to have held the enlightened
views advanced in his client Martin Clifford’s A Treatise of
Humane Reason, were among the few in the kingdom who did not
see the Declaration as a hypocritical makeshift. The measure also
suffered from being introduced in the context of a pro-French and
anti-Dutch foreign policy. That Shaftesbury had actively supported
this was still regarded by Dryden as a stick to beat him with in
Absalom and Achitophel:
State Satire 119
}
To Compass this the Triple Bond he broke;
The Pillars of the publick Safety shook:
And fitted Israel for a Foreign Yoke. (ll. 175–7)
The yoke was that of Louis XIV. The Machiavellian view presented
by Buckingham in A Letter to Sir Thomas Osborne (1672) that Hol-
land had to be crushed in order to secure British domination of
worldwide trade carried little weight against the likelihood of French
triumph over a Protestant ally. Finally there was the fact that toler-
ation was introduced, in defiance of parliament, under the same
‘dispensing power’ that was to be claimed by James when king. In
such a situation all parties in the nation had good reasons to be
suspicious of the Cabal.
Charles’s return, under Danby, to a pro-Church outwardly
anti-French policy silenced one group of satirists but energized
another much more dangerous group associated with Buckingham.
Rochester’s major satires (though not overtly political) are a product
of this period of disillusionment. Yet while Danby’s ruthlessness and
corruption drew hostile comment from the lampooners, he had the
largest party in the nation behind him, and was generally able to
manage parliament. A greater cause of disquiet was that the heir to
the throne was now openly Catholic. The violent anti-Catholicism of
the ‘Advice to a Painter to Draw the Duke by’ (1673), probably by
Rochester’s and Buckingham’s friend Henry Savile, marks the begin-
ning of a new national schism between those who respected York’s
right to succeed to the throne and those who regarded him as a trai-
tor and public enemy. While Danby and York disliked each other
and Danby was both politically and personally a staunch Anglican,
their enemies cheerfully elided them as champions of the same
tainted cause; however, while the duke’s life offered numerous sub-
jects for satire, in the more guarded Danby’s case they had largely to
be invented, which soon happened.
Resentment of Danby found expression in an extraordinary poem
describing his and his wife’s behaviour at his installation as a knight
of the Garter at Windsor on 19 April 1677.
Both he, and she, are Persons of fine Parts,

And have peculiar ways of gaining Hearts.
First he brings always with him a sweet Savour
To win the Courtier’s Love, and Courtier’s Favour,
Then she puts on a Fore-head-cloath to please
120 State Satire
The City and the Godly Folk, she says:

And so with ease, and without Cost, or pother,
They get a World of Friends one way, or other.
For they were worse, than Devils, could oppose
Such taking Charms, both of the Eyes and Nose.
The poem was printed as Buckingham’s in the unreliable, posthu-

mously published The Second Volume of Miscellaneous Works
(London, 1705).30 Yet at the time of the inauguration Buckingham
was a state prisoner in the Tower, meaning that, if the attribution is
genuine, the poem must rest on a bizarre exercise of imagination. At
its climax Danby is addressed by St George, the patron of the order,
who
. . . whisper’d thus in pale Sr. O——s Ear,
Away thou worthless Rogue, what mak’st thou here?
How dare you in this Chappel keep a quarter,
With your blew Lips, blewer then Robes or Garter?
Go get a Shroud to match your Face and Breath,
Be drest, as well as look and smell, like death.
’Twas that alone at first which Nature meant,
Your Loathsome Carcass still should represent
For so unlively and so Nauseous too,
Is every thing you either say or do;
That even your base Ingratitude does give
The least Offensive tokens, that you live.
You’re such a scurvy, stinking, Errant Knight,
That when you speak a Man wou’d swear you S——te:
Then in a trice he flew from thence and tore
His pert Wif’s Croslet off; who curst and swore,
Bit her thin Lips, and rail’d like any punk,
Whilst pale Sir O——n opned his and stunk.
The motive for this venom lies in Danby’s having risen to influence as
Buckingham’s client. Buckingham must have enjoyed it even if he did
not write it; yet the intensely personal nature of its attack (and its fail-
ure to raise any significant political issues) suggests a motive apart
from the political, and that the primary intended reader was Danby
himself.
More typical of anti-Danby polemic is a poem, also associated
with Buckingham, which circulated early in 1679 at a time when the
Whigs were at last closing in for the kill. Danby had been exposed as
30
pp. 83–8.
State Satire 121
a supporter of the king’s covert alliance with Louis XIV, which under
the heightened feelings of the time put him under suspicion of in-
volvement in the Popish Plot. ‘What a devil ails the parliament’ exists
in forms ranging from 24 to 128 lines: overall 237 lines survive
across the wildly variant sources. It is written to a simple template
established by the opening quatrain:
What a Devil ailes the Parliament
Sure they were drunck with Brandy
When they did thinck to circumvent
Thomas Earl of Danby.31
Like Mr Toad’s song of self-praise in The Wind in the Willows, but

at much greater length, the second line of every stanza has to rhyme
with the proper name at the end of the last. Textual variation of every
kind abounds: the first line is also found in the forms ‘Souns/Wounds/
Zoons/Zwounds what ails/ailed/wills/meant the/our parliament’.
Moreover, it seems that few readers could resist amplifying or re-
shaping the poem. References to datable events in particular stanzas
allow its growth to be tracked over the early months of 1679. A lam-
poon of this kind was a living thing recreating itself day by day to
meet the challenge of new events and new audiences. It also descends
to a level of coarseness and vulgarity rarely equalled even in its own
unedifying genre. Danby’s wife and children become the victims of
pornographic slurs, some true but others wholly imaginary:
Lord Latimer has clap’d his Wife
It is as true as can be
It had like to have cost her life
So pocky a Son has Danby
Dunblane he F—— his Brother’s wife
For Cakes and Sugarr Candy
Makes speeches for the wretched Life
Of Thomas Earl of Danby.
Sophia finds a better way
Her Husbands both disclaim’d be
And dos with faithfull footmen play
Of Thomas Earle of Danby.
31
This poem is quoted from an eclectic editorial version prepared for Plays, Poems
and Miscellaneous Writings Associated with George Villiers, Second Duke of Buck-
ingham, ed. Robert D. Hume and Harold Love (Oxford: Oxford UP, forthcoming).
122 State Satire
His daughter Latt: with Nose most flatt

With Pills and close stool pan by
Swears Brother Dunn hath poxt her bumm
And Curses Tom of Danby (ll. 53–68)
The allegation of the first and last stanza is unfortunately true: Lati-
mer, Danby’s eldest son, his wife Elizabeth, and three newly born
children in succession all died of syphilis. Only the second half of the
accusation against Dunblane is known to be true. That directed at
Sophia, the fifth and youngest daughter, rests on the satirist not
understanding that she had married the same husband twice, first in
infancy and then, on 26 March 1679, as a 14-year-old, which would
hardly leave much time for gambolling with footmen. But the rights
of the case and the sensibilities of the victims were of no significance
in comparison with the determination of the Whigs to humiliate their
most formidable enemy.
But our new Parliament we hope
As Thou deservst will brand thee
And with Saint Colemans holy Rope
Hang Thomas Earle of Danbye
And to Compleat the Godly Show
Sr Formal Trifle and the
Bigotted Duke must swing alsoe
With Thomas Earle of Danby
Edward Coleman, the Duke of York’s secretary, had been hung for
complicity in the Popish Plot on 3 December 1678. ‘Sir Formal Trifle’
was Heneage Finch, Shaftesbury’s successor as Lord Chancellor.
Despite a huge manuscript circulation, the ‘Song’ did not appear in
print until 1704, and even then only in an anodyne twenty-four-line
version which would hardly have offended its still living subject.32
The case of the ‘Song on Danby’ helps us to identify a widening of
the audience for the state lampoon beyond that of parliamentarians,
courtiers, and administrators to the whole community of the polit-
ically concerned and influential. Moreover, this community had
itself widened dramatically in the late 1670s and early 1680s, as the
great battle between Whig and Tory reached its fiercest point of con-
testation. An increase in the frequency of general elections (not re-
quired during the long life of the Cavalier parliament), and the fact
that from 1678 onwards municipal and even parish elections might
32
POAS (1702–7), iii. 177–8.
State Satire 123
be fiercely fought on party lines, gave the lampoon a new practical

relevance which is reflected in a preference for popular forms and un-
bridled invective. From May 1679 political debate at all levels was
further stimulated by the beginning of a six-year hiatus in pre-
publication press censorship. Much material that would formerly
have been restricted to manuscript could now be printed; but, signifi-
cantly, there was no falling off in the supply of new scribally circu-
lated lampoons. One reason for this seems to have been that the
medium, ambiguously suspended between the private and the pub-
lic, possessed an inherent persuasiveness that was denied to the pub-
lic print. A second was that the press was usually more open to one
political side than the other, the Whigs making the early running and
the Tories and Jacobites regaining control from 1682. Satire issued
through unlicensed presses or under false imprints, like the first
edition of MacFlecknoe ‘for D. Green’, is still to be regarded as
clandestine.
t h e S c ro g g s f i l e
The ‘Song on Danby’ was a product of the large-scale eruption of

public insanity brought about by Titus Oates’s fabricated revelations
of a Popish Plot to kill the king and replace him with York. (There
was indeed a plot to introduce Catholicism, headed by the king him-
self, but this widely understood fact could not be uttered publicly.)
Oates and his imitators issued their ‘narratives’ in handsomely
printed folios that had enormous circulation.33 They also for a time
had the support of the courts and parliament in suppressing public
disagreement. However, there were limits to what could be uttered
through the press even at this unconstrained time and it is to the clan-
destine media that we must turn to discover the otherwise unspoken
views of both sympathizers and resisters. A survey of satires directed
in both manuscript and print at one of Danby’s clients, the Lord
Chief Justice, Sir William Scroggs, will allow us to review the variety
of modes and approaches now available to the state lampoonist.
Scroggs was the academically able son of a butcher, a fact that
inevitably drew comment:
33
See on this my ‘The Look of News: Popish Plot Narratives 1678–1680’, in John
Barnard and D. F. McKenzie with the assistance of Maureen Bell (eds.), The Cam-
bridge History of the Book in Britain, iv (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2002), 652–6.
124 State Satire
Within this House lives justice Scroggs

Who hath Killed more men, then his Father did Hogs.34
He took an MA from Pembroke College, Oxford, in 1643 and be-

came a barrister of Gray’s Inn ten years later. A royalist, he was
knighted after the Restoration and elevated to Justice of the Common
Pleas in 1676 and Lord Chief Justice in 1678. In the latter capacity
he presided over the trials of several unfortunate victims of the plot
hysteria, showing great Protestant vigour. His trenchant, but always
logical, courtroom style is vividly preserved in the printed transcripts
of these cases. In the early months of 1679 he was a Whig hero, fit to
be mentioned in the same breath as the Country Party leaders:
Would you exalt the mighty name
Of Shaftesbury and Buckingham,
And not forget Judge Scroggs his Fame?
This is the time.35
However, in 1679 he unexpectedly changed sides, first by bailing

Samuel Pepys, who had been charged with selling naval secrets to the
French, and then by acquitting Sir George Wakeman, physician to
the queen, of a charge of having conspired with her to poison the
king. In the version of Settle’s Absalom Senior (1682):
He pois’d his scales and shook his ponderous sword,
Loud as his father’s Bashan-bulls he roar’d;
Till by a dose of foreign ophir drench’d,
The fever of his burning zeal was quench’d.36
Here the symbols of the law are wittily elided with the butcher’s
chopper and balance and the butcherly judge himself metamorposed
into a bull cured by the veterinary treatment of drenching. It is un-
clear even today whether judicial probity or bribes and pressure from
the crown contributed more to these decisions but, coming at a time
when parliament was prorogued, they helped considerably to check
the political momentum of the Whigs. In November 1680 Scroggs
was himself impeached by parliament and in the following year
removed from the Chief Justiceship.
34
Yale MS Osborn b 54, p. 1103.
35
‘Queries’, ll. 24–7, POASY, ii. 294.
36
Ibid., iii. 141. Scroggs is also attacked in a Whig burlesque A Letter from Paris,
from Sir George Wakeman, to his Friend Sir W.S. in London (London, 1681), in
which ‘Wakeman’ invites Scroggs to join him in Paris and offers his services as a
poisoner.
State Satire 125
Scroggs’s spectacular change of sides meant that, at different

times, he was the subject of both Catholic and Protestant satires.
Interestingly, he is not subjected to the gross sexual abuse that was
levelled at Danby and his unfortunate family; instead, he is insist-
ently attacked for greed, low birth, and, in the more extreme cases,
being a covert agent of the pope. ‘Justice in Masquerade’, attributed
to Stephen College, begins with the low birth:
A butcher’s son’s judge capital
Poor Protestants for to enthrall,
And England to enslave, Sirs.
Lose both our laws and lives we must,
When to do justice we entrust
So known an errant knave, Sirs.37
Because butchers at this period personally slaughtered the animals

whose flesh they sold, they were presumed to be cruel and heartless,
and could sometimes gain exemption on this ground from jury duty.
Continuing, the satirist asserts that Scroggs’s father’s had claimed this
exemption and that this made it improper that the ‘butcherly son’
should be both judge and jury; however, Scroggs is not damned
for butcher-like ruthlessness but for his devotion to a different
quadruped, the ‘golden calf’. Either he should be treated like one of
his father’s carcasses and cut into a thousand pieces with a ‘keen-whet
chopping knife’ or parliament should stake him out till he rotted.
The charge of being a covert Romanist is added to those of cor-
ruption and low birth in another ballad-style piece, ‘His holiness has
three grand friends’, one of them being Scroggs:
The judge is a butcher’s son,
Yet hates to shed innocent blood:
But for ten thousand pound has done
The Pope a great deal of good.38
This notion of Scroggs as a papist ‘sleeper’ is further developed in

‘The Pope’s Advice and Benediction to his Judge and Jury in Utopia’,
in which Innocent XI is represented giving advice on how to extir-
pate his ‘curs’d foes, the Protestants their laws’.39 This piece belongs
to a satirical sub-tradition in which a demonized form of the
37
POASY, ii. 284–5. 38
Ibid. 291.
39
Ibid. 281–4. Lord’s text is from POAS (1702–7), iii. 188–9. There is a MS ver-
sion in Princeton MS Taylor 4, pp. 33–7.
126 State Satire
political opponent exhorts followers to unqualified villainy. Its ori-

gin lay in monologues by villains in tragedies, of which an early ex-
ample was the fraudulent circulation of a speech by an atheist from
The First Part of the Tragicall Raigne of Selimus (1594) as ‘Certaine
Hellish Verses Devysed by that Atheist and Traitor Ralegh’.40 The
speech of the ghost of Sulla in the induction to Jonson’s Sejanus be-
came the locus classicus for such pieces. It is imitated with full-bore
conviction in a ‘A Dialogue between the Duke of Buckingham and
his Father’s Ghost’ of about 1673 and more light-heartedly in ‘Mrs
Nelly’s complaint’ (‘If Sylla’s ghost made bloody Catiline start’) of
1682, in which Nell Gwyn is reproved by the ghost of Mall Knight
for stealing her lover.41 Oldham drew on it, along with Buchanan’s
Franciscanus, in ‘Loyola’s Ghost’, the third of his Satires upon the
Jesuits, which is an obvious influence on ‘The Pope’s Advice’.
The weakness of satires of this quasi-theatrical kind lay in an inter-
textual playfulness that makes it hard to take their ingenious recyclings
of libertine fantasies of violent destruction seriously. Certainly, in
this case the presentation of Scroggs as a papal agent is so outrageous
as to make the performance comic rather than threatening:
And first, dear Scroggs, with thee we shall begin,
Although of late thou wert a man of sin
And didst abuse those (for us) put you in.
From which we now absolve ye as we’re Pope,
And do allow that butchers by the rope
Begin (not end) for that would mar our hope.
’Tis true at first ’twas prudent, witty, quaint
To counterfeit the Devil, act the saint,
With zealous thunder ’gainst the Jesuits complaint.
This gained you credit with the rabble rout,
Confirm’d the choice of those that wish’d you out,
But now that’s done ’tis time to tack about,
And dare to act to set my vassals free;
You shall receive from holy James and me
A crimson cap, at least my legate be,
Provided you escape Tresilian’s Triple Tree.42
40
Text in Jean Jacquot, ‘Ralegh’s “Hellish Verses” and the “Tragicall Raigne of
Selimus” ’, MLR 48 (1953), 1–9.
41
Yale MS Osborn fb 140, pp. 97–9; CSR, 97–101.
42
POASY, ii. 282. Lord suppresses the triplet divisions of his copy-text.
State Satire 127
Tresilian was an earlier hanging judge who had himself been hung.
Taken a little further such a piece might be mistaken for a Tory spoof
of Whig conspiracy theories, and yet at that fevered time much more
outrageous claims were given unthinking credence.
A more effective use of the apocalyptic rhetoric favoured by the
Whig conspiracy theorists is given in ‘Oceana and Britannia’
(‘Whither O whither wander I forlorn’), attributed to John Ayloffe,
which, while directed at James, introduces Scroggs as an accomplice.
(Oceana represents James Harrington’s ideal commonwealth of that
name.)
What doleful Shrieks pierce my affrighted Ear!
Shall I ne’er rest from this lewd Ravisher?
Rapes, Burnings, Murders are his Royal Sport,
These Modish Monsters haunt his perjur’d Court.
No tumbling Player so oft e’er chang’d his Shape,
As this Goat, Fox, Wolf, timorous French Ape.
True Protestants in Roman Habits drest,
With Scrogs he baits, that rav’nous Butchers Beast;
Tresilian Jones, that fair-fac’d Crocodile,
Tearing their Hearts, at once doth weep and smile:
Neronian Flames at London do him please,
At Oxford Plots to Act Agathocles.
His Plot’s reveal’d, his Mirth is at an end,
And’s fatal Hour shall know no Foe nor Friend.
Last Martyr’s Day I saw a Cherub stand
Across my Seas, one Foot upon the Land,
The other on the enthrall’d Gallick Shore,
Aloud proclaim their time shall be no more.
This mighty Power Heav’ns equal Ballance sway’d,
And in one Scale Crowns, Crosiers, Scepters laid;
I’th’ other a sweet smiling Babe did lie,
Circled with Glories, deck’d with Majesty.
With steddy Hand he pois’d the Golden Pair,
The gilded Gew-gaws mounted in the Air,
The ponderous Babe descending in its Scale,
Leapt on my Shore—
Nature triumph’d, Joy eccho’d thro the Earth,
The Heav’ns bow’d down to see the blessed Birth.43
Jones was Sir William Jones, Scroggs’s successor as judicial oppress-

or of Catholics. The poem seems to take its apocalyptic pretensions
43
POAS (1702–7), i. 1117–18.
128 State Satire
with entire seriousness, in this representing a re-eruption into wider

circulation of Puritan millenarian polemic. Some at least of Oates’s
followers were convinced that they were taking part in the great
drama of the end of time foretold in the Book of Revelation. Others,
including their prophet himself, were more cynical.
Biblical imagery is differently used in one of the early, Catholic at-
tacks on Scroggs, which draws on the Old Testament as a source of
historical analogues rather than the New as a source of prophecy. In
the Catholic John Caryl’s Nabaoth’s Vineyard, Scroggs is Arod, the
Achitophel-like counsellor of Queen Jezebel in her attempt to des-
troy the innocent Nabaoth, who represents the English Catholics:
She summons then her chosen instruments,
Always prepar’d to serve her black intents.
The chief was Arod, whose corrupted youth
Had made his soul an enemy to truth;
But nature furnish’d him with parts and wit,
For bold attempts and deep intriguing fit.
Small was his learning, and his eloquence
Did please the rabble, nauseate men of sense.
Bold was his spirit, nimble and loud his tongue,
Which more than law, or reason, takes the throng.44
Dryden may have half-remembered the sixth line of the passage in his
‘For close Designs, and crooked Counsels fit’ (l. 152). In what fol-
lows Scroggs is further excoriated as the procurer of the false wit-
nesses who testified to the plot. The resort to allegorical narration
allowed personality to be explored in some depth through set-piece
‘characters’. By contrast other anti-Scroggs lampoons are devoted to
pure execration. One widely circulated piece, beginning ‘Here lives
the wolf justice, that butcherly knave’, uses the convention of a lam-
poon supposedly posted on its victim’s door. Scroggs is addressed,
as ‘Clodpate’ after the foolish, Town-hating justice in Shadwell’s
Epsom Wells, and promised Tresilian’s fate once the parliament had
met.45 Another, beginning ‘Here lies a judge will lie no more’, takes
the form of an anticipatory epitaph:
}
Here lyes a Judge will lye no more
Nor swear, nor drink, nor Game, nor Whore
Tho’ he did nothing else before.
44
POASY, ii. 88. 45
Ibid. 288–9.
State Satire 129
}
This bawling babling Butchers Son
With speech making and Cant begun
But left the world e’er ’twas half done.
This goodly Judge a bribe did take
And sav’d the cause for Wakeman’s sake,
Gold, of a Lord, a Knave can make.
}
}
Now with the Devill he drives in haste
First Bedlowes Evidence he Blasts
And disbelieves the plot at last.
}
The King good man durst not displace him
The truth it self could not disgrace him
Whilst James and Kate doth both Embrace him.
A Letcherous Goat; A Drunken Hogg
A Treacherous Knave; A Lying Dog
All this is Lord Cheif Justice Scrogg.46 }
The text of this version seems reasonably good. A version from an-
other source demonstrates what could happen to such an originally
well-written piece in transmission:
Here lies a Judge, who’l lie no more,
Nor game nor drink nor swear no more
Here lies one who ne’re did take
A bribe, unlesse for Wakemans sake,
The Kings Protestant evidence to blast,
And say there’s scarce a popish plott at last,
Here lies the Ld cheif Justice Scroggs,
A Judge for the Devill, a judge for his hoggs;47
The wit has gone but the rancour remains, though by now almost
inarticulate.
After this barrage of rants it is a relief to find Scroggs for once
treated in a comic even ironic spirit rather than with the bludgeon.
‘Another Lampoon against Scroggs 1679’ (‘O strange what is’t I hear
the man’) baits him amusingly enough in well-turned Hudibrastics,
saving its best rhyme for just before the end:
Now Art thou turned inside outward,
Thy honors falln into a cow-turd:
Who would haue thought our famous Scrogg
Would haue been lost thus in a fogg.48
46
47
All Souls College, Codrington Library MS 116, fo. 37v.
48
130 State Satire
In another gentler lampoon of early 1680 Scroggs becomes the

straight man in a double act as he advises his fellow judge, Jeffreys,
over a delicate matrimonial issue:
But one thing more cannot be pass’d—
When George with Clodpate feasted last
(I might say Clodpate was a sinner
To serve his brother so at dinner)
He by his almanac did discover
His wife not thirty weeks went over
Ere she (poor thing!) in pieces fell,
Which made Mouth stare and bawl like Hell;
And, puppy-like, told Clodpate truly
First leap he made was but in July:
What then, you fool? Some wives miscarry
And reckon June for January.
This Clodpate did assert as true,
As he by old experience knew;
Yet all his canting would not do:
George put him to’t, upon denial,
Which set him hard as Wakeman’s Trial.
They rail’d and bawl’d and kept a pother,
And like two curs did bite each other;
This brought some sport but no repentance,
So off they went to Harris’s sentence,
Which soon was pass’d against all laws,
To glut their rage and Popish cause;
For which injustice the knaves, we hope,
Will swing together in a rope . . .49
Harris here was the bookseller Benjamin Harris, who was put in the
pillory by Scroggs for publishing a Whig political tract.
The body of satires directed at Scroggs comprises a substantial
sub-tradition in its own right which, because of his change of sides
and the political hysteria that surrounded the final stage of his career,
is of a remarkably rich and varied kind. While his parentage encour-
aged coarse demotic insult, his presumed involvement in the great
popish conspiracy could lend him an apocalyptic grandeur. Yet to
Caryl he was simply a talented and unscrupulous operator in a
politico-legal system that would never hesitate to sacrifice innocence
to the whims of power. What is missing from these attacks is any
49
POASY, ii. 354–5. For the record Jeffreys’s marriage licence was issued on
6 June 1679 and Harris’s trial took place on 5 Feb. 1680.
State Satire 131
sense of personality. The abstention from sexual insult is telling. A

political enemy who can be characterized, in the court manner, as an
erotically hyperenergetic buffoon has at least been allowed a certain
vulnerable humanity. It is hard to be fully a figure of power with
one’s clothes off. Something about Scroggs closed off that satirical
possibility in a way that was clearly not true of his even more hated
disciple Jeffreys. His standing as a lampoon star was acknowledged
in an undated prose piece, The Bellowings of a Wild-Bull: or, Scroggs’s
Roaring Lamentation for Being Impeached of High-Treason in
which satire itself becomes part of his punishment: ‘Now shall I have
more Scroggs upon Scroggs, Satyrical Poems, wicked Lampoons,
odious New-year’s Gifts, damnable Looking-Glasses, plaguy
Memorandums, and such like, bawled about the Town.’50 Although
a good deal of this material appeared in print at the time, its spirit
was still clandestine—it was never a light matter to libel a Lord Chief
Justice. What the final quotation reveals is that, political animus
apart, it had become a kind of satirical game to lampoon Scroggs.
the Monmouth file
A second figure on the Whig side had an even longer file of satirical
representations. Early commentary on the Duke of Monmouth,
Charles II’s illegitimate son by Lucy Walter (also known as Lucy Bar-
low), treated him as little better than an icon for the king’s own
debauchery and improvidence, but he soon remedied that situation.
In contrast to Scroggs, it is the person rather than the office that pre-
occupies the poets and yet the person both in satire and as far as can
be judged in real life was remarkably uncomplicated. Unlike Buck-
ingham, Cleveland, and the tribe of high satirees, Monmouth was
neither extravagantly self-dramatizing nor touched by the grotesque.
His positive qualities were courage and a degree of personal charm,
his negative ones conceit, ambition, and lack of judgement—all to be
expected from someone of his upbringing, but none pursued to a
degree that made him either a monster or a paragon. It was agreed
that he was handsome and an excellent dancer. He is never allowed
to forget that he was a bastard, as in a repartee attributed to Nell
Gwyn (who in real life was one of his supporters):
50
p. 3.
132 State Satire
Scarce Monmouth’s self is more beloved than she.

Was this the cause that did their quarrel move,
That both are rivals in the people’s love?
No, ’twas her matchless loyalty alone
That bid Prince Perkin pack up and be gone:
‘Ill-bred thou art’, says Prince. Nell does reply,
‘Was Mrs. Barlow better bred than I?’
Thus sneak’d away the nephew overcome,
By’s aunt-in-law’s severer wit struck dumb.51
The name Perkin was awarded in imitation of Perkin Warbeck, the
pretender of Henry VII’s reign. When an attempt was made by Mon-
mouth’s political supporters to establish that Charles had secretly
married Lucy, which would have made him the legitimate heir, his
enemies responded by removing the honour of paternity from the
king to Sir Robert Sidney:
But was it not ungrateful
In Monmouth, ap Sidney, ap Carlo,
To contrive an act so hateful,
O Prince of Wales by Barlow.52
The other repeated charge was that of dullness: Monmouth seems
not to have been very bright:
He with that thick impenetrable skull
(The solid harden’d armour of a fool)
Well might himself to all war’s ills expose
Who (come what will) yet had no brains to lose.53
An anti-Whig satire of 1682 written in an implausible Scots accent
brands him as ‘a senseless loon’ and a ‘fool by nature’.54 In his incur-
sions into politics he is uniformly portrayed, as in Absalom and
Achitophel, as the dupe of more intelligent and ruthless manipulators.
In 1671 Monmouth was held responsible for the public mutilation
by members of his regiment of the parliamentarian Sir John Coven-
try, who had been guilty of a quip in the house about the king’s mis-
tresses. Shortly after this, he was one of a group of aristocratic louts
who murdered a beadle in Whetstone’s Park. Two independent lam-
poons on this subject both employ versions of mock-heroic.55 In the
51
POASY, ii. 244.
52
‘The Haymarket Hectors’, ibid., i. 170. On the legitimation attempt, see ibid.,
ii. 257–60.
53
‘Rochester’s Farewell’, ibid., ii. 222. 54
Ibid., iii. 103–4.
55
Texts ibid., i. 172–6.
State Satire 133
first, beginning ‘Near Holborn lies a Park of great renown’, superfi-

cial jocularity veils stinging contempt which becomes direct in the
close:
What storms may rise out of so black a cause.
If such turd-flies shall break through cobweb laws.
In the second (‘Assist me, some auspicious muse, to tell’) the lightness
of tone is sustained to the end, and the concluding reflection is not on
the violence of the act but on the implicit cowardice of the courtly
warriors. Along the way Monmouth is given a Hobbesian speech
recalling the courtier’s interpolation in the ‘Second Advice’:
Curs’d be their politic heads that first began
To circumscribe the liberties of man,
Man that was truli’st happy when of old
His actions, like his will, were uncontroll’d,
Till he submitted his great soul to awe
And suffer’d fear to fetter him with law—
This law that animates with partial looks
One saucy watchman to oppose two dukes,
Though back’d with four or five brave youths beside
That only sought to have their courage tri’d.56
The argument is the same appeal to the conditions of Hobbes’s state

of nature that was to be invoked by Dryden in excusing Charles’s
violations of matrimonial law
In pious times, e’r Priest-craft did begin,
Before Polygamy was made a sin;
When man, on many, multiply’d his kind,
E’r one to one was, cursedly, confind:57
Both passages support the power of the prerogative but with the dif-
ference that Monmouth would have used such power to destroy life
while Charles was content to perform the ‘Godlike’ function of
creating it. The two parallel lampoons are clearly the work of ac-
complished poets. The first treatment is the more engaged and
oppositional, the second the more polished and literary, but by
refusing even to take Monmouth seriously may have done him
greater damage.
Monmouth next essayed a real military career, acting with bold-
ness at the taking of Maastricht in July 1673. Rochester’s comment,
56
Ibid. 175–6. 57
Absalom and Achitophel, ll. 1–4, in Works, ii. 5.
134 State Satire
in ‘Upon Drinking a Bowl’, written from a court functionary’s per-

spective, is dismissive:
I’me none of those who took Mastricht
Nor Yarmouth Leaguer knew58
but at least concedes that taking towns was a more noble occupation
than his own preference for draining cups. The episode might have
been remembered to Monmouth’s credit if he had not been per-
suaded to re-enact it in a ludicrous mock-battle at Windsor a year
later. This and Monmouth’s skill as a dancer are dismissively elided
in a stanza from ‘A Ballad Called Perkin’s Figary’ written to the
‘Packington’s Pound’ melody:
This Perkin’s a prince whose excellency lies
In cutting of capers and storming dirt pies;
He aims at a crown for his noddle unfit
As Howe for a duchess, or he for a wit.
He danceth, he skippeth,
He frisketh, he leapeth,
To trumpet and drums he manfully trippeth—
But his Highness, God bless him, is safely come back
To the shame and confusion of Perkin Warbeck.59
The reference to Jack Howe arises from his having claimed in 1679
to have had an affair with the Duchess of Richmond, which was
deemed a malicious libel. The last couplet refers to York’s return
from exile in August 1679 and Monmouth’s dispatch to Holland.
Monmouth’s being put forward in the late 1670s as an alternative
heir to York brought him a new kind of attention—hostile from
Tories and Catholics, laudatory from those who supported his
candidature from either personal enthusiasm or political calculation,
and sceptical from the other Whig factions who would have
preferred a constitutionally limited but unexcluded James, or no
king at all, or William and Mary. Dorset, a Williamite Whig, in ‘My
Opinion’ (1682) is as scornful of Monmouth as of York. The subject
is ‘Poor Rowley’:
’Twixt brother and bastard, those Dukes of renown,
He’ll make a wise shift to get rid of his crown;
Had he half common sense, were it ne’er so uncivil,
He’d have ’em long since tipp’d down to the Devil.60
58
Works, 41. 59
POASY, ii. 123. 60
Poems, 56.
State Satire 135
Monmouth’s unauthorized return from Holland in November 1679

prompted a group of three first-person satires which achieved con-
siderable joint circulation.61 In the first (‘Letter of the Duke of Mon-
mouth to the King’) a first line that seems to promise a sympathetic
treatment is rapidly undercut:
Disgrac’d, undone, forlorn, made Fortune’s sport,
Banish’d the kingdom first, and then the Court;
Out of my places turn’d, and out of doors,
And made the meanest of your sons of whores,
The scene of laughter, and the common chats
Of your salt bitches and your other brats;
Forc’d to a private life, to whore and drink,
On my past grandeur and my folly think.
Would I had been the brat of some mean drab
Whom fear or shame had caus’d to choke or stab,
Rather than be the issue of a king
And by him made so wretched, scorn’d a thing.
What little cause hath mankind to be proud
Of honor, birth, the idols of the crowd!
Have I abroad in battles honor won
To be at home dishon’rably undone? . . .62
One can imagine this being read by Tories sober and Whigs drunk in
the full conviction that the author was of their own persuasion. The
piece makes better sense as a satire on Charles than as either a con-
demnation or a displaced eulogy of Monmouth. The second poem in
the series, ‘The King’s Answer’ (‘Ungrateful boy (I will not call thee
son)’), though classified in POASY as Tory, is another double-edged
piece aimed as much at Charles as at Monmouth:
But say I did with thy fond mother sport,
To the same kindness others had resort:
’Twas my good nature, and I meant her fame,
To shelter her under my royal name.
Alas! I never got one brat alone,
My bitches are by ev’ry fop well known,
And I still willing all their whelps to own.63
The perspective here could be either Yorkist or dissident Whig. The
tone of a subsequent passage suggests the latter:
61
POASY, ii. 249–56. Lord places ‘The Ghost of Tom Ross’ as the first of the
group rather than as a reply to ‘Disgrac’d undone’, as I have treated it.
62
Ibid. 254. 63
Ibid. 255–6.
136 State Satire
Office is but a fickle grace, the badge

Bestow’d by fits and snatch’d away in rage;
And sure that livery I give my slaves
I may take from ’em when my Portsmouth raves.
A moment of extreme exasperation at least offers reassurance of

Monmouth’s paternity:
Oh! that my pr—— when I thy dam did f——
Had in some turkey’s a——, or cow’s been stuck!
The third piece, Roscommon’s ‘The Ghost of Tom Ross to his Pupil
the Duke of Monmouth’ (‘Shame of my life, disturber of my tomb’),
is a straightforward Anglican-Tory condemnation in which Mon-
mouth is compared first with Saul and then with Lucifer.
Read, if you can, how th’ old Apostate fell,
Outdo his pride and merit more than Hell;
Both he and you were gloriously bright,
The first and fairest of the sons of light;
But when, like him, you offer’d at the crown,
Like him your angry father kick’d you down.64
Whether the ‘Read, if you can’ is another dig at Monmouth’s sup-

posed stupidity would depend on whether the satirist was recom-
mending Genesis or Paradise Lost. The notion of God’s dethronement
of Lucifer as a kicking downstairs at Whitehall destroys any religious
resonance. Whereas the same analogy applied in ‘The Parallel’ (‘As
when proud Lucifer aimed at the throne’) to the malicious and pre-
posterously arrogant Mulgrave could be recognized as having some
personal substance behind it, Monmouth was simply too lightweight
to sustain it.
A more successful attempt to mythologize Monmouth is made in a
brilliantly eccentric piece, ‘Some Passages Illustrating the Giants’
War’ (‘This rumour entering angry Titan’s ears’), but even this stops
just where it ought to begin.65 The poem is for a change the work of
a convinced Monmouthite for whom it is natural and proper to por-
tray his idol as Jove, first hurling back the Titans (Yorkists) from
their attempt to storm heaven and then supplanting the effete ruling
64
POASY, 252.
65
A possible author is proposed in John Burrows and Harold Love, ‘The Role of
Stylistics in Attribution: Thomas Shadwell and “The Giants’ War” ’, Eighteenth-
Century Life, 22 (1998), 18–30; text in Love, Restoration Verse, 2nd edn. (London:
Penguin, 1997), 90–7.
State Satire 137
deity, Saturn (Charles). But a summary hardly conveys the extra-

ordinary stylistic achievement of the piece, which, totally unlike the
conventional mock-heroic of the time, deploys a battery of real and
garbled mythology together with strings of outlandish place names
and a mock-Latinate syntax reminiscent of Paradise Lost. A passage
in which Titan (York) recruits followers to oppose Jove will give a
sense of its linguistic exuberance:
Now Titan into downeright rage flyes out,
Hee picks his Nose and stamps and flings about,
Here Gripes, there Cuffes, there swings his Barbarous steele;
But Saturnes stones his first dire Vengeance feele.
Then Musters hee all that in Cellers sculke,
Lie rough in Entryes or that snore on Bulke,
In allyes sneake, suburbian Garrets Cram;
Toryes of double forme and triple Name,
From Goales Escap’d, from Pilloryes unpinn’d,
And from high Padd compleately disciplin’d;
Skip-kennells, Roysters, Ruffins all prophane,
And Buggerers too, a foule ungodly Traine;
Those who from loughs their tainted seed had drawne,
Monsters and Orkes and boggs ungracious spawne.
With this unlikely army he proceeds to invade heaven:

Nimble as Beares the ugly Gyants Climb
And every God they mett tore Limb from Limb.
The skyes all broken downe, no age they spare,
From hobby horse to the old one in the Chaire.
One thought hee saw a Gracelesse, great, unshod,
Unshapely, shabby Gyant eat a God;
}
Another spy’d a raw Gigantick youth
Swearing with an Imortall in his Mouth
Who sprawld and sprawld but could not ’scape one tooth;
Another saw a Huge Titanian Whale
Swallow four Gods, their shovel board and all.
One pityes heaven, and of strange havock dreames:
How on the floor spilt aqua vitæ swimmes,
With Gay attire torne, tumbled and defac’d—
There Wigg, there Crevat, there Embroydred Vest.
The simple Clowne thus fancied, but Heavn safe
Did at their care and rustick folly laugh;
Yet Gaping Preists Gulpt the Tradition downe
And all his Creed to after ages own’d.
138 State Satire
At this point all is set for the arrival of Jove (Monmouth) to rescue
the gods from the invaders:
But say not, you profane, heavn had no share
In that days Toyle: Heavn’s Champion Jove was there,
Heavn’s darling Jove, and now Imediate care.
However, it is exactly here that the poem ends, suggesting that even
so imaginative and poetically gifted a supporter of Monmouth could
not quite see how to present him in a heroic light. The most cele-
brated attempt to mythologize Monmouth is Dryden’s as the Absa-
lom of Absalom and Achitophel (not of course a clandestine satire,
though drawing much from the tradition). It is hard to believe that
Dryden, despite his outwardly exculpatory argument that Mon-
mouth had been led astray by the satanic wiles of Shaftesbury, had
anything but contempt for the individual, or that he wept too many
tears at his execution after the failed insurrection of 1685. One of his
motives for his and others’ relatively gentle treatment of his patron’s
principal enemy might have been that to quash Monmouth too com-
pletely would have been to awake a far more formidable threat in
William. The royal bastard was of more political value to Tories as a
way of keeping Whig factions at each other’s throats than for any
real threat he posed to his father or uncle.
In the summer of 1680 Monmouth played the role of successor-in-
waiting in a series of country progresses. A tour of this kind through
the West, during which he performed supposedly miraculous acts of
healing, was instrumental to his later ability to raise support for his
rebellion in that area.66 In the following month he visited Oxford
where he was feted by the town and ignored by the university. The
second of the visits is scoffingly celebrated in ‘A Ballad upon the
Duke of Monmouth’s Reception by the Right Worshipful the Mayor
and Bargemen of Oxford’ (‘Ye townsmen of Oxford and scholars
draw near’).67 None of these pieces generates much real venom—
their aim is to laugh or at best sneer him away—but once James was
on the throne he became a more serious problem. His rebellion was
not the military folly it is often represented but a daring roll of the
dice that failed; yet once again his significance lay in the conse-
quences of his actions for other people, and satire both against him
66
For a highly professional Hudibrastic satire on Monmouth’s touching for the
king’s evil (‘As Popish farriers use t’ employ’), see POASY, ii. 273–9.
67
Ibid. 262–8.
State Satire 139
and on his behalf is often really about more interesting issues, such as
the Whig resort to populist politics, in which grandees such as Mon-
mouth, Buckingham, and Shaftesbury were sent on the equivalent of
whistle-stop tours, during which they ‘condescended’ to municipal
elites. However, this tendency to weave treatments around him also
suggests that he lacked the complexity to inspire great satire in his
own right. Having called him a stupid son of a whore there was not
much more that one could add.
f ro m J a m e s to W i l l i a m
The repressive reign of James II saw the state lampoon become a pri-
mary means of mainstream political dissent. The climate of the times
is represented in an account of the court already quoted from ‘The
Town Life’:
The English must not seek preferment there,
For Mac’s and O’s all places destin’d are.
No more we’ll send our youth to Paris now——
French principles and breeding once wou’d do—
They for improvement must to Ireland sail,
The Irish wit and language now prevail.
But soft my pen, with care this subject touch,
Stop where you are, you soon may write too much!68
This represents the writer of what is essentially a Town lampoon

pulling up at the recognized boundary of his genre; but even the
Town lampoon was now increasingly politicized—the most remark-
able clandestine satire of the period, Dorset’s ‘A Faithful Catalogue
of our Most Eminent Ninnies’ (further discussed below), chooses to
violate exactly this boundary by turning the materials, tropes, and
clichés of court and Town satire to Whig political uses. In this case
the writer’s withdrawal was physical as well as moral: Dorset, like
many Protestant courtiers, had retired to his country seat, where he
became an active conspirator to replace James with William and
Mary. We know that the poem was circulated as a separate because
we have a worn master copy divided up into page lengths for the bene-
fit of scribes, though no actual copies in this format survive.69 Other
68
Ibid., iv. 67; also Love, Restoration Verse, 220.
69
Illustrated in POASY, iv, facing p. 190.
140 State Satire
opponents of James’s Catholicizing policies sought exile in the

Netherlands or visited across the channel. Lampooners on both sides
had a justified sense of being in the front line of a great battle of alle-
giances. In the event it was widely believed that a lampoon whose
words today are almost unintelligible, ‘Lilli Burlero’ (‘Ho brother
Teague dost hear de decree’), had, in the words of its author, Thomas
Wharton, ‘sung a deluded Prince out of three kingdoms’.70 The
poem, being widely circulated in printed broadsheets, can hardly be
claimed as clandestine but the public singing of it was unmistakably
a subversive act—it became the ‘Marseillaise’ of the Glorious Revo-
lution. A purer example of the role of the scribal media in whipping
up anti-Jacobite feeling was the circulation in manuscript of a men-
dacious newsletter claiming that Irish troops in James’s army had
fired into a Protestant church during sermon time. This invented
story swept the country.71
Otherwise the political verse of James’s reign is either a continu-
ation of the anti-Catholic rants of the late 1670s, or consists of violent
personal attacks on James’s courtiers and ministers, or asserts tri-
umphalist anti-Protestantism. The accession of William and Mary
saw a new professionalism evident in both the composition and the
distribution of the state lampoon. It also inaugurated a multiplica-
tion of political possibilities which was accompanied by the in-
creased self-consciousness in individuals’ identification with party
which has been noted by Whyman in her account of the Verneys.72
Within the established tendencies, court Whigs now competed with
country Whigs as well as with court and country Tories while Jac-
obites and Non-Jurors kept up a steady fire from a political margin
that might still at any juncture have become a centre. Xenophobia
combined with Jacobite animus produced satire of particular fer-
ocity directed at William’s Dutch advisers and just as vigorous defences
that were to culminate in Defoe’s ‘The Foreigners’. The methods of
machine politics trialled under the Shaftesburian Whigs in the early
1680s were now refined, especially in the management of parliamen-
tary and municipal elections. The manipulation of parliament be-
came something of a science when a Tory revival brought the master
tactician Danby back to office.
70
Text in POASY, 311–12. 71
SPISCE, 11–12.
72
Sociability and Power in Late-Stuart England (Oxford: Oxford UP, 1999),
149–77.
State Satire 141
In William the majority of Britons had the king they had sup-
posedly yearned for throughout the Stuart century—a committed
Protestant and fierce antagonist of the national enemy, France. What
the nation now discovered was that warfare in the Protestant cause
was enormously expensive, and that the maintenance of actively en-
gaged standing armies demanded much higher taxation, as well as
new-fangled revenue-raising measures, of increasing complexity and
desperation.73 Conflict between the monarchs and the Protestant
heir, Princess Anne, added to the complexities of a political arena in
which, despite the increasing liberty of the press, each party and sub-
party sought to advance its position through the semi-organized
writing and publication of lampoons. Complexity is also evident
from the behaviour of individual poets, several of whom made dra-
matic changes of allegiance. Mordaunt, whose support for the Revo-
lution had earned him a place on William’s Privy Council and the
earldom of Monmouth, was ejected in 1696 and promptly became a
Tory, while courting Anne, under whom he later returned to office.
Jack Howe made the same shift even more abruptly. Careers built
around the undisguised pursuit of gain and office could now accom-
modate themselves to clearly defined party structures.
Under such circumstances it was only natural that the old cat-
egories of court, Town, and state lampoon should become somewhat
blurred. I have shown that this distinction was recognized in a rough
way at the time by the hiving off of pieces of one kind or the other
into separate scribal anthologies, such as the Cameron scriptorium’s
‘Venus’, ‘Restoration’, and ‘William’ groups; but this was by now
largely a retrospective distinction, applied to increasingly elaborate
collections of the verse of the two previous reigns, while current pro-
duction, whatever its primary audience, was rarely without a polit-
ical colouring.74 Pure court satire became increasingly rare, especially
after the death of Mary, because the court itself had largely surren-
dered its cultural supremacy and distinctiveness. The withdrawal of
the monarchs to the more secluded Hampton and Kensington fol-
lowed by the physical destruction of Whitehall in the fire of 1698
accentuated this process: the private life of royalty had ceased to be
73
There is a brief account of these measures in Andrea Finkelstein, Harmony and
the Balance: An Intellectual History of Seventeenth-Century English Economic
Thought (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2000), 219–22.
74
For the groups see W. J. Cameron, ‘A Late Seventeenth-Century Scriptorium’,
Renaissance and Modern Studies, 7 (1963), 25–52.
142 State Satire
on show to the same extent as in Charles’s time. Yet examples of

court satire still occur. One memorable and widely circulated ex-
change, more fully treated in later chapters, arose from a quarrel be-
tween members of the committee of regents appointed in June 1690
to advise Mary during William’s long absence. It was set off by ‘The
Nine’, a lampoon, possibly by Mulgrave and answered by Mordaunt
whose answer was then answered by Dorset.75 The pieces count as
court satire in the sense that their primary motivation was one of per-
sonal malice and dislike, with the underlying political issues given
little prominence; yet, outside the court, they would have been read
as reflecting on the capacity of the regents to govern effectively,
which was no doubt the Tory Mulgrave’s aim in penning ‘The Nine’.
The most interesting point raised by their existence is that the gov-
erning body of the state should have included two acknowledged
masters of clandestine satire in Mordaunt and Dorset and that a
third, Mulgrave, should have been lurking on the fringes of power.
(He was to enter the Privy Council himself in 1694.)
A sense, if no more, of the way clandestine satire was developing
in the 1690s can be gained by its treatment of the monarch himself.
He was a foreigner, withdrawn and private in his personal relation-
ships, and devoted to the craft and practice of military kingship in a
way that was totally unfamiliar to his new subjects. He was also a de-
vout Calvinist. For the Jacobites the incentive was to make the worst
of every possible situation, and it is to these that we owe a steady
stream of satires charging William with homosexual relationships
with his Dutch confidants William Bentinck, Earl of Portland, and
Joost Keppel, Earl of Albemarle. Yet the tone of these attacks is sur-
prisingly light and amusing, reflecting what seems to have been a
generally civilized attitude towards same-sex relationships in the
1690s Town.76 One such piece presents itself as a parody of a scene
from Buckingham’s The Rehearsal:
Enter K. Phys. in his Night-Gown and Benting with his Breeches down.
K. Phys. Come here my Benting and Indulge thy charms,
More dear than Untoucht Virgins to my Arms,
For thee I have Abandon’d Woman-kind,
75
See below, pp. 163–4. The sequence of three satires is given in POASY, v.
195–213.
76
See for example the amusing paired lampoons ‘The Women’s Complaint to
Venus’ and ‘Venus[’s Reply]’ in Love, Restoration Verse, 156–7.
State Satire 143
And all my Wishes to that Arse confin’d:

My Consort in her Bed neglected lyes,
Whilst I am rev’lling in thy whiter Thighs
Assist me with thy Councill, if thou can,
How to o’recome this Most Prodigious man.
This luxemburgh, whose name my Genius aws,
And Conquest still attends the sword he draws.
Benting. The only way this mighty man to beat,
Great Sr, you know, before you Fight to Treat;
And when y’have lull’d th’Unwary Fool asleep,
You are too wise the Articles to keep;
Witness St Dennis! that Immortall Day
When on their Backs so many French-men lay:
The Day obtain’d, you lost a little fame;
The statesman is above the sence of shame.
Enter a Messinger out of Breath.
Mess: Your Heavy Cannon to Dixmude is come,
And Great Sr Martin Beckman leads ’em on.
K. Phys. Say, of what Pieces does our Train consist?
Mess: There’s Three Two-pounders, Sakers all the rest.
K. Phys. Tremble, you Dunkirk walls!
Mess: In the canal approaching to the Siege
We shot at Ducks, and one is split, my Liege.
K. Phys. Curst be my Starrs! what Benting shall I do?
Benting. To Horse, Great Sr, and lets away to Loo
[Exeunt Omnes.
The whole Play shall be speedily made Publick and Acted &c.77
Paul Hammond has brought together a remarkable florilegium of

similar attacks which would seem to make William a candidate for
the pantheon of gay monarchs.78 Yet Cameron dismisses the same at-
tacks as ‘an expression of xenophobia’, pointing out that ‘The fact
that not one satire of the period alludes to William’s mistress is in
itself remarkable.’79 The mistress was Elizabeth Villiers, and the re-
lationship seems to have lasted for most of William’s married life
with Mary. Mary herself in a lampoon of 1689, which begins with
the attention-grabbing couplet
77
Yale MS Osborn b. 111, p. 371.
78
Figuring Sex between Men from Shakespeare to Rochester (Oxford: Clarendon
Press, 2002), 172–85.
79
POASY, v, p. xxxvii. Some do, however, refer to an anonymous ‘whore’ (ibid.
122, 386), and there is the earlier incident, recalled in Turner, Libertines and Radicals,
230, of his attempting to break into the maids of honour’s quarters at Whitehall.
144 State Satire
Whilst William of Nassau, with Benting Bardasha,

Are at the old game of Gomorrha . . .
is improbably accused of relationships with the Earl of Shrewsbury,

Bishop Burnet, and the Earl of Devonshire, and Princess Anne of
betraying her husband with an ‘orthodox looby’, whom Cameron
identifies as Henry Compton, Bishop of London.80 Such charges
were the small change of political lampooning.
Mary is addressed in this poem as ‘Tullia’, which is also her name
in Arthur Mainwaring’s ‘Tarquin and Tullia’, a miniature historical
allegory in the tradition of Absalom and Achitophel. This represents
England, only a year after the Revolution, as already ruined by the
malice and brutality of Tarquin (William):
Innumerable woes oppressed the land
When it submitted to his cursed command;
So just was Heaven that ’twas hard to tell,
Whether its guilt or losses did excel.
Men who renounced their God for dearer trade
Were then the guardians of religion made;
Rebels were sainted, foreigners did reign,
Outlaws returned, preferments to obtain,
With frogs and toads and all their croaking train.
No native knew their features nor their birth;
They seemed the greasy offspring of the earth.
The trade was sunk, the fleet and army spent,
Devouring taxes swallowed lesser rent,
(Taxes imposed by no authority:
Each lewd collection was a robbery).
Bold self-creating men did statutes draw,
Skilled to establish villany by law,
Fanatic drivers, whose unjust careers
Produced new ills exceeding former fears.81
The main interest of the passage does not lie in its inaccuracies (as they
appear to a modern reader) nor in its no doubt reliable record of the
feelings of the defeated party but in the sense it conveys of a society
being subjected to radical modernization at all levels, and that this was
felt more keenly for following on James’s attempt to carry through a
different no less radical transformation over the preceding three years.
80
POASY, v. 60–1. We have met Compton earlier as the putative lover of Philippa
Temple. His real crime was that of being a Whig.
81
Ibid. 53–4.
State Satire 145
Clandestine satire was a medium of particular importance for Jac-

obites and Non-Jurors, who had only restricted access to print. One
particularly valuable source from the early 1690s which has already
been mentioned is Beinecke Library, Osborn MS b 111, a mixture of
panegyric verse addressed to the exiled James and satires against his
enemies, which was prepared for presentation to him and has his
coat of arms on its Morocco binding. It was later owned by Sir
Thomas Strange, secretary to the Young Pretender. Five hundred
and ninety-six pages long (exclusive of index), it has been edited with
such care that the index lists the number of lines of each of its
231 items. The contents include much otherwise unrecorded state
verse—including the burlesque scene just quoted—some of which
may well have been manufactured for the occasion. To immerse one-
self in such a collection is to enter the hothouse world of Jacobite fi-
delity and resistance more completely than by any other conceivable
means. Yet, as a guide to its royal reader concerning the true senti-
ments of his subjects, it would have been dangerously misleading.
Nothing has so far been discovered about the circumstances of its
compilation.
d e c l i n e a n d s u rv i va l
The writing and circulation of state verse remained a significant elem-

ent in national political life well into the reign of Anne and beyond;
but it is fair to say that after 1704 the primary attention of contem-
porary, as has been the case with modern, readers would have been
directed towards the printed political pamphlet, rather than its
scribal verse sibling. This was partly due to the greater liberty of the
press after the final lapsing of the Licensing Act in 1694 and the
growing preference of administrations to fight fire with fire by en-
rolling their own cadres of expert pamphleteers rather than em-
ploying cumbersome and unpopular techniques of repression. The
identities of writers could now be protected by pseudonyms and
those of printers and publishers by surreptitious publication, which
was much easier with neither a censor to hound offenders nor
a strong Stationers’ Company fighting all encroachments on its
monopoly status.
As the quality, as well as quantity, of pamphleteering rose, it was
less often the case that to encounter the work of outstanding writers
146 State Satire
one had to go to the circulators of manuscripts. The last of the seven

Yale POAS volumes, covering 1704–14, is predominantly drawn
from printed sources. Swift was an exception only in that his social
verse, written for a circle of close friends, was in many cases only be-
latedly sent to the press: his polemical prose appeared immediately
and as a rule pseudonymously. But a further reason for the decline in
importance—though never total disappearance—of the state lam-
poon was a change in the nature of satiric discourse itself. The lam-
pooners’ style had been outspoken and totally devoid of indirection.
They spoke their truth or spite as plainly and forcefully as possible.
In an age that increasingly prided itself on its polish and savoir faire,
this very directness came to be seen as self-defeatingly crude: persua-
sion in this new world was more likely to be secured by more refined
kinds of ridicule uttered in the measured tones of the metropolitan
man and woman of sense. Changes in notions of how satire should
be written were a response to new forms of civility which were them-
selves a product of the mollifying influence of the Town, extended by
now over several decades. The habit of being civil to a person’s face
and abusive behind their back was long familiar but not the practice
of being rude to their face without them realizing it, or half-realizing
it but being unable to resent it—the capacity that Dryden praises in
his famous Jack Ketch analogy in the dedication to Juvenal and that
Pope cheekily acknowledged in addressing George II:
The Zeal of Fools offends at any time,
But most of all, the Zeal of Fools in ryme.
Besides, a fate attends on all I write,
That when I aim at praise, they say I bite.82
David Malouf places this change within a wider retreat from both a
language and a social order that were ‘violent and violently abusive’:
When the scion of a good country family came up to London as young Kas-
tril does in The Alchemist, it was to learn to ‘quarrel’, to be a ‘roaring boy’.
Quarrelling and the language of quarrelling were at the heart of the sectar-
ian and political violence that led to the Civil War, which had from the be-
ginning been as much a war of words, of the way opposing ideas found
violent language to clothe and arm them, as a war with muskets and pikes.
What had to be reformed in the aftermath of the war was not simply
factional politics and a tradition of angry dissension and dissent, but the
82
Dryden, Works, iv. 71; ‘To Augustus’, ll. 406–9, in The Poems of Alexander
Pope, ed. John Butt (London: Methuen, 1963), 649.
State Satire 147
language through which these were encouraged and spread. English had to
be purged of all those forms of violent expression that had led men to violent
action. By limiting the one, you would limit the other. That was the program.
The language itself was to be disarmed. Irony would replace vituperation;
good humour, a middle tone, and balance of syntactical structure would en-
sure that proper weighing of pros and cons that would make extremist views
appear so crass and undisciplined as to have no place in polite company.
Moderate language would produce moderation.83
Lampooning was both a product of that older culture and, through

its replacement of direct vituperation with witty mockery, one of the
means by which it was reformed; but for it to become moderate
would be to make it something other. Opposition together with the
not otherwise available liberty of speech offered by the scribal
medium was of its very nature.
As part of the movement just described printed verse developed
techniques of allusiveness that allowed dissident political opinions to
be expressed without being explicitly stated—Pope being the master
of this kind of insinuation. Augustan irony, regarded as a social as
well as a literary accomplishment, eroded the prestige and effective-
ness of the lampoon by making it seem crude and unmodish. More-
over, since political hostility was now increasingly ritualized and
polite society inclined towards Addisonian notions of inclusiveness,
the energy and directness of the lampoon were more likely to be em-
ployed by holders of opinions so dissident that they would never be
accepted by the mainstream. Rather than a means of persuasion it
had become a way of letting off steam for those who had little or no
possibility of putting their programmes into practice. In the end the
state lampooner was left as a lone railer against unassuageable enor-
mities; but during the four Restoration decades, when matters had
been simpler and most programmes must at one or another time have
seemed practicable, he could pride himself on having played as im-
portant a part in the forming of national opinion as any other polit-
ical persuader. From the mid-eighteenth century what had formerly
been the role of the lampoon was largely appropriated by pictorial
caricature. Hogarth, Gillray, and Cruikshank were the lampooner’s
true successors.
He (together with the small number of ascertained women lam-
pooners) had also exercised an enormous influence on the way those
83
‘Made in England’, Quarterly Essay, 12 (2003), 46–7.
148 State Satire
four decades would be understood by posterity. This may not be im-

mediately evident. In one sense the Restoration state lampoon
quickly became a buried genre, lurking unread for centuries in manu-
scripts that were either forgotten or, if inadvertently opened, often
mutilated to remove obscenities. The poems were only re-established
as vital historical sources through the enthusiasm of a collector,
James M. Osborn, and the publication, with his encouragement, of
the Yale POAS series of 1963–75. Yet even these invaluable volumes
offer only a small proportion of the total repertoire. Moreover, be-
cause the POASY editors so frequently illuminate the meanings of
the poems by citing modern works of historical scholarship, they
cannot avoid conveying a sense of the poems being secondary to the
real business of historical argument—adding flesh and a certain pi-
quancy to received portraits and narratives but not creative in their
own right of historical understanding, and certainly not founda-
tional to historians’ own conceptions. A leading Stuart historian of
the last century, Sir Charles Firth, encouraged this view when he ar-
gued that lampoons circulated in manuscript should be disregarded
as ‘usually the off-spring of private spite’, a matter on which he is ju-
diciously corrected by W. J. Cameron.84
Firth’s view was not that of the compiler of the original printed
POAS volume of 1697. To begin with he regarded himself as pre-
senting not fugitive scurrility but ‘a Collection of those Valuable
Pieces, which several great Men have produc’d, no less inspir’d by
the injur’d Genius of their Country, than by the Muses’, men who
were of ‘Establish’d Fame, and already receiv’d, and allow’d the best
Patriots, as well as Poets’. Their work was to be preferred in every
sense to that of ‘a sort of Men, who having little other merit, than a
happy chime, would fain fix the Excellence of Poetry in the smooth-
ness of Versification, allowing but little to the more Essential Qual-
ities of a Poet, great Images, good Sense, &c.’ The poems were part
of a struggle for liberty that was still progressing through the
continental wars against France:
But when all Europe is engag’d to destroy that Tyrannick Power, the mis-
management of those Times, and the selfish evil designs of a corrupt Court
had given Rise to, it cannot be thought unseasonable to publish so just an
84
POASY, v, pp. xxxix–xliii. Firth, A Commentary on Macaulay’s History of
England (London: Macmillan, 1938), 105. The same historiographical argument had
been put forward even more forcefully in Roger North’s Examen: or an Enquiry into
the Credit and Veracity of a Pretended Complete History (London, 1740), 658–72.
State Satire 149
Account of the true sourse of all our present Mischiefs; which will be evi-
dently found in the following Poems, for from them we may collect a just and
secret History of the former Times.
Some of the poems in the collection had already been printed before
in ‘loose Papers’ but ‘so mangled that the persons that wrote them
would hardly have known, much less have owned them’, but most
had ‘never before seen the Light’.85 It was through the printed texts,
particularly the four-volume set of 1702–7, containing a total of
671 predominantly satirical poems, that the spirit of that ‘just and
secret History’ was passed on. Moreover, it rapidly outgrew its
original ideological bias as satires of all political colourings were
added to what rapidly became a commercial operation in search of
the widest possible market. There were limitations of course: the
texts, derived in the first place from fortuitously acquired separates
or late scribal anthologies, were frequently shortened and bowdler-
ized—the best versions of most satires still remained in the manu-
scripts—but the original POAS volumes, considered collectively,
constituted an extraordinary publishing success. Three- and four-
volume sets are still available relatively cheaply on the rare-book
market. These sets continued to be read eagerly in the eighteenth and
subsequent centuries for their political as well as their entertainment
value. In the 1860s a Sydney clergyman, David Blair, painstakingly
prepared a handwritten index to such a set for the benefit of users of
the Public Library, clearly regarding them as a vital source for the
study of Protestantism and liberty. They were also well known to
early historians of the period and in this way formative to attitudes
adopted towards the great figures of the age. In particular many
accusations of contestable accuracy passed into biographical records
on the unacknowledged testimony of the lampoonists. Firth noted
that Macaulay ‘quotes and systematically employs the printed col-
lection of satires and political songs published at the beginning of
Queen Anne’s reign, in four volumes, and known as Poems on
Affairs of State’.86
The manuscripts may also have been more frequently studied than
we realize. Macaulay knew the unprinted repertoire well and draws
on it in both acknowledged and unacknowledged ways in his highly
85
Poems on Affairs of State from the Time of Oliver Cromwell (London, 1697),
A3r–v, A4v.
86
Commentary, 98.
150 State Satire
influential History.87 Firth himself owned two important scribal an-

thologies of lampoons now in Bodley. A Victorian duke of Portland
was an energetic collector: his hoard is now on deposit at the Uni-
versity of Nottingham Library. Often the volumes themselves show
signs of use that pre-date their arrival in their modern institutional
homes: annotations, erasures, excisions, candle-grease, snuff and
wine stains, hairs, thumbprints. Harvard fMS Eng. 636 contains nu-
merous pencil annotations in what appears to be an early twentieth-
century hand. Every time one of these volumes was opened, as Firth
warned, it conveyed a powerful, polemic view of the leading political
figures of its time.
The danger is that charges made in these untrustworthy lampoons may be
allowed too large a share in forming the historian’s general estimate of the
personage, may so influence his conception of the character that he may be
tempted to accept trifles as confirmations of these charges, and not pay suf-
ficient attention to evidence telling the other way.88
To this one can hardly object unless the lampoon were to be allowed
no weight at all in the determining of a verdict: it certainly expressed
what many people thought. The modern historian heading off to
study graver and more respectable documents is often unconsciously
infected with attitudes towards the period and its statesmen that had
their origin with the lampooners. It is hard to view Scroggs, Mon-
mouth, Buckingham, Portsmouth, Cleveland, and even Charles and
James except through the prism of the lampoon. This rich body of
wholly undisinterested commentary deserves renewed historio-
graphical scrutiny in order to identify the attitudes, conjunctions,
and conceivings that it has directly and indirectly fostered.
87
On this see Richard B. Vowles, ‘Macaulay’s “History” and the Lampoon’,
N&Q 196 (1951), 320 and Cameron, POASY, v, pp. xxxvii–xliii and annotations,
passim. Firth noted that Macaulay had consulted ‘a considerable number of manu-
script libels and lampoons’ (Commentary, 98).
88
Firth, Commentary, 106.
5
Lampoon Authorship
So far we have been considering the lampoon as an epiphenomenon

of the life of communities, performing the tasks of regulating mem-
bership, marking boundaries, and defining group identities. We have
been chiefly concerned with the largest of these communities—the
court, the Town, and the political nation—but lampooning was also
endemic in such lesser formations as universities and colleges within
universities, extended families, professions, political clubs, and gos-
sip circles. Moreover, other towns beside London and other king-
doms beside England also sustained traditions of clandestine satire:
Dublin was a fertile source of lampoons from both sides of the polit-
ical and religious divide.1 I wish now to look more closely at the ac-
tual circumstances under which lampoons were written.
the context of writing
Most lampoons were issued anonymously, and with good reason.

Personal insult in seventeenth-century England was likely to provoke
retaliatory violence, administered through the duel for social equals
or the beating for inferiors. The known writers of lampoons were no
different from their readers in this respect: even by the standards of
the time they seem to have been an exceptionally quarrelsome lot.
Rochester in 1676 envisaged responding to an anticipated provoca-
tion from Dryden by sending for ‘Black Will with a cudgel’.2 When
on 18 December 1679 Dryden was set upon in Rose Alley by three
assailants using exactly that weapon, it was assumed that either
Rochester or one of the other victims of ‘An Essay upon Satyr’ was
responsible. Like most men of his rank at court Rochester received
1
Andrew Carpenter (ed.), Verse in English from Tudor and Stuart Ireland (Cork:
Cork UP, 2003) contains some striking examples, two of which are cited below.
2
The Letters of John Wilmot, Earl of Rochester, ed. Jeremy Treglown (Oxford:
Blackwell, 1980), 120.
152 Lampoon Authorship
and issued several challenges. One, which did not actually lead to
fighting, involved his rival lampooner, Mulgrave.3 The Duke of
Buckingham is remembered for having mortally wounded the Earl of
Shrewsbury and afterward cohabited with his widow. High rank
offered some protection in his case, since duels between members of
the aristocracy were often aborted by the precautionary arrest of the
intending duellists. Sir William Coventry’s sending a challenge to
Buckingham in response to being portrayed in a scene written for
The Country Gentleman led to him being deprived of his secretary-
ship as a punishment. However, the effect of such protection might
simply be to displace the conflict from the principal to a follower. On
6 October 1666 Sir Thomas Osborne and Captain Daniel Colling-
wood fought Thomas Belasyse, Earl Fauconberg and Sir John Talbot
in a sanguinary duel that seems to have been prompted by Faucon-
berg’s pathological dislike of the unreachable Buckingham.4 In 1671
Buckingham was widely believed to have instigated an attack in
which the Duke of Ormonde was dragged from his coach and would
probably have been murdered had he not managed to struggle free.
Ormonde’s son Ossory publicly threatened Buckingham over the
incident.5 At the Duke’s Theatre on 28 August 1675 the brother of
the poet Sir Carr Scroope was killed in a duel with Sir Thomas
Armstrong.6 Two years later the author of ‘A Familiar Epistle to
Mr Julian Secretary to the Muses’ (‘Thou common shore of this
poetic town’) was still taunting Scroope with his failure to retaliate:
Laugh at him, justle him, yet still he writes,
In Rhyme he Challenges, in Rhyme he fights;
Charg’d with the last, and basest Infamy,
His Bus’nesse is to thinke what Rhymes to — Lye:
Which found, in fury he retorts agen,
Strephon’s a very Draggon at his Pen.
His Brother Murder’d, and his Mother Whor’d
His Mistresse Lost, and yet his Pen’s his Sword.7
3
See V. de Sola Pinto, Enthusiast in Wit: A Portrait of John Wilmot Earl of
Rochester 1647–1680 (London: Routledge, 1962), 93–6.
4
Andrew Browning, Thomas Osborne, Earl of Danby and Duke of Leeds
1632–1712, 3 vols. (Glasgow: Jackson, 1944–51), i. 41.
5
Winifred, Lady Burghclere, George Villiers, Second Duke of Buckingham
(London: John Murray, 1903), 238–43.
6
Margaret M. Verney (ed.), Memoirs of the Verney Family (London: Longmans,
Green, 1899), iv. 229.
7
Yale MS Osborn b 105, pp. 358–9.
Lampoon Authorship 153
John Pulteney suffered similar taunts owing to his having fled from the
French when the Dutch army was routed at the siege of Saint-Omer.
These ceased when a rival paid with his life for having accosted him in
the street. In 1687 a literary quarrel between Robert Wolseley and
William Wharton escalated into a duel in which Wharton was killed.8
The author of a Tunbridge ‘reply’ to be considered shortly concludes,
‘I would say more but that I fear theyl fight us.’9 Confrontation by an
outraged lampoon victim must have been disconcerting. Dryden is al-
leged to have denied being the author of MacFlecknoe to its principal
victim ‘with all the Execrations he could think of’.10
Women too might revenge an insult through direct or surrogate
violence. Lady Harvey, the reputed author of ‘Take a turd’, was said
to have killed a page with his own sword because he had boasted of
having slept with her.11 In May 1669 the Countess of Shrewsbury,
that ‘killing dame’, arranged for Henry Killigrew to be attacked and
‘wounded in nine places’ by her footmen, and his servant reportedly
murdered, while she watched from her coach. This was done ‘Upon
an old grudge, of his saying openly that he had lain with her’.12 Other
duels fought over her resulted in the deaths of her husband and of
Giles Rawlins and William Jenkins, acting as seconds. Her second
son John, taunted in a number of lampoons for his homosexuality,
was killed in a duel by the king’s illegitimate son, the Duke of
Grafton.13 If Dryden’s beating in Rose Alley was not organized by
Rochester it may have been by the Duchess of Portsmouth.14 Dorset’s
stepdaughter, Mary Gerard, was accused of involvement in the
murder of two fiddlers.15
8
Brice Harris, Charles Sackville, Sixth Earl of Dorset, Patron and Poet of the
Restoration (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1940), 110–12.
9
‘A Reply by Mr Hawse his Son’, Yale MS Osborn b 54, p. 1133.
10
Thomas Shadwell, The Complete Works of Thomas Shadwell, ed. Montague
Summers, 5 vols. (London: Fortune Press, 1927), v. 292. Nathaniel Thompson’s
caning by a member of the Charlton family arose from a newspaper report, not a lam-
poon ( John Spurr, England in the 1670s (Oxford: Blackwell, 2000), 167).
11
CSR, 28.
12
(London: G. Bell & Sons, 1970–), ix. 557. See also 558 for her lover Buckingham’s
lame attempt to excuse her.
13
CSR, 286.
14
Edward Saslow, ‘The Rose Alley Ambuscade’, Restoration, 26 (2002), 27–49,
argues cogently that the attack was a revenge by Dorset on behalf of his wife who had
recently died in childbirth; however, Saslow may sentimentalize Dorset’s married life.
He was also cohabiting during his marriage with his mistress, and the mother of three
of his children, Philippa Waldegrave.
15
CSR, 243–5.
In the light of this frequent recourse to the duel and the beating as a
means of evening scores, we would expect the identity of lampoon
authors to be carefully guarded. In the case of particular poems this is
often the case; yet there was a widespread understanding that certain
individuals, well known to the Town and to each other, were the prin-
cipal authors of lampoons. In the manuscript sources for court lam-
poons of the 1660s and 1670s, the names of Rochester, Dorset,
Mulgrave, John, Lord Vaughan, and Etherege appear regularly,
either as ascriptions on texts or in identifications made by other lam-
pooners. The efflorescence of the Town lampoon in the early 1680s
can be mapped through a series of poems (listed below) in which lam-
pooners cheerfully spill the beans on each other. The key names recur
with an insistency that suggests that a large part of the surviving cor-
pus of lampoons was not the generalized emanation of an upper-class
folk culture but the product of a small coterie of identifiable writers.
There are good reasons why this might be so. While the manner
and forms of the lampoon were a universal possession, for a piece to
be remarked and discussed required that it should retail fresh and, if
possible, sensational gossip and that it should be written with a par-
ticular kind of flair that was not as easy to achieve as one might as-
sume. There must often have been an up-to-date sparkle to a
successful lampoon that is lost on us today when we review the genre
en masse. The lampoon that failed to meet these two criteria of con-
tent and style might have been copied a few times as a separate but
without achieving the level of circulation that would ensure its sur-
vival. Other pieces, written for a particular narrow coterie, must
have been denied wider circulation through relying on allusions that
were not intelligible to outsiders; nor need the writers have regretted
this. One important aid to survival was the ability to place work with
the professional scribes of the metropolis. Julian, Somerton, War-
cup, and their ilk were not acknowledged publishers with known
addresses at which unsolicited manuscripts might be left, but relied
on material being fed to them by individuals who were personally
known to them and whom they trusted. A Dorset or a Jack Howe
would know into exactly what hands a lampoon needed to be placed
to achieve maximum circulation; others would not. Moreover, those
hands, as well as multiplying copies as separates, were also respon-
sible for the creation of the large retrospective manuscript antholo-
gies which are today the chief repositories of the genre. A piece might
circulate successfully as a separate without ever being selected for
this higher level of preservation. Merely to leave copies in coffee

houses, scatter them at court, or bestow them on friends was a less
reliable path to posterity.
As an example of the ease with which lampoons could disappear
from sight let us take a group written at Tunbridge Wells in the sum-
mer of 1680. Tunbridge was the fashionable out-of-town gathering
place of the early Restoration years, only gradually yielding place to
Bath. It is the subject of many lampoons, of which the best known is
the satire by Rochester.16 In 1680 a visitor to the Wells assembled a
linked group of five lampoons then in circulation which have come
down to us in a single source, Yale MS Osborn b 54, pp. 1128–33:
‘A Satyr on Tunbridge Wells 1680’ (‘England by all thought beauty’s natural
soil’)
‘[A] Hue and Cry to the Crier of Tunbridge Wells’ (‘O yee yes if anyone can
tidings tell’)
‘An Answer to the Satyr on Tunbridge Wells or A Whip, a Whip, Poor Pug
Lashed for Spoiling the Best Parlour 1680’ (‘To lampoon ladies thus for
everything’)
‘On Mr Haws at Tunbridge by Sir Rob: Howard. 1680’ (‘At Tunbridge
Wells a New England apostle’)
‘A reply by Mr Hawse his Son’ (‘On Tunbridge walks two bona robas
justle’)
The first poem of the group created offence not so much by its reve-
lations of scandal (with names of victims identified in the margins)
but by insisting that only ugly women had come to the Wells that
year. England, once called ‘the paradice of women’, had become
An overteeming Beldam spent and done
The daughter more degenerate then the son:
Once the deform’d the only Monsters were,
The Beautys now are so because they are rare.
Gathered in their evening finery the visitors resembled ‘The awfull
order of the Whetstone band’. The first of two replies is a parody of
a bellman’s call:
O yee yes! If any one can tydings tell,
Of a certain Lampooner with a whip and a bell;
That hath lashed ye Ladys; as round as a hoop
in ye calves of his leggs, a little given to stoop;
16
Works, 49–50. For further examples see below, pp. 207–12.
With a Frenchifyed pace and a selfe conceit

That his witt and his meritts are wondrous great:
And more besides that if I be not mistooke
He has a hedge-hog face and a lampoon looke:
From Westminster hall o’th’ fathers side,
On ye mothers deriv’d from ye divill and pride:
If any such monster shall happ in yr way
That may seem to have err’d and quite gon astray;
Bring him to ye cryer without further regard
And you shall be sure of a swinging reward.
God save ye King.
1680
The description was recognizable enough for the compiler of the group
to identify its object as ‘Mr Skip-with’—i.e. Thomas of that name,
remembered for his later adventures in theatre management. He is
listed in ‘To Captain Warcup’ (‘Here take this Warcup spread this up
and down’) as a lampoon poet.17 The second reply takes upon itself to
reprove not only the lampoon but lampooning itself. The author
presents himself as a knight errant devoted to the defence of ladies
Att any time shall mankind dare ith’ least
To haue ill thoughts of woman in his breast
And liue to see the sun? no, lett him dye.
And then be damn’d to all Eternity:
For he that can of them imagine evill
Is a fitt present; only for the Divill:
The poem goes on to refute some of the specific personal attacks of
the original before concluding with further huffing at those who
maligned women. The author of the piece may well have been
Rochester’s poetical foe Sir Carr Scroope, who had himself appeared
in Skipwith’s gallery of visitors to the Wells:
That purblind Knight that with Lyncean eyes,
And magnifying glasses faults Espys;
He walks alone, ’tis great and shews disdaine,
See what a contemplation works his braine,
That Ballader that jurney man of Rhime
That can’t distinguish Burlesque from sublime;
From far fetcht paraphrase he seeks renown,
And furiously he threatens a Lampoon.18
17
CSR, 161 and for his life CSR, 287–8. The ‘Mr’ is correct as he did not become
Sir Thomas until 1694.
18
p. 1130.
The ‘paraphrase’ would have been Scroope’s ‘Sappho to Phaon’ in

Dryden’s Ovid’s Epistles Translated (1680) and the lampoon, pre-
sumably, his ‘toothless’ ‘In Defence of Satyr’. The Tunbridge reply
gives a distinct sense of a piece written to set right a violation of the
ethics of sociability. Sexual insult could be tolerated as generic to the
lampoon but not the accusation of universal ugliness. The remaining
two pieces are an epigram by Sir Robert Howard on an Anabaptist
preacher at Tunbridge and a reply, addressed to Howard and his
brother Phillip, by the minister’s son. However, the appeal of the
1680 Tunbridge group was too local and particular to inspire further
circulation. It has survived only because it fortuitously came to the
hands, first of an unknown visitor to the Wells and secondly of an in-
discriminate amateur collector of lampoons (assuming they were not
the same person), who has also preserved many other unique pieces.
In a parallel case a lengthy Dublin lampoon survives only because a
copy was fortuitously taken by Sir William Petty.19
The professional scribes had a keen understanding of how a well-
known name might help sell a lampoon. A Tory satire of 1679–80,
‘The Visitt’, in introducing Robert Julian, the best-remembered
vendor of clandestine satire, shows him at pains to advertise the
authorship of his wares:
Of Guineys tost with Julian you’re a Rogue

we’are straight Presented with whats new in vogue.
There was obscene Rotchesters Cheife storys
of matrix Glances Dildo and Clittoris
With Dorsetts Tawdry Nonsense drest For sale
This motto on’t Braue Buckhurst nere Faile
Gods Blood and wounds Crys Julian thats grown stale
I scarce can Put it off For nants and Ale
The next was smoothly writ by squinting Carr
Of Pembrooks drunken tricks, his Bull and Beare
Behen was there with Bawdry in a vaile
But swearing Bloodily as in a Goale
Mulgraue appear’d with his base Borrowed witt
And Dryden at his heeles a owning it
There was Lewd Buckinghams slimb Poetry
But stufft so full of horrid Blasphemy
made Julian doubt there was no diety
19
Carpenter, Verse in English, 423.
Feirce Drydens satyr wee desir’d to veiw

For wee had heard he mourn’d in Black and Blew
Hee search’d for it but twas not to be Found
Twas Put ith Garett for a hundred Pound (ll. 15–35)20
The piece by ‘squinting Carr’ is ‘In Defence of Satyr’, just mentioned.

‘Feirce Dryden’s satyr’ is the ‘Essay upon Satyr’ written collabor-
atively with Mulgrave. (Further attributions of lampoons to Dryden
are discussed below.) For Julian, as represented here, an ascription to
an author is primarily a marker of commercial value: Rochester and
‘Feirce Dryden’s satyr’ sell, while Dorset and Buckingham are a drug
on the market. The important point is that the buyer was likely to be
influenced by an attribution in determining whether to part with his
guineas. As early as 1673, Theophilus, Earl of Huntington was in-
structing his London agent to hunt down work by Rochester circu-
lating in manuscript.21 That several of the professionally circulated
lampooners were members of the house of peers, others baronets and
knights, and yet others younger sons of the aristocracy was presum-
ably no accident. Not only did their rank afford them the celebrity
status that allowed Julian to ask for higher prices but it also ensured
that they moved in circles where they were able to obtain fresh,
riveting gossip. To be a successful lampoon author, then, involved a
willingness to negotiate personal danger, the ability to insert one’s
work advantageously into systems of copying, and skills in writing
and the acquisition of gossip. To these we should add personal mal-
ice and an attraction to the particular kind of power the lampoon
gave one in the social world of the time. A concern for the political
health of the state might also impel one to lampoon-writing, but it
was rare for this to be unmixed with less commendable motives.
n a m i n g t h e au t h o r
The authors of 1660s and 1670s court and state satire are known to
us today from attributions that, to a surprising extent, accompanied
their works in circulation. An editor of Dorset, Rochester, Sedley,
Etherege, or Marvell has numerous scribal attributions of this kind to
use as a starting point, many of which stand up well to scrutiny. (The
20
Lincolnshire Archives Office MS Anc 15/ B/4, p. 20.
21
Lucyle Hook, ‘Something More about Rochester’, MLN 75 (1960), 478–85.
numerous attributions that appear in early eighteenth-century

printed collections are, by contrast, of little authority.) The authors
named in ‘The Visitt’ correspond closely to those collected in the 1680
Rochester Poems and its lost manuscript source represented by the
collateral Yale MS Osborn b 105.22 It is valid to associate this body of
clandestine verse with Julian even if the particular manuscript may
have been the work of another hand. Similar, though less exhaustive,
lists of the authors of pre-1680 court and early Town lampoons are
offered in the ‘Essay’ itself, Rochester’s ‘An Allusion to Horace’, the
anonymous ‘Advice to Apollo’, and a number of related satires.23
The Town lampoons of the 1680s and 1690s, by contrast, are less
frequently accompanied by an ascription: the identity of the poet was
not in this case of such pressing concern to potential buyers. Yet
names can often be attached to them either through audacious in-
ternal signing or through attributions made in other lampoons. In-
ternal signing may have begun with the Rochester dubium ‘To the
Post Boy’—at least some contemporaries read Rochester’s name, ap-
pearing as the last word in the poem, as a surrogate signature and
dropped it accordingly to a line of its own.24 In three instances of self-
signing identified by Wilson, the name is similarly positioned at the
end of the last line. ‘Advice, or a Heroic Epistle to Mr Fr. Villiers to
an Excellent New Tune Called “A Health to Betty” ’ concludes:
Now to conclude at parting,
All I have writ is certain;
And so I end,
Your faithful friend
And servant, Roger Martin.
The existence of a second lampoon ‘There’s Sunderland the Tory’,

which in one source is headed ‘A ballad to the tune of Sir Roger Mar-
tin’, raises the possibility that we are dealing with a fictitious knight
whose name just happens to correspond to that of a real one; how-
ever, an attack, quoted below, on a lampooning ‘Sir Martin’ con-
firms the existence of an actual author, who is identified by Wilson as
Sir Roger Martin of Long Melford, Suffolk (1639–1712).25 Wilson
22
Discussed in David M. Vieth, Attribution in Restoration Poetry (New Haven:
Yale UP, 1963) and my own ‘Scribal Texts and Literary Communities: The Rochester
Circle and Osborn b. 105’, Studies in Bibliography, 42 (1989), 219–35.
23
Reprinted in POASY, i. 325–415. 24
Works, 42–3.
25
BL MS Harl. 7319, fos. 142r–144r; CSR, 117. Martin is also credited with a
stanzaic lampoon against Monmouth, ‘ ’Twas a foolish fancy Jemmy’.
also cites the conclusion of ‘A Letter to Julian from Prison’ (‘Dear

Julian having missed thee a long time’):
So rest I till you hear from me again,
Your real friend and servant,
Henry Maine
and that of ‘Satyr 1692/3’ (‘Declining Venus has no force o’er love’)
This stingless satire’s author, if you’d know,
The dial speaks not, but it points
Jack Howe26
Howe had already worked his name into the conclusion of ‘An Epis-
tle to Somerton, Secretary to the Muses, 1691’ (‘Dear Somerton,
once my beloved correspondent’), which concludes:
Many more might be nam’d Ther’s a Cartload of Crimes
And in Pity to shee I shall shorten my Rhimes
Which prithee Dear Jack industriously scatter
And if thou scap’st banging, expect a new Satyr
If you’re askt, who’s the Author, pretend you don’t know
Thô twixt you and I, tis
Your Servant, Jack How.27
While one or both of these internal signings may have been fraudu-
lent, yet Howe, accurately described by Wilson as ‘wrong-headed,
fractious and malicious’ (p. 256), was exactly the kind of hyperactive
exhibitionist to have signed a lampoon with his own name. His
poetic oeuvre still awaits collection. Another apparent example of an
internally signed poem is ‘On the Ladyes at Tunbridge’ (‘Our ladies
fond of love’s sweet toys’), variously dated 1688 and 1690, which
concludes
When Friends amongst themselves fall out,
Scandall like Plagues does fly about.
A Fool Inrag’d soon shoots his Bolt.
This Limping Satyr’s Harry Colt.28
Colt may have been a brother of the courtier William Dutton Colt,
who was himself assailed in ‘Mrs Nelly’s Complaint’ (‘When Sylla’s
gost made angry Catiline start’).29
26
CSR, p. xiv.
27
BL MS Harl. 7315, fos. 211v–212r. The ‘shee’ is Cleveland. For some additional
verse attributed to Howe see CSR, 256.
28
Yale MS Osborn b 111, p. 560. 29
CSR, 97–101.
A later exchange of internally signed lampoons began with ‘An

Epistle from Henry Heveningham to the Duke of Somerset at
Newmarkett 1698’ (‘Since Manwaring and learned Perry’) which
concludes:
Now, thô your Absence gives us Anguish
Wee must not let the Ladys languish
Therefore Excuse my hast, who am
your Loving Brother
Heveningham30
A reply to this piece, ‘A Letter from J.P. to Colonel H. Occasion’d by

the Colonel’s Two Late Letters’ (‘O Harry, canst thou find no Sub-
ject fit’), mimics it by making the writer’s initials its concluding
rhyme:
If after all the Criticks tell us right,
Who say some other did those Rhymes indite,
And set thy Name to what thou didst not write;
Then pardon this Impertinence in me,
Who am thy most assured Friend J.P.
‘J.P.’ is John Pulteney, whose career has been summarized by

Wilson.31 The title ‘Colonel’ was either a militia rank or inspired by
Heveningham’s humbler position as lieutenant of the Band of
Gentleman Pensioners.32 Pulteney and Heveningham had been
linked as minor pests of the Town as early as ‘Satire’ (‘Must I with
patience ever silent sit’):
Must I meet Heveningham where’er I go,
Arp, Arran, villain Frank, nay Pulteney too?33
The ‘Letter from J.P.’ is part of a linked group connected with ‘the
knights of the toast’ that is preserved entire in BL MS Harl. 7315,
fos. 255v to 269r, Leeds Brotherton MS Lt q 38, pp. 204–29; and
Nottingham University Library MSS PwV 44, pp. 181–220. It is an
ingeniously two-edged exercise in which a list of topics, partly
recommended to the incompetent fellow poet and partly claimed as
30
BL MS Harl. 7315, fo. 261v. The name was pronounced ‘Henningham’. He is
the subject of ‘A Dialogue between Poet Motteux and Patron Henningham’ (I told
you, Sir, it would not pass’). ‘An answer’ to ‘Since Manwaring and Learned Perry’
(‘The town is in a high dispute’) alleges that the poem was really written by Arthur
Mainwaring.
31
CSR, 278–9. 32
Ibid. 61. 33
POASY, ii. 205.
beyond his powers, serves as a commentary, sometimes complimen-

tary and sometimes satirical, in its own right:
Aim not at things that are above thy reach
Mildmay seems fitting for a Stile like thine,
And William Pawlet in thy Works would shine;
Lord Ratcliff ’s Poems might thy Satyr fit,
But what hast thou to do with Men of Wit?
Resign the Task to some sublimer Muse,
To tell what Beauties Burl——n pursues,
What powerful Charms did Anglesea recal,
And who now warms the Heart of gentle Maule;
What lovely Youth Boyle fondly doth caress,
Or strowling Punk does brawny Granvile bless;
What new Swivante Manwaring will clap,
And who by Walsh is destin’d to a Rape;
How Therrold still for Mazareen doth burn,
And Lady Mary does lost Kingston mourn. . . .
But these are Subjects that surpass thy Rhimes,
Draw thou the Fops or Husbands of the Times,
Or if to charge the fair thy Fancy moves,
Write Popham’s Life or Madam Griffin’s Loves.
One Labour too to Ranelagh is due,
Who with false Beauty does deface the true;
And may arrive with Diligence and Care
In time to rival Darentwater’s Heir,
On such as these thy Doggrel Numbers try,
And fresh Memoirs Lord Edward will supply.34
Several of the names are those of known writers or wits: Charles
Boyle, Earl of Orrery, Richard Boyle, Earl of Burlington, George
Granville, Lord Lansdowne, Arthur Mainwaring, Walter Moyle,
and William Walsh, although none is here identified as a lampooner.
Lord Edward mentioned in the last line is presumably the ‘Darent-
water’s Heir’ of two lines previously, i.e. Edward Radclyffe, Vis-
count Radclyffe, invoked at the beginning of the passage as a poetic
model for Heveningham, but here as an informant.35
A second source of information is references in lampoons to the
circumstances of composition of other lampoons. It is from these
34
POAS (1702–7), ii. 256–7. See also below.
35
For Radclyffe see David M. Vieth, ‘Poems by “My Lord R.” : Rochester versus
Radclyffe’, PMLA 72 (1957), 612–19. Dryden praised Derwentwater (as he became)
as a critic but considered that as a poet he was ‘none of the best’ (The Letters of John
Dryden, ed. Charles E. Ward (Durham, NC: Duke UP, 1942), 58).
that in the relative absence of ascriptions we are able to acquire a

good sense of who the principal lampoon poets of the second gener-
ation were and how they operated. As is hinted in Pulteney’s sugges-
tion of a partnership between Heveningham and ‘Lord Edward’,
lampoon writing was often collaborative. Charles, Viscount Mor-
daunt, later famous in military and diplomatic history as the third
Earl of Peterborough, is alleged to have taken part in several such
collaborations.36 In an answer poem to ‘The Ladies’ March’, headed
‘A Satyr’ (‘A scribbling puppy has of late designed’), the writing of
the poem is attributed with much venom and particularity to Mor-
daunt; however, its information is credited to Henry or Richard
Lumley:
Dull Lumly joynes with thee sweares he’l be true
And tho he cannot write he’l give the que
Tells them who has the Whites, who stinks, who’s sweet
Who frigs who F—s, and who has stinking feet
Relates the Ogling he has seen att Playes
Describes the Persons, Boxes, Acts and Stages
Tells them he dogg’d a hackny Coach all night
Where the Errant Widdow dropt and where the Knight.
Like Bedford Ned who spends’s Estate and time
That his dull tye may be put into Rhyme
Or like a Curr who’s taught to fetch he goes
From place to place to bring back what he knowes
Tells who’s ith’ park what Coaches Turn’d about
Who were the Sparkes and whom they follow’d out.37
The ‘Curr who’s taught to fetch’ is an evident parody of Dryden’s

‘nimble spaniel’ in the preface to Annus Mirabilis.38 A similar rela-
tionship is asserted for a later court lampoon, ‘The Female Nine’
(1690), which is attributed to Mordaunt by Dorset in ‘A True Ac-
count of the Birth and Conception of a Late Famous Poem call’d
“The Female Nine” ’. This answer to an answer represents Lady
Monmouth (the former Cary Frazier), apprehensive that, following
the appearance of ‘The Nine’, attacking the nine regents appointed
to advise Queen Mary during William’s absence in Ireland, ‘the nine
36
On Mordaunt generally see my ‘Charles, Viscount Mordaunt and the “The
Ladies’ March” ’, RES (forthcoming).
37
BL MS Add. 34362, fos. 132r–133r, where it follows the ‘March’. For the Lum-
ley brothers see CSR, 262–3, and for more on informants CSR, p. xv.
38
Works, i. 53.
ladies turn would be next’. On this ground she persuades her hus-
band that they should get in first with a reply in which her ‘prudence
and virtue’ should shine and he would be allowed to appear as ‘the
great Turk of the scene’. She would ‘furnish the sense’ if he would
agree to ‘tag it with rhymes’:
Her spouse, fir’d at this, scream’d aloud and leapt forth,
And fetching his dead-doing pen in his wrath,
He workt off his piece with such art of the pen
That he aim’d at the ladies but wounded the men
And labour’d so hard
The doors were all barr’d,
And none was admitted but trusty Blanchard.
’Twas writ in such haste, you’re desir’d to dispense
With the want of true grammar, good English and sense. (ll. 37–45)39
W. J. Cameron has questioned Dorset’s attribution on the ground of

gaps and inaccuracies in the satirist’s knowledge of the persons at-
tacked; however, he does not dismiss it outright, noting that it has
‘circumstantial evidence in its favour as well’ (p. 202), and in the ab-
sence of any alternative attribution, or a contemporary denial, it
should be allowed to stand. Both accounts suggest that Mordaunt
was a fluent versifier whose ability might be harnessed by those with
the ideas and content for a satire. One manuscript of a widely circu-
lated satire found in a longer form with the first line ‘My muse and I
are drunk tonight’ but which is more often encountered in a shorter
version beginning ‘Clarendon had law and sense’ attributes the work
to ‘Lord Mordent and Lord Faughland’, which is at least as persua-
sive as much later rival attributions to Dryden, Rochester, and
Dorset.40 ‘A Letter to a Friend by the Lord R——’ (‘Worthy sir,
though weaned from all those scandalous delights’) attacks Mor-
daunt as ‘the Lisping Lord’ together with his ‘correcting Friend, |
Who slily laughs at what he seems to mend’.41
According to ‘Letter to Julian’ (‘Dear Julian, twice or thrice a
year’), Mordaunt collaborated with Etherege in the epilogue to
Rochester’s posthumously performed Valentinian.42 The prologue
to Valentinian is claimed in the same source to have been the product
of an even more elaborate collaboration, initiated by Howe:
39
Dorset, Poems, 25. The complete sequence of three satires is given in POASY,
v. 195–213.
40
Discussed below, and in Love, ‘Charles, Viscount Mordaunt’.
41
BL MS Harl. 6913, fos. 32r–v. 42
CSR, 132, 135.
Jack Howe, thy patron, ’s left the town,

But first writ something he dare own,
A prologue lawfully begotten
And full nine months maturely thought on,
Born with hard labour and much pain;
Wolseley was Doctor Chamberlain;
At length from stuff and rubbish picked,
As bear cubs into shape are licked.
When Wharton, Etherege, and Soame,
To give it the last strokes were come,
Those critics differed in their doom.
Some were for embers quenched with pages,
And some for mending servants’ wages.
Both ways were tried, but neither took,
And the fault’s laid on Mrs. Cook;
Yet Swan says he admired it ’scaped,
Since ’twas Jack Howe’s, without being clapped.43
Both versions seem to have been tried at performances without rais-

ing a laugh, and the blame laid on the performer, Sarah Cooke. The
prologue included a savage attack on John Sheffield, Earl of Mul-
grave, both a lampooner and a perpetual butt of lampoon wit, which
is extended in Wolseley’s preface to the published play.
Authorship of this kind was another extension of Town sociabil-
ity, not a solitary occupation or even, possibly, the primary aim of
the meetings which gave rise to the texts. Yet the passage also indi-
cates the great importance placed on prologues as a means of com-
municating with the Town and the anxieties that attended the
writing of these pieces. Similar anxieties must have attended the
launching of a lampoon whose authorship was likely to be suspected
or which its author or authors wished to be noted and discussed.44
One way of drawing attention to a lampoon was to leak knowledge
of it in advance. ‘The Character of Two Scotch Bards (after Long
Strowling) Lately Arriv’d at Tunbridge’ (‘Ladies take heed a north-
ern blast approaches’) is a warning of the imminent appearance of a
lampoon which was still at the consultative stage:
43
Ibid. 132. For the prologue see Rochester, Works, 643.
44
Links between prologue and lampoon writing are evident when lampoons are
referred to in stage orations, as in the prologue to Southerne’s Sir Anthony Love
(1690) (The Works of Thomas Southerne, ed. Robert Jordan and Harold Love
(Oxford: Oxford UP, 1989), i. 173).
As yet they onely show it to some Friend

That where their Mallice fails his Witt may mend
But least the Authors when it does come out
Should not be known I will describe each Lout
These are respectively ‘A clumsie fellow with a hatchett Face’ and a

‘dull Booby’ with ‘clouted Shooes and stocking out oth’ Heels’.45
Etherege’s habit of circulating drafts for comment was reproved in
Wycherley’s ‘To Sir George Etheridge, On his Shewing his Verses Im-
perfect’ and on one occasion forced him to abandon a lampoon.46
Dryden tells the story in a letter to Rochester written in the spring
of 1673:
These observations would easily run into Lampoon, if I had not forsworn
that dangerous part of wit, not so much out of good nature, But least from
the inkhorn vanity of poets, I should show it to others, and betray my self to
a worse mischief than what I designed my enemy. This has been lately the
case of Etherege, who translating a Satyre of Boileau’s, and changing the
French names for English, read it so often that it came to their eares who
were concerned; and forc’d him to leave off the design e’re it were half
finished. Two of the verses I rememember.
I call a spade a spade; Eaton a Bully
Frampton a pimp, and Brother John a Cully
But one of his friends, imagined these names not heroique enough for the
dignity of a Satyre, and changed them thus.
I call a Spade a Spade; Dunbar a Bully
Brounckard a Pimp and Aubrey Vere a Cul[ly]47
The communal nature of much lampoon writing could not be better

illustrated.
Howe, Wolseley, Wharton, Etherege, Mordaunt, and Soames (but
not the Scotch bards) are all linked with other enterprises of Town
writing. Soames, who died in 1686 on his way to Constantinople as
Charles II’s ambassador, made a free translation of Boileau’s L’Art
Poétique, which, in another example of collaboration, was worked
over by Dryden, and in an epistle beginning ‘Though teaching thy
peculiar business be’ reproved Oldham in verse for his ‘Sardanapalus’.
Etherege achieved fame as a dramatist. Mordaunt is mentioned in
45
BL MS Harl. 6913, fos. 149r–v.
46
The Works of William Wycherley, ed. Montague Summers (London: Fortune
Press, 1924), iv. 227.
47
Rochester, Letters, 89–90.
several sources as an author or plagiarist of ‘songs’.48 All, apart from

Soames, were named on several occasions elsewhere as writers of
lampoons. ‘The king, duke and state’ (1682) sets out to identify the
authors of libels then current. Those named are John Baber, Howe,
Faulkland, Mordaunt, Mordaunt’s brother-in-law Dr Charles Fra-
zier, Sir Fleetwood Sheppard, Dorset, Heveningham, and William
Fanshaw.49 Sheppard and Dorset were survivors from the 1660–
1670s generation of court lampooners who by 1682 were in the pos-
ition of being political semi-exiles from the court. Heveningham held
a minor court position and Fanshaw had been dismissed from a
lucrative one for his Whig sympathies.50 Other satires support this
picture of a coterie of poets engaged in the often collaborative pro-
duction of Town satires which were then circulated by well-
organized scribal publishers. ‘An Answer to the Satire on the Court
Ladies’ (‘Since every foolish coxcomb thinks it fit’, 1680)51 lists
Dryden, who ‘In all his satires pecks at only men’, Etherege, ‘lisping
Mordaunt’, ‘beau Henningham’, Faulkland, and Howe, who
. . . to this function mightily pretends
And satires those the most he calls his friends. . . .
Sends forth his spies; his home-spun sisters too
Daily inform what their acquaintance do.
Then out himself he packs and scouting goes,
Singles out pairs as he thinks fit, and those
He handles civilly, then frames his jest,
Writes what he sees, feigns and makes out the rest. (p. 42)
Among other names offered by the satirist are those of Henry, Lord
Eland, Baber, and Goodwin Wharton, though it is not clear whether
it is as lampooners or simply fops.
The following list records those verse references to scribally pub-
lishing Town poets which specifically or by implication name them
as writers of lampoons. In many cases there are other references
which do not indentify the individual concerned as a lampooner.
References to professionals are included only when there is an impli-
cation that they may also have written clandestine satire. Where a
manuscript source is cited it is that which has the title here used, since
titles are highly variant. The first line is given in the standardized
48
See Love, ‘Charles, Viscount Mordaunt’. 49
CSR, 92–6.
50
He is the ‘limping Will Francho’ of ‘Seigneur Dildoe’, l. A91. See Rochester,
Letters, 184 n. and CSR, 236–8.
51
CSR, 41–6.
form used for the Appendix, and is therefore in modernized spelling

without punctuation. Further locations, when they exist, may be re-
covered from the Appendix. No assurance can be given that the
satirists’ information is correct but at least some of it must have been.
Satires are arranged in alphabetical order of first lines under their pu-
tative year of composition when that is known or can be guessed at,
with an appendix of those which cannot confidently be dated. The
starting date is 1680. References to earlier lampooners can easily be
recovered from Vieth’s Attribution in Restoration Poetry, POASY,
i and ii, and the standard editions of Rochester, Dorset, and Sedley.
‘A Satyr on Tunbridge Wells 1680’ (‘England by all thought beauty’s natural

soil’), Yale MS Osborn b 54, 1128–30: Scroope.
‘Rochester’s Ghost Addressing to the Secretary of the Muses’, after July
1680 (‘From the deep vaulted den of endless night’), BL MS Harl. 6913,
fos. 211r–215r: ‘Falkland’, Eland, ‘Henningham’, ‘Wharton’, Mordaunt,
Howe, George, Earl of Dumbarton, preceded by a group of unnamed poets
who appear to be Dorset, Sheppard, Frazier, Etherege, Halifax, Dryden, and
Mulgrave.
‘To Mr Julian’, 1680 (‘Julian in verse to ease thy wants I write’), BL MS Harl.
6913, fos. 3r–4v: John Pulteney, Sir Carr Scroope, Theophilus, Earl of Hunt-
ington, ‘civil Grey’ (Ford, Lord Grey).
‘The Supposed Author of the Preceding Poem’, 1680 (‘O yes if anyone can
tidings tell’), Yale MS Osborn b 54, pp. 1128–30: Thomas Skipwith.
‘Barbara Piramidum Sileat Miracula Memphis’, 1680 (‘Of all the wonders
since the world began’), BL MS Harl. 6913, fos. 19r–24r: Mulgrave, Howe,
Scroope, Dryden.
‘An Answer to the Satire on the Court Ladies’, 1680 (‘Since every foolish
coxcomb thinks it fit’, 1680). [See above.]
‘A Letter to a Friend by the Lord R——’, 1680 (‘Worthy sir, though weaned
from all those scandalous delights’), BL MS Harl. 6913, fo. 32r: Mordaunt.
‘A Satyr’, c.1681 (‘A scribbling puppy has of late designed’), BL Add. MS
34262, fos. 132r–133r: Mordaunt. [See above.]
‘Utile Dulce’, 1681 (‘Muse, let us change our style and live in peace’), CSR,
49–55: Faulkland, ‘peevish Jack’ Howe. [‘Henningham’, ‘Tyzard’ (identi-
fied by Wilson as Henry Lumley), Thomas or Henry Wharton, and Mor-
daunt are mentioned as writers but not specifically lampooners.]
‘An Heroic Poem’, 1681 (‘Of villains rebels cuckolds pimps and spies’), CSR,
68–75: Sheppard, Fanshaw.
‘Quem Natura Negat Facit Indignatio Versus’, 1682 (‘I who from drinking
ne’er could spare an hour’), BL MS Harl. 7319, fos. 114r–119r with attribu-
tion to ‘Mr Allen’: Sheppard, Eland.
‘To Julian’, 1682 (‘Julian how comes it that of late we see’), BL Harl.
6913, fos. 151r–152r: Eland, Scarborough, ‘Chomley’, Dorset, Aelst,
Sheppard, Charles Frazier, ‘Sir Martyn’, ‘Henningham’, Villiers, Faulkland,
Huntington.
‘Satire to Julian’, 1682 (‘Send forth dear Julian all thy books’), CSR, 86–91:
Mordaunt.
‘The king duke and state’, 1682. [See above.]
‘Satyr of the Towne’ (‘The town has thought fit’), BL MS Harl. 6913,
fos. 120r–21v: Lumley, ‘Libelling Jack’ Howe.
‘The Lady Freschevile’s Song of the Wives’, 1682 (‘You scribblers that write
still of widows and maids’), CSR, 112–16: Anne, Lady Freschville, Cather-
ine Stanhope.
‘A Letter to Julian’, 1684 (‘Dear Julian, twice or thrice a year’), CSR, 131–7.
[See above.]
‘Julian’s Farewell to the Muses’, 1685 (‘Mine and the poets’ plague consume
you all’), CSR, 138–40: Howe, Etherege, Eland, Mulgrave, Dorset.
‘To Capt. Warcup’, 1686 (‘Here take this, Warcup, spread this up and
down’), CSR, 159–65: Hugh, Viscount Cholmondeley, John Cecil, fifth
Earl of Exeter, Cary or Charles Frazier, Parsons, Baber, William Wharton,
Colonel Edward Sackville, Skipwith, Edward Griffin.
‘The Town Life’, 1686 (‘Once how I doted on this jilting town’), POASY, iv.
61–7: Exeter, Wolseley.
‘The Duel’, 1687 (‘Of Clinias’ and Damœtas’ sharper fight’), Nottingham
University Library, Portland MS PwV 43, pp. 195–8: William Wharton,
Wolseley.
‘The Renegado Poet’, after 1688 (‘Damon, the author of so great renown’),
POAS (1702–7), ii. 168–9: Dryden.
‘Somerton’s Epistle’, 1689 (‘Dear Somerton once my beloved correspond-
ent’), BL MS Harl. 7315, fos. 210r–212r: Wolseley.
‘On Monmouth, John Howe, and Lord Mulgrave’, also as ‘On the Modern
Lampooners’, 1690 (‘Ye mighty lampooners who grow into fashion’),
BL MS Harl. 7315, fos. 202v–203r: Jack Howe, Mordaunt (as Earl of
Monmouth), Mulgrave.
‘The Divorce’, 1691 (‘You Englishmen all who are tendered the curse’),
BL MS Harl. 7315, fos. 206v–209r: Heveningham, Sheppard, Howe.
‘Jenny Cromwell’s Complaint against Sodomy’, 1695 (‘In pious times ere
buggery did begin’), POASY, iv. 366: ‘Scarsdale, Berkeley, Ployden and the
rest’ with the aid of Robin the drawer at Locket’s. [Robin is invoked in
The Way of the World, iii. i. 103–5.]
‘A Letter from J.P. to Colonel H. Occasion’d by the Colonel’s Two Late
Letters’, 1698 (‘O Harry, canst thou find no Subject fit’), POAS (1702–7),
ii. 255–7. [See above.]
Date uncertain
‘The Description of a Poetress’ (‘A famous poetress has lately writ’), BL MS
Harl. 6913, fo. 126r–v: Olive Porter.
‘Essay’ (‘Baber to whose stupendous natural parts’), Lincolnshire Archives
Office, MS ANC 15/B/4, p. 83: Baber.
‘To the Secretary of the Muses: A New-Years Gift’ (‘Julian with care peruse
the lines I send’), BL MS Harl. 6913, fos. 159r–160v: Faulkland, Mordaunt,
‘Henningham’, Howe.
‘Scandal Satyr’d’ (‘Of all the fools these fertile times produce’), BL MS Harl.
6913, fos. 105r–107r: ‘Falkland’, Mordaunt. Also Olive Porter but not as
poet.
‘Letter’ (‘ ’Twas Sarsfield, Parsons and Mon Sherman’s wit’), BL MS Harl.
6913, fos. 128r–129r: Patrick Sarsfield, Sir John Parsons, Sherman.52
Some of these names probably reappeared on the ‘stock joke’ prin-

ciple; but the recurrences suggest that for the 1680s and 1690s, no
less than for the previous Restoration decades, to be a lampoon poet
was not to labour in obscurity but rather to belong to a literary circle
whose members were known to each other and to the Town. Most of
the writers named also wrote in the respectable genres of songs, pro-
logues, epistles, and Pindarics.
Any involvement of professionals in the writing of clandestine
satire was carefully concealed, though Dryden, on the strength of
‘An Essay upon Satyr’ and MacFlecknoe, is regularly included in the
lists of lampooners, and may have written or assisted with other
pieces as well (see below). In the epilogue to The Feign’d Curtizans
(1679), Aphra Behn envisages a situation in which the decline of the
playhouses will lead to the stage poets becoming lampooners:
52
Who is claimed as the joint author of
That learned Libell where poor Herriott’s Face
Is wittily compar’d to Sasfield’s Arse
The Edmund Sherman who became involved in ecclesiastical controversy in 1682
(POASY, iii. 271–2) does not seem to be the same person.
When we disband, they no more Plays will write,

But make Lampoons, and Libell ye in spight;
Discover each false heart that lies within,
Nor Man nor Woman shall in private sin;
The precise whoring Husbands haunts betray,
Which the demurer Lady to repay,
In his own coin does the just debt defray.
The brisk young Beauty linkt to Lands and Age,
Shuns the dull property, and strokes the youthful Page;
And if the stripling apprehend not soon,
Turns him aside and takes the brawny Groom,
Whilst the kinde man so true a Husband proves,
To think all’s well done by the thing he loves;
Knows he’s a Cuckold, yet content to bear,
What ’ere Heaven sends, or horns or lusty heir;
Fops of all sorts he draws more artfully,
Then ever on the Stage did Nokes or Leigh:
And Heaven be prais’d when these are scarce, each Brother
O’ th pen contrive to set on one another:53
The passage is interesting both for its tongue-in-cheek advocacy of

the moral utility of lampooning and its implied argument that the
genre would be more effectively conducted by theatre professionals
than by Town amateurs. That this was already to some extent the
case is suggested by Behn’s own involvement in the collection and
writing of lampoons.54 Common sense would suggest that profes-
sionals may have been approached to polish or to ghost on behalf of
aggrieved parties in exchanges of lampoons, as Dryden was in the
case of ‘An Essay upon Satyr’, and that payment for such work may
have been substantial. The accusation that a ‘Scribler of Honour’
might resort to a ‘hir’d Lampoon’ is made in Wycherley’s The Plain
Dealer (1676).55 John, Lord Cutts reproves men who in order to
53
The Works of Aphra Behn, ed. Janet Todd, 7 vols. (London: Pickering and
Chatto, 1992–6), vi. 159.
54
Her participation in the compilation of the important lampoon collection
Bodleian MS Firth c 16 is established in Mary Ann O’Donnell, ‘A Verse Miscellany of
Aphra Behn’, English Manuscript Studies, 2 (1990), 189–227). For Behn as lampoon
writer see John Burrows and Harold Love, ‘Attribution Tests and the Editing of
Seventeenth-Century Poetry’, YES 29 (1999), 151–75 and ‘Did Aphra Behn Write
“Caesar’s Ghost”?’, in David Garrioch, Harold Love, Brian McMullin, Ian Morrison,
and Meredith Sherlock (eds.), The Culture of the Book: Essays from Two
Hemispheres in Honour of Wallace Kirsop (Melbourne: Bibliographical Society of
Australia and New Zealand, 1999), 148–72.
55
i. i. 258, 261 (Plays, 386).
‘blast the Lady’s Fame’ in a ‘lewd Lampoon’ will ‘do’t themselves, or

pay for those that do’.56 ‘The Renegado Poet’, mentioned above,
represents Dryden as a dissatisfied poetical ghost:
Basely he prostitutes his Muses Fame
To some rich Booby Lord, or Statesman’s Name;
Calls him both Wise and Generous, tho he be
Like Dover Dull, or Churchill niggardly.
If some good Piece the rhyming Drudg has writ,
He gives the Booby leave to father it;
Then crys it up, and while he wou’d make known
His Patron’s Wit, slily commends his own.57
Evidence of professional authorship or assistance would lie not so

much in the quality of the writing, for many of the amateurs could
write very well in the accepted, quasi-conversational style favoured
for the genre, but rather in the practised use of the new neoclassical
manner and the characteristic tropes of prologue wit. Only Dorset
among the amateurs had a real command of this style. The nervous-
ness felt by the collaborating authors of the Valentinian stage orations
suggests that gentlemen poets found the genre a particular challenge.
Even Rochester’s attempts are pale things besides Dryden’s.
How many women wrote lampoons is hard to establish. A squib
on the ‘chits’ appointed by Charles II to run the treasury after the fall
of Danby is consistently attributed to Lady Harvey, herself a lam-
poon ‘star’ as a court bisexual. Two attributions to Behn have al-
ready been mentioned. Katherine Sedley is reported in a letter from
Lady Chaworth of 30 January 1677 to have written a lampoon on Sir
Carr Scroope, in response to one by him on her. Vieth identifies Sed-
ley’s poem with the variously titled ‘As Frazier one night at her post
in the drawing room stood’, though this does not accord with the
summary given in the letter.58 ‘The Knight Errant’ (‘Surly mankind
has long despised lampoon’), belonging to the ‘letter to Julian trad-
ition’, announces itself as written by a woman in defence of women:
In this so very well deserving Town
We the ungenerous Whip have felt alone
Envy has our Fam’d Chastity defac’d,
56
‘La Muse Cavaliere’, in Poetical Exercises on Several Occasions (London,
1687), 32.
57
POAS (1702–7), ii. 168.
58
‘A “Lost” Lampoon by Katherine Sedley?’, Manuscripts, 6 (1954), 160–5. See
also CSR, 239–40.
Each reverend Matron made a Baudy Jest

Our Countesses leud Pintle-mongers call
Who mix with young Ware, shrivel’d up and stale.59
The last line could be a response to lampoon attacks on Sedley as the

‘wither’d Countess’.60 Anecdotal evidence that she liked to shock by
referring to herself frankly as a ‘whore’ might even make the closing
couplet of ‘The Knight Errant’ a form of self-signing:
Dear Julian I can stay to write no more
Disperse this small Revenge of Injur’d Whore. (fo. 212r)61
One woman directly charged with writing a lampoon was Olive

Porter (see above). ‘A Letter to the Lady Osbourne’ (‘Madam I loathe
the censurers of the town’) (1688) seems to characterize its addressee
as a gossip rather than a lampooner though, as we will see, there was
often little difference between the two.62 Mrs Jean Fox wrote an an-
swer poem to Rochester’s ‘Artemiza to Chloe’, which hardly, how-
ever, qualifies as a lampoon.63 ‘Lady Freschville’s Song of the Wives’
declares itself to have been ‘sent out’ by Anne, Lady Freschville and
Catherine Stanhope, which, while possibly a joke, may have arisen
from an involvement in lampoon culture. Catherine Crofts, who had
apartments at court which were available for assignations, is named
in a collector’s annotation as the source of an answer poem to ‘When
Aurelia first I courted’.64 Lady Monmouth, as we have seen, was al-
leged to have assisted her husband in the composition of ‘The Female
Nine’: as the court beauty Cary Frazier she had herself been the sub-
ject of lampoons, including that supposedly by Sedley.65 The text of
‘Young Jemmy was a lad’ in Yale MS Osborn b 105 is headed
‘Upon the Duke of M——th. supposed to be written by My Lady
B. Felton’.66 ‘R.E.’, whose verse is preserved in a miscellany compiled
59
60
For an example, see below, p. 203. The French ambassador, Barillon, described
her to Louis XIV in 1686 as ‘forte laide, aigre et hautaine’ adding in another dispatch
that ‘Elle a beaucoup d’esprit et de vivacité mais elle n’a plus aucune beauté, et est
d’une extresme maigreur’ (V. de Sola Pinto, Sir Charles Sedley (London: Constable,
1927), 353, 355).
61
For the anecdotes see Pinto, Sir Charles Sedley, 218, 238.
62
BL MS Add. 21,094, fos. 85r–86r. See also below, pp. 203–7.
63
‘My dear Sabina why should you and I’ (‘Chloë to Sabina’), National Library of
Ireland MS 2093, pp. 112–16.
64
BL MS Add. 18220, fo. 43r. 65
See above, p. 172.
66
For Felton see CSR, 238–9 and Rochester, Works, 441.
by Oliver le Neve, has left ‘An Answer of a Parson to Some Lady that
Very Scurrilously Lampoond him’:
Female Lampooners a new fashion’d thing
Lord! unto what excess will Women bring
This Age? ere long thay’l make no more
to ride the men than thay did them before.
And yett that they should scourge and satyrize
Mens Actions, when from them nought did arise
Both now and since the great Creation
But ill to Man save Procreation.
To some perhaps ile grant that glorious gift
of Poetry to help them att a lift
But pray don’t Ladies you presume to write
for lett me tell you if you go to shite
youl gett more Poetry and witt from thence
By reading of that high flowne stile and sence
of Bawdy Ballads pasted on the wall
Than both you have the Parson too and all. Aut: R.E.67
It is unfortunate that inspiration ran out in the last line just when the
reader was looking for the coup de grâce. Since women were so directly
affected by the lampoon phenomenon, one would imagine they were
eager to seize control of it, either directly or through male surro-
gates—a poet referred to in Burnaby’s The Reform’d Wife is described
as ‘writing a Lampoon for a Lady of Quality, in which he was to com-
mend her and abuse all her Aquaintance’68—but the customs of the
Town would have made it prudent for them to conceal authorship.
It is only justice that the lampooners should furiously lampoon
each other in a latter-day form of flyting. The process had begun in
the 1670s with Rochester’s verse exchanges with Mulgrave and
Scroope. Jack Howe is attacked in a similar style in ‘An Answer to
the Satire on the Court Ladies’:
A face he has much like a skeleton,
Two inches broad and fifteen inches long,
His two cheeks sunk, a visage pale as death,
Adorned with pimples and a stinking breath.
His scragged carcass moves with antic grace,
And every limb as awkward as his face.
His poisoned corpse wrapped in a wicker skin,
Dismal without and ten times worse within.69
67
Manchester, Chetham’s Library, MS Mun. A.4.14, p. 91.
68
(London, 1700), 7. 69
CSR, 42–3.
A friendship with Rochester is turned into a homosexual seduction:

How oft has Howe (by Rochester undone,
Who soothed him first into opinion
Of being a wit) been told that he was none?
But found that art the surest way to glide
Not into’s heart but his well shaped backside.
Not Nobs’s bum more adoration found,
Though oft ’twas sung, his was more white and round.70
Another lampooner, Sir Roger Martin, is vividly caricatured in ‘To
Julian’ (‘Julian how comes it that of late we see’):
}
Tell ’em Sir Martin, that long wiredrawn Knight,
A Stalking Shadow in a Moon light Night,
Harsh to the Ear and hideous to the Sight;
With hollow Jaws, no Teeth, and Toes turn’d in,
A greater Monster than from Nile they bring,
With his gray Mares, white Wig, and gaudy Coach,
Presumes his Lady’s Woman to Debauch:
And ’tis but just, since she employs his Man,
He should enjoy her Woman, if he can.71
Baber’s distinctive body language is caricatured in ‘Baber to whose
stupendous natural parts’:
His Body of it’s selfe such talk affords
Which others are oblig’d to doe by words
The buisy Elbow and the Nimble Toe
Doe dextrously their Masters meaning show
Duly the much Importing shrugg attends
Nay’s soul speakes at his very fingers ends
And Each officious member with respect
Concurrs to forme the Dainty Dialect
Besides all which the properties of Dress
Contributes mainly to his happiness
}
The well pitch’d Crevate with black Wig of France
And due position of his hat advance
The Charmes of his All Conquring Countenance.72
All three passages seem to have been influenced by Rochester’s
savage verse caricatures mentioned above.73 Quarrels within the core
70
‘Satire on Both Whigs and Tories’, ll. 88–94; ibid. 124. Nobs remains unidentified.
71
BL MS Harl. 7319, fo. 102v: Cf. CSR, 117.
72
Nottingham University Library, MS Portland PwV 39, pp. 106–8.
73
Works, 92–108 passim.
group could easily escalate to something more serious, as in the duel

in which William Wharton died of a wound in the left buttock in-
flicted by Robert Wolseley. Here the real coup de grâce had already
been given by Dorset in ‘The Duel’, written when the quarrel was still
being pursued with pens.74
Collectively these portrayals suggest several things. The first is that
the bulk of the widely circulated lampoons were the work of a some-
what fractious and politically divided coterie of poets who neverthe-
less were in close enough touch with each other to be able to report
with some authority in secondary lampoons on the authorship and
circumstances of production of predecessor pieces. The second is
that composition was as likely to be collaborative as solitary, the col-
laboration often being one between a writer and an informant and
proceeding through the review of work-in-progress by fellow poets.
Both practices further encouraged the binding of lampooners into a
coterie. A third is that while Town lampoon texts of the 1680s and
1690s were not sought for the sake of their authors to the extent that
had been the case with Rochester and Dorset at an earlier period,
lampooners did enjoy a kind of mutually bestowed celebrity. A
fourth is that the (largely titled) writers named were able to enhance
the circulation of their pieces by feeding them directly to the profes-
sional copyists from whose archives they were soon incorporated
into extended manuscript anthologies.
d ry d e n as au t h o r a n d s u b j e c t o f l a m p o o n s
Dryden’s assurance to Rochester in 1673 that he had ‘forsworn that

dangerous part of wit’ might be read as implying that he had once
been a practitioner, and he was certainly to break his word in at least
two cases. While at Cambridge he is alleged to have ‘traduced’ a
nobleman and been punished for it.75 He is a presence in the personal
miscellanies and scribal anthologies of the time through excerpts
copied from printed works, through attacks on him in lampoons,
and through verse which claims him as its author. All three cat-
egories have their interest. The way in which Dryden was read and
understood is illustrated by the passages from plays and poems that
74
Dorset, Poems, 21–4.
75
James Anderson Winn, John Dryden and his World (New Haven: Yale UP,
1987), 67.
readers chose to preserve for future reference.76 In some cases ex-

cerpts acquired a transmissional identity of their own independent of
the printed versions. Many readers would have encountered his elegy
on Cromwell (‘And now ’tis time for their officious haste’) in this
way since, from its initial appearance in 1659 to the publication in
1681 of the first of a series of vexatious reprintings meant to embar-
rass Dryden, it circulated only in manuscript. The suppressed pro-
logue to ‘The Prophetess’ (‘What Nosterdame with all his art can
guess’) is found in seventeen manuscript sources.77 The annotation
‘1682 By Dryden not printed’ on a transcript of the prologue and epi-
logue to Secret Love in BL MS Egerton 2623, fo. 43r is incorrect, in
that, while not included in the quarto of the play, it had appeared in
1672 in the Covent Garden Drollery; however, the texts in the
Haward miscellany of the prologue to the first part and the epilogue
to the second part of The Conquest of Granada (pp. 248–9) and the
prologue and epilogue to Amboyna and the epilogue to The Man of
Mode are accepted by all editors as derived from manuscript sources
independent of, and probably prior to, the printed edition.78 Two of
them contain lines that are not present in the printed versions. The
verse letter to Etherege, written on behalf of the Earl of Middleton
(‘To you who live in chill degree’), was also initially circulated in
manuscript and inspired a scribally circulated parody (‘To you who
hang like Mecca’s tomb’).
The second category, that of attacks on Dryden, is a startling trib-
ute to his centrality to political debate, reaching peaks after the pub-
lication of Absalom and Achitophel in 1681 and the news of his
conversion to Catholicism in 1686. A good selection of this material,
both printed and manuscript, is listed by Macdonald but there is cer-
tainly more to be found, not to mention glancing blows and parodic
quotations in lampoons not primarily directed at Dryden. A recent
discovery is a Dublin lampoon ‘On Doctor Dryden’s Coming over to
the Provost of Trinity College’ written on the rumour of such an ap-
pointment.79 Among the most interesting of these are pieces in which
76
University of Chicago Library MS f553 and Harvard MS Eng. 602f contain
excerpts of this kind.
77
Peter Beal, Index of English Literary Manuscripts, 2 vols. (London: Mansell,
1980, 1993), ii/1. 412–13.
78
Bodleian MS don. b 8, pp. 248–9, 463–4, 558–9. The Amboyna pieces are also
in Huntington MS EL 8917–18.
79
Carpenter, Verse in English, 502–3.
Dryden is made the speaker of satire against himself, such as the

series of three monologues adventurously attributed by Montague
Summers to Shadwell (Satyr to his Muse. by the Author of Absalom
and Achitophel (London, 1682), The Address of John Dryden,
Laureat to His Highness the Prince of Orange (London, 1689), and
A Poem on His Majesty’s Happy Accession to the Crown (London,
n.d. [1689]), the last of which comes with a mock dedication to
Dorset) and ‘An Ironical Panegyric from Poet Bayes to King Phys. in
his Irish Pilgrimage’ (‘Sir ’Tis not in me your miseries to redress’) in
which ‘Dryden’ is made to present a frank and unflattering portrait
of James II.80 ‘The Renegado Poet’, as we have just seen, represents
him as ghosting for his patrons.
The category of texts that had their primary circulation in manu-
script is wider than normally realized. Dryden’s epitaph of 1689 on
the Jacobite hero Dundee (‘O last and best of Scots who didst main-
tain’) occurs in twenty manuscript sources.81 MacFlecknoe, which
survives in sixteen manuscript copies and whose first appearance in
print was surreptitious and unauthorized, was his most important
contribution to clandestine satire. It appears in the same scribal an-
thologies that contain the work of Rochester, Dorset, and other
court lampooners and was intended as a check, issued on behalf of
the Mulgrave faction, to their pretensions.82 Most editors of Dryden
have chosen to disregard the universal assumption among his con-
temporaries that he collaborated with Mulgrave in ‘An Essay upon
Satyr’; however, there can be no doubt that he was associated with
the work as a reviser, and readers may well feel that certain of its
stronger passages suggest his hand. One lampooner, in attacking the
work, singled out lines 164–5 as representing Dryden at his best, and
by implication totally beyond the reach of Mulgrave:
Yet lett’s doe Right and praise him where ’tis fitt
Some Strain to mimick none can match his Witt
Save but his Bones he’s well secur’d of Fame
The Chancelors Epitaph must preserve his Name
80
BL MS Harl. 7319, fos. 326r–328v.
81
Beal, Index, ii/1. 421–4 identifies nineteen. The twentieth is described in Hilton
Kelliher, ‘Dryden Attributions and Texts from Harley MS. 6054’, British Library
Journal, 25 (1999), 1–22.
82
On the genesis of the piece see Harold Love, ‘Shadwell, Flecknoe and the Duke of
Newcastle: An Impetus to MacFlecknoe’, Papers on Language and Literature, 21
(1985), 19–27 and ‘Shadwell, Rochester and the Crisis of Amateurism’, in Judith Slagle
(ed.), Thomas Shadwell Reconsider’d, published as Restoration, 20 (1996), 119–34.
‘At Barr abusive on the Bench unable

‘Knave on the Woolsacks Fopp at councell Table
Such pregnant Truths and Sence were never putt
In so small Room since Homer in the Nutt
Too many Times a far less meaning Text
Has Doctors Schools Ages and Empires vext
O could my Muse but two such Lines afford
(If any Muse wou’d take a Poetts word)
I’d promise fair nay Solemn Oath I’de take
By all the Gods and by their Stigian Lake
Ne’re more to Stretch her on the Rhiming Rack83
A modern reader familiar with such polished antithetical structures

from Pope, in whom they are almost normative, is unlikely to appre-
ciate the freshness they had for one of the 1670s.
The following ascriptions to Dryden, arranged in alphabetical
order of first lines, are also encountered. Several can be disregarded
on the grounds that his name has been misleadingly added in order
to give spice to pieces that contradict his known opinions; others
deserve consideration.
‘On the Young Statesmen’ (‘Clarendon had wit and sense’). Attributed
unauthoritatively in POAS (1702–7), i. 1163–4 and from that source by a
later hand in Harvard MS Eng. 24, p. 101. This short stanzaic lampoon sur-
vives in both a shorter form, with a late attribution to Dorset (Poems, 50–4),
and a longer one beginning ‘My muse and I are drunk tonight’ attributed in
Lincolnshire Archives Office MS Anc. 15/ B/4, p. 122 to Mordaunt and
Faulkland.
‘On the Duchess of Portsmouth’s Picture’ (‘Hadst thou but lived in Cleo-
patra’s age’). Attributed to Dryden in BL MS Harl. 6914, fo. 24v and else-
where. This oleaginous quatrain is widely found in both MS and printed
sources, sometimes in the company of dissenting rejoinders. The attribution
to Dryden may rest on nothing more than its citing the title of his best-known
play.
‘Epitaph on Lamentable Lory by Driden 1687’ (‘Here lies a creature of in-
dulgent fate’). Attributed to Dryden in five MSS from the Cameron scriptor-
ium and in POAS (1702–7), ii. 215. Attribution rejected by Crump in
POASY, iv. 97–8.
‘Englishd by Dreyd-n from his own mouth’ (‘Here lies my wife there let her
lie’), BL MS Harl. 6054, fo. 20. Supported in Kelliher, ‘Dryden Attributions’.
83
‘Advice to the Satyricall Poetts’ (‘Satyr’s despotic now none can withstand’),
‘Satyr on the King and Duke 1680’ (‘How our good king does papists hate’).
Attributed unauthoritatively to Dryden in the contents list but not the text
(fos. 52v–54v) of BL MS Harl. 7319. Contradicts his known allegiances.
‘A Maidenhead’ (‘It is of a nature so subtle’), Chetham’s Library, MS Mum.
A4.14, p. 44. From an unidentified printed source. Unlikely to be authentic.
‘By Mr Dreyden Spoke by his Son when a Westminster Schollar’ (‘Iuno tonat
lingua sed fulmine Iupiter urget’), BL MS Harl. 6054, fo. 27r. A Latin epi-
gram which Kelliher, ‘Dryden Attributions’, 11–12, argues may well have
been composed by Dryden during a gathering at Westminster School. Also
in Bodleian MS Add. b 105, fo. 7r.
‘A Satyr. p[er] Dryden’, also as ‘An Heroic Poem’ (‘Of villains rebels cuck-
olds pimps and spies’). So attributed only in BL MS Harl. 7317, fos. 49r–51v.
Accomplished enough to be by Dryden but in its material, which is distinctly
of the court, beyond his range. Dorset is a possibility. See also pp. 55–7 above.
‘Satire upon the Romish Confessors’ (‘Our church alas as Rome objects does
want’). Attribution only present in POAS (1702–7), iii. 2–3. Unpersuasive
on grounds of content.
‘On the French King by Mr Dryden’ (‘Second alone to Jove in whom unite’),
Princeton MS Taylor 3, p. 300. Possibly a translation of a Latin epigram
praising Louis XIV.
‘A Familiar Epistle to Mr Julian Secretary to the Muses 1677’ (‘Thou com-
mon shore of this poetic town’). An exceptionally well-written satire attrib-
uted to Dryden in five closely related MS sources; however, its context in the
Rochester–Scroope exchange makes Dorset or Sedley more probable. There
is a less persuasive ascription to Buckingham. To be included in the OUP edi-
tion of Buckingham’s writings, edited by Robert D. Hume and Harold Love.
‘King James to himself, by Mr. D——n’ (‘Unhappy I who once ordained
did bear’). In POAS (1702–7), ii. 215–16 only. Too lamely written to be
authentic.
‘Song. By Mr Dryden; in the Person of my Lord Salisbury, then in the Tower’
(‘While Europe is alarmed with wars’), Bodleian MS Firth e 6, fo. 60r–v.
Accepted as genuine in Paul Hammond, ‘A Song Attributed to Dryden’,
Library, 6th ser. 21 (1999), 59–66.
Of course if Dryden wrote lampoons he may well have taken care to

disguise his style and suppress all other traces of his responsibility.
The only evidence in that case would be political alignment and that
the piece would be effectively written. One possibility is the satire on
Buckingham quoted in Chapter 1, ‘A New Ballad to an Old Tune
Call’d Sage Leafe’ (‘I sing the praise of a worthy wight’), which after
manuscript circulation was published in a broadside assigned by
Luttrell to 1679 but by Anthony Wood to ‘Jan. or Feb. 1673’.84 The

piece is skilful of its kind and in devoting seven stanzas to The
Rehearsal foregrounds an issue about which Dryden would under-
standably be sensitive. One of its stanzas
But when his Poet, John Bayes did appeare,
’Twas knowne to more than half that were there
The greatest part was his owne Character . . .85
anticipates Dryden’s statement to Dorset of 1693 that ‘I answer’d

not the Rehearsall, because I knew the author sate to himself when he
drew the Picture, and was the very Bays of his own Farce.’86 The at-
tribution to Dryden in the POAS (1702–7) version has no value as
external evidence; yet one imagines that, if he had decided to respond
to Buckingham clandestinely and in a manner deliberately distanced
from his usual one, the ballad to ‘Sage Leafe’ would have been pretty
much the kind of work that would have resulted. The case is worth
leaving open. The attendant ‘Litany’, also cited in Chapter 1, may
have been by the same hand. Further compositions could exist which
had been augmented and touched up by Dryden as happened with
the ‘Essay’, The Second Part of Absalom and Achitophel, and
Soames’s translation of the Art Poétique. Detecting these, however,
would be difficult.
t h e l a m p o o n e r as w i t
This chapter has argued that to become an acknowledged lampoon

author was to join a circle of versifiers who were largely known to
each other. State lampoons, sometimes of great power and influence,
might come from outside this circle but the court and Town lampoon
and probably a substantial body of state lampoons were the work of
individuals who, while they cannot always be linked to particular
pieces, were publicly recognized as creators of the genre—in the
1660s Marvell and Ayloffe; in the 1670s Rochester, Dorset, Etherege,
Mulgrave, Scroope, Sedley, and Vaughan; in the 1680s and 1690s
Baber, Dorset, Eland, Faulkland, Heveningham, Howe, Martin,
Mordaunt, Prior, Pulteney, Sheppard, Villiers, Walsh, Wharton, and
84
Hugh Macdonald, John Dryden: A Bibliography of Early Editions and of
Drydeniana (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1939), 213.
85
Yale MS Osborn b 105, p. 374. 86
Works, iv. 8.
the lesser figures from the list just given. The attributes common to
this group were rank (though variable), wealth (though fluctuating),
participation in the court and Town, and access to a professional
distribution system, whose test of merit was saleability. The passing
down of stock accusations, images, turns of phrase, and quotations
from other lampoons was probably as much a product of the social
connectedness of the writers as of the knowledge gained through the
bare reading of lampoons.
In asking why lampoons should have been written in such num-
bers during the Restoration decades we encounter the obvious an-
swer that people wanted to read and recite them. A close link, to be
considered in the next chapter, between the lampoon and the culture
of gossip offers one reason why this should be so; yet treating the
lampoon as an extension of gossip does not explain its insistent
grossness, the particular nature of its fixation on sexual behaviour,
its furious demolitions of the dignity attending class and rank (of
which its writers were themselves beneficiaries), and the endemic
hostility of certain writers or parties of writers towards each other.
Gossip, even malicious gossip, can still be measured, witty, and more
or less civilized. Medley in The Man of Mode is not feared for Manly-
like savagery but for his ability to undermine the status of his victims
through urbane ridicule. The lampooners preferred the bludgeon,
even when it was the less effective instrument for the task in hand, or
doomed to be counter-productive. It is tempting to seek for an ex-
planation of the crude aggressiveness of the lampoon in factors af-
fecting lampooners as a class. In the earlier chapters on the court and
Town lampoon, suggestions were made concerning the influence of
court institutional anxieties in the first case and the strains and un-
certainty attending the creation of a new kind of urban sociability by
transplanted country-dwellers in the second. The state lampoon ex-
tended the field of anxiety and uncertainty even further. By this read-
ing the lampoon was the seismic manifestation of subterranean
social change, an interpretation that is helpful in making sense of the
three predominant styles of lampooning within the context of their
three respective communities. But in the present chapter we have
been able to examine a fourth community—that of the lampoon
authors themselves. This requires us to ask in what ways the nature of
the tradition might have been determined by the immediate predica-
ment of its writers rather than the deeper concerns of its readers.
Here questions arise of how we might model and interpret that
community of writers. Differing approaches would permit a biolog-

ical, an anthropological, a sociological, or perhaps even a pyscho-
analytical analysis of the motives behind lampoon-writing. A
biological approach might take its model from Walter J. Ong’s ac-
count of the academic disputation in Fighting for Life, in seeing the
lampoon as a form of ritual combat between younger and older
males over territory and the possession of females, but complicated
by taking place in a world in which the females, far from being pas-
sive followers of the highest-status male, were themselves active
competitors for dominance.87 An anthropological approach might
look closely at questions of rank and status in court, Town, and king-
dom as they are reflected in the lampoon and may have been experi-
enced by its makers. It could also look for illumination through
comparative studies with such traditions as those of present-day An-
dalusian urban lampooning and modern British and American satir-
ical journalism of the Private Eye kind.88 A sociological approach
would examine the backgrounds and life histories of the known
lampoon-writers in the hope of discovering constants (though I
believe these would be rarer than is imagined). A psychoanalytic
approach would be of little value because of uncertainties about the
universality of current theoretical models; but there might be insights
to be gained from scrutinizing the biographical records of the known
authors for evidence of a ‘lampooner personality’. That many of
them belonged to a wartime generation that saw much splitting up of
families is at least suggestive. These are paths which I do not intend
to follow myself but which would be worth pursuing with this little
studied field of writing.
My own approach in this short concluding section is to use the
form of self-definition used by the lampooners themselves, which
resides in the notion of the wit. Whatever they were they were wits,
both in their own judgement and that (not always kind) of their
readers. A wit, we are told by Sir Credulous in Behn’s Sir Patient
Fancy (1678), ‘writes Lampoons, rails at Plays, curses all Poetry but
87
(Ithaca, NY: Cornell UP, 1981).
88
For the first see Jerome Mintz, Carnival Song and Society: Gossip, Sexuality and
Creativity in Andalusia (Oxford: Berg, 1997). Private Eye, while close in its aims to
seventeenth-century clandestine satire, differs by organizing its critique around inter-
minable repetitions of a small number of key jokes, which are attached in turn to dif-
ferent victims. The Restoration lampoon is surprisingly free of jokes, preferring
straight malice.
his own, and mimicks the Players’.89 Nonetheless the known writers
of lampoons seem, as far as we can tell, to have been happy with the
description. We should note, for a start, that ‘wit’ in the abstract was
a quality valued by many readers of lampoons. The host in ‘Timon’
who praises the insipid lampoon is a figure of fun but his engagement
with the text is by his standards a serious one
He takes me in his Coach, and as wee goe
Pulls out a Libell, of a Sheete or Two;
Insipid as the Praise, of Pious Queenes,
Or Shadwells, unassisted former Scenes;
Which he admir’d, and prais’d at evr’y Line,
At last, it was soe sharpe, it must be mine.
I vow’d, I was noe more a Witt than he,
Unpractic’d, and unblest in Poetry:
A Song to Phillis, I perhaps might make,
But never Rhym’d but for my Pintles sake;
I envy’d noe Mans Fortune, nor his Fame,
Nor ever thought of a Revenge soe tame.
He knew my Stile (he swore) and twas in vaine
Thus to deny, the Issue of my Braine.
Choakt with his flatt’ry I noe answer make,
But silent leave him to his deare mistake.
Which he, by this, has spread o’re the whole Town,
And me, with an officious Lye, undone.90
The ‘son of that arch rebel, Col. Gibbon’ who in 1678 was consigned
to Newgate for possessing ‘villainous libells’ claimed in exculpation
that it was because of ‘a love to poetry and wit’.91 Sir John Pye, about
whom we will hear more shortly, was also interested in lampoons as
examples as wit: indeed, its presence or absence is the attribute most
commented on in his annotations to the text and indexes. His high-
est praise ‘very witty and satirical’ is awarded to ‘Of Vincent Door-
keeper at Haberdasher’s Hall’ (‘Vincent the great comptroller of us
all’), ‘As t’other night in bed I thinking lay’, Rochester’s ‘Tunbridge
Wells’, and Vaughan’s ‘On a Mistress that Broke her Vow’ (‘Why
fair vowbreaker hath thy sin thought fit’). ‘A History of Insipids’ was
‘very witty but too libellous’. ‘Painter once more thy pencil reassume’
is described in the second index to volume i as a ‘Satyr on the parlia-
ment very witty’. In contrast ‘A New Ballad to the Tune of The Irish
89
iv. i. 89–90 (Works, vi. 44). 90
Rochester, Works, 258–9.
91
CSP (Dom), Mar.–Dec. 1678, p. 506.
Jigg’ was returned to George Grafton because ‘I do not thinke on

second reading to be so witty, as I thought’.92 The piece seems to have
been read aloud or hastily scanned while in the bookseller George
Grafton’s company. The closer acquaintance required by transcrip-
tion had confronted Pye with its curious indirectness, which has been
commented on by Howard Schless.93 Irony was unusual in lam-
poons, and Pye may even have been puzzled as to whether this was
really, as he had hoped, a Whig poem. (It is actually an ironically
written Tory ballad attacking the Rye House plotters.) But the cru-
cial matter was its failure to convince him of its wit. The production
of wit was the specialized province of those recognized as wits. Being
wits preceded their being lampooners, and should also have been evi-
dent in other aspects of both their writings and their lives. Since most
wits were male the masculine pronoun will be used in referring to
them. In any case the female wit, as we will see, was more likely to
seek distinction through gossip rather than authorship.
The writing of lampoons was one of several markers by which one
recognized a wit. If one wished to become an acknowledged member
of this community it was almost a duty to write lampoons, or as one
of the tribe put it:.
Since Satyr is the only thing that’s Writ
And who no Author is, is held no Wit
Rather than Silent sit, my Pen I’ll lend
And in Truths Cause, spare, neither Foe, nor Friend.94
This part of it is clear enough—to be a wit one had to be a writer—

and yet the professed wit was also expected to be a brilliant conver-
sationalist, Sedley and Rochester being the models. Secondly, he
must be a person of some consequence in the Town, preferably titled
but, if not, sufficiently well connected to have entrée into titled cir-
cles. He did not have to be rich but was required to have ways of rais-
ing sufficient money to support the life of conspicuous pleasure. Debt
and marriage were the recommended avenues but the latter only as a
last resort when all else failed. He was also expected to display a cer-
tain insouciance towards fame and fortune and to have made a
lifestyle choice of wine and women over business and virtue. The wit
was expected to be lettered: most of the better-known members of
92
Yale MS Osborn b 52, i. 161; ii. 145, 164, 167; i. 237, 161, ix.
93
POASY, iii. 505.
94
‘Satire Undisguis’d’, BL MS Harl. 7319, fo. 134v.
the class had spent time at a university or Inn of Court, or both, and
knew their Virgil and Horace and sometimes their Coke and Selden.
He was also, as a rule, politically engaged, often as a member of one
or the other House of Parliament.
The wit so defined, and regularly personified in Restoration com-
edy, is not a particularly admirable person—often little more than a
self-centred hedonist and social parasite. But what has so far been de-
scribed was merely the precondition of being a wit, not the sub-
stance. Taken no further it might equally qualify one for membership
of those two other foundational orders of Restoration male society,
the knaves and the fools. So with writing: the lampoon was only one
genre in which the wit was required to excel (or if not to excel at least
to meet expectations). He should also write songs, elegies, pan-
egyrics, epistles, essays, and pamphlets. If he wrote for the stage, he
would do so as an amateur, possibly even making a gift of his third-
night profits. A professional poet or dramatist might also use the
term ‘wit’ but was excluded from the higher levels of social witdom
except by such generous patrons as Dorset, at whose poets’ dinners
at Copt Hall and Knole bank notes would be placed beneath the
plates of the traders but not the gentlemen. The wit’s writing be-
longed to a long tradition of gentry and aristocratic literary accom-
plishment that was soon to be eclipsed by the principled
professionalism represented by Dryden, who never tired of showing
that he could perform the wits’ literary tricks even better than they
could. The wit’s interest in literature was expected to extend beyond
writing to criticism and patronage. His interest in new writing was
often perfectly genuine. Dorset, the archetypal literary wit, in an
early verse letter from the country to Etherege, which is largely con-
cerned with the state of his penis, imagined necrophilia with Cleo-
patra, and ‘modern bitching’, also demands to be sent new poetry as
it appears:
Next, I must make it my request,
If you have any interest,
Or can by any means discover
Some lamentable rhyming lover,
Who shall in numbers harsh and vile,
His mistress ‘Nymph’ or ‘Goddess’ style,
Send all his labors down to me
By the first opportunity.
Or any Knights of your Round Table,
To other scribblers formidable,

Guilty themselves of the same crime,
Dress nonsense up in ragged rhyme,
As once a week they seldom fail,
Inspir’d by love and gridiron ale.
Or any paltry poetry
Tho’ from the university . . .95
This was to be a lifelong practice. In 1685 he and Sedley conscien-

tiously read through Moestissimae ac Laetissimae Academiae
Cantabrigiensis Affectus, Decedente Caroli II. Succedente Jacobo II.
(or at least its English contributions) ‘as indeed every Thing that
came out, was favour’d with their Perusal’, deciding on this basis to
invite Charles Montagu and George Stepney to come to London.96
Wits were readers as well as writers. In its best expression, the cor-
porate support of wits so defined did much to nourish the careers of
the great Augustan professional writers. Being a committed amateur
writer helped the wit to judge the writing of the professionals: he was
never a literary bystander. The evolution of standards of criticism
owed much to the informed kinds of conversation about writing that
patrons such as Dorset helped to stimulate.
However, critical discussion, which Dryden in Of Dramatick
Poesie placed in the rarefied surroundings of a boat on the river, was
much more likely to take place in clubs, taverns, or coffee house cir-
cles where drink, dining, and in some instances drabs were enjoyed
side by side with discussion of books and ideas and the reading or
improvisation of sociable poetry (the lampoon being a particular
favourite). One notable case is illuminated by a group of lampoons
already cited concerned with a wits’ club called ‘The Order of the
Toast’, whose membership included a number of acknowledged
lampooners. This body stood in a lineal succession from such fore-
runners as Ben Jonson’s club at the Apollo Tavern and the interreg-
num ‘Order of the Fancy’, whose story has been told by Timothy
Raylor, in that their meetings were organized around ritualized
drinking.97 However, the later Order, as well as being devoted to
95
‘A Letter from the Lord Buckhurst to Mr. George Etherege’, ll. 47–62, in Poems,
107.
96
The Works and Life of the Right Honourable Charles Late Earl of Halifax
(London, 1715), 26.
97
Raylor, Cavaliers, Clubs, and Literary Culture (Newark: University of
Delaware Press, 1994). For toasting see Peter Clark, British Clubs and Societies
(Oxford: Oxford UP, 2000), 163–4, 225–32, and for what is known of the ‘Order’,
alcohol, the poetic celebration of beauty, and the enjoyment of lam-

poons, was also a venue for serious discussion of radical philosoph-
ical and religious ideas. Its guiding spirit was the former court
lampooner and governor of Jamaica, John Vaughan, third Earl of
Carberry, who had responded to an education supervised by the
saintly Jeremy Taylor with the composition of the most flagrantly
atheistical poem of the period.98 A disrespectful account of Vaughan
by Henry Heveningham led to a defence in a satire that has already
been partly quoted, by Sir John Pulteney:
Is this thy Gratitude for all the Wine
The Knight’s bestow’d, who never tasted thine?
And dost thou thus our Mysteries disclose,
And in rude Rhime our President expose?
How oft hast thou with awful Silence heard
The midnight Lectures of that Reverend Bard,
When with his Glass in Hand he doth unfold
What Faith the Priests of all Religions hold;
What old Socinus, and Molinos teach,
And what the modern Philadelphians preach;
What nice Remarks each different Tongue affords,
And curious Etymologies of Words?
Then he goes on to search Decrees of Fate,
And give strong Proofs about a future State:
Not old Silenus so divinely spoke
Of hidden Truths in Virgil’s sacred Book,
When with a load of Wine and Knowledg fraught,
The drunken God the listning Satyrs taught;
And dost thou thus his Care and Pains requite,
To make thee learned in thy own Despite?
Hard Fate of Greatness! tho a Man should be
As wise as Ashly, or refin’d like thee,
Like Fletcher should for England’s Glory toil,
And plot as deep as Monmouth, or as Moyle,
Yet Barber, B——y, and such Wits as those,
Would find out something in him to expose.
Pulteney’s poem is a classic example of a reactive lampoon written to

reprove the excess of another lampooner; yet its picture of the Order
W. J. Cameron, ‘John Dryden and Henry Heveningham’, N&Q 202 (1957),

199–202. The Order merged in 1703 with the Kit-Kat Club.
98
Preserved with the variant first lines ‘Religion’s a politic law’, ‘There’s no such
thing as good or evil’, and ‘There’s no harm in sound cunts nor in arseholes’.
being instructed by its resident philosopher is not an unattractive

one. Such bodies had serious interests in literature and ideas to com-
plement their vinous sociability and role as gossip circles and gener-
ating points for lampoons. They offer us a more constructive model
of the wit than the actual conduct of lampoon warfare would have
suggested. An endemic aggressiveness is accepted but is not the
whole story. They link the writing of lampoons with the rapidly con-
solidating club culture whose centrality to Augustan social life has
been established by Peter Clark in British Clubs and Societies. But
most of all they offer a means by which lampoon culture, rather than
being seen as self-subsisting, can be integrated within the wider liter-
ary culture as simply one of the several fields in which the male wit
was expected to demonstrate his talent.
Needless to say this favourable view of the wit was far from uni-
versal. Indeed it was largely restricted to wits themselves. References
in those primary markers of Town taste, prologues and epilogues,
are almost uniformly hostile.99 For Roger L’Estrange, describing the
life of a Town rake, lampooning was a fundamental violation of the
code of a gentleman. ‘The Ladies next must take their Turn; in a
Lampon perhaps, or some such thing: (that most Un-christian, and
Un-manly mixture of Wicked, and of Brutish Folly) ’Tis but a Cata-
logue of their Names, no matter for the knowledge of their
Humours, or their Persons, and the things done.’100 To be ‘Un-christian’
was one thing: to be ‘Un-manly’ was much worse. Worst of all is the
implication that writing lampoons was not even particularly witty.
The wit who wrote lampoons as part of his engagement with a wider
range of polite literature and as a collaborative activity with other
wits had a defence of sorts; the patriot of either party who wrote
them to avert dangers seen as threatening the nation might even have
had cause for self-congratulation; the professional writing to order
was putting bread in his mouth; even the witling who wrote for the
amusement of his immediate circle was creating diversion and
99
For examples see Pierre Danchin, The Prologues and Epilogues of the Restor-
ation 1660–1700, 7 vols. (Nancy: Presses Universitaires de Nancy, 1981–8), under
index entry ‘Lampoon[s]’. Further information on public attitudes towards lampoon-
ers and libellers can be extracted from the Chadwyck-Healey LION archive by using
variants of the words as search terms.
100
L’Estrange his Apology: With a Short View of Some Late and Remarkable
Transactions . . . by R.L.S. (London, 1660), B4v. A similar view is expressed in
William Walsh, A Dialogue Concerning Women, Being a Defence of the Sex (London,
1691), 104–5.
amusement of a usually harmless kind. But many lampoons were

written out of undisguised, inveterate, unthinking malice. For them
and their authors it is hard to find any excuse except for what they
reveal as case studies in the pathology of hatred, or, if not hatred, the
endemic violence whose other expressions were duels, sexual
assaults, and beatings.
6
The Lampoon as Gossip
The lampoon in its lighter manifestations is written gossip; gossip

was all too often a spoken lampoon. The good lampooner was prob-
ably also a good gossip; moreover, a lampoon was a prompt for fur-
ther gossip by becoming a subject of conversation in its own right.
The circulation of a lampoon was likely to be enlarged by the fresh-
ness and piquancy of its gossip, something for which diligent re-
search of the kind carried out by Rochester with his paid sentinel,
Lumley with his nocturnal stalking, and Howe with his briefings
from his sisters was required. This is not to say that accusations so
assembled had to be truthful—much, as the account given earlier of
Howe’s method indicates, was likely to be invented. Rochester ex-
plained to Burnet that ‘The lyes in these Libels came often in as Or-
naments that could not be spared without spoiling the beauty of the
Poem’.1 But the persuasiveness of the invented would be enhanced by
its being interwoven with testable fact, and the lie as ornament by its
adorning the brow of truth. The lampoon was similar in its function
to the present-day newspaper gossip column, and, like that, needs to
be viewed as a written derivative of oral culture. Nor was this simi-
larity restricted to the court and Town lampoons, since the state
lampoon insistently set out to reduce politics to personalities and
personalities to scandal.
Gossip has always performed important functions of moral and
social regulation. Its narratives are exemplary: never narrowly con-
tingent. What was said in Chapter 3 of the lampoon as an instrument
of rough vigilante justice in the newly established and still imper-
fectly defined community of the Town appplies equally to gossip.
Disapproving gossip was a means of enforcing communal sanctions,
not because the victims of the gossip would necessarily be aware they
1
Harrap, 1951), 106.
192 The Lampoon as Gossip
were being gossiped about, but because they would regularly partici-
pate in conversations about others in which behaviour similar to
their own was castigated. It was a cliché of libertine philosophy that
fear of ridicule was a stronger disincentive to transgression than any
moral reluctance to transgress. When Rochester insisted that ‘all
men would be Cowards if they durst’ he was paying tribute to the
regulatory power of gossip.2 Reputation, today in the care of spin-
doctors, was in his time determined by gossip alone. The very malice
and injustice of much gossip was a dissuasive from any form of be-
haviour that might provoke it. Jean-Baptiste Morvan de Bellegarde’s
Reflexions sur le ridicule, et sur les moyens de l’eviter, translated into
English in 1706 as Reflexions upon Ridicule; or What it is that Makes
a Man Ridiculous and the Means to Avoid it, starts from the premiss
that ‘Men are made for Society, and therefore the most useful of all
Sciences is the Art of Living, that guards us perpetually against
Ridicule’ and moves quickly to the corollary that ‘that which goes by
the Name of great Merit, is sometimes nothing but a great Artifice to
hide our Imperfections’.3 Gossip was the antidote to such artifice:
‘We find, in Societies, People of a certain Character, which seem born
for nothing else but to say disobliging Things: a Man must not trip
before them; they criticize all the Faults that are committed in their
Presence, and droll upon them, even to the fatiguing those that hear
them’ (p. 71). Although here slighted, gossip could claim a truth-
telling function as the avowed enemy of concealment and hypocrisy.
The lampoon is rich in such protestations.
Gossip is also vital to the process by which individuals, on a daily
basis, form expectations about what they can expect in their dealings
with other individuals and classes of individuals. In this, gossip has
much in common with newspaper crime narratives as they have been
analysed by Jack Katz.4 Katz starts from the perception that, like
gossip, crime narratives are almost mindlessly repetitious. What then
can lie behind ‘the daily recurrence of the reading appetite’? One very
simple answer, also applicable to gossip, would be the one given by
Aristotle: that reading these narratives is a way of discharging the
same tendencies (or anxieties) in ourselves. Katz rejects this view; nor
does he think that the public turn to crime narratives ‘in a naive
search for the empirical truth about crime’ or ‘in the naive sense that
2
‘Against Reason and Mankind’, l. 158, in Works, 61.
3
(London, 1706), 8.
4
‘What Makes Crime “News”?’, Media, Culture and Society, 9 (1987), 47–75.
The Lampoon as Gossip 193
we read about crime to discover that crime is morally wrong’; in-

stead, reading a news story about a 10-year-old bank robber encour-
ages us to revise our assumptions about 10-year-olds in general. We
also use the stories as a way of recalibrating our personal ethical
systems:
The experience of reading crime news induces the reader into a perspective
useful for taking a stand on existential moral dilemmas. The dilemmas of im-
puting personal competence and sustaining one’s own moral sensibility, of
honouring sacred centres of collective being, of morally crediting and dis-
crediting political opponents, and of deferring to the moral superiority of
elites, cannot be resolved by deduction from rational discourse. In these
moral areas, a measure of faith—of understanding a position or making a
commitment that underlies the reasons that can be given for one’s beliefs—
is an essential part of everyday social life. (pp. 47–8)
Gossip performs the same task of alerting us to the ways in which

others may be capable of behaving and helping us to determine how
we should behave in return. In an age before newspapers and pop-
psychology, the norm-adumbrating function of gossip was of particu-
lar importance.
gossip and belonging
Gossip is also a means by which individuals compose themselves into

communities. Personal and group image is constructed from the
materials of gossip; boundaries between groups defined; and un-
worthy members and unsuitable applicants marked for rejection.
This aspect of gossip is a long-standing concern of cultural anthro-
pologists and all textbooks on the discipline include some considera-
tion of its functions within a variety of societies. Laura Gowing in
Domestic Dangers drew on a classical paper of 1963 by Max Gluck-
man and a reply of 1967 by Robert Paine.5 Gluckman saw gossip
in functional terms as a mechanism for the preservation of social
structures and the assertion of communal values. Paine challenged
this by presenting gossip as ‘a device intended to forward and protect
5
(Oxford: Oxford UP, 1996), 120–3; Max Gluckman, ‘Gossip and Scandal’,
Current Anthropology, 4 (1963), 307–15; Robert Paine, ‘What is Gossip about: An
Alternative Hypothesis’, Man, ns 2 (1967), 287–85. M. L. Kaplan’s The Culture of
Slander in Early Modern England (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1997) is more con-
cerned with literary texts than with the day-to-day practice of gossip.
individual interests’ (p. 279). Both viewpoints would need to

be allowed for in any account of the operations of gossip within
a given historical society. Robin Dunbar has argued that gossip
is a form of grooming and therefore one of the primary functions
of human language—grooming from this perspective being a
means to social cohesion.6 Kate Fox, building on his insight, has in-
vestigated ways in which gossip has been transformed by the advent
of the mobile phone. Among her subsidiary claims are that women
are more skilled than men at making gossip entertaining, that
gossip involves an enticing element of risk-taking, and, follow-
ing Gluckman, that ‘negative gossip’ is an important way of learning
the unwritten rules of a community and promoting social bonding
of an us-against-them kind.7 Of course, as Paine points out, there is a
destructive as well as a constructive negativity. By using ungrounded
accusations to destroy reputation, status, or relationships, gos-
sip can fracture as well as confirm social bonds. Moreover, like the
present-day tabloid press, it will often use a hypocritical pretence
of moral outrage to disguise malevolence and lubricity. Likewise the
lampoon. Mulgrave and Dryden’s ‘An Essay upon Satyr’ annoys
through its attempt to claim the moral high ground for what is
really an exercise in self-interested character assassination. Dorset’s
‘Faithful Catalogue’, through making no attempt to disguise its
anarchic malice, finds it easier to win the reader’s imaginative
complicity.
A further function shared by gossip with the lampoon is to serve as
a lightning rod for envy. To display power with its clothes off and
beauty engaged in sexual calisthenics was a way of dealing with the
reality of not being powerful or beautiful oneself. Raised to a more
philosophical sphere, gossip demanded acknowledgement of a com-
mon, flawed humanity that the powerful and successful did, and still
do, all in their power to deny. Edmund Burke a century later was to
see the matter otherwise: ‘On this scheme of things, a king is but a
man; a queen is but a woman; a woman is but an animal; and an animal
not of the highest order. All homage paid to the sex in general as such,
and without distinct views, is to be regarded as romance and folly.’8 This
6
Grooming, Gossip and the Evolution of Language (London: Faber, 1996).
7
‘Evolution, Alienation and Gossip: The Role of Mobile Telecommunication in
the 21st Century’ (unpaginated), at www.sirc.org/publik/gossip.shtml.
8
Reflections on the Revolution in France, ed. Conor Cruise O’Brien (Har-
mondsworth: Penguin, 1968), 171.
scheme, which Burke attributed to French revolutionary ra-

tionalism, was exactly that of the lampoon, offering a Hobbesian
‘sudden glory’ of inward superiority to lives that, in many cases, were
devoted to displays of ritualized deference to prominent individuals.
Moreover, one did not have to be at the bottom of the pecking order
to experience envy: it might bite harder at those who were themselves
beautiful or powerful but not quite beautiful or powerful enough to
supplant the occupants of the top rung of the ladder. An adage from
the ‘Buckingham’ commonplace book maintains that ‘The first man
is the most happy and the second the most miserable’, a view borne
out by present-day organizational psychology.9 The prominent place
occupied among the ranks of the lampooners by leading court func-
tionaries suggests that a sense of undervalued worth increased with
proximity to the most envied condition. Gossip, if we had an ad-
equate record, would no doubt tell the same story. In a more con-
structive sense gossip and the lampoon both performed a constant
testing of the fitness of the great to enjoy the privileges of high rank,
yet not always in the way we would expect. An accusation of un-
chastity against a duchess of our period, while it might make her ob-
noxious to virtuous women, would not make her any less of an
aristocrat; but an accusation of cowardice or foolish behaviour
against a duke would suggest that he should not have been a duke at
all. Putting it the other way round, while Buckingham’s conduct as a
politician and private citizen was the subject of incessant criticism,
there was little disagreement that he was a brilliant performer of the
ceremonial aspects of his station.10
A point that can be verified from present-day celebrity journalism
is that the narratives of gossip usually precede any particular applica-
tion. Not only do we like reading about the same celebrities over and
over again, but as one person loses celebrity status, stories of which he
or she has been the temporary protagonist will quickly reattach them-
selves to someone new. A measure of the supreme celebrity status of
the late Princess of Wales is the number of different stories and story
types she was able to appropriate. One of these concerned her as (1) a
rejected wife, another as (2) the mother of a young family, another as
(3) a femme fatale stealing other women’s husbands or lovers,
9
Herts Record Office MS D/ EP F37, p. 5, item 16.
10
Cf. Lockier’s tribute in Joseph Spence: Observations, Anecdotes and Characters
of Books and Men, rev. edn., ed. James M. Osborn (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1966),
i. 276.
another as (4) someone herself betrayed by snoopers who intruded on

her privacy or friends who spilled the beans, another as (5) a royal
public figure doing good deeds, another (6) simply as an embodiment
of the privileges of wealth and luxury, such as expensive clothes, ex-
clusive holidays, and appearances at grand occasions. There were also
an eating-disorder narrative and those arising from her anti-landmine
campaign and comforting of AIDS sufferers, which may not have re-
ceived the attention they deserved because they did not fit her image
of transcendent glamour. None of these were single narratives but
rather groups of related stories that were written and rewritten week
by week in rotation. Now we have the various death narratives, in-
cluding those that would claim her death to be murder. There is even
a class of metanarratives: narratives about Princess Diana narratives.
(Are we suffering from Di burnout? What happened to the money
donated to charity in her honour?) One notable aspect of the much-
publicized revelations by her butler, Paul Burrow, is that they were
generally elaborations of already existing narratives; but this was it-
self a reflection of the sheer multiplicity of stories that had come to be
told about her. A lesser celebrity royal, such as the Duchess of York,
was typed into a much more restricted body of stories. None of this is
said in mockery of the Princess, or of those for whom infidelity, eating
disorders, or the threat of death by landmines or AIDS is a source of
acute misery, but simply to illustrate the way in which celebrity jour-
nalism perpetuates itself by reapplying pre-existing story types to new
individuals. Early modern gossip was of a similar nature: it was the
power of the stories as much as the prominence of the individuals that
led to their interminable retelling. The lampoon followed faithfully in
this path. Buckingham was the vehicle of one kind of story that people
liked to tell; Cleveland of another; but if they had not been avail-
able as vehicles for these or similar stories, other individuals would
have been found and upon their departure from the scene soon were.
It is sometimes difficult to tell which aristocratic woman is the subject
of a particular onslaught.11 Tellingly the marginal identifications
made in lampoon collections are frequently wrong or contradict iden-
tifications made in other collections.12 Because certain kinds of story
11
In the first edition of my Restoration Verse, I mistakenly annotated the
Rochester dubium ‘Let ancients boast no more’ as about Cleveland. Its actual subject
was Betty Felton but with a slight modification to the list of lovers it would have done
just as well for the duchess or any other promiscuous court woman.
12
For a striking example see Rochester, Works, 432–3.
soothed anxieties, helped to sustain moral norms, and assisted in

marking off communities from each other, they were never allowed
to die.
Needless to say, not all of the functions of gossip just suggested
will be operative in every given historical situation. Kate Fox’s ac-
count of the risk-taking aspect of gossip includes the following
This element of ‘invasion of privacy’ is particularly relevant for the naturally
reserved and inhibited English, for whom privacy is an especially serious
matter. Our homes are our castles, we are taught to mind our own business,
keep ourselves to ourselves, not to make a scene or draw attention to our-
selves and never wash our dirty linen in public. As a result—thanks to the
inevitable ‘forbidden-fruit’ effect—we are a nation of curtain-twitchers,
endlessly fascinated by the ‘tabooed’ private lives of our neighbours, friends,
family and colleagues.13
One might accept this as a fair judgement on nineteenth- and

twentieth-century Britain without being sure how far back it goes.
Our immediate sense of the reign of Charles II is one of an uninhib-
ited exhibitionism in public life; yet it is likely that more modern ideals
of reticence and conformity were already gathering strength, and it is
certain that they were already in evidence in eighteenth-century
middle-class canons of domestic probity and in the kind of upper-
class good breeding recommended in Chesterfield’s Letters. If so the
Restoration lampoon could be viewed either as a form of concele-
bratory participation in the libertine transgressions of the court and
the Town or as an early manifestation of bourgeois curtain twitch-
ing. As societies develop, so do the nature and functions of gossip.
Before we could apply anthropological insights to the Restoration
court, City, and Town, it would be necessary to enquire closely into
then current uses of and attitudes towards gossip. This need not be as
difficult as it might seem. Personal letters of the time survive in large
numbers, many of which are largely composed of gossip. Restor-
ation comedy presents us with numerous representations of gossip:
even footmen in i. i. of The Wives’ Excuse are inveterate gossips. In-
dividual gossips—among them Aubrey, Pepys, and Wood—have left
us extensive written records. Finally the lampoon, as well as being an
instrument of gossip, will often reflect on its own functioning as a
purveyor of gossip and the nature of gossip as an activity. None of
these sources is a vehicle of dispassionate scientific observation: tact
13
‘Evolution, Alienation and Gossip’.
is required at every turn in mining them for information about the

real-life culture of gossip; yet they all suggest something of contem-
porary attitudes towards and beliefs concerning gossip, and will be
drawn on in what follows.
gossip and news
In addition to its other functions, gossip was a means of encounter-

ing news. One assumption of which we need to disabuse ourselves is
that rumour and gossip were somehow inferior forms of information
in the seventeenth-century anglophone world. Not so—in the early
modern period there was no public data bank of assured, written in-
formation about current happenings which could claim higher reli-
ability than the oral. The belief that print was regarded at the time as
possessing this status has been demolished by Adrian Johns and
David McKitterick.14 Both scholars agree that it was not until circa
1800 that modern assumptions about the fixity and reliability of in-
formation conveyed by the print media acquired either general ac-
ceptance or any substantial basis in fact, thus challenging the attempt
of historians such as Eisenstein and theorists such as Ong to project
such values back onto the earlier centuries of print.15 Bacon dis-
missed an implausible story as ‘no better than a gazette or a passage
of Gallo-Belgicus’, with reference to early newsbooks.16 In the
Restoration decades oral news from a well-informed source or writ-
ten news from a trusted correspondent would generally be given
greater credence than that conveyed through the print media, which
were seen as tardy, undiscriminating in their use of sources, and fa-
tally compromised by party allegiances.17
14
Adrian Johns, The Nature of the Book (Chicago: University of Chicago Press,
1998); David McKitterick, Print, Manuscript and the Search for Order, 1450–1830
(Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2003).
15
Eisenstein’s views are summarized in her The Printing Revolution in Early
Modern Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1983) and Ong’s in his Orality and Lit-
eracy: The Technologizing of the Word (London: Methuen, 1982).
16
The Life and Letters of Francis Bacon, 7 vols. (London: Longmans, Green,
1861–74), v. 289. Cited in Alastair Bellany, The Politics of Court Scandal in Early
Modern England (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2002), 198. Donne makes a similar
taunt in his epigram ‘Mercurius Gallo-Belgicus’, which concludes ‘thou art like
Mercury in stealing, but lyest like a Greeke’ (The Satires, Epigrams and Verse Letters,
ed. Wesley Milgate (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1967), 53).
17
See also on this theme Steven Shapin, A Social History of Truth (Chicago: Uni-
versity of Chicago Press, 1994).
Gossip, from this perspective, is a class of public information con-

cerned with the personal behaviour and moral standing of individu-
als, and thus a significant subset of the wider field of news.18 Gossip
was, as it remains, the most common form of orally conveyed infor-
mation: even the most formal of social or business meetings were
likely to include interludes of gossip. If this is no longer the case
today, it is only because much of our casual conversation is about
events picked up from the mass media, whereas in early modern
times rumour and gossip were the mass media. Access to gossip was
also a source of status. Possession of fresh gossip and the ability to re-
tail it in a vivid way brought prestige and prominence: backwardness
in this respect could incur the charge of dullness. So Medley in
Etherege’s The Man of Mode (1676) owes his standing in the Town,
and his power over Dorimant, to his flair as a retailer of gossip. While
gossip was circulated privately, usually between pairs of individuals
or among assemblies no larger than the tea or drinking party, by
flowing rapidly from one such group to another it became a public
medium. Modern newspapers acknowledge this when they run gos-
sip columns, supposedly a dipping into the stream of oral gossip, and
yet gossip columns, despite their arch attempts to sound colloquial,
always sit awkwardly on the printed page, with their exponents
often looked down on by other journalists (who nonetheless gossip
furiously among themselves). In any case, gossip columns were a
nineteenth-century invention. In the early modern period there was
only gossip—and the lampoon.
The way in which both the stanzaic and the couplet lampoon,
rather than using the quasi-forensic demonstrations of neoclassical
satire, were assembled as a chain of loosely linked satirical epigrams
gave them a structural resemblance to the present-day gossip column
while escaping its artificiality. The public status of the lampoon was
confirmed by a specialized department of the book trade being de-
voted to the multiplying of copies in manuscript and by its being read
aloud at dinners and during visits. The second practice sometimes
caused irritation, as in ‘The Visitt’:
18
Fox cites a definition of gossip from M. Noon and R. Delbridge, ‘News from
behind my Hand: Gossip in Organizations’, Organization Studies, 14 (1993), 23–6,
as ‘the process of informally communicating value-laden information about members
of a social setting’.
Pox on the Rhiming Fops that Plague the Town

with Libelling the Court and Rayling at the Gown
A man can make no visitt now but his Caresse
Is a Lewd Satyr shewn . . . 19
Visiting, it hardly needs saying, was both a source of and a means of

communicating gossip. To Mrs Witwoud’s morning meetings in
The Wives’ Excuse, held to ‘scatter about the scandal of that day’, we
should add the description of Millamant’s hens’ night in i. i. of
Congreve’s The Way of the World: ‘last Night was one of their
Cabal-nights; they have ’em three times a Week, and meet by turns,
at one another’s Apartments, where they come together like the
Coroner’s Inquest, to sit upon the murder’d Reputations of the
Week.’20 Information so obtained might then be brought, in order to
be verified and interpreted, to the Town’s corporate meeting places,
the New Exchange and the auditoria of the theatres, particularly
Drury Lane. The theatres, as we have seen, were of special import-
ance because attendance was not solely or even primarily to see the
show but to meet friends in a club-like atmosphere and deliberate
over reputations.21 Satirical allusions in plays to living individuals
assume in advance that the point of the joke had already been com-
municated by gossip.22 The lampoon relied for much of its effect on
the same assumption but could not rely on that alone, since it was
also expected to supply new gossip, preferably of a sensational kind.
What appears like gratuitous lubricity may often have arisen from a
desire to meet that expectation.
Yet it was also important, as we saw, that useful and preferably ac-
curate information should be included, however embroidered. Early
in Rochester’s poem Artemiza tells Chloe
Y’expect att least, to heare, what Loves have past
In this lewd Towne, synce you, and I mett last.
What change has happen’d of Intrigues, and whether
The Old ones last, and who, and who’s togeather.23 (ll. 32–5)
19
Compare ‘The Town Life’ on the same subject at p. 74 above.
20
The Works of Thomas Southerne, ed. Robert Jordan and Harold Love (Oxford:
Oxford UP, 1989), i. 289; The Complete Plays of William Congreve, ed. Herbert
Davis (Chicago: Chicago UP, 1967), 396.
21
See pp. 71–2.
22
Examples are the jokes about Dryden’s private life in The Rehearsal and Shad-
well’s in Sir Barnaby Whigg.
23
Works, 64.
These things have been the subject of gossip in all ages. Another poet
put it more crudely:
This way of writing I observed by some
Is introduced by an exordium,
But I will leave to make all that ado,
And in plain English tell you who fucks who.24
In communities as close as the court and Town, and yet with a kind
of closeness that was so unfamiliar to many of their members as still
to be shot through with distance and uncertainty, such information
was not only agreeable but necessary to successful interaction. Not
to possess it was to risk gaffes and inappropriate behaviour. The
lampoon along with the personal letter (one often accompanying the
other) was the form in which gossip about Town relationships
passed from the oral to the written media in order to be laid down
and circulated for future practical use.
The possession of such information was also a marker of one’s
membership of the court or Town and capacity to be an under-
standing participant in its conversations. A song from Henry Neville
Payne’s The Morning Ramble (first performed 4 November 1672)
portrays two males leaving the theatre to walk in St James’s Park.
Their conversation is about the scandalous behaviour of the people
they observe there.
Catch.
1. Boy, call the Coach; come, Jack, let’s away:
’Tis tedious to sit out this Tragical Play.
A Plague o’their plotting and dying in Rhime,
Let’s drive to the Park
Before it be dark,
There we’l better dispose of our Time.
2. Stay, who is that so drest like a Queen?
1. ’Tis the fine Lady Lofty, but let’s not be seen:
For her Husband is surely gone out.
Chor. —— She searches to find
If a Friend will be kind,
And treat her abroad with a Supper and ’bout.
2. Why should she want that? Her Lord’s a brave Man.
1. Ay, Jack, but they’re marry’d.
2. Then what two are yon?
24
‘Satire’, CSR, 81–5.
1. ’Tis Will Lovewell and his pretty Miss,

He hath kept her this seven year, yet prethee, Jack, see
How jocund and merry they be,
How Crown’d, and incircl’d with Bliss.
Chor. Love Revels, and Feasts in hearts that are free,
But languishing starves if restrained he be.
1. See, yonder sits Well-born with his pretty Wife.
2. They look as they’d ne’re seen each other before.
1. Shee seeks for her Gallant, and he o’my Life
Hath a mind to be feaguing yon Vizor-Mask-Whore.
But stay, let me see; by Heav’ns ’tis so,
That Mask hides a Lady I know,
Who seems for to dote on Husband and Honour,
But look there, Ned Ranter has just fixt upon her.
2. She hath yielded, and see they do go.
1. If Wives will do this,
Give me the true Miss,
She’d be hang’d e’re she’d serve a Man so.
Chor. They’re Fools then that Marry, and strive to confine
In politick Chains what still will be free;
No Fetters can hold a pow’r that’s Divine,
Nor Shackles restrain great Loves Deity.25
No doubt similar real-life conversations were part of every public as-
sembly. The main speaker in the catch is the shrewd observer, alert
for the material of gossip. By instructing Jack in the hypocrisy of the
Town, he is also training him to be a gossip. The poem itself is not a
lampoon (for one thing type-names, not real ones, are used) but it de-
fines a social habit of malicious voyeurism that was instrinsic to the
lampoon. Payne’s speaker takes the matter further by using the dis-
coveries as a justification for a libertine lifestyle that in real life would
have made him a lampoon target in turn; yet his viewpoint is not
moralistic. Jack’s surprise at the behaviour of real people in the real
world marks him as an ingénu, who will soon know better; but also
reflects a desire for the stimulation, and power, that comes from the
knowledge of other people’s secrets. Gossip was a means to that
power; but more importantly it was a form of cultural capital to be
acquired through a process of initiation. Jack is not yet fully of the
Town.
There is further testimony to this initiatory function of gossip,
long recognized by anthropologists, in Richard Duke’s ‘An Epistle to
25
(London, 1673), 11–12.
Mr Otway’ sent by an exile from the Town to ‘learned, dirty’ Cam-

bridge. Gossip for Duke is not significant for its ethical content or
even for the knowledge it conveys but simply for its validation of his
sense of being a functioning member of the Town:
I have forgot whatever there I knew,
Why Men one Stocking tye, with Ribbon blue.
Why others Medals wear, a fine gilt Thing,
That at their Breasts hang dangling by a String;
(Yet stay, I think that I to Mind recal,
For once a Squirt was rais’d by Windsor Wall.)
I know no Officer of Court; nay more,
No Dog of Court, their Favourite before.
Should Veny fawn, I shou’d not understand her;
Nor who committed Incest for Legander.26
Gossip here is so emptied of content as to be reduced to insider

information about the ancestry of lap-dogs; and yet without this
means to participation as an equal in Town chat Duke is condemned
to decline into outsider status as ‘A greasie Blockhead Fellow in a
Gown’.
t h r e e s h a r p - to n g u e d l a d i e s
The many parallels between lampooning and gossip, but also some
of the differences, are illustrated by three lampoon attacks on gos-
sipers. The first to be considered is a description from 1698 of
Katherine Sedley, Countess of Dorchester, the former mistress of
James II:
A wither’d Countess next, who rails aloud
At the most reigning vices of the Croud,
And with the product of that ill turn’d brain,
Does all her Guests at Visits entertain,
Thinks it a Crime for any one to be,
Either ill natur’d or as leud as she,
A Soveraign Judge over her sex does sitt,
Giving full scope to that injurious witt,
26
In The Penguin Book of Restoration Verse, 2nd edn. (Harmondsworth:
Penguin, 1997), 247.
Too old for Lust and prove against all shame,

Her only business now is to defame,
She hath done well the one Ey’d Knight to choose
For one who’s two, wou’d ne’re endure the Noose27
The ‘one Ey’d Knight’ was Sedley’s husband, Sir David Colyear, later
Earl of Portmore. Sedley was famous for her acid wit and may have
written lampoons (p. 172) but the concern here is with her brilliance
as a gossip. Like Witwoud in The Wives’ Excuse she exercises her
malice during visits by her friends. Her criticisms are vitiated, in the
eyes of the satirist, by coming from a person who is herself of blem-
ished reputation and because defamation is offered as entertainment,
not as justified censure. But both these criticisms would apply
equally to the lampoon in which they are made, with the difference
that it is a dull, poorly written piece, whereas Sedley’s brand of bitch-
iness was clearly of the highest order.28 Otherwise the two activities
fuse. Sedley is a lampooner in the oral medium: the lampooner a gos-
sip in writing.
The same equivalence had been drawn a decade earlier in ‘A Letter
to the Lady Osbourne’. The addressee was the former Penelope Ver-
ney, an elderly Town lady, otherwise remembered as a keen econo-
mist and a stickler for the decorum of visits.29 In this case, however,
we are also given a record of the content of the gossip:
Oh Lady Osbourne! pity and forbear
To tell the nauseous follies that you hear;
Let each man sin without prescribing rules;
We must have madmen, and we must have fools.
Prithee what is’t to me if Princess Anne
Will eat as much again as any man,
Or if sh’has orange trimming on her head.
She’s blameless, sure. The Queen herself is fled.
Brave Churchill can’t escape your flattering jest:
You rally all his victories in the west;
27
‘An Answer to J. Poultney’s Letter: why I do not let my wife keep some sort of
Company: 1698’ (‘And why to me this Letter of Complaint’), Leeds University Li-
brary, Brotherton MS Lt. q. 38, p. 207. ‘Tunbridge 1’ (see below) describes Dorchester
as ‘hagge[r]d’ (p. 167).
28
Her style comes vividly to life in the idiosyncratically spelled letters reproduced
in V. de Sola Pinto, Sir Charles Sedley (London, 1927), 345–52.
29
Susan E. Whyman, Sociability and Power in Late-Stuart England (Oxford:
Oxford UP, 1999), 143, 96. Numerous letters from her survive among the Verney
collection.
Say public zeal did press the hero on

To vindicate his virtuous sister’s wrong;
That while his lady was the Bishop’s prize,
Passive obedience was her exercise.
The jolly prelate, through his non-resistance,
Drew all the women into his assistance;
Except old Orrery, who stayed at home
To muzzle with her favourite footman Tom.
And some few others quite worn out with trading,
Afraid to move as conscious of their jading.
On Shelburne’s purchased honor you’re severe:
Her Hebrew face and beard will still appear
As a memento mori to the King
For granting Waller’s daughter anything.
What horrid fury has provoked your mind
That speaks your witty ladyship unkind
To all the late fair honorable maids?
For since their table fails, you style ’em jades,
And swear that pigmy, Gray, debauches all
The very boys and wenches at Whitehall.
It shows the empty court is very poor
If with that little lord they’ll play the whore.
For Nancy Luck refused to wicked chit;
She liked his gold, but not his childish wit.30
Here we have another accomplished woman gossip, whose behav-

iour was hardly distinguishable from that of a lampooner. Yet this
time the two performances differ in their nature. Because spoken
gossip is always delivered face to face, it has the option of being iron-
ically subversive of any assumed truth value. The gossip ‘rallies’
where the lampooner berates. Nor is it ever free from the need to ac-
commodate the perceived responses of listeners, otherwise, as Belle-
garde points out, it quickly becomes boring. Good gossip should be
a social activity in which speakers feed off each other’s reactions. The
lampooner’s conversion of the animated to-and-fro of conversation
into a bare catalogue replaces this implied mutuality with a much
simpler relationship of dominant authorial persona to subservient
reader. It is also performed appropriatively: the narrating voice is
distinctly that of the lampooner, not that of Osborne, whose accusa-
tions are simply summarized at second hand. Once again the author
30
POASY, v. 78–80.
is self-confessedly a hypocrite in his reproving Osborne for being the

originator of gossip which he is delighted to broadcast further and
has probably embroidered in the process. Indeed, he is using her as
an excuse for his own deplorable behaviour. If ‘nauseous follies’
should not be told he is as guilty as she is of doing so.
A third account of a gossip occurs in Jack Howe’s ‘Somerton’s
Epistle’ mentioned earlier. Its subject appears to be the second wife
of Henry St John, father by his first of the Earl of Bolingbroke:31
The next in this Circle comes in Mrs St Johns
Who thinks very little but talks with a vengeance . . .
Then balkt of her Aim, having nothing to doe
She makes it her business to know who Loves who,
And being well furnisht with Tongue and ill nature
She rails at intriguing and sets up for Satyr
And thus she begins
May Foy I have been at Lord Radnors to day
Who came like a Puppy new lickt from the Play
Me thought the vermillion became him as ill
As Dorset at waiting or Baby Grevile
This snug Litle Lord having searcht up and down
Has smelt out the closest intrigue of the Town
The Uxorious Somerset, that formal Wooer
Who fain woud sett up for wit and Amour
And makes all his Court and Pays all his vows
To the poor Irish Dutchess, that games with his Spouse
Whose easy good nature all freedom allows
}
There still unsuspected she Ogles and Plays
Whispers the Husband before the Wives face
Thrice hapy Lord O——d who free from the Cares
Of Family Duty and drudging for heirs
A Lazy lewd Life securely does lead
While his Wife and her Stallion take care of his Breed
Thus wanting of breath she concludes her Harangue
And the Dutchess of O. was sworn of the Gang.32
The passage distinguishes two agents in the culture of gossip as the

lord who scouts for scandal and the Town lady who retails it to her
friends at visits. Howe poses as a third retailer of the information
concerned, though it is unlikely that his designs in the poem were
31
Cameron, ibid. 363, suggests a date of ‘1690 or 1691’.
32
BL Harl. 7315, fo. 211v, with emendation ‘unsuspected’ in the nineteenth line
for MS ‘unexpected’. For the Duke and Duchess of Ormond, see POASY, v. 363–4.
quite that simple. In any case his objection is clearly to the style of the
gossip rather than its content. Like the fine lady in ‘Artemiza to
Chloe’, St John is represented as an unstoppable monologuist, de-
livering a kind of Aristophanic pnigos which ends only when she is
physically unable to continue. She is clearly one of Bellegarde’s gos-
sips who ‘criticize . . . even to the fatiguing those that hear them’. The
anapaestic metre conveys the remorseless, driven quality of her per-
formance. By the standards proposed a little earlier this is bad gossip
but possibly good oral ‘satyr’. The main difference between St John’s
performance and Howe’s is that hers was delivered to her ‘gang’ and
leads to an act of incorporation through which the duchess is to be
admitted to that body, while his, through being addressed to the
scribal publisher Jack Somerton, is broadcast to the entire Town and
has as its implied aim the subversion of marriage as an institution.
Otherwise, as in the Sedley example, a certain kind of virtuosity in
gossip and a certain kind of gossipy lampoon have almost become in-
terchangeable. The distinction becomes one of gender. Women are
acknowledged to be the more brilliant gossips, while men are the pre-
dominant contrivers of lampoons. There is also a sense that women
are better supplied with the materials of gossip. Howe who formerly
relied for information on his ‘homespun sisters’ is now plagiarizing
St John.
Tunbridge gossip
One would expect all the qualities attributed to gossip to be intensi-

fied when members of court and Town were artificially restricted to
each other’s company, away from the distractions of the metropolis.
So it proved at the two favoured spa towns of Tunbridge and Bath,
each of which gave rise to a vigorous lampoon culture.33 Of these
Tunbridge was the early favourite owing to its location and the pat-
ronage of Queen Catherine. Her husband preferred the more re-
mote Bath, whose pre-eminence, however, was not fully established
until it was reduced to politeness by Beau Nash in the early eight-
eenth century. While great faith was placed in the therapeutic
powers of both sets of waters, the towns were also treated as holiday
resorts and as a refuge from the isolation of summers spent on estates
33
On Wells satire, see Cameron at POASY, v. 346–8.
in the country. Since visits to Bath involved daily immersion in the

waters, it was particularly favoured by those with skin complaints.
At Tunbridge application was internal and in heroic quantities. The
power of the spring was believed to be at its greatest just before sun-
rise, requiring very early rising, especially as many visitors resided in
outlying villages rather than the town itself. The rest of the day was
then free for such pleasures as the place afforded. Both waters were
regarded as beneficial for infertility, though Rochester had another
explanation:
Poore foolish Frible who by subtilty
Of midwife; truest freind to Lechery,
Perswaded art to be att pains, and charge
To give thy wife occasion to Enlarge
Thy silly head; For here walk Cuffe, and Kick
With brawny back, and leggs, and Potent Prick
Who more substantially will cure thy wife
And on her halfe dead womb bestow new life:
From these the waters gott the reputation
Of good assistants unto generation. (ll. 151–60)34
The pump stood at the end of a promenade divided into upper and
lower walks. Already by the early 1670s these had become lined with
booths selling clothes, country produce, and knick-knacks. How-
ever, not all enjoyed the outdoor part of the cure. A satire of 1691
notes
The sun appearing, we with dust are choked,
And with the least of rains our feet are soaked.
Both weathers keep us in a shed that stinks,
Poisoned with English and outlandish drinks.
The justling in the walks, the going bare
Before the Princess in a nasty air,
The making lanes for lame Sir Robert’s chair——
What flesh alive, even for health, can bear?
These sure are miseries as bad as Hell
For any man who wishes to live well.35
The antidotes to such enormities were intrigues and gossip about

intrigues.
34
Works, 53. Rochester’s authorship is not fully confirmed. Henry Savile may
have contributed. Mary of Modena’s choice of Bath for the same purpose in 1687 gave
rise to predictable gossip.
35
(‘How many fools at Court bawl out aloud’), POASY, v. 349.
While Bath gave birth to two exceptionally interesting lampoons

in ‘The Argument’ (‘Say heaven-born muse, for only thou canst tell’)
and Sir Francis Fane’s ‘Iter Occidentale’ (‘Deep in an unctuous vale
’twixt swelling hills’), Tunbridge lampooning was far more pro-
lific.36 Few seasons passed from the mid-1670s onwards without the
appearance of at least one lampoon.37 Rochester’s ‘Tunbridge Wells’
is uncharacteristic of this tradition owing to its concentration on
types rather than individuals (though a few are singled out). Usually
as many names were crowded in as possible. There is a sense of the
annual lampoon being an expected part of the ritual of taking the
waters, either eagerly or apprehensively awaited and often collect-
ively written. Two further examples of 1690 will serve to illustrate
this catholicity and a characteristic allusiveness, reaching at times to
mystification, that reveals a group of titled persons too much in each
other’s company, and a poet or poets unconcerned to be understood
away from the place and the moment.38 ‘Tunbridge Lampoon, 1st’,
as it is called in the Huntington MS (‘Our ladies fond of love’s soft
joys’), drops a long list of names, partly composed of Town lampoon
stars, such as the Countess of Dorchester and Mall Howard, and
partly of lesser lights who had the misfortune simply to be present.
The highly allusive nature of the commentary, combined with care-
less writing, leaves it unclear at times whether males or females are
referred to; however, the main emphasis falls on the ladies. Some of
the more obscure references are clarified by marginal identifications.
Others can be explicated from other lampoons.
‘Tunbridge 1’, as we shall call it, was answered in ‘Tunbridge
Lampoon 2d’ (‘Since I came last I’ve seen a lampoon here’) which
reports of its predecessor that ‘The Ladys talk and Read it every
where’, and that
36
For ‘The Argument’ see Rochester, Works, 81–5, and above pp. 47–50.
37
Some examples listed by first lines are as follows: ‘A long preludium where the
matter’s full’, ‘At five this morn when Phoebus raised his head’, ‘At Tunbridge Wells
a New England apostle’, ‘Big with the thoughts of pleasure down I came’, ‘Dear friend
I fain would try once more’, ‘England by all thought Beauty’s natural soil’, ‘How many
fools at court bawl out aloud’, ‘Ladies take heed a northern blast approaches’, ‘Let the
walks of my satyr beware’, ‘Not all the Baths nor Tunbridge can assuage’, ‘Not many
miles from Tunbridge town’, ‘O yee yes if anyone can tidings tell’, ‘Our ladies fond of
Love’s soft joys’, ‘Riding of late to take a little air’, ‘Since I came last I’ve seen a lam-
poon here’, ‘Sure that wise man who undertook’, ‘The witty Northumberland’,
‘Though satyr do admonish every year’, ‘To lampoon ladies thus for everything’, ‘To
Tunbridge I went’, ‘Tunbridge which once has been the happy seat’, ‘You maidens and
wives and young widows rejoice’. See also pp. 155–7.
38
Texts in Huntington MS Ellesmere 8770, pp. 167–70, 170–5.
To such great impudence they’re now arriv’d,

They care not if ’tis known, by whom they’re swiv’d . . . (p. 171)
but is soon engaged in exactly the same kind of character assassin-

ation. A strong suspicion of joint composition is raised by the fact
that the poem is partly in pentameter couplets and partly in tetra-
meter, as if it had crudely been cobbled together from two originals,
one possibly of the ‘sessions’ type. We find that Tunbridge society was
as factionalized as that of the court or Town. ‘Tunbridge 1’ had poked
fun at Mall Howard for belonging to ‘the Southborow Tradeing
Crew’, and is condemned in return for being partial to ‘Zion Crew’—
the attenders of the Nonconformist meeting house at the Wells.
Both lampooners were anti-Catholic. Several lines in ‘Tunbridge 2’
are devoted to rebutting a suggestion in ‘Tunbridge 1’ that Lady
Bellasis was having an affair with the Earl of Shrewsbury; however,
she is immediately supplied with other lovers. A sense of lampoon
tradition is indicated by ‘Tunbridge 2’s’ quotation of a line from
‘The Ladies’ March’—‘If you don’t beleive me Try her’—there
applied to Howard but here to Bellasis. Towards its close ‘Tunbridge
2’ rattles off a list of contradictions or qualifications of claims made
in ‘Tunbridge 1’:
Northumbland is much abus’d,
Essex seldom or never us’d.
Dorchester is an Errant saint
Cleveland has quite forgot to paint.
Huntingdon is very frigid.
His Lady also very Rigid.
Cliffords whites are much amended
Hughes’s Coin will ne’r be ended.
Needham dresses for the Fight,
But Bell undresses at the Knight;
Radnor as witty as his wife
She vows Chastity all her life.
Mall Howard lends Jack Sheldon Mony
For which he takes her by the Cony. . . . (p. 174)
And so on till
The Lady Arran, to Conclude
Say’s she hopes, ’tis not very Rude,
And since ’tis not her way to Flatter,
She’s willing to disown the matter. (p. 175)
The ‘matter’, whatever it was, had been the subject of the following
in ‘Tunbridge 1’:
Methinks I hear fond Arran Moan,
Arran whose Paleness makes me Tremble
Her Eyes do fall’n Stars resemble,
Mouths too are Emblems as some say.
Her Coyn is base, for ’ts most Allay.
Oh happy Change, a Lasting Oar
Is pleas’d to reach the wish’d for Shoar. (p. 168)
Understanding of both passages (and of much else in both poems)

was clearly dependent on transient gossip that had no currency be-
yond Tunbridge.39 What is offered is hardly gossip at all but a chain
of allusions to gossip. The principle can be illustrated from a passage
from ‘Tunbridge 1’
Huntingdon’s Countess fain would find
A Less with vigor to her mind.
Monstrous Things are long a Raiseing
Nimbleness, she Once was praiseing,
Which Turner hearing Skip’t about
A Tumbler to the Gazeing Rout;
This was the Cause in jealous Rage,
That Rumbold took the Stallion Page. (pp. 167–8)
The lampooners’ stock attributes for Theophilus, Earl of Hunting-

don were a large penis and a small wit. Provided with this know-
ledge, some sense can be made of the passage: without it it would
remain inscrutable. ‘Tunbridge 2’ repeats the charge of impotence (if
that was already a meaning of ‘frigid’) while apparently defending
the countess (unless ‘Rigid’ has some cant meaning now lost). Here,
then we have a story and a rebuttal; however, in the other passages
quoted from both lampoons we are mostly being given the materials
of gossip—personal attributes and hints of relationships—not the
thing itself. Oral gossip sets out to fill time, not compress it, and
thrives on the spinning out of such hints into amusing narratives. It
would be more fruitful to treat both poems as Lego kits for the manu-
facture of oral gossip than as a substitute for it. Since neither poem
achieves the slightest distinction of style or wit, their raison d’être is
39
It could be, of course, that there was no secret but the two lampooners were
dimly trying to imagine one; however, the widowed Lady Arran was a stock butt. See
CSR, 150, 152, 162, 170, 173.
to be sought in the peculiar behaviour of the Town on holiday in a

situation where blatant voyeurism was one of the few available
sources of entertainment.
g o s s i p i n r e t ro s p e c t
An important difference between gossip in its spoken and written

forms is that the former was almost immediately superseded while
the latter persisted and might continue to be circulated for decades.
Many lampoons were still being transcribed long after their subjects
had passed from the social or political stage. This is signally the case
for the many retrospective scribal anthologies, often covering several
decades of lampoon production, which appear to have been highly
valued in their own time and could never have come cheap. In the
case of state lampoons, what was originally gossip may have been re-
garded as having hardened into a Procopian kind of secret history;
but what can have been the attraction of the accumulations of purely
personal scandal and sexual insinuation preserved in such vast col-
lections as BL MS Harl. 7319, Österreichische Nationalbibliothek,
Cod. 14090, and Victoria and Albert Museum, Dyce 43? Even re-
garded as a form of pornography, they must have possessed an anti-
quated, even necrophiliac quality. The modern reader encountering
such volumes has a sense of being enveloped by a bizarre, long-
vanished human world whose curious obsessions and passionate
hostilities have somehow to be made sense of; but near-contemporary
readers were close enough to that world to share its reigning as-
sumptions. What can have been interesting to those contemporaries
about ten-, twenty- or thirty-year-old gossip unreliably attached to
names which were often of little significance?
Here we can only speculate. In an age always conscious of literary
precedent the existence of a stock of approved lampoons from the past
might have been valued as an aid to the production of new ones; but
this would only have been significant for a minority of readers. A more
important attraction was likely to be the opportunity to trace the his-
tory of families. The Restoration landed class was profoundly dynas-
tic and intricately intermarried. Few members of that class would not
have encountered distant and possibly near relations among the sub-
jects of lampoons; moreover, having a stronger propensity than we do
for organizing history around lineages, they would instinctively have
placed individual attacks in familial contexts. Much as the history of

the many-branched and sexually promiscuous Villiers family could
hardly be written without reference to lampoons, lampoon attacks on
its individual members would have been read by contemporaries as
episodes of a vast family saga reaching back to the reign of James I.
Early readers must also have had a very different reaction from ours
to the charge of endemic sexual infidelity among both the males and
the females of the Restoration ruling class, regarding it not as a mat-
ter of personal honour or lifestyle choice but as a radical overturning
of the sober reckonings by which executors and heralds determined
the descent of titles and property—something not incompatible with
an interest in lineages but making that interest much more compli-
cated. The author of ‘Preserved by wonder in the oak O Charles’ holds
the king responsible for this situation:
Thy base Example Ruines the whole Town,
For all keep Whores, from Gentleman to Clown.
The Issue of a Wife’s, unlawfull Seed;
And none’s Legitimate, but Mungrill breed.
Thou, and thy Braches, have quite cross’d the Strain,
We nere shall see a true bred Whelp again.40
The lampooners never hesitate to hammer home the message that
women of the governing class were constantly conceiving children by
males other than their husbands. Their allegations were, among
other things, a whole system of alternative genealogies.
This was certainly a matter of concern. Halifax in the Advice to a
Daughter makes it the basis of his defence of the double standard:
First then, you are to consider, you live in a time which hath rendred some
kind of frailties so habitual, that they lay claime to larg graines of allowance.
The World in this is somewhat unequal, and our sex seemeth to play the
Tyrant, in distinguishing partially for ourselves, by makeing that in the ut-
most degree criminal in the woman, which in a man passeth under a much
gentler sensure. The root and the excuse of this injustice is the preservation
of Families from any mixture which may bring a blemish to them: and whilst
the point of honour continueth to be so placed, it seemeth unavoidable to
give your sex the greater share of the penalty. But if in this it lyeth under any
dis-advantage, you are more than recompenced, by haveing the honour of
Families in your keeping.41
40
41
The Works of George Savile, Marquis of Halifax, ed. Mark N. Brown (Oxford:
Clarendon Press, 1989), ii. 371–2.
There is every indication that this well-meant male advice was falling
on increasingly deaf ears. What Restoration morality offered the
married woman was the ability to have children by a multitude of
fathers. Martial 6. 39, telling of a wife whose seven children had all
been conceived from different adulterous unions, was pertinently
updated in 1755 by William Hay:
. . . This swarthy, flat-nos’d, Shock is Africk’s boast;
His grandsire dwells upon the golden coast.
The second is the squinting butler’s lad;
And the third lump dropp’d from the gardener’s spade.
As like the carter this, as he can stare:
That has the footman’s pert and forward air.
Two girls with raven and with carrot pate;
This the postillion’s is, the coachman’s that.
The steward and the groom old hurts disable,
Or else two branches more had graced your table.42
At the opposite end of the social scale, faced with the forced enlist-
ment of her husband, the poacher’s wife in v. v. of The Recruiting
Officer proclaims, ‘Look’e, Mr. Captain, the Parish shall get nothing
by sending him away, for I won’t loose my Teeming Time if there be
a Man left in the Parish.’43 English law was more sympathetic than
Roman to such practices, since the husband who at the time of con-
ception had been ‘within the four seas’ had to accept his wife’s chil-
dren as his own. Both passages quoted suggest a belief in a Niobe
complex, in which the status of a woman was determined by the
number of her offspring over a generally shorter span of fertility than
today and any dereliction by a husband in this respect would rapidly
be rectified.
Moreover, at a time when the majority of marriages were arranged
ones, and divorce was not a practicable escape, any lasting liasion
with a partner of choice might need to be an adulterous one. There
were a number of relationships of this kind which were sympathet-
ically viewed and did not involve the partners in ostracism. Beyond
that, some Town spouses, like Mr Friendall in The Wives’ Excuse
and—if Mrs St John is to be believed—the Duke of Ormonde, seem
to have regarded marriage as little more than a matter of convenience
42
J. P. Sullivan and A. J. Boyle, Martial in English (London: Penguin Books, 1996),
192–3.
43
The Works of George Farquhar, ed. Shirley Strum Kenny (Oxford: Oxford UP,
1988), ii. 112.
in which the husband would have opportunities to pursue the wife’s

friends, relatives, and servants and the wife would enjoy the pleas-
ures of wealth, a handsome establishment, and her choice of lovers.
Others must have concurred with the Duchess of Buckingham in ‘pa-
tiently bearing with those faults in him which she could not remedy’.
Halifax advised his daughter that ‘next to the danger of committing
the fault your self, the greatest is that of seeing it in your husband.
Doe not seem to look or hear that way.’44 All this was fuel for the
anti-genealogies of the lampoon. A family whose women would in
Dorset’s words ‘f—— with any fool, in any place’ was undermining
patriarchy and primogeniture in the most radical way possible.45
Even when the individual accusation was false—as it must often have
been—the allegation against the class as a whole remained. Retro-
spective anthologies of lampoons must sometimes have been
scanned for evidence of irregular conceptions and perhaps even de-
stroyed because of the information they contained. It is also possible
that lampoon collections were sometimes produced as blackmail ve-
hicles, which purchasers would acquire in order to suppress unwel-
come disclosures—we have encountered something similar in the
contemporary Earl of Derby who hid one such volume in his chim-
ney and the nineteenth-century Duke of Portland who, it has been al-
leged, collected volumes depicting his ancestor, the first duke, to hide
them from historians.46 If this was the case, the loss rate of such ret-
rospective volumes might be even greater than we imagine. There
must also have been a frisson arising from generational shift—for the
young to encounter relics of the wild youths of sober great-aunts and
grandparents, or for great-aunts and grandparents to revisit the ex-
citing years of their first entry to court or Town. To such readers an-
cient lampoons might have served as a version of the modern album
of old photographs and yellowed press clippings or the files of an an-
cient university newspaper.
All these things are possible; but we must also allow the lampoon
another power shared with gossip of having constructed a vast, lurid,
imaginative world of endemic knavery and virtuosic, hilariously rep-
resented couplings—Hobbes’s mechanistic state of nature brought to
life in Whitehall and Covent Garden, or the satiric world of Martial
and Juvenal recreated without any need for translation. It is also the
44
Works, ii. 372. 45
‘A Faithful Catalogue’, l. 83.
46
This at any rate was W. J. Cameron’s view, expressed many years ago in con-
versation with the author.
case that many lampoons are effective and entertaining pieces of

writing in a mode which demanded that popular form and unre-
strained vulgarity should be brought into harmony with courtly pol-
ish and Town sophistication—a far from simple balancing act, but
one often performed with flair. We have seen that contemporaries
read these pieces for literary pleasure as well as for their scandalous
content and with an appreciation that written as well as spoken mal-
ice could become a source of enjoyment when it was presented with
wit and elegance. We must also be prepared to grant those contem-
poraries the common sense to realize that, as with gossip, what the
lampoon presented them with was not sober truth but a peculiar
kind of fiction populated by real people and not to be taken seriously.
The lampoon author was first and foremost an entertainer. Finally,
we should not overlook the very real lessons of social deportment
taught by the lampooners: attention to their pages was as good a way
as any of learning how not to make a spectacle of oneself in court and
Town. To see reputations demolished by ridicule was to discover
how best to protect one’s own. In this respect at least the lampoon
author was performing a necessary and valuable social service—a
matter on which he will sometimes congratulate himself.
How far the accusation of a loosening of sexual morality among
the landed class had a basis in fact is a matter that lies beyond the
scope of this investigation. Certainly it was devoutly believed by con-
temporaries but then so was the Popish Plot. Peter Laslett has argued
that, as far as the matter can be determined from statistics for the
birth of bastard children, the Restoration was a comparatively more
moral period that those preceding or following it.47 His figures,
drawn largely from rural parishes, provide no measure for marital fi-
delity; but one would expect that to be symmetrical with chastity
among unmarried women. If he is correct it might well be that the
lampoon and Restoration comedy reflect a situation in which trans-
gression had become culturally more visible rather than any real in-
crease in transgressive behaviour. However, our concern here is not
with the population at large but with the landed class at a particular
moment in its evolution when, for the first time in its history, a large
proportion of both its male and its female married members were
congregating for long periods of the year in London. We have no
47
The World We Have Lost—Further Explored, 3rd edn. (London: Methuen,
1983), 159 and passim.
data about bastardy rates among this specific group, though wills
sometimes specify inheritances to illegitimate children and others
can be traced through acts of patronage such of that of Sedley in
obtaining a knighthood for his son by Anne Ayscough. If at that
period the well-documented liberties of the court were extending, as
the lampooners insisted, downward to the Town, and outward from
the town to the landed class in general, one can point to a striking bio-
logical advantage that would have ensued. Given the effects of
centuries of regulated marriages between relatives, designed to
amalgamate estates and confirm local political allegiances, access to
a wider gene pool would have been a valuable corrective to the ef-
fects of inbreeding. The matter could not have been conceptualized
in that way at the time, but biologically advantageous behaviour is
not always the result of conscious deliberation and is, anyway, to be
investigated through the study of populations, not of individuals. On
the occasion of a later migration in which a large part of the rural
labouring class relocated to the new cities created by the industrial
revolution, Laslett’s own figures record a steep rise in the bastardy
rate. Statistics are to be respected, but gossip, and the lampoon,
should also be allowed their voice.
7
A Poetics of the Lampoon
The varieties of clandestine satire so far considered invite scholarly

exploration through more closely focused period studies, examin-
ations of thematic and formal traditions, and readings of the politics of
individual pieces; but we also need to consider whether state, court,
and Town lampoons are to be treated merely as documents illustra-
tive of mentalities (my predominant emphasis to date) or whether
they qualify as a branch of literature to be interpreted and evaluated
as well as contextualized and explicated. Marvell’s and Rochester’s
contributions to the tradition clearly do; but they were two out-
standing poets who happened to write clandestine satire. Once we
exclude lampoons written by incompetent amateurs and those (often
highly competent) whose allegiance is to an older tradition of folk
balladry, how far might examples of the metropolitan genre, as it was
practised by educated but not outstandingly gifted writers, reward
critical scrutiny? From one present-day point of view, that would de-
pend on the hermeneutic tools applied by the critic or the master dis-
courses to which the historically specific discourse of the poem might
be assimilated. But that would be to recode rather than decode them.
Reader-response readings of present-day popular film and fiction
have turned this approach round by redirecting attention to the
complex, deeply internalized skills habitually brought to such texts
by their consumers. Psychoanalytical readings are also invited by a
genre so profoundly powered by aggression and that continually ac-
commodates its victims to a small range of reviled stereotypes. Yet
neither approach would help us much in devising a poetics that
would sharpen our appreciation of lampoons as crafted writing or
perhaps even as works of art. Such a poetics would need, for a start,
to consider the variety of forms and styles employed by the writers
and how particular poems might be seen as using these forms and
styles in effective or ineffective ways. By classifying a bad lampoon as
bad literature rather than not literature at all, we might have a better
chance of discovering what makes a good lampoon good.
A Poetics of the Lampoon 219
A convenient starting point for a poetics of the lampoon would be

an understanding of the writerly resources employed in its most fa-
miliar form—that in which a perfunctory introduction, or some-
times only a title, introduces a sequence of attacks on individuals,
each of whom is assigned a single stanza in a stanzaic lampoon or a
single verse paragraph in a couplet lampoon. Thousands of such
poems survive. The pattern can be accounted for from rhetorical the-
ory as an application of that mode of proof by which the validity of
a general proposition is demonstrated by reference to a series of ex-
amples. This is the first method of two allowed by Aristotle to the
orator, the other being the enthymeme. Yet, once we address the
reasons why one unit in such a series might be placed before or after
another, we require a richer set of criteria than are offered by rhetoric
or formal logic. The aesthetic problems are similar to those that arise
from variation form in music, which includes most jazz. While vari-
ation form is treated by music theorists as limited and even primitive
by comparison with, say, fugue or sonata form, it is still progressive
in that it involves a discovery of unrealized possibilities for elabor-
ation which are latent in the theme and should by the completion of
the work have changed our understanding of the theme. (Hearing
Coleman Hawkins play just two choruses of ‘Body and Soul’ in his
classic 1939 recording means that the original has somehow been
augmented so that it will never be heard in the same way again.) The
primary structural issue for a jazz performance is whether there is
any significance in the placing of one element (say a clarinet solo) be-
fore or after another element (say a piano solo). Jazz is a good ana-
logy to the lampoon because solos are regarded as self-portraits of the
player and are more valued by listeners for being expressive of per-
sonality. Fats Waller’s piano playing had the same flair and assur-
ance as the inimitable voice. The introverted restraint of Miles
Davis’s trumpet playing was not an erasure but an intensification of
self. A comparable work from the symphonic repertoire is Elgar’s
Enigma Variations, in which each of the movements is a portrait of
one of the composer’s friends. Again the question would be whether
altering the order of the elements would change the essential nature
of the work (in this case instrumentation, tempo changes, and key re-
lationships would determine that it did—but are these post hoc
or ante hoc?). A practical issue in any set of variations is that of
sustaining the listener’s interest by means of variety and inventive-
ness. Why, having heard four or five variations on a musical theme,
220 A Poetics of the Lampoon
or encountered four or five victims in a lampoon, should we wish to

venture further rather than skipping to the next track or turning over
to the next poem? A solution is suggested by a version of musical
variation form very familiar to the generation of the lampooners in
which two bass viol players took it in turn to improvise variations
over a ground, with one player playing the ground while the other
improvised.1 Here the main concern was that succeeding variations
should allow no dropping off in interest. Competition between the
performers should spur them on to greater extravagance. To run out
of ideas or to fail to match the technical accomplishment of a prede-
cessor variation would be to acknowledge defeat, and to lose the in-
terest of the hearer.
Yet while some lampoons may well have been composed in a simi-
lar competitive spirit of what Catullus calls ‘reddens mutua per
iocum atque vinum’, this is not often evident as a quality of style in
the finished product.2 Some lampoons are nicely paced, in the sense
of moving from an introduction, however perfunctory, through a
series of portraits of increasing interest or complexity to a climax fol-
lowed by a recognizable conclusion, which may take the form of a
dismissively quick survey of lesser victims or a final outburst of in-
vective against a particular victim, as in ‘The Ladies’ March’, dis-
cussed in Chapter 3; yet others offer no sense of development at all,
bringing in portraits of roughly equivalent interest in apparently for-
tuitous order. In cases where one would judge that altering the order
of stanzas or verse paragraphs would not seriously change the effect
of the work, or when the work survives, as many do, with its stanzas
in a number of different orders, the question arises whether its struc-
ture is purely additive or whether there may be other form-composing
relationships that need to be acknowledged.3 Of course, the very ab-
sence of any evident articulated structure might be seen as a way of
reducing each of the victims to an indiscriminate equality of con-
tempt; likewise, an abrupt breaking off, such as the ‘Cetera desunt’
at the close of Dorset’s ‘A Faithful Catalogue’, is a signal that the
universality of folly would have provided the satirist with an endless
progression of ninnies if motivation, leisure, or the dimensions of the
1
Described with written-out examples in Christopher Simpson’s The Division-
Viol (London, 1659).
2
50. 6.
3
Radical variations in order are found in the cases of ‘A Song on Danby’ and
‘Seigneur Dildoe’ discussed in Chapter 4.
bifoliar separate had not imposed closure; but this hardly solves our
problem. Sometimes the satirist will tell us that a new victim has for-
tuitously just come into mind or had inadvertently been forgotten;
but often there is no evident reason for sequence or even for choice of
victims, other than chance association and the availability of gossip.
While the protestations of the speaker of the lampoon (always a dra-
matic creation) concerning the process of writing should not be
taken at their face value, they often assert an improvisatory spirit
which may be echoed in a crudity, either natural or calculated, of
craftsmanship and metre.4 A work such as ‘The Lovers’ Sessions’, or
at a higher level of achievement, ‘A Faithful Catalogue’, may be addi-
tive in the manner of one of Simpson’s sets of variations but without
the mounting excitement. The interest of the reader is not held by
any progress towards a climax but by curiosity about how long the
poem can sustain its established level of verbal inventiveness and by
variations in the tone and manner of succeeding sections.
The issue can be tested by looking more closely at ‘A Faithful Cata-
logue’, which moves from victim to victim according to no easily
discernible rule apart from an initial gesture of respect to older es-
tates satire in beginning with the king and the Duke of York and lin-
gering for a while in the upper aristocracy.5 Its immediate model
seems to have been the ‘Essay upon Satyr’, though this is a more pol-
ished piece with classical aspirations in both language and structure
which are rejected by the 481-line ‘catalogue’. Its opening lines pro-
fess a moral intent recalling that of ‘Rochester’s Farewell’ (1680),
which may well be from the same hand:
Curs’d be those dull, unpointed, dogg’rel rhymes,

Whose harmless rage has lash’d our impious times.
Rise thou, my muse, and with the sharpest thorn,
Instead of peaceful bays, my brows adorn;
Inspir’d with just disdain and mortal hate,
Who long have been my plague, shall feel thy weight.
I scorn a giddy and unsafe applause,
But this, ye gods, is fighting in your cause;
Let Sodom speak, and let Gomorrah tell,
If their curs’d walls deserv’d their flames so well.
4
As is conceded in the opening lines of ‘Fools must be meddling in matters of state’
(see p. 239).
5
Text in POASY, iv. 189–214; also in Dorset, Poems, 136–67.
Go on, my muse, and with bold voice proclaim

The vicious lives and long detested fame
Of scoundrel lords, and their lewd wives’ amours,
Pimp-statesmen, bugg’ring priests, court bawds, and whores.
This preamble seems to promise an uncompromising state satire but

this is not what we get. While the speaker’s rage at the court is furi-
ously maintained, his presentation of his victims is so densely allusive
and reliant on the reader’s possession of arcane gossip (much of
which defeats its two well-informed modern editors) that few who
were not themselves courtiers would have been able to understand it.
The present-day reader cannot avoid a sense of being deliberately ex-
cluded from the presented world; but so must many of its original
ones. It is not clear how far this was intended.
Ignoring by-blows, the ‘catalogue’ can be broken down into a series
of twenty-two portraits, beginning with the Duchesses of Cleveland,
Grafton, and Norfolk, the Earl of Mulgrave, and Thomas, Lord
Wharton, and concluding with the very ancient gossip of Jane Middle-
ton’s smelly feet but revived on this occasion in a spirit of violent
personal antipathy through which physical decay is made to stand for
moral dereliction. The reigning pose is of a preternatural knowing-
ness. Adulteries are not only enumerated but sited in the places where
they occurred, with dialogue and intimate physical details freely sup-
plied. Victims may be addressed in the second person singular as if
they were present to hear. There is a sameness of method to the por-
traits that should lead to tedium. That it does not arises from the vivid-
ness with which the poem’s surreal world is created for the reader, as
in the brief account of the Earl of Mulgrave’s transaction with a pimp:
Well has his staff a double use suppli’d,
At once upheld his body and his pride.
How haughtily he cries, ‘Page, fetch a whore!
Damn her! She’s ugly! Rascal, fetch me more!
Bring in that black-ey’d wench. Woman, come near.
Rot you, you draggl’d bitch, what is’t you fear?’
Trembling she comes, and with as little flame
As he for the dear part from whence he came;
But, by the help of an assisting thumb,
Squeezes his chitterling into her bum . . . (ll. 102–11)
However, dramatic vignettes of this kind are a special effect. The pre-
vailing method is one of a recycling of scandal in ornately rhetorical
couplets and spiced with burlesque allusions to the classics, the Bible,
and the Anglican and Catholic liturgy:
Miserere Domine! Ave Maria!
Poor Father Dover has got a gonorrhoea.
Was e’re dread James, so much affection shown?
He’d save thy soul, but cares not for his own.
How Sedley prays, the old adult’rous fop
May find it a Carnegan-swinging clap!
}
And sure ’twill in the bones and marrow stick,
And must be damnable to soul and pr——
The pocky jade was a damn’d heretic! (ll. 244–52)
Here, the reader is expected to recognize that ‘Father Dover’ is

Henry, Lord Dover, a Catholic supporter of James II; that Sedley is
not the poet but his daughter, the king’s mistress; that her hostility
arose from the pressure being put on the king by advisers such as
Dover to abandon her; and that ‘Carnegan’, unhelpfully corrupted in
several manuscripts to ‘gormogon’, refers to an ancient story about
James having been infected by an earlier mistress, Lady Carnegie.
(Harris maintains that the fop is James himself, but the syntax re-
quires it to be Dover. The identity of the ‘pocky jade’ is yet another
mystery—it cannot have been Cleveland, with whom Dover is con-
nected in line 31, as she was a Catholic.) Formal rhetoric is bur-
lesqued in the double antithesis of the fourth line and the bathos of
the eighth. Dorset enjoys these deliberately strained figures, espe-
cially as a way of concluding a portrait, as at the close of his joint
account of Lady Gerard and Robert Wolseley:
Join then, propitious stars, their widow’d store,
And make them happy, as they were before;
That is, may the decay’d, incestuous punk
Swill like his spouse; and he, like hers, die drunk. (ll. 326–9)
The complexity of this defeated Harris who wrongly identifies the

punk as the male of the equation rather than the female.6 There is an
almost Joycean exuberance to the poem, arising from its rhetorical
virtuosity, its constant teasing of the reader with arcane knowledge,
and its vivid responsiveness to sights and sounds.
Dorset’s emphatic way of ending and beginning sections may seem
to mark his method as purely additive. Smooth transitions are not
6
Dorset, Poems, 161.
attempted. Beginnings are often second-person addresses or lines of

dialogue, while the conclusion to each section is usually a carefully
prepared punchline, which, in the case of the Dover portrait, is em-
phasized by being the third of a triplet. The placing of the Dover por-
trait within the poem is not entirely arbitrary—it follows that of
Sir Edward Hales, another member of James’s Privy Council—but not
far removed from it, since the link is no further pursued, and before
long Dorset is haring after ninnyish Protestants. More significant is
the way in which the passage stands on its own feet as an epigram, in
the manner of Martial, and how much Dorset’s satirical method, and
that of the lampoon generally, owes to the Roman poet.7 Martial was
certainly well known to the Restoration satirists. Sedley translated
and imitated him and a widely circulated clandestine satire ‘Barbara
Pyramidum Sileat Miracula Memphis’ took its title from him. J. P.
Sullivan and A. J. Boyle, in their anthology Martial in English, sug-
gest persuasively that, although Dryden never translated Martial,
‘the Latin epigrammatist informed his whole compositional style’
and that there is a sense in which his longer satires are ‘constructs of
epigrams’.8 Martial’s denunciatory epigrams were not personal in
quite the same sense as those of a lampoon such as ‘A Faithful Cata-
logue’ because of their preference for invented names; but that there
was a known referent for many of these names is clear from poems in
which Martial threatens enemies and stingy patrons with the shame
of being added to his gallery; moreover, his congratulatory epigrams
use real names. That Dorset wrote anonymously and from a loftier
position in the social hierarchy allowed him to attack authority in a
way that was impossible for the imperial client Martial; but he has
certainly absorbed elements of his portrait manner from the Roman.
Writing of Rochester, Boyle and Sullivan instance ‘the sexual detail
and graphic obscenity, the rasping, cutting trenchant couplets, the
obsession with semen and with female body parts and odours, the
scathing treatment of male hypocrisy, social pretension and, above
all, female promiscuity, the animal imagery, the fusion of fiery indig-
nation and black laughter, the self-deprecating humour’ as in the
spirit of Martial (p. 103). These qualities are no less characteristic of
‘A Faithful Catalogue’.
7
The influence of Martial on late Elizabethan and Jacobean satire is explored in
John Peter, Complaint and Satire in Early English Literature (Oxford: Clarendon
Press, 1956), 160–7.
8
(London: Penguin Books, 1996), 114.
What makes Martial and his Renaissance imitators relevant to an

understanding of the structure of the ‘Faithful Catalogue’ and the
lampoon generally is their ways of bringing epigrams together into
larger units. Martial’s epigrams were assembled into books, part of
whose charm is the lack of connection between contiguously placed
items but in which names and themes constantly reappear and there is
a good deal of alluding from one part to another. Looking at the
‘Faithful Catalogue’ as a loosely linked, casually ordered sequence of
epigrams is much more productive than trying to accommodate it to
the principles of the Augustan formal verse satire. Its unity, then, is to
be sought in its internal cross-references and constant reiterations of
the themes announced in its opening lines. The cross-references are
often subtle: ‘He’d save thy soul, but cares not for his own’ is echoed
at line 390 in the course of another attack, by ‘He will not only save
its life, but soul’, both being versions of James’s statement when he
brought a priest to his dying brother: ‘Sire, here is a man who saved
your life and now is come to save your soul.’9 While other lampoon-
ers, among them the author of ‘Good people draw neare’, considered
below, found more formally satisfying ways of coordinating se-
quences of epigram-like attacks, Dorset’s unmethodical method is ap-
propriate for a poem of such length, whose aim is one of crushing an
entire political culture under a sheer weight of obscene invective. One
should read it much as one would read a book of Martial with one’s
primary attention directed to the parts rather than the whole, but
without losing sight of the whole as the larger context of meaning.
Martial several times offers the reader the choice of reading all or
only part of the contents of a book. In 3. 68 he tells women readers
that they should cease reading at this point as the rest of the book
would be too raunchy for them (while assuming that this will be an in-
centive for them to continue). In the introductory poem to Book 10 he
explains that if it seems too long it can be made as short as the reader
likes by skipping (10. 1). But almost in the same breath he is telling the
same reader that this is a revised and perfected edition that will still
survive when marble monuments have been split apart by fig trees
(10. 2). His true hope is surely that expressed in the introductory
poem to Book 9 that his works will often return to the reader’s
hands—not presumably always to be read as a whole but to be
9
Dorset, Poems, 164.
assimilated over a number of partial readings.10 Does the ‘Faithful

Catalogue’, then, need to, or even mean to, be read continuously from
‘Curs’d be those dull, unpointed dogg’rel rhymes’ through to ‘As
when old Hyde was catch’d with rem in re’, or would a contemporary
have begun like one of Martial’s perfunctory readers by scanning for
the sections of most immediate interest—which would presumably
have been those about the individuals that reader was most interested
in? One can imagine a recently written, highly topical lampoon being
read right through because it offered a digest of current gossip; but
lampoons, strikingly, often continued to be copied and read for
decades after they had ceased to be topical, and the ‘Faithful Cata-
logue’ was, in a sense, retrospective from the start—a compilation
from the collective social memory of the court and Town rather than
a source of fresh gossip. Interestingly many of the scribal anthologies,
which are our principal source for the lampoon genre, give every en-
couragement to this kind of selectivity by writing the names of the vic-
tims with a second, thicker-cut nib, so that they stand out boldly on
the page. An interest in particular names might well determine the
reader’s path through whole anthologies as well as particular lam-
poons. Later one might return to examine passages possessing other
kinds of interest, with an assimilation of the whole work only coming
at a latter stage by a process of accretion, not through following the
the linear axis assumed by reader-response theory.
t i m e r e l at i o n s h i p s i n t h e l a m p o o n 11
Questions of order raise others concerning the management of time in

the lampoon. Time matters for the genre because it is constantly re-
quired to mediate between timeless moral principles (however crudely
asserted) and the time-bound behaviour of living contemporaries.
Without this double perspective it could not perform its particular
quasi-judicial assessments of the significance of actions. Lyric, epic,
10
‘mihi parva locuto, | sufficit in vestras saepe redire manus’ (9. 1. 7–8). 2. 6 (with
its interesting reference to the social reading aloud of poems and their circulation as
separates prior to book publication), 10. 59, and 11. 106–7 further acknowledge that
some readers will choose to skip.
11
The importance of examining both time and space relationships in the lampoon
was suggested by a paper on analogous relationships in Renaissance lyric given at
Monash University in 2002 by Heather Dubrow, though my own discussion falls well
short of the inventiveness and subtlety of hers, particularly as regards the interactions
of the represented parties and the examination of degrees of ‘overhearing’.
and other more purely imaginative modes of writing, including the

formal verse satire, do not have to justify their assertions in this way
against the contingent and topical. The lampooner may lie and will
certainly distort but cannot avoid having his assertions measured by
the reader against knowledge already possessed of real persons and
events. Time also matters as the organizing principle of narrative. Al-
though relatively few lampoons tell a continuing story, individual por-
traits often contain compacted narratives or imply an envisaged future
or past for a focal event seized upon. In the numerous satires written
as parodic litanies, with the response ‘Libera nos, domine’ or an Eng-
lish equivalent at the close of each stanza, the individual lines evoke
particular past or current misdoings, while the deliverance belongs to
an envisaged future.12 Often, presented action is framed within a fur-
ther action in which the presenter brings the case studies to attention
within an imagined social scene. In this case the time of the showing is
distinguished from that of what is being shown or narrated. Finally,
reading itself is performed within a time sequence dependent partly on
the structure of the work and partly on the whim of the reader. These
three temporal modes—which we might call narrational time, pre-
senter time, and reader time—all require consideration, not because
the writers were necessarily conscious of them but as operational func-
tions without which they could not have created an effective lampoon.
In addition, the intersection of differing time frames will sometimes re-
quire the lampoon to engage with the various ways in which time itself
may be conceptualized.
A stanzaic lampoon from an earlier decade than the ‘Faithful
Catalogue’ offers an opportunity to observe each of these time scales
in application:
Song
Good people draw neare,
If a Ballad you’l heare
Which will teach you the right way of thriving.
Nere trouble your Heads
With your Bookes, and your Beads
Now the World’s rul’d by cheating, and swiving.
If you prattle, or prate
For Myter, or State,
12
Examples in POASY, i. 190; ii. 192–9; iii. 574–5; v. 218–22, 323–6, 458;
vii. 547–51.
It will never avayle you a Button.

Hee, that talkes of the Church,
Will bee left in the lurch
Without e’re a tatter to putt on.
Old fatt Gutts himselfe
With his tripes, and his pelfe,
And a purse as full, as his paunch is,
Will confesse, that his Nanny
Fob-doudled our Jamy,
And his Kingdome came by his Haunches.
Our Arlington Harry,
The prime Secretary,
Was first to the Smocke a secretis;
He was Squire of the frocke,
And being true to the Smocke,
Now admitted to manage the State is.
And Dapper his Clarke,
Being true to the marke,
Is boeth his Scribe, and his setter:
Now Joseph, wee heare,
Shall bee made a peere:
Lord, and Lackey begin with a letter.
Our Comptroller Clifford
Was forc’t to stand stiff for’t,
To make his way to the Table
Hee’d a freind att a shift,
That gave him a lift.
Tom foole may thanke God for’s Bauble.
’Tis well for the Babbs,
That the pimpes, and the Drabs
Are now in high way of promotion,
Else Villers, and May
Had beene out of play:
But poore Denham went off with a potion.
Then there’s Castlemaine,
That prerogative Queane:
If I had such a bitch, I would spay her:
Shee swives, like a stoate,
Goes to ’t hand, and foote,
Levell-Coyle with a prince, and a player.13
13
Harold Love, Restoration Verse, 2nd edn. (London: Penguin, 1997), 79–80.
Both the title and the stanza form indicate that the poem is meant for
singing, possibly to ‘Taking of snuff is the mode at court’. It was writ-
ten at some time between the death of Lady Denham on 6 January
1667 and the dismissal of Clarendon on 30 August, but the poet’s at-
titude is not so much anti-Clarendonian as regretful for the general
condition of the realm. The second stanza hints at sympathy with the
plight of the bishops, who had every reason to be grateful to the
Chancellor. The method is scholastic: a timeless generalization is
proposed (‘the World’s rul’d by cheating, and swiving’) and then
formally ‘proved’ by the adduction of particular time-bound in-
stances. Readers are presented with a series of satiric portraits, one
to a stanza, except for stanza 7, which addresses a group of victims,
first generally (‘the pimpes, and the Drabs’) and then, individually
(Baptist May as pimp and Lady Denham as drab—it is not clear
which member of the large Villiers clan is referred to). The succession
follows the ‘estates’ principle, beginning with the chief minister and
descending to the chief secretary of state, his ‘clerk’ (Sir Joseph
Williamson), the Comptroller of the Household, the Keeper of the
Privy Purse, and the mistresses of the duke and the king. The last
stanza, though presented as if it was a kind of afterthought, obtains
climactic force through the gender of its subject and the dismissive
animal comparison, but most because it short-circuits the hierarchy
of power: Castlemaine’s bedroom influence is in no way inferior to
that of Clarendon at the council table: indeed, when push came to
shove, it was to prove stronger.
Narrational time is illustrated through the portraits’ comprising a
series of parallel compacted histories. Clarendon begot a daughter
and then allowed her to seduce and marry the Duke of York; Arling-
ton and Clifford achieved office through being the lovers of influen-
tial women; Williamson, through having pimped for Arlington, will
be ennobled; Lady Denham, having become the duke’s mistress, was
poisoned by her jealous husband; Castlemaine, dominant over the
king, is now unfaithful to him with an actor. The reader is assumed
by the poet to be in possession of fuller information about each of
these histories. Yet, importantly, the prefatory ‘Now’ of line 6 con-
cedes that this state of affairs might not have prevailed always but
represents a degeneration from a nobler age in which politicians
were respectful of the Church and the state. This places the particu-
lar histories within an even longer cycle. The presenter’s attitude to
this altered but supposedly unalterable condition is superficially one
of resigned acceptance. No doubt he would agree with Shadwell’s

Bruce in The Virtuoso that ‘say what we can, the Beastly, Restive
World will go its way; and there is not so foolish a Creature as a Re-
former’;14 nonetheless, there is a clear hint, in the third line of the last
paragraph, that a return to probity is not impossible but might be se-
cured by spaying the duchess and (by implication) castrating the er-
rant males, including the king. A practical alternative to so drastic a
procedure would be for parliament to remove control of the purse
strings from the supporters of the prerogative. The poem does not
directly advocate this course but even the simplest of historical con-
textualizations should reveal that that was its message to its first
readers. In this way the satirical commentary on the present not only
posits a historical past in which the vices of that present were not cur-
rent but a future in which they might be remedied. Simultaneously
the poem plays with notions of time that are in a certain sense ahis-
torical. The metaphor of power being perpetually transferred
through the penises and vaginas of the swivers and cheaters suggests
a biological clock with a difference—a cyclic motion that overrides
the earlier linearity. The cycle may also give rise to a literal annihila-
tion of time as when Castlemaine’s copulations with the prince and
the player fuse ‘Levell-Coyle’ into a single achronological orgasm.
(Like ‘shift’ and ‘lift’ in stanza 6, this is a double entendre, being de-
rived from the French phrase ‘leve-le-cul’, still sometimes cited at the
time in that form.15) The characteristic juxtaposition of the univer-
sal, the obdurately historical, and the experiential is a way of both
layering events in time and counterpointing different ways in which
time might be conceived and apprehended. Meanwhile, the pre-
senter, in moving through his own time sequence, has also completed
a progression in space which will be described shortly.
The lampooners’ understanding of the interaction of narrational
and presenter time is most fully evident from the small proportion
of lampoons that tell an extended story. Dryden’s MacFlecknoe was
a product of a sub-tradition of the Town lampoon concerned with
the behaviour of authors and only appeared in print, in a surrepti-
tious and unauthorized edition, after several years of manuscript
14
The Complete Works of Thomas Shadwell, ed. Montague Summers, 5 vols.
(London: Fortune Press, 1927), iii. 107.
15
James Grantham Turner, Libertines and Radicals in Early Modern London
(Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2002), 188, in a brief discussion of the poem, states that
this was also the name of a card game—however, this was not the predominant sense.
transmission. It is concerned with both cultural and national pol-

itics—the first in the implied parallel between Flecknoe and his own
and Shadwell’s real-life patron, the Duke of Newcastle, and the sec-
ond, less stressed, in the king’s relationship with Shadwell’s other
patron, Monmouth. Its avowed subject is succession anxiety. The
narrative is developed through three dramatic scenes: the introduc-
tory soliloquy of Flecknoe, the coronation of Shadwell, and Fleck-
noe’s final prophecy and negative apotheosis. But this brief succession
of events is also powerfully evocative of a past of ‘heroic’ actions by
Flecknoe and a promised future of heroic actions by Shadwell. Putting
it another way, the poem could be either the last book of a Fleck-
noead or the first book of a Shadwelliad—one or both of which has
to be afforded a virtual existence in order to explain its own.
Like ‘Good people draw neare’ MacFlecknoe opens with a time-
less truism:
All humane things are subject to decay,
And when Fate summons, Monarchs must obey;
Its method of developing this truism, though, is neither forensic nor

scholastic. Instead, it is merely the prompt for Flecknoe’s musing on
the way in which time both as sequence and agent has eroded his own
power. His soliloquy is a celebration of his past exploits in the cause
of dullness, but coloured by a recognition of loss and decline: he is
‘Worn out with business’ (l. 9). Renewal can only come through the
passing of his heroic talent to Shadwell. It is politically significant
that this would be by an act of adoption, as would happen if either
Monmouth or William of Orange were to supplant the biological
heir, York. Once more Flecknoe turns to the past in a narration of
heroic events that have declared the sublime dullness of his about-to-
be-anointed successor, and yet the events of this past are strangely
smudgy and disconnected. The one which receives most attention
is obscure even in Flecknoe’s narrative, involving a trip down the
Thames in a convoy of boats, including a ‘Celestial charge’, during
which Shadwell had conducted the musicians with a roll of paper.
Even among contemporaries memories of this event must have been
few and imperfect. The brevity of this and other references to Shad-
well’s career once more suggests that knowledge of the past is rapidly
disappearing. Beer and poppies are cited as specific agents of obliv-
ion, but the predicament is also a historical one, reflecting the huge
loss of memories encoded in the streetscapes destroyed during the
Great Fire, and a metaphysical one, arising from a corruption

through political disloyalty of lineal time, ordered through the prin-
ciple of just succession.16 The following scene brings us back to a pres-
ent in which we watch the events of Shadwell’s coronation; but our
attention is soon redirected, by Flecknoe’s prophecy, towards a fu-
ture in which Shadwell and dullness will dominate the entire world,
or at least the watery part of it between Ireland and Barbados. At the
end of the prophecy there is a further mutation. So far we have been
dealing with modes of historical time involving a past, a present, and
a future but the descent of Flecknoe into the underworld as an in-
verted Elijah involves a transition from human time to a timelessness
that is no longer propositional but theological. Occurring at the end
of the poem, it coincides with the cessation of textual meaning. If
there is to be a future of the kind prophesied by Flecknoe, it is to be
one in which Shadwell’s double portion of his father’s art will bring
all things to terminal inanity—the theme re-enunciated by Pope at
the close of Dunciad IV. However, if Flecknoe should be a false
prophet and Shadwell, as seems clear enough, a false messiah, then
time might be redeemed in the way celebrated in lines 1026–7 of
Absalom and Achitophel
Henceforth a Series of new time began,
The mighty Years in long Procession ran:
Treason annihilates time in the same breath as it annihilates loyalty.

Sanctified time resides in fidelity to the legitimate succession.
s pat i a l r e l at i o n s h i p s i n t h e l a m p o o n
As well as engaging with time relationships in more complex ways

than is normally recognized, lampoon writers gave careful attention
to the placing of the presenter, the reader, and the victims in im-
agined space, whether it is that of the depicted scene or one in which
the writer asserts his co-presence with the reader, or a combination
of the two. Many of these relationships are established through
metaphors or analogies, of which the more frequent are given below.
16
For the erasure of knowledge by the Fire and subsequent reconstitution see
Cynthia Wall, The Literary and Cultural Spaces of Restoration London (Cambridge:
Cambridge UP, 1998). MacFlecknoe is discussed on pp. 124–9.
The shooting gallery

This is not to my knowledge an analogy consciously recognized at
the time though it is sometimes used, as by Lord Foppington in i. i. of
The Relapse, for the beau’s pursuit of conquests. It was accepted by
Wilson as implicit in the material when he invented the term ‘shot-
gun lampoon’ for a poem that blazed away at a group of subjects.
The art of the stanzaic lampoon is closer to that of the sharpshooter,
with each section disposing of a separate target.
Rooms in a house
This analogy is more often implicit than explicit but was a powerful
one in an age when the practice of using architectural structures as
‘memory theatres’ was still current. The palace of Whitehall is the
implied frame of a good deal of court satire in ways that are unlikely
to be evident to a modern reader. Its galleries were public spaces in
which respectable visitors were permitted to loiter at their leisure (a
liberty of which Pepys took frequent advantage), and there was a
widespread understanding, briefly discussed in Chapter 2, of the role
that the location of courtiers’ apartments played in defining their pres-
tige.17 The technique of disposing victims into rooms is used openly
in ‘The Last Night’s Ramble’, where the building is a brothel in ‘old
Dunkirk Square’ in which a voyeuristic narrator moves from cham-
ber to chamber observing the behaviour of the occupants. In ‘Cae-
sar’s Ghost’ a resonant opening, reminiscent of a stage incantation
scene, draws the dead Charles II from his tomb in Westminster
Abbey in order to visit a series of tents at the camp at Hounslow
Heath, where debauched members of James II’s officer corps reveal
their corruption and ineptitude. The ‘Third Advice to a Painter’ sets
its most important scene in a single room of the mansion of the Duke
of Albermarle.
The stage of a theatre

Where the satirist is not leading readers in imagination from room to
room, he will sometimes situate them in the audience of an imaginary
theatre, as in MacFlecknoe. The ‘Session of Ladies’ is also set on a
stage, with an actor as the prize.18 The model is evoked whenever a
17
pp. 38–9. 18
CSR, 204–16.
transition in a lampoon from one victim or group to another is char-

acterized as a ‘change of scene’. ‘Ghost’ lampoons in which the pre-
senter is harangued by a visitant from the other world often have a
distinctly stagy quality, as if the writer was really thinking of the
apparition scenes so popular in the dramas of Dryden and Nat Lee.
(Lee’s Nero has two different ghosts in successive scenes.) Rochester,
Raleigh, Lord Lucas, Robert Wild, Marvell, and Charles II all appear
in this function.
A court of law
In other ‘sessions’ satires, such as in the long series of ‘sessions of
poets’ lampoons, victims are brought one by one before a judge pre-
siding over an imagined court or tribunal.19 Dorset’s ‘Colin’ uses a
variant in which the victims are represented as attempting to qualify
themselves before the king for the position of chief mistress.
A portrait or a gallery of portraits

The painter satires and their many later imitations dispose their vic-
tims around an imaginary painting. Another analogy, which was as
often implicit as explicit, is of paintings arranged along a gallery in
its original sense of a long room in a great house with windows to one
side and pictures hung on the other. The presenter in this case be-
comes the cicerone who comments on the likenesses. The notion is
alluded to in i. i. of Congreve’s Love for Love where Scandal’s visual
‘Satyrs, Descriptions, Characters and Lampoons’ are represented as
pictures ‘to the Life, and as like as at Knellers’.20 It is implied in satires
in which one is continually exhorted to look at victims, as if they
were visibly displayed before one.
A religious ceremony
In the popular satirical form known as the litany, the presenter is rep-
resented as a priest and the reader as a member of a congregation.21
19
POASY, i. 327–37, 352–6. See also ‘The Lovers’ Session’ and ‘The Session of
Ladies’, CSR, 175–98, 204–16.
20
The Complete Plays of William Congreve, ed. Herbert Davis (Chicago: Chicago
UP, 1967), 232–3.
21
For examples see n. 12 above.
The favoured verse form is a triplet followed by a refrain which is

imagined as being chanted collectively by the readers. Mock sermons
and Puritan exhortations are also encountered. Both forms encour-
age readers to imagine themselves inside a church at service time.
Mock-epitaphs position the reader as a visitor to a church surveying
its monuments.
A cabinet of curiosities
In Stephen College’s ‘A Raree Show’ at POASY, ii. 426–31 the vic-
tims are represented as part of an intinerant showman’s portable ex-
hibit. The presenter becomes the mountebank who presents the
show.
A lecture or disputation
A number of lampoons, like ‘Good people draw neare’, adopt the
method of the academic disputation, which at this period was still an
integral part of university training. The universities also produced
burlesque Latin disputations such as those of the Oxford and Trinity
College, Dublin, Terrae filius and the Cambridge Act declamations,
which were an occasion for satirical attacks on dons and towns-
people.22 Copies of these were widely circulated and can be found in
personal miscellanies side by side with other kinds of clandestine
satire. To a reader with the appropriate background, a lampoon
showing the impress of this tradition would have suggested the phys-
ical circumstances of a university ceremony.
A catalogue
In this case the satire is mediated through a number of physical ob-
jects represented as to be offered for sale, and therefore open for in-
spection by potential buyers. A widely copied pair of prose satires
which use this device may be located through the Appendix under
the incipits ‘One whole piece of the Duchess of Cleveland’s honesty’
and ‘Seventy-four articles of war in large imperial paper’. The trope
22
Discussed in Kristine Haugen, ‘Imagined Universities: Public Insult and the
Terrae Filius in Early Modern Oxford’, History of Universities, 16 (2000), 1–31 and
Felicity Henderson, ‘Putting the Dons in their Place: A Restoration Oxford Terrae
Filius Speech’, ibid. 32–64.
is also present in the title of Dorset’s ‘Faithful Catalogue’, though

the poem makes no use beyond this of the formal properties of a
catalogue.
Incidents of a journey
In this case the reader is virtualized into a traveller being guided by
the satirist through a landscape or townscape. The satirical journey
took its inspiration from Horace 1. 5, describing a journey to Brun-
disium, itself modelled on a now lost original by Lucilius. In another
version of the same device, Juvenal’s second satire takes the reader
on a journey through Rome, sometimes to specific sites such as the
Porta Capena and sometimes to be a witness of more generally
framed enormities, such as poets reciting in the month of August.
Structures of this complexity were alien to the lampoon and when
they occur it is usually a sign of aspirations towards classical form;
but authentic examples are found in the form of libertine satires
in the ‘Ramble’ tradition, of which Rochester, in ‘A Ramble in St
James’s Park’, Alexander Radcliffe, and Ned Ward have left ex-
amples. Radcliffe’s popular ‘Captain Ramble’ (‘When duns were
knocking at my door’) exists in two forms, one circulated in manu-
script in the mid-1670s and the other expanded for authorized print
publication in The Ramble: An Anti-heroick Poem.23 Its stanza form
is borrowed from Suckling’s ‘A Soldier’.
Events in a public place

In a reversal of the previous relationship the presenter remains sta-
tionary or only minimally mobile within a circumscribed space
where he is accosted by the victims of the satire in turn. Horace 1. 9
is the model. Or he may adopt the role of the classical cynic by stand-
ing in the market place and railing, one by one, at those who pass
by.24 Or he may simply be a witness to localized displays of shocking
behaviour. In ‘Tunbridge Wells’, the presenter, visiting the Wells
early in the morning, is driven helplessly from one spectacle of folly
to another as he proceeds along the circumscribed space of the walk.
23
(London, 1682), 85–110.
24
For the cynic diatribe as a reprobative model see Mary Clare Randolph, ‘The
Structural Design of the Formal Verse Satire’, PQ 21 (1942), 368–84.
Events in a private or secret place

The presenter may also be a voyeur who has penetrated some sup-
posedly secret assembly where the victims imagine themselves to be
unobserved. ‘The Last Night’s Ramble’ is of this kind. A number of
satires do this through the ‘vision’ convention in which, as in ‘A
Dream of the Cabal’, the presenter is conveyed by supernatural
means to some secret assembly. At other times the space of inter-
action is a mental one, with the presenter pictured as an abstractly
not physically present witness of the scenes described. Marvell’s
technique in the ‘Last Instructions’ of moving from one vividly
located scene to another is a developed version of this mode. To a
modern reader the technique seems cinematic but the seventeenth
century knew nothing of cutting, tracking, and montage. One is
tempted to connect the method with the widely current early modern
belief that human actions were under the constant scrutiny of super-
natural beings and the spirits of the dead. The presenter, in such a
case, would become a kind of surrogate ghost, from whom no doors
were closed and from whom no knowledge could be concealed. In
‘Caesar’s Ghost’ it is a literal ghost, that of Charles II, who tours
the camp observing the debauchery of his brother’s army before
delivering the ringing judgement:
——Full fiue and twenty yeares
I Reignd without the Noyse or Toyles of warr,
Bore all indignitys of Rebell Pow’re
And saw my life in danger euery houre,
Yet rather had resignd it up in Peace
Than owd my safty to such Bruits as these.25
But he has been followed throughout this process by a second
ghost—the disembodied presenter—who is our source of informa-
tion for the journey of the royal spectre.
Recognizing the deployment of one or another of these ways of
positioning the presenter, reader, and victims is only a starting point
for investigation of the spatial aspects of the lampoon, since these all
imply secondary relationships between the three parties which will
often alter in the course of the satire, in the ways analysed for lyric by
Dubrow. In ‘Good people draw neare’ the initial presenter–reader
25
Lines 285–90. Text from John Burrows and Harold Love, ‘Did Aphra Behn
write “Caesar’s Ghost”?’, in D. Garrioch et al. (eds.), The Culture of the Book
(Melbourne: Bibliographical Society of Australia and New Zealand, 1999), 169.
relationship proposed is that of a street ballad singer performing to

passers-by; but this almost immediately gives place to a conducted
tour in virtual space from Clarendon’s home at ‘Dunkirk House’, via
the palace apartments of a series of officials, to the king’s bedcham-
ber and that of Castlemaine directly above it. Then, at the conclu-
sion, we are snatched from the palace to the hunting field with its
bitches, stoats, and plain-man invective. MacFlecknoe opens with
the presenter speaking from the abstract space of ‘literature’, in the
impersonal tones of epic narrative, to a reader assumed to be in the
customary space of attentive reading—a study, easy chair or coffee
house table; however, the reader is soon summoned to be a virtual
spectator in a room of an imperial palace in which Flecknoe delivers
a burlesque monologue. In the coronation sequence the image is con-
cretized by making readers spectators in a theatre, the Nursery,
where we observe a mock enthronement and succeeding apotheosis,
presented as a show in that theatre.
In each case described, the critical task is one of first tracking the
precise way in which the persons and materials of the poem are dis-
tributed and redistributed in space and then asking how effective
these dispositions are for the purposes of the satire. One would also
need to follow the development of the relation of the presenter to
these distributed and redistributed objects. That modes of spa-
tialization are not an explicit structural element does not mean that
they may not have been part of an unspoken cultural contract
between writer and reader which would reveal itself through a close
analysis of language and allusion. The shared experience of being
part of the audience in a theatre or witnessing an academic disputa-
tion could be evoked by the lightest of references. Moreover, as well
as being a means of framing the victims of the satire, spatialization is
often also important as a way of moderating the presenter’s relation-
ship with the reader, especially when the reader is asked to become a
virtual presence in the scene of the satire. This will be the subject of
our next section.
addressing the reader
Much has been written about the framing of the satiric persona in
late Elizabethan and Jacobean elite satire, the Augustan formal verse
satire, and the eighteenth-century comic or satirical novel. When we
consider the subtleties of ironic insinuation achieved by Pope and

Swift, or the fullness of personation sustained by Fielding in Tom
Jones or Sterne in Tristram Shandy, the management of the same
tropes in the Restoration lampoon may seem rather primitive. The
presenter rarely draws much interest as a character: even as voice he
tends to be one-dimensional. He sees little need to ingratiate himself
with the reader. Irony makes only rare appearances in a genre that
prided itself on speaking its thoughts openly and without reserve. On
the other hand the lampooner’s assumption of a plain-man bluffness
will sometimes veil more complicated designs of which we need to
become aware.
While some use is made of the older mode of the satyr-satirist as
scourger of vice (as in the opening of ‘Rochester’s Farewell’ and ‘A
Faithful Catalogue’), the most common self-characterization is of a
no-nonsense hedonist, as in a passage from ‘On the Ladies of Honour’:
Fools must be medling in matters of State,
While I drink my Bottle, and swive with my Mate.
The Mornings being cold, I sit by the Fire
And scribble while sixty Swift Minutes expire.26
‘Good people draw neare’, as we have seen, opens with the speaker
adopting the persona of a street ballad singer but we will hardly be
taken in by this. He is a man of education (thus the scholastic method
of argument). He has respect for the mitre but contempt for Claren-
don. He is cool and almost ironic in his acceptance of the rottenness
of the world (a metropolitan attitude); yet the animal images of the
last stanza would seem to position him as a country gentleman in the
hunting field, as does his blunt proposal for remedying matters.
None of this, needless to say, can be taken as autobiographical,
though it does hint at an alert conservative mind at work behind
these transformations of the persona. Rather it represents a transi-
tion between two stock personae that are helpfully exemplified in
Buckingham’s The Rehearsal as Smith, the Town man of pleasure
and good sense whose disapproval is expressed through understate-
ment and pretended agreement, and Johnson the no-nonsense coun-
try visitor. The satirist of ‘Good people draw neare’ begins as Smith
and ends as Johnson. From time to time we encounter lampoons
which are so intemperate as to suggest a writer genuinely out of
26
control. Jacobite satires of the 1690s offer examples, as does earlier

work emerging from the political losing party. Satire of this kind sac-
rifices any chance of winning over readers who are not already of the
satirist’s persuasion. In the cases of ‘Cover le feu ye Hugeuenots’ and
‘The Catholic Priest’s Farewell to the House of Commons’ (POASY,
i. 204–12), it is likely that we are dealing with Protestant fakes of
Catholic rage rather than the real thing, but the real thing certainly
existed.
As well as posing as a truth-teller, the lampoonist is also a retailer
of secret knowledge and aberrant attitudes in which the reader is in-
vited to share. When, as often happens, the content of the satire is
frankly pornographic, the invitation is one to engage in an act of
voyeurism in which the lampoonist plays the role of bawd and the
reader that of the client in search of arousal. By accepting the invita-
tion to share the lampoonist’s erotic fantasy, the reader is also ac-
cepting the role of curtain twitcher or peeping Tom. Moreover, even
when the satire is not of a sexually explicit kind, and may even rec-
ommend virtuous opposition to publicly apparent enormities, the
reader runs the danger of succumbing vicariously to spite, envy, hat-
red, malice, Schadenfreude, and many other undesirable feelings.
Insofar as the lampoonist bore false witness he was violating the
commandment of God. Another text says, ‘Whoso privily slandereth
his neighbour, him will I cut off.’27 The reader’s enjoyment of a lam-
poon made him just as guilty of this transgression. The lampoonist
was also almost invariably in breach of the law of the land as formu-
lated by royal proclamations and the legal principles summarized in
Coke’s De Famosis Libellis or William Sheppard’s Action upon the
Case for Slander.28 The reader of a lampoon was not only morally
but also legally guilty of the same crime. The relationship of a usually
anonymous writer to a usually surreptitious reader plays out a sub-
tle power play of seduction and resistance, in which writers degrade
themselves in order to entice the reader to accept the same degrad-
ation and readers must either acknowledge complicity with writers
or reject them as contemptible buffoons. The practical result must
often have been an uneasy mixture of both attitudes.
27
Ps. 101: 5. Slander and by implication the lampoon are eloquently reproved in
sermons 4 to 7 of Isaac Barrow’s Several Sermons against Evil Speaking (London,
1678), 1133–243, 21–29.
28
Quinta pars relationum Edwardi Coke (London, 1612); Action upon the Case
for Slander (London, 1662).
The other important relationship that would need to be explored

in any more developed poetics of the lampoon is that between
speaker and victim. Here the range of possibilities extends from a de-
tached, third-person presentation to an intense deixis in which the
victim is affronted in the second person; or the two methods can be
alternated, even within the same portrait, as in the section of ‘A
Faithful Catalogue’ devoted to the Duchess of Cleveland:
Ah Barbary! thy execrable name
Is sure embalm’d with everlasting shame.
Could not that num’rous host thy lust suffice,
Which in lasciv’ous shoals ador’d thy eyes,
When their bright beams were through our orb display’d,
And kings each morn their Persian homage paid?
Now (Churchill, Dover), see how they are sunk
Into her loathsome, sapless, aged trunk!
And yet remains her c——’s insatiate itch,
And there’s a devil yet can hug the witch.
Pardon me, Bab, if I mistake his race,
Which is infernal, sure, for though he has
No cloven foot, he has a cloven face. (ll. 25–37)
The second-person opening, sustained through the vision of the

duchess in her youthful glory, veers into the third person with the
evocation of her as a witch in the arms of her demon lover, the actor
Carlell Goodman. (The crucial change occurs between the ‘thy’ of
the fourth line and the ‘her’ of the eighth.) Yet in the eleventh line
there is an unexpected switch back to an intimate form of the second
person using the nickname ‘Bab’. Both at the beginning and the end
of the passage the speaker is addressing the duchess familiarly as a
well-known equal. In between she becomes an object, a withered and
decayed tree, in which the shining eyes have become sunken knot-
holes. Behind the peculiar moral rage of this repellent but fascinating
poem lies an even more fundamental rage at the loss of an ideal ro-
mantic beauty to which in former times kings had, indeed, paid their
‘Persian homage’. Cleveland’s and Middleton’s real crime is not that
of political corruption or sexual promiscuity but that they have
dared to outlive the transcendent glamour of their and the satirist’s
younger days and, like him, become old. The intense personal close-
ness claimed by the satirist to his victims, whether feigned or partly
real, allows kinds of subjective engagement which are unusual for
the genre and which, by bringing the speaker so fully into the scene
of the satire, compromise its assumed univocality of judgement. The

addressing of the victims in ‘Good people draw neare’ involves the
same assertion of familiarity but from a greater personal distance.
The male victims are addressed by insulting nicknames—‘fatt Gutts’,
‘Dapper’, ‘Tom foole’, and ‘Babb’—which would never have been
used to their faces, while the women are saluted more formally as
‘Villers’, Denham, and Castlemaine. There is no suggestion that the
presenter was personally intimate with his subjects or privy to their
inner thoughts.
s e c o n da ry m e a n i n g s
A comprehensive poetics of the lampoon would also need to chart

those features which are the common property of all poetry: metre,
vocal register, and the use of figures. This will not be attempted in the
present sketch apart from a brief glance at the lampoonists’ use of
metaphor and allusion. Restoration poetry is not known for its ingenu-
ity in framing metaphors—that was a speciality of the Metaphys-
icals, against whom the generation of Dryden were in self-conscious
reaction. One can often search many dozens of lines of lampoon
verse without discovering a metaphor of the traditional literary kind.
The simile, on the other hand, was a staple of impromptu verbal wit
and its theatrical imitations—the comedies of Wycherley, Etherege,
and Congreve sparkle with them. Yet even here we encounter a cer-
tain disapproval: it is often the fools rather than the wits who excel
at simile-hatching. The more admired form of comedic wit is the epi-
grammatic maxim equating respectable persons and actions with
disreputable ones, on the Hobbesian principle that virtue, especially
when publicly proclaimed, was nothing more than a mask for ap-
petite and knavery. The lampoon avoids the labour of having to
argue this equation by assuming it as its philosophical starting point.
The more literary productions of Restoration poets compensated for
their neglect of metaphor by doing interesting things with the anti-
thetical tropes that had been accommodated to the couplet by Waller
and Denham. Lampoons do likewise at times, but often, as in the in-
stance cited earlier from the ‘Faithful Catalogue’, in a deliberately
strained and parodic manner. The lampoon generally preferred an
assertive plainness but when the poets turned to parodies of main-
stream forms they could be more adventurous. An example would be
Oldham’s ‘Sardanapalus’, in which the machinery of the Pindaric

ode is employed for a parodic representation of sexual excess. How-
ever, ‘Sardanapalus’ only becomes a lampoon if one accepts its central
character as a representation of Charles II. It could be read just as
easily as a burlesque of the Pindaric form rather than a satire on court
libertinism, or even as an only half-ironic celebration of the divinity
of lust. A better example is Marvell’s playful elaboration of Waller’s
own stylistic playfulness in his three ‘advices’.
‘Sardanapalus’ and Marvell’s painter poems raise the issue of how
the fictions of the lampoon can be made to invoke a mythic,
metaphorical, or even allegorical dimension rather than simply serv-
ing as a register of events. This in turn requires us to examine how
primary narratives enlarge their significance by building links to al-
ready existing secondary narratives, as Dryden does to the Aeneid in
MacFlecknoe and the Book of Samuel in Absalom and Achitophel.
Allusions of a more local kind are certainly present, a lesson if not
learned certainly reinforced by Hudibras which subjects an astonish-
ing richness of miscellaneous learning to comic elaboration. The
writers of court, Town, and state lampoons were on the whole edu-
cated people, many having spent time at the universities or the Inns
of Court, and, even when writing at their most demotic, see no need
to disguise that fact. They were likely to have read some Horace, Vir-
gil, Juvenal, and Martial in Latin, and a few of them were fluent read-
ers of the language, though also keen to distance their cultured
metropolitan identification with the great Romans from the
pedantry of the despised ‘gown-men’. They also knew the Bible and
the Anglican liturgy extremely well and the popular plays of their
time, including Shakespeare and Jonson: echoes of all these are fre-
quent. Lampoons are also rich in allusions to other lampoons, espe-
cially those like Dorset’s ‘Come on ye critics’ which were regarded as
classics of the genre. Mulgrave turns a reference to this poem against
Dorset himself when he describes him as
Dull as Ned Howard, whom his brisker time
Had fam’d for dullness in malicious rhyme.29
Many of the writers could speak French fluently and had read
Voiture, Corneille, Boileau, Montaigne, La Rochefoucauld, and the
romance writers in the original. Etherege’s library, left behind on his
29
‘An Essay upon Satyr’, ll. 192–3, in POASY, i. 410.
flight in 1688 from Regensburg to Paris, contained Voiture’s

Œuvres, a variety of historical works in French, and French transla-
tions of Tacitus, Polybius, Livy, Terence, Juvenal, Lucian, and Pro-
pertius.30 The court was effectually bilingual, with Saint-Evremond
its resident Gallic literary star. Rochester’s and Oldham’s debts to
Boileau are on record but the wider debt of the lampoon as a genre to
French models has never systematically been explored. Contempor-
aries would no doubt have picked up many cross-references to
French satire that escape present-day anglophone scholars.
Rochester’s lyric ‘By all Loves soft, yet mighty Pow’rs’, a court lam-
poon possibly directed at Nell Gwyn, would have had an added ele-
gance to set against its gross subject matter for those who recognized
it as a parodic reworking of Voiture’s ‘Stances a une demoiselle qui
avoit les manches de sa chemise retrousées et sales’.31
Allusion and quotation were the commonest way by which the
language of the lampoon reached beyond the referential. When the
‘Faithful Catalogue’ refers to Cleveland and Portsmouth as Charles’s
‘brace of cherubs’ (l. 19) it is invoking not only the two cherubim
who guarded the ark of the Covenant but the ‘beastly brace’ of l. 65
of ‘An Essay upon Satyr’. The ‘brace’ is doubly reductive, equating
them, as winged creatures, with a pair of game birds or small ani-
mals. The allusion also contests Dryden’s fawning identification in
Absalom and Achitophel of Charles first with David and then with
the Almighty. Dryden’s ‘pious times’ from the first line of Absalom
and Achitophel had already been countered by the ‘impious times’ of
the second line of Dorset’s poem. The account of the Duchess of
Grafton’s choice of a ground-floor bedroom produces a classical par-
allel with the legend of Danaë:
Through the large sash they pass, like Jove of old,
To her attendant bawd, in showers of gold. (ll. 55–6)
Another classical analogy is invoked in the immediately following

account of the Earl of Mordaunt’s precipitate flight after being dis-
covered naked in the duchess’s closet:
30
Dorothy Foster, ‘Sir George Etherege: Collections’, N&Q 153 ( July–Dec. 1927),
477–8.
31
Les Œuvres de Monsieur de Voiture, 7th edn reneuë, corrigée et augmentée
(Paris, 1665), 231. See also my ‘Nell Gwyn and Rochester’s “By all Love’s soft, yet
mighty Pow’rs” ’, N&Q 247 (2002), 355–7.
Defenseless limbs the well-arm’d host assail’d;

Scarce her own prayr’s with her own slaves prevail’d.
Though well prepar’d for flight, he mourn’d his weight
And begg’d Actaeon’s change to ’scape Actaeon’s fate;
But wing’d with fear, though untransform’d he bounds,
And swift as hinds outstripp’d the yelling hounds. (ll. 64–9)
Allusions of this kind are obvious enough. Their importance is to

alert us to less obvious ones which may also serve to expand the sig-
nificance of the apparently trivial. Dorset’s whole formal engage-
ment with Martial, discussed earlier, and close imitations of the
manner of the sturdier and more outspoken Juvenal, are the most ef-
fective means through which his highly contingent text seeks univer-
sality. The satire may be time-bound but the role of satirist, as he
performs it, has its foundation in the Rome of Domitian and Trajan.
In MacFlecknoe the setting of a lost classical splendour against
present-day meanness is not only the ruling trope of the entire
poem but has determined its brilliant marriage of vulgar content to
Virgilian stylistic pastiche. Other lampooners try to perform the
same transformation through more economic means. ‘Good people
draw neare’ asserts a Jonsonian inheritance by its naming Sir Joseph
Williamson ‘Dapper’, after the foolish clerk in The Alchemist. The
effect of this is not only to place its whole body of victims in a
Jonsonian world of monomania, but to invoke Jonson’s defence of
the right of satire to judge and reprove vice.
Another way by which the lampoon seeks an allegorical status is
through what may be called its anti-Freudian tendency by which, in-
stead of reading politics as an expression of sex, sex becomes an ex-
pression of politics. ‘A Faithful Catalogue’ continues the equation of
sodomy with Catholicism and perverted power that was discussed in
Chapter 2. The Duke of Norfolk, a Catholic, disdains his wife’s
‘spacious womb’ for the anus of a ‘common bulker’ (ll. 88–90); the
duchess, a Protestant, on the other hand will ‘f—— with any fool in
any place’. In the account quoted earlier of Mulgrave’s first terrifying
then sodomizing the ‘black-ey’d wench’, he, while not himself a
Catholic, is acting as one would expect from an Anglican who ac-
cepted office under a Catholic king. The mistreatment of the reluctant
whore becomes a metaphor for the court’s abuse of the nation. By con-
trast, Mulgrave’s wife ‘lies as she would burst’, having been rejected by
both her ‘drone’ and her ‘noble Protestant’ lover (ll. 98–125). In this
she represents a Protestant nation not yet possessed by its Dutch hero.
One particularly unpleasant anti-Catholic outburst produces a

strange confusion of images that on first reading is likely to be dis-
missed as the effect of sheer bad writing. Its subject is the unfortunate
Queen Catherine:
Thou worst of flesh in superstition stew’d,
In blood thy Cunt but more thy hands imbrew’d;
}
Blood which not all thy double clouts containe,
But three large pallaces thrô out does stain,
And makes thy masse and holy waters vain.
When thy Cunt itches, Christians murthered lye,
Murther and threason make thy Leachery;
Thy Cunt which humane touch cannot reclaime,
For Dildo does with triple crosier cramb:
Pope in thy lust, pope thy bald belly frigs,
Till spirituall whoredome foams betwen thy leggs:
}
To him thou heav’st and shov’st and spends, to him
Thy wrotten eyes in nights pollution swimm,
And willing Cunt descends between the brim.32
The palaces are Whitehall and Windsor, both associated by Protest-

ants with alleged plots to murder the king, and the queen’s own
palace at Somerset House, in which Titus Oates had placed the mur-
der of Sir Edmund Berry Godfrey. Bad writing is evident enough in
the inept handling of the triplets, each of which crashes dismally on
its final line; but the images have an inner cohesion that would have
made them seem less gratuitous to a seventeenth-century reader than
they do today. The catachresis of the blood from Christ’s wound on
the cross flowing freely for the redemption of mankind is a very an-
cient one, present in Faustus’ despairing cry ‘See, see where Christ’s
blood streams in the firmament’. Its transference to Antichrist, or
rather the Scarlet Woman in parodic copulation with Antichrist as
her succubus, and the assumption that the outcome of this outpour-
ing would be murder and damnation, are perfectly consistent. That
the queen suffered from dysmenorrhoea was common knowledge
and regarded as the cause of her infertility; but the poem is more an
exercise in politico-religious allegory than a personal attack. A belief
that the dildo was an Italian device, first introduced to England by
Mary of Modena, had been promulgated in ‘Seigneur Dildoe’, which
also describes it as the pope’s nephew.33 The notion of one being
32
‘On the Queen 1679’, Yale MS Osborn b 54, p. 1229.
33
Lines A56 and B56 in Rochester, Works, 249, 255.
made in the form of the papal triple crown is a logical development

of this association. That Queen Catherine’s inferior (spiritual) flesh
should have needed to be stewed is an implied contrast with that of
Protestants which, like the beef of old England, was suitable for
roasting in the fire of authentic faith. Alternatively it could be read as
alluding to the Protestant accusation that the Catholic doctrine of
the real presence was a form of cannibalism.34 The distinction of this
piece is, in an act of what can only be called genital Góngorism, to
have turned the extravagant imagery of Counter-Reformation devo-
tional verse, best known to English readers through Crashaw,
against the faith that had fostered it. Strange as it may seem, this was
a piece that might have been valued in its time for its wit as well as for
exemplary Puritan spite. It also offers a fascinating insight into the
figurative underpinnings that made anti-popery so powerful and
long-persisting a political force. Peter Lake founds the Protestant at-
titude in a belief that the authority of the pope, once established, had
been used ‘to set up and confirm in the Church a whole series of cere-
monies, forms of worship and belief which were of entirely human
origin’, one of which, the present work seems to suggest, was ritual
masturbation.35 Catholic devotion was to be understood as dis-
placed sexuality.
A metaphorical function can also be claimed for the sexual narra-
tives of the Town lampoon. Its ‘celebrities’ acquire an emblematic
status in which they embody the plight of their whole community in
its ambiguous relationship to pleasure and liberty. A good lampoon
(to return to an issue raised at the beginning of this chapter) will not
only make effective use of the technical resources that have been dis-
cussed but succeed in raising its characters and narratives from a
quotidian to a hyperenergized, mythic order of existence in which
they shine as timeless embodiments of lust and corruption. A bad
lampoon leaves its victims as aberrant individuals.
34
For an example see The Works of Nathaniel Lee, ed. Thomas B. Stroup and
Arthur L. Cooke (New Brunswick, NJ: Scarecrow Press, 1954), ii. 364.
35
‘Anti-popery: The Structure of a Prejudice’, in Richard Cust and Ann Hughes
(eds.), Conflict in Early Stuart England: Studies in Religion and Politics 1603–1642
(London: Longman, 1989), 74.
8
Transmission and Reception
The classification of lampoons into court, Town, and state varieties

does not claim exactitude. To a degree it reflects authors’ perceptions
of the social purpose and intended audience of their writing, though
these things are not always clearly determined and many pieces
straddle borders. Harris’s edition of Dorset recognizes something
like it in its distribution of poems into sections with names like ‘old
affected court ladies’, ‘state affairs’, ‘advice to lovers’, and ‘court and
town’. A less exact classification can be observed in the practice of
the Hansen and Cameron scriptoria of issuing separate, parallel lib-
ertine and state satire collections. Yet, most private collectors of the
time, and many professionals, cheerfully intermingled material of all
three classes and need not have perceived much difference between
them. Our distinctions are simply a convenient means of giving man-
ageable shape to a twenty-first-century discussion of the larger trad-
ition. Once we move away from an authorial perspective (or what we
can reconstruct of it) our discriminations become even less assured.
It has already been demonstrated that readers would frequently in-
terpret lampoons in ways that could never have been foreseen by
their authors, as when court lampoons, having escaped into wider
circulation, were read as state satires. Robert Wolseley wrote of
Rochester that his pen was ‘usually imploy’d like the Arms of the an-
cient Heroes, to stop the progress of arbitrary Oppression, and beat
down the Bruitishness of headstrong Will; to do his King and Coun-
trey justice upon such publick State-Thieves, as wou’d beggar a
Kingdom to enrich themselves’, which is not an obvious reading of
the corpus as we possess it.1 Indeed, only ‘Too long the wise com-
mons’ from the known writings is readily classifiable as a state satire.
In the present chapter we will look at the ways in which lampoons
were understood and interpreted by their readers; but before we do
1
Preface to Valentinian (London, 1685), A3v.
Transmission and Reception 249
this it will be necessary to consider the means by which they came to

the attention of those readers in written, sung, or spoken form.
lampoons in performance
As we have seen, and as Fox and Bellany have demonstrated,

the lampoon was an oral as well as a written medium.2 One of
Gramont’s more complicated stories concerns a feud between
Rochester and Henrietta Maria Price, one of the queen’s maids of
honour, and the use made of this by another of the maids in order to
sow ill feeling between Rochester and Anne Temple, a maid of
honour to the duchess (not the Philippa Temple discussed earlier).
Saying this, the perfidious Hobart showed her friend half a dozen shameful
couplets, which Rochester had made against the former maids of honour. It
was Miss Price whom he mainly assailed with the most bitter shafts, anato-
mizing her person in the most hideous manner imaginable. Miss Hobart had
merely substituted the name of Temple for that of Price, which she made to
agree with both the measure and tune of the song. No more was needed: the
credulous Temple no sooner heard her sing the lampoon but she firmly be-
lieved that it had been made upon herself . . .3
The particular interest of the anecdote is that the lampoon was nei-
ther shown, nor recited, but sung, no doubt to a broadside ballad
melody. Some of the better-known tunes were supplied with dozens
of different sets of words.4
One’s appreciation of the lampoon is enormously increased by
knowing these melodies. Often a tune is specified in sources, as in
‘Advice, or a Heroic Epistle to Mr Fr. Villiers to an Excellent New
Tune Called A Health to Betty’, which begins as follows:
2
Adam Fox, Oral and Literate Culture in England 1500–1700 (Oxford: Oxford
UP, 2000), 299–334; Alastair Bellany, ‘Railing Rhymes and Vaunting Verse’, in
K. Sharpe and P. Lake (eds.), Culture and Politics in Early Stuart England (Stanford,
Calif.: Stanford UP, 1993), 287–8.
3
Anthony Hamilton, Memoirs of the Count de Gramont, ed. Henry Vizetelly
(London: Vizetelly & Co., 1889), ii. 106.
4
For this repertoire see Claude M. Simpson, The British Broadside Ballad and its
Music (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers UP, 1966). Examples may be heard in such CD
collections as The Baltimore Consort, Watkin’s Ale: Music of the English Renais-
sance, Dorian DOR-90142; The City Waites, ‘How the world wags’: Social Music for
a 17th Century Englishman’, Hyperion CDA66008; The King’s Noyse, The King’s
Delight: 17c. Ballads for Voice & Violin Band, Harmonia mundi 907101; Les
Witches, Nobody’s Jig: Mr Playford’s Dancing Master, Alpha 502; and The Broadside
250 Transmission and Reception
Leave off your ogling Francis,

And mind your sister Nancy’s;
She’s quite undone
If once King John
Should get between her haunches.
I hear Phil Kirke does thrum, sir,
Your brother’s lady’s bum, sir.
’Tis ten to one
He’ll get a son
May stand ’twixt you and home, sir.5
Readers may like to experiment for themselves with the difference

between merely reading the words and hearing them sung (or simply
being aware of the melody as one reads them).
Fig. 1 A Health to Betty

Source: Jeremy Barlow, The Complete Country Dance Tunes from Playford’s Dancing Master
(1651–ca.1728) (London: Faber, 1985), 25. Later editions tonalize this modal melody by putting
it into G minor.
Two early court texts of ‘Seigneur Dildoe’, National Library of

Wales, Powis papers, and Bodleian MS don. b 8, identify the tune as
‘Peg’s gone over the sea with a soldier’. Singing it to the melody6 im-
mediately transforms it from a mechanical succession of libellous
stanzas to a performance text with which a skilled entertainer could
amuse a group of listeners. In other lampoons, such as ‘A Ballad to
the Tune of Walton [sometimes Watton] Townes Ende’ (‘The Par-
sons all keep whores’) and ‘A Ballad to the Tune of Cheviot Chace,
or Whenas King Henry Ruled this Land’ (‘Come all ye youths that yet
are free’), the tune is part of the title.7 There may be special point to
Band, English Country Dances from Playford’s Dancing Master 1651–1703. The
dance-based part of the repertoire is available in Jeremy Barlow (ed.), The Complete
Country Dance Tunes from Playford’s Dancing Master (1651–ca.1728) (London:
Faber, 1985).
5
CSR, 118; see Simpson, British Broadside Ballad, 298–9.
6
Simpson, British Broadside Ballad, 572.
7
Texts in Rochester, Works, 280–2 and CSR, 102–11; melodies Simpson, British
Broadside Ballad, 460–6, 96–101.
the choice of a melody. ‘Peg’ in ‘Seigneur Dildoe’ is not far removed

from ‘Pego’, a slang term for penis, and the song does indeed record
how the eponymous dildo was brought ‘over the Maine’ from Italy
in the retinue of Mary of Modena. ‘Julian’s Farewell to the Family of
the Coquets’ (‘Give o’er ye poor players depend not on wit’) was, ap-
propriately for a superannuated roué, to be sung to ‘An old man with
a bed full of bones’.8 A satirical account from 1677 of Buckingham
being entertained by the Oxford aldermen is set to ‘Cuckolds All
A-row’.9 In other cases humour may have been found in the dis-
proportion between words and vehicle. ‘A Ballad to the Tune of
Cheviot Chace’ uses a melody which Fox describes as ‘the nation’s
favourite song’.10
Fig. 2 Chevy Chase

Source: Thomas D’Urfey (ed.), Wit and Mirth: or Pills to Purge Melancholy, introd. Cyrus L. Day,
6 vols. (New York: Folklore Library, 1959), iv. 289.
Here the original was the account of a sanguinary battle between the
English and the Scots, of which Sidney wrote that he ‘never heard the
old song of Percy and Douglas that I found not my heart moved more
than with a trumpet’.11 The lampoon is aptly described by Wilson as
‘a double-barrelled shotgun libel, one barrel aimed at the reputa-
tions of unmarried ladies about the Court, the other at rampant
widows’—military ardour in this case being severely displaced.12
‘Chevy Chase’ is documented by Simpson as ‘the tune for some three
dozen ballads before 1700’.13
In many cases the tune may be cited not by its original words but
other sets to which it had been fitted. An interrelated group of four
printed Whig ballads, apparently the work of Stephen College, all
make use of the tune ‘I am the Duke of Norfolk’, also known as
‘Paul’s Steeple’, but only the first, ‘I am a senseless thing’, identifies
it.14 The second, ‘A Raree Show’, announces itself as written to the
8
The tune is at Simpson, British Broadside Ballad, 129.
9
POASY, i. 430. 10
CSR, 102–11; Fox, Oral and Literate Culture, 1.
11
An Apology for Poetry, ed. Geoffrey Shepherd (Manchester: Manchester UP,
1973), 118.
12
CSR, 102. 13
British Broadside Ballad, 96.
14
Text at POASY, ii. 176–9.
tune of ‘I am a senseless thing’. The third, ‘Assist me some good

spright’, appeared without a nominated tune but with the giveaway
refrain common to all four. Its text, discussed below, develops a
comparison between the Anglican bishops and magpies. A fourth
piece, ‘Some Nonsense’ (‘Old wainscot is in the right with a hey’),
was described as written to the tune of ‘the Magpyes’, which, in the
singular, is the title given to a version of ‘Assist me some good sprite’
in Bodleian MS don. b 8.15 This passing on of names seems to have
been a device to advertise the pieces’ relationship to each other, since
the reader would have known all the time that the tune was really
‘I am the Duke of Norfolk’.
In a great number of cases the tune is not specified but obvious
from the shape of the stanza. A galloping, eight-line stanza in ana-
paestic tetrameter was probably meant for ‘Packington’s Pound’—if
nine lines are used with the seventh and eighth being dimeters, this is
certain to be the case.
Fig. 3 Packington’s Pound

Source: D’Urfey (ed.), Wit and Mirth, iv. 20.
A simple quatrain in ballad measure (rhyming abab, with the a-lines

iambic tetrameters and the b-lines trimeters, as in ‘Chevy Chase’)
might be sung to any one of a number of melodies at the singer’s
pleasure. The author of one such piece, composed in 1648, advises
This if you will rhime dogrel call
(That you please you may name it)
One of the loyal traytors here
Did for a Ballad frame it;
Old Chevy Chase was in his mind,
15
pp. 621–3. For the group, see Simpson, British Broadside Ballad, 333. Simpson
suggests that the poems might be better fitted to another ballad melody ‘Sound a
charge’ but this is merely a varied or predecessor form of ‘I am the Duke of Norfolk’.
If any sute it better,

All these concerned in the Song
Will kindly thank the setter.16
The bare reading of a stanzaic piece of this kind would prompt the
reader to search for a tune that might fit it or to invent one if that was
lacking. The headnote to a copy of ‘As I went by St James’s I heard a
bird sing’ specifies, without giving an actual tune, that ‘in the singing
every verse must be repeated twice’.17 A careful search of the
lampoon manuscripts would yield a rich supplement to Simpson’s
identifications.
While the ballad repertoire belonged to popular culture it was also
of interest to Restoration virtuosi. Selden had observed that ‘More
solid things doe not shew the Complexion of the times so well as Bal-
lads and libells.’18 Samuel Pepys and Anthony Wood were two en-
thusiastic collectors of the fugitive ballad prints sold by pedlars and
street-corner singers, recognizing their importance as records of both
past and present history; but there was also respect, nourished by the
new preference for a plainer, more colloquial style in ‘polite’ writing,
for the actual verse manner of the ballads. In the new century Add-
ison was to write two famous Spectator essays in praise of ‘Chevy
Chase’.19 Dorset imitated the ballad manner in his ‘Song Written at
Sea’, while Sedley used it for his ‘Ballad to the Tune of Bateman’ on
the murder of John Hoyle, as well as lighter pieces: some of his finest
quatrain verse is in this manner. Prior was another poet to draw in-
spiration from the ballad tradition, though the greater polish and
formality demanded by the new century led to some loss of the plain-
ness admired by Dorset and Sedley and a century later by the Ro-
mantics. Of course, the Restoration street ballad, since it drew on
popular composed songs as well as traditional ditties, was a far more
heterogeneous genre than the older strain of border ballads which
acquired literary status following the publication in 1763 of the
Percy Folio. Hit theatre songs of the time such as Purcell’s ‘If love’s a
sweet passion, why does it torment’ from The Fairy Queen and
16
Simpson, British Broadside Ballad, 100.
17
18
Table Talk of John Selden, ed. Sir Frederick Pollock (London: Quaritch, 1927),
72. This compilation by Selden’s secretary Richard Milward circulated in manuscript
prior to its print publication in 1689.
19
Numbers 70 (21 May) and 74 (25 May 1711). See Donald F. Bond (ed.), The
Spectator (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1965), i. 297–303, 315–22.
Eccles’s ‘The jolly, jolly breeze’ from Rinaldo and Armida were
rapidly converted into broadsides and equipped with new words,
such as ‘You true-hearted Protestants pray now attend’ and ‘The
jolly, jolly bowl’. It is often difficult to distinguish between a ballad
adaptation and the parodic genre of the ‘mock-song’, as practised by
Rochester and Alexander Radcliffe.20
The point is not that most stanzaic lampoons were written to be
sung but that they were more effective when encountered in sung
form, with their verbal nuances slowed down for inspection and vocal
colourings used to give emphasis. Music of all kinds at the time was
routinely ‘graced’ and ‘divided’ by singers as well as instrumentalists.
Tempo might be varied or notes stretched and altered to suit the words
of any particular stanza or the mood of any given audience. The
singer, being face to face with the company, had to feed off its re-
sponses—teasing or feigning reluctance at one time or pressing against
the boundary of acceptability at another, knowing when to delete and
when to improvise, always making sure that the piece worked as a
comic turn and that satirical points were underlined by gesture and fa-
cial expression. A technique later used in the Major-General’s song in
The Pirates of Penzance of gaining attention by pretending to be un-
certain what was to come next would arise instinctively in such per-
formances. The singer’s aim should be to bring out every nuance of
every insult. Modern CD versions of seventeenth-century ballads,
sung to instrumental accompaniment (which would rarely have been
the case under the social circumstances of the time), display a vocal
professionalism unlikely to have been evident at the dinner table, par-
lour, or street corner. Heavy drinking must often have accompanied
performance. Quite a number of lampoons have refrains in which all
present would have joined: the very word ‘lampoon’ is believed to
have arisen in this way.21 At other times the words may well have been
passed round the table with all present contributing a stanza.
It is likely that professional singers, performing at private dinner
or drinking parties, included lampoons in their repertoire. Pepys
mentions an occasion at Thetford when the king was entertained by
the local fiddlers with ‘all the bawdy songs they could think of’.22
20
See Rochester’s ‘I Fuck no more then others doe’ (Works, 102) and the mock-
songs in Radcliffe, The Ramble: An Anti-heroick Poem (London, 1682), 21–30.
21
See above, p. 13.
22
(London: G. Bell & Sons, 1970–), ix. 336.
‘My muse and I are drunk tonight’ envisages the ministry being the
subject of such a performance:
But Sunderland, Godolphin, Lory
Turne Politicks to jest,
And will appear such Chitts in story
To bee repeated with John Dory
When Fidlers sing att Feasts.23
The ballad of ‘John Dory’ was an old favourite about a sea battle
between a French privateer and a Cornish captain.24 It is sung to An-
tonio in iii. ii. of Fletcher’s The Chances while he is having his wounds
treated. Osborn MS b 54 contains a twenty-two-stanza lampoon
headed ‘A Ballad Sung by Aaron Smith before the D. of Bucks and
those noble Lords who were for passing the Bill gainst the Duke of
Yorks inheriting the Crown of England &c. when they dined at the
gun att Mile-end Monday Dec:13. 1680’, giving us a putative per-
former and location as well as an occasion.25 The piece was one of the
group of four discussed earlier written to ‘I am the Duke of Norfolk’,
alias ‘Paul’s Steeple’.
Fig. 4 I am the Duke of Norfolk

Source: The First Part of the Division Flute (London, 1706), 2. See also Claude M. Simpson, The
British Broadside Ballad and its Music (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers UP, 1966), 331–5.
The three opening stanzas will give a sense of the whole:

1.
Assist me some good spright
With a hey with a Hey
Whilst I sing of a flight
With a Ho;
23
Text from facsimile of ‘Derby’ MS in Peter Beal, In Praise of Scribes (Oxford:
Oxford UP, 1998), 26.
24
Simpson, British Broadside Ballad, 398–400.
25
p. 1208. Sir William Haward’s copy (Bodleian MS don. b 8, p. 621) gives the al-
ternative title ‘The magpie, or the Song against the bishops sung by Aaron Smyth at
the feast of the lords at the Gunn at Mile-End-Greene’. For the event see Lady Burgh-
clere, George Villiers, Second Duke of Buckingham (London: John Murray, 1903),
379–80.
Of inauspicious souls
All sillier then owls
With a hey Tronny, nonny nonny no.
2.
Not so graue as owles they be,
Nor so wise in time you’l see
These birds when they are installed
All magpies are called
3.
The platter faced owle
Like a wise sober fowle
Is bashfull in the light
And preys only in the night . . .
This has nothing in particular to do with the Duke of York but is a

blistering attack on the Anglican bishops, who had voted in the
Lords against a number of Whig measures, giving the ‘Paul’s Steeple’
title a special resonance. Unable from the nature of his audience to
attack the House of Lords as such, the poet is at pains to indicate that
bishops were not real lords:26
17.
It is a mungrell creature
Of a strange double nature,
’Tis called a Lord ’tis clear
But as true it is no peer.
18.
The right reuerend Buggering Lord
Magpy of waterford
By a common Jury try’d
By a common Hang-man dy’d.
19.
He acts a lord for life,
But no title has his wife;
Ius divinum is his word,
For which we care not a turd. (p. 1210)
John Atherton, Bishop of Waterford, had been hanged as long ago as

1640 for a homosexual liaison. The rather abstruse point made by
the stanza is that a real lord would have been tried by his peers and
executed by the axe. Smith, the singer, was a ‘furious fanatic’ who
26
Their legal status is considered in Selden, Table Talk, 13–22.
after involvement in the Rye House Plot became solicitor to the treas-
urer and public prosecutor under William III.27 Nothing is known of
his musical talents. Imagination readily suggests the circumstances
of the performance: the packed upstairs room at the inn (little better
than a sailors’ dive), dark with candle-smoke; the bewigged, semi-
drunken post-dinner audience, which included Monmouth as well as
Buckingham, joining in the refrain; and the singer delivering his
budget of treason from the foot of the table in a resonant parlando.
There may even have been a theatrical element to the performance,
since ‘I am the Duke of Norfolk’ was associated with a drinking
game involving a mock-crowning with a cushion.28 On the other
hand, while the lampoon seems to be perfectly genuine and the text
good, it is possible that the heading was devised by a Tory printer as
a way of discrediting the Whig lords. In this case, while the entry
could still be cited as evidence of the general practice of singing songs
at banquets, we would lose it as a witness to the particular occasion
at Mile End.
Of course there are also lengthy, carefully written stanzaic lam-
poons that may have been intended for the page only: an example
would be the eighty-three-quatrain long ‘The Lovers’ Session’ (‘A
session of lover’s was held t’other day’), which would take a good
half-hour to sing in full, and its forty-five-quatrain long sequel, ‘The
Session of Ladies’.29 Yet even these seem to acquire greater force
when heard, at least in part, to a melody: ‘Packington’s Pound’ is a
possibility for the first, with the quatrains combined into eight-line
stanzas, though it would not work so well for the second. A polished,
epigrammatic stanzaic lampoon like ‘A History of Insipids’ (‘Chaste
pious prudent Charles the second’) would have had less to gain from
being sung but might still have been meant to be read aloud as its pri-
mary mode of delivery. The fact that we encounter these pieces
chiefly in retrospective manuscript anthologies which present them
as reading texts, and often explicitly encourage us to approach them
as an informal secret history of the times, obscures the circumstances
of their original circulation, as topical satires. Prior to their being so
collected, the shorter pieces would often have circulated memorially.
Inscribed texts would have passed as fugitive separates, whose
27
DNB; POASY, v. 420.
28
Described in William Chappell, Popular Music of the Olden Time (London:
Cramer, Beale & Chappell, 1859), 119.
29
CSR, 175–98, 204–16.
possessors would often have regarded them as scripts for singing or

speaking aloud.
Even lampoons in heroic couplets must sometimes have been de-
signed for vocal rather than silent reading, though not singing, and
will come alive in unexpected ways if the modern reader is prepared
to adopt the early modern practice of solitary declamation (having
first ascertained that the neighbours are unable to hear). A passage in
Aphra Behn’s Love-Letters between a Nobleman and his Sister sug-
gests that even letters were frequently read aloud by the recipient in
an endeavour to recapture the vocal inflections intended by the
sender.30 Couplet lampoons must often have been produced as social
verse to be read over meals, as recorded in the prologue to Raven-
scroft’s The London Cuckolds (1681):
Now Fop may dine with Half-wit ev’ry noon,
And reade his Satyr, or his worse Lampoon.31
They were also a way of entertaining travel companions, as in

Pepys’s account of communal reading of the second and third
‘Advices to a Painter’ during a coach journey.32 The host in ‘Timon’
reads aloud in his coach ‘a Libell, of a Sheete or Two’.33 When lam-
poons were read aloud we may be sure that it was with an appropri-
ate fire and vitality. A French visitor of the 1690s was impressed by a
particular form of declamation adopted for the reading of poetry.
The English have a mighty Value for their Poetry. If they believe that their
Language is the finest in the whole World, tho’ spoken no where but in their
own Island; they have proportionably a much higher Idea of their Verses.
They never read or repeat them without the most singular Tone in the
World. When they happen in reading to go out of Prose into Verse you
would swear you no longer heard the same Person: His Tone of Voice be-
comes soft and tender; he is charm’d, he dies away with Rapture.34
30
Discussed in my ‘Vocal Register in Behn’s Love-Letters between a Nobleman
and his Sister’, ELN 41 (2003), 44–52.
31
Pierre Danchin, The Prologues and Epilogues of the Restoration 1660–1700,
7 vols. (Nancy: Presses Universitaires de Nancy, 1981–8), ii/1. 329.
32
Diary, viii. 313.
33
34
M. Misson’s Memoirs and Observations in his Travels over England, trans. John
Ozell (London, 1719), 220–1. In the original ‘leur ton de voix devient doux et lan-
goureux; ils sont charmez, ils se pâment’ (Memoires et observations faites par un
voyageur en Angleterre (The Hague, 1698), 348.
Soft and tender would be quite wrong for lampoons but the notion
of a delivery sharply differentiated from prose seems appropriate for
these thundering pieces. The rants of Dryden’s and Lee’s heroic
tragedies would be one model—the opening lines of ‘Rochester’s
Farewell’ and ‘A Faithful Catalogue of our Most Eminent Ninnies’
are each suggestive of the stage rant. Lampoons may even have been
socially performed by actors. John Lacy is credited with a satire on
Charles II (‘Preserved by wonder in the oak O Charles’) and shares
the prize in the first ‘Sessions of Poets’ with another actor, Joseph
Harris, while Joe Haines is mentioned by a late source as the author
of ‘Madame Le Croix’.35 Haines was celebrated for his renditions of
prologues and epilogues, so why not lampoons?
r e a d i n g a n d c i rc u l at i n g
l a m p o o n s e pa r at e s
Nonetheless, lampoons, even stanzaic ones, were often read pri-

vately and silently, and the more lengthy examples in Pindaric form
or written in tetrameter or pentameter couplets may well have had
the reader rather than the listener as their primary audience. They
circulated by handwritten copies with only the rarest of incursions
into print. Bellany draws attention to a Star Chamber document of
1628 which reports how a lampoon text had been traced back
through fourteen successive possessors, each of whom had person-
ally transmitted it to the next in the series. At each stage, he notes, ‘a
separate path of transmission could have branched off ’.36 The trans-
missional trees of popular Restoration libels must have been just as
fruitful. In considering this complex history, we will begin with the
slightest and most fragile vehicle of this transmission, the separate,
and then trace the movement of pieces into ‘linked groups’ and then
into two larger outcomes, the specialized scribal anthology com-
posed entirely of lampoons and the personal miscellany in which
lampoons exist side by side with other scribally circulated texts. In
doing so we will also consider the differing agencies involved in the
production of the physical records.
35
POASY, i. 337; CSR, 166.
36
The Politics of Court Scandal in Early Modern England (Cambridge: Cam-
bridge UP, 2002), 109.
The scribal separate was sometimes a whole sheet, sometimes a

half-sheet, and sometimes a single leaf cut from a sheet. For a longer
poem, or small linked group, it was usually a whole sheet folded by
two successive bisections of the longer side to give a quarto gathering
of four leaves. A half-sheet, folded once, would give a bifolium. Irre-
spective of sheet size, verse in pentameter couplets could always be
entered in a clear, legible hand within such a measure. A taller, more
slender bifolium suitable for tetrameter verse or stanzaic lampoons
written in short lines could be created by bisecting a whole or half
sheet on the shorter side. Authors’ awareness of these formats must
often have dictated the length of a lampoon: the majority fit neatly
into three handwritten pages with the fourth left blank for a descrip-
tion or address. Many surviving separates exhibit creases from fold-
ing for storage or posting. If sent through the mail, the separate
would bear a circular postmark giving the day and month of dis-
patch. The public postal service offered regular departures from Lon-
don on designated days to major centres in the country and overseas.
From 1680 there was also an efficient penny post within London it-
self. Since mail could lawfully be opened and read in transit by agents
of one of the secretaries of state—and frequently was—it was often
more prudent to send by a friend, servant, or carrier.37 Seals will
sometimes help in identifying a sender, though it was common for the
same individual to use several different seals. Pepys and Sir John Pye
both refer to lampoons being sent ‘sealed up’ in order to prevent in-
spection; however, the secretary’s office possessed a device invented
by Sir Samuel Morland which allowed them to remove and then re-
place seals.38 In some cases addresses or inscriptions are taken over
from a letter into the miscellanies into which the works were tran-
scribed. A text of Lady Harvey’s ‘Take a turd’ in Yale MS Osborn
b 54 is followed by the inscription: ‘To John Chace esq in Henrietta
street, pro Gente Anglicana, sumata Hora nona, die Martis proximo,
cum patientia: March 26: 1679 Rob: Talbor: equite Aur:’ or literally
in English ‘To John Chace esq in Henrietta street, on behalf of the
people of England, acquired at nine o’clock last Tuesday, with
patience. March: 26: 1679 Sir Robert Talbor, bart.’39 Alternatively,
37
For official monitoring of information, see Peter Fraser, The Intelligence of the
Secretaries of State and their Monopoly of Licensed News 1660–1688 (Cambridge:
38
Diary, vii. 407; Yale MS Osborn b 52, i. p. ix, ii. 187.
39
p. 1103. 26 Mar. 1679 was a Wednesday.
the Latin distich ‘pro Gente Anglicana, | sumata Hora nona’ may be
a concealed reference to the parable of the vineyard in Matthew 20.
The ‘cum patientia’ echoes the ‘cum privilegio’ of printed royal
proclamations. The surname of the sender—there being no baronet
of this name, or the more common Talbot—is either mistranscribed,
encoded, or invented. Some kind of disguised political message ap-
pears to be intended—perhaps a Tory or recusant one. In another
source, associated with the scribe Robert Julian, the same poem is
signed ‘R:T:’ and has been transcribed with the address ‘To Mr: John
Chace Apothecary in ordinary to his Matie:’, indicating that the ad-
dress had travelled as part of the text through a series of copyings.40
Chace, then, was probably not the compiler of Osborn b 54. Separ-
ates had a high rate of loss from being carried round in pockets and
passed from hand to hand and because paper, not as freely available
as today, was in constant demand for domestic uses. One might end
its life as a container for coffee beans, supporting a pie crust, or des-
cending a privy. If its contents were regarded as compromising or if,
having lost topicality, it was no longer seen as worth preserving, it
might simply be destroyed. Even serious collectors of lampoons do
not seem to have had much respect for separates once they had tran-
scribed their contents into their personal miscellanies. Anthony
Wood, however, preserved copies of some of the separates which he
entered into his volume of ‘Libells and Songs’. These survived when
the volume itself disappeared from its home in the Ashmolean.41
Separates originated in three ways corresponding to the three prin-
cipal modes of scribal publication.42 Either they were written and cir-
culated by the author of the lampoon or under authorial direction, or
they were copies made for personal use by readers and collectors, or
they were professionally copied for sale. Scribal entrepreneurs, such
as Robert Julian and John Somerton (considered below), offered
both copies of individual poems and bound anthologies of lam-
poons. ‘The Visitt’ gives a vivid portrait of Julian in action, with his
pockets stuffed with lampoon separates, haggling over his fee.43
They might also be acquired from booksellers, such as John Starkey
and Thomas Collins, who in 1675 were running a scriptorium
specializing in parliamentary separates, bootleg copies of state
40
‘Derby’ manuscript, p. 117. Information kindly supplied by Peter Beal.
41
See Kate Bennett, ‘Anthony Wood’s Verse Miscellany “Libells and Songs”: The
Lost MS. Wood E 31’, Bodleian Library Record, 16 (1999), 391–8.
42
On these see Love, SPISCE, 35–89. 43
See pp. 157–8.
documents, and ‘All novells and accurents so penned as to make for

the disadvantage of the King and his affairs’.44 In the same year
Roger L’Estrange, discussing ‘Libells in Writing’, which he regarded
as even more dangerous than the printed kind and ‘well nigh as
Publique’, noted that ‘some certain Stationers are supposed to bee
the chiefe, and profest dealers’.45 On 6 June 1684 and 17 May 1688
Sir John Pye acquired lampoons from the bookseller George
Grafton, whose shop in ‘in Fleetestreete next the diuell tauerne’ was
only a few steps from that of Starkey and Collins.46 Authors unwill-
ing to circulate their own copies could leave an exemplar with such a
trader. ‘The Knight Errant’ (‘Surly mankind has long despised lam-
poon’) ends with exactly such a request:
Dear Julian I can stay to write no more
Disperse this small Revenge of Injur’d Whore47
While aristocratic authors would have made such presentations

gratis, a professional author might have expected payment. Bodleian
MS Firth c 16, a volume of lampoons partly transcribed by Aphra
Behn, has Somerton’s name among a group of addresses noted on the
title page.48 Even a borrowed lampoon, according to a story told of
Joe Haines selling Julian a copy of ‘On the Three Dukes Killing the
Beadle’ (‘Near Holborn lies a park of great renown’), might have
been convertible into cash.49
Professional distribution would seem to have been supplemented
by a debased survival of the medieval practice by which works were
directed to a patron who would arrange for their copying and circu-
lation.50 The guards officer Lenthal Warcup, who is addressed in a
lampoon as a distributor of separates, may have been an example.51
Major patrons such as Dorset and Sedley must often have done
44
Andrew Browning, Thomas Osborne, Earl of Danby and Duke of Leeds
1632–1712, 3 vols. (Glasgow: Jackson, 1944–51), iii. 2–3; SPISCE, 20–2. ‘Novells’
here means novelties.
45
SPISCE, 74.
46
Yale MS Osborn b 52, i, pp. [ix]–[viii]; ii. 206. See also below and SPISCE, 20–1.
47
BL MS Harl. 7319, fo. 212r. Another case is that of ‘The Divorce’, discussed
below.
48
Mary Ann O’Donnell, ‘A Verse Miscellany of Aphra Behn’, English Manuscript
Studies, 2 (1990), 191.
49
Tobyas Thomas, The Life of the Late Famous Comedian, Jo Hayns (London,
1701), 45–6.
50
Discussed in Robert K. Root, ‘Publication before Printing’, PMLA 28 (1913),
417–31.
51
See above, pp. 291–2 and CSR, 159–65.
likewise, even if their intervention amounted to no more than redir-

ecting a piece to one of the professionals. The practice is assumed in
a prefatory letter of 1691 to ‘The Divorce’ (‘You Englishmen all that
are under the curse’), addressed to the patron and lampoon poet
Henry Heveningham, which begins ‘I make bold to send this ballad
to you to publish’.52 The author had thought of approaching others
of the ‘wits, beaux, wags and poets about town’ to perform the same
service—those mentioned by name are Fleetwood Sheppard, Jack
Howe, the Countess of Dorchester, and Sir George Downing.53
Cameron observes that the letter draws a distinction between a
‘notched’ scrivener who had made the copy and the ‘publisher’
whose task was ‘to create the demand for copies of a lampoon’.54
Heveningham, if he took his responsibility seriously, might have
arranged for more separates to be copied, but it would be the
scrivener, still in possession of the exemplar, who would have
profited from this. The fact that this somewhat insulting letter to ‘airy
Harry’ circulated with the poem suggests that it may have failed in its
purpose or had never been meant seriously, but it is easy to imagine
the advantage to an amateur ‘publisher’ of being the first person to
have possession of a new lampoon, which could be read aloud
during visits or over dinner and loaned to friends for copying, and
that authors and scriveners would both have been eager for their
work to come into the hands of acknowledged wits.
In today’s libraries, surviving lampoon separates have mostly been
bound up into volumes, with one edge glued to a stub. An exception
is Yale MS Osborn 108, an assemblage of ninety-one separates of
state satires of 1688–9 which include a number which were written in
London and sent through the post to a reader with the initials ‘C.B.’
or ‘C.M.’ in Dorset.55 The reader’s name has been scored through
every time it occurs but not the address which reveals that he lived at
the home of Sir George Strode. Three of the letters have postmarks.
MS Osborn fb 70 is a similar collection of more diverse origins. Sep-
arates so encountered were often distributed by newsletter-writers or
in correspondence sent to friends or legal clients in the country. God-
frey Thacker, a lawyer, searched at a noble client’s request for separ-
ates of verse by Rochester.56 Otherwise separates passed by hand
52
Text in POASY, v. 316–22. 53
Ibid. 534. 54
Ibid. 535.
55
Cameron, ibid. 533, reads the first name as Christopher.
56
Lucyle Hook, ‘Something More about Rochester’, MLN 75 (1960), 482;
SPISCE, 248.
among acquaintances or were made available at public meeting

places, particularly coffee houses and taverns, where they rested on
tables, alongside printed pamphlets. The prologue to D’Urfey’s
Sir Barnaby Whigg (1681) refers to one such place maintaining a
‘Treason-Table’.57 ‘Utile Dulce’ (‘Muse, let us change our style and
live in peace’) identifies Peters’s coffee house in Covent Garden as a
point of distribution
A tedious elegy may without fear
On Peters’ table lie for seven year;
Not Henningham, nor any critic fop,
Scarce wry-mouthed Tyzard, deigns to take it up.
Bold Wharton hears it read without a frown,
And the author safe, unthreatened, walks the town;
But he that jeers and makes the reader smile,
Whom all find fault with, and yet read him still,
While giddily without respect he flies,
Even those he pleases makes his enemies.58
Where D’Urfey’s table may have been intended primarily for trea-
sonable talk, Peters’s was clearly a repository for verse, especially
lampoons, which might be read aloud as well as silently. It would be
strange if they were not also to be found at barbers’ shops, ordin-
aries, high-class brothels, and other places of assembly. Men’s coats
of the period had large external pockets where separates could be con-
veyed along with billets-doux, wig-combs, and other impedimenta.
From time to time lampoons seem to have been scattered in public
places such as Westminster Hall, which, when they were in session,
housed both the principal law courts and the parliament.59 The anti-
Protestant satire (or anti-Catholic spoof ) ‘Cover le feu ye Huguenots’
is found in two sources with the respective annotations ‘This was
taken up by one Mr Thwaites man a Gentleman in Leeds. Yorks’ and
‘A copy of a libel found in Westminster Hall the last day of Michael-
mas Term 1666. by Mr Twaight’s man a gentleman of Leeds’; how-
ever, this could well be part of the intended text of the piece rather
than an actual record of discovery.60 Numerous short lampoons
claim in their titles to have been posted for reading in public places.61
If we were to take such titles seriously, we would have to assume that
57
Danchin, Prologues and Epilogues, ii/1. 335. 58
CSR, 49–50.
59
Examples at SPISCE, 247.
60
Yale MS Osborn b 52, i. 150 (see also below); BL MS Add. 34362, fo. 26r.
61
SPISCE, 247–8.
life at the palace of Whitehall was continuously enlivened by epi-

grams being attached to doors, thrown through windows, or left on
beds. In poems using the ‘Here lives . . .’or ‘Here lies . . .’ convention,
the act of posting was envisaged during the writing of the piece and
need not actually have been performed; however, an incident
recorded by Sir William Haward shows that it sometimes was:
‘About nyne of the clock at night on Friday being the 26th of
November 1675. This ensuing Distich was found put over the Doore
of the kings new Bedchamber, and taken downe by Francis Rogers page
of the Bedchamber.’62 The public posting of a lampoon in a market
place was an established practice for writers of folk lampoons and no
doubt had its upper-class counterpart.63 Like the statues of Pasquin
and Marforio in Rome, certain public places seem to have become
recognized venues for leaving and seeking lampoons. A lampoon of
1669 collected by the Florentine agent Lorenzo Magalotti contains
the annotation ‘Sir This is all the song it was found scattered up and
down the wits drawing roome at Whitehall’.64 The title of a satire of
1694, ‘When the last of all knights is the first of all knaves’, claims
that it was found ‘under the treason bench in St James’s Park’.65 A
transcription of a poem beginning ‘Vouchsafe o God to hear the
mournful cries’ in Yale MS Osborn b 54 is annotated ‘The preceding
verses in paper, were found in the key-hole of the church door at
St Dunstans in the West, Lond: 1676’.66 A lampoon memorized from
a separate might subsequently be reconsigned to paper from memory
and continue its travels in predictably varied forms. Gross textual
transformations, such as are found in the ‘Song on Danby’ (‘What a
devil ails the parliament’) and ‘Seigneur Dildoe’, can only be ex-
plained on this assumption. It is likely that many individual copies
passed along chains of readers. Once work judged worthy of preser-
vation had been copied into a personal miscellany the original might
be sent to a friend or correspondent. In town it might return to the
pocket or be sold on.
While the majority of separates contain only a single work, space
62
Bodleian MS don. b 8, p. 539.
63
On this see Fox, Oral and Literate Culture, 299–334 passim.
64
Yale MS Osborn fb 66, item 8. The term may be a corruption of ‘withdrawing
room’; however, it is nice to think of a drawing room reserved for wits, and the fact of
distribution is confirmed in either case.
65
Text in POASY, v. 403–4. ‘Treason bench’ is corrupted in some sources to ‘trees
and bench’.
66
p. 867.
left within a bifolium or quarto gathering is sometimes used for a sec-

ond or third. The most interesting of these ‘linked groups’ are those
created by the writing of answer poems and answers to answers.67
Rochester’s lampoon exchanges with Scroope and Mulgrave are of
this kind, as is the group commencing with the ‘Letter of the Duke of
Monmouth to the King’ (‘Disgrac’d undone forlorn made fortune’s
sport’) already discussed.68 Other linked groups grew from for-
tuitous conjunctions that were perpetrated through successive copy-
ings. Such exchanges would sometimes grow to the size of small
booklets, requiring two or more sheets. The repeated appearance of
two lampoons side by side in larger volumes usually indicates that
they had circulated together: the relationship can be tested by colla-
tion. Linked groups might be combined with other freely circulating
lampoons into small booklets which were then copied on into larger
assemblages. Lampoon anthologies can often be collapsed back into
smaller tributary collections through evidence of sequence, author-
ship, topic, or date.
lampoons in miscellanies
and anthologies
Despite most reading of clandestine satire probably taking place

from separates, our principal present-day source is the more robust,
bound personal miscellany and the dedicated scribal anthology of
lampoons. Volumes of the first kind were compiled by readers enter-
ing texts from separates as they came to hand, or as leisure permitted,
while those of the second were mostly the work of professional
scribal publishers, though there are instances, such as Yale Osborn
MS b 54 and Anthony Wood’s lost book of ‘Libells and Songs’, of
lampoon anthologies compiled by private individuals. Professionally
compiled anthologies sometimes survive in non-professional tran-
scriptions. We will begin with volumes assembled by readers.
The collecting urge was a powerful one in scribal culture. In
67
For the answer poem as a lyric genre, see Arthur F. Marotti, Manuscript, Print
and the English Renaissance Lyric (Ithaca, NY: Cornell UP, 1995), 159–71 and E. F.
Hart, ‘The Answer-Poem of the Early Seventeenth Century’, RES, ns 25 (1956),
19–29. Hart’s concluding statement about the decline of the genre in the Restoration
was written without knowledge of the scribal satirical heritage.
68
At pp. 135–6.
personal miscellanies, lampoons sit alongside verse of other kinds,

short prose tracts, facetiae, private letters, prophecies, epitaphs, fu-
nerary inscriptions, prayers, medical ‘receipts’, and transcripts of anti-
quarian records. These often give a vivid sense of the personality of
the collector and how lampoons fitted into the other interests of a
reading life. One of the best known of these volumes, already dis-
cussed in Scribal Publication in Seventeenth-Century England, is
Bodleian MS don. b 8, the massive 721-page miscellany of the
courtier Sir William Haward of Tandridge, which appears to have
been chiefly entered during the 1670s.69 Sir William was appointed in
1641 as a Gentleman of the Privy Chamber in Ordinary to Charles I
and continued in that office under his two sons. In a number of cases
he preserves lampoon versions in the distinctive form in which they
circulated at Whitehall before being distributed to a wider public.70
As Paul Hammond was the first to point out, the order of material in
the volume has broad dating implications.71 However, like other col-
lectors, Haward would frequently interrupt the transcription of cur-
rent materials to insert retrospective ones. Haward’s miscellany is
valuable because, as well as being a resourceful collector with excel-
lent sources, he was a careful scribe with an unfailingly legible hand.
Among the 327 items entered into the miscellany, 152 could be clas-
sified as clandestine satires either in verse or, less frequently, prose.
Their item numbers are as follows, with consecutive groups marked
by square brackets:
29 31 34 [42 43 44 45 46 47 48 49 50 51 52 53 54 55] [60 61 62
63 64 65 66 67 68 69 70 71 72 73] 75 77 [80 81 82] 85 90 93 98
[100 101] [114 115 116 117] [124 125 126 127 128] [150 151 152
153] [171 172 173] 178 [183 184 185 186] 188 [188 (continu-
ation, following 189) 190 191 192 193 194 195 196] 198 202
[208 209] 211 212 [223 224 225] [227 228 229 230] [232 233]
[235 236 237 238] 243 [246 247 248 249 250 251 252 253 254
255 256 257 258 259 260] [263 264 265] 267 269 272 274 [276
277] 279 281 [283 284 285] [287 288 289 290 291 292 293 294
295 296 297 298 299] [301 302 303 304 305 306 307] 309 [312
313 314] 317 [319 320 321] [324 325 326]
69
SPISCE, 211–17.
70
Examples are his texts of ‘Seigneur Dildoe’, ‘A Song on Danby’, and Rochester’s
‘In the Isle of Brittain’.
71
Paul Hammond, ‘The Dating of Three Poems by Rochester from the Evidence of
Bodleian MS don. b 8’, Bodleian Library Record, 11 (1982–5), 58–9.
It will be noticed that lampoons tend to cluster. This could result

from Haward having hoarded up several separates before transcrib-
ing them or from his having transcribed an already existing sub-
collection; but it could also reflect a chronological spike in the
circulation, and presumably writing, of clandestine satires. Parlia-
mentary sessions, by increasing the concentration of grandees in
London, would have been a stimulus. The range of types is wide. The
Rochester canon contributed fifteen items. Most of the painter
poems are present, along with several other ‘Marvellian’ satires.
Since Haward and Marvell were both MPs they may well have
known each other—the collection includes a ‘more blatantly
raunchy’ version of ‘To his Coy Mistress’ which is the only surviving
manuscript of that poem.72 There is a fair representation of regional
and folk-style satires and even a few pre-1660 survivors. Court
satires preserved by Haward include ‘Cary’s face is not the best’,
‘Seigneur Dildoe’ in both an ‘original’ version and a collection
of added stanzas with space left at the end for further additions,
‘Reform dear Queen the errors of your youth’ (dated 1670),
‘Amstrother all men she comes near she engages’, Rochester’s ‘In the
Isle of Brittain’, self-protectively headed ‘A base copy’, and ‘An
horrid anagram’ of ‘dieu et mon droit’ as ‘Vi te demon rodit’. There
are also several satirical epigrams and epitaphs in Latin, including
parodies of distichs written in honour of Louis XIV.
Haward’s interest in satire does not seem to have arisen from any
strong personal political animus but to be an expression of the his-
torical concerns that are abundantly evident from the remainder of
the volume. He clearly saw himself as living in interesting times
whose fugitive records would have the same value for antiquarians
of the future as those left by his predecessors had for him. John
Aubrey, Anthony Wood, and Samuel Pepys (considered as a collect-
or of ballads and other popular printed ephemera) were of a similar
mind, and were right. Haward’s interest in the world around him
was that of a scholar and virtuoso. While his long career as a courtier
(he was still being consulted on points of decorum in William III’s
reign) and his keen interest in heraldry and antiquities indicate a
strong devotion to the court as an institution, he even-handedly
admits texts of all political persuasions, even going as far as to tran-
scribe the fiercely anti-episcopal ‘The Magpie’ and the entire text of
72
Paul Hammond’s phrase, Figuring Sex between Men from Shakespeare to
Rochester (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2002), 223.
the prohibited Fifth Monarchist prophetic text known as ‘The Pan-

ther’. If we are to draw a lesson from this remarkable volume it is that
faithful servants of the crown could still be fascinated by the wide
range of political alternatives that remained actively in play. Clan-
destine satire, which might seem at first hand to be performing an
erasure of complexity, by its fracturing political discourse into a
range of strongly competing univocalities challenged any comfort-
able resting, other than the pragmatic, in a single position. Restor-
ation political culture may have been too polarized to allow
meaningful dialogue between opposed parties but gave every en-
couragement to a practical reconciliation of theoretically unrecon-
cilable opposites. Managed cognitive dissonance became the
condition for dealing with a world in flux.
A second Rochester source, also briefly discussed in Scribal Publi-
cation in Seventeenth-Century England, is the miscellany of the
Cambridge don John Watson. Its contents are nearly all derived from
manuscript circulation. ‘A Poem upon Hunting the Stag by Waller,
in Print’ is included but only in order to introduce a Latin translation
presented to Watson by Thomas Townes on 15 May 1671.73 The
volume is of bibliogeographical importance for the fact that Watson
usually identified the donor of each item and its date of entry; but it
is also a fascinating mirror of a social world in some ways completely
remote from Haward’s but in others intimately linked with it. Watson
was a fellow of Queens’ College, and later vicar of Mildenhall,
Sussex. His album was received as a gift on 5 December 1667 from
the widow of its former owner. On 31 January following, Watson
made a beginning by entering the first of a series of three lyrical
poems by Thomas Flatman—one of which is annotated ‘This printed
since’. The first piece of satirical verse entered is a four-line Latin
piece against Clarendon (‘Pacto uno binis thalamis belloque tri-
formi’), dated ‘Nov: 28: 1667’, which is followed by Watson’s own
English version beginning ‘Dunkirk is sold Dutch French and Dane
our foes’. Having nailed his colours to the mast he had soon added
further topical verse about Clarendon and the church hierarchy. One
of these, beginning ‘Paint me St Alban full of sup and gold’, is an ex-
cerpt from Marvell’s ‘Last Instructions to a Painter’, which survives
in only three other contemporary manuscripts. Watson received it
on 10 July 1668 from Sir Henry North, a member of the family of
73
Fos. 71v–72r.
Dudley North, third Baron North. Sir Henry was a writer himself:
his lost romance Eroclea is referred to both by Watson, who tran-
scribes a song from it, and in two commendatory epistles in Folger
MS V.a.220.74 The oppositional tendency of Watson’s volume is
strengthened by its inclusion of Lord Lucas’s speech in the Lords of
22 February 1670—a forthright attack on the Cabal ministry de-
livered in the king’s presence and later ordered to be burned by the
common hangman.75 However, as a churchman he had no sympathy
for Nonconformists, one of whom, the Cambridge Anabaptist
Stephen Perry, is the subject of a Latin satire by Robert Peachey, a
fellow of Pembroke (‘En Stephanus Perry qui conventicla flagellat’).
Of the 164 items in the Watson miscellany about a third might be
classified as clandestine satires or satiric epigrams. Among these are
two examples of provincial lampoons of a kind undoubtedly widely
practised but only infrequently recorded. The first comes from
Hadleigh in Suffolk, and is supplied by Watson with an appropri-
ately dignified Latin explanation:
83 [64] 56v–57v Libellus scurrilis in Hadleighham Suffolciensem qui Rog:
Wolverton M. D. amandabant, contextus (uti mihi aiebat ipse Rogerus) a
filio eius Rog: An[n]o aetatis 14o. quem apellabat A farewell to the Town of
Hadleigh. (Now, Hadleigh, Adieu)
Fourteen-year-old Roger junior turns out to have been an accom-

plished lampooner. Such pieces are not folk lampoons of the type
considered earlier but the work of provincial literati. A second local
satire appears as item 142:
[107] 112r–113r Blind Man’s Buff: or The New Suffolk way for chusing a
Knight of the Shire viz By subscribing before-hand to vote for such a person
as my Lord-Comr. shall nominate when the day of election shall come. To
the tune of. What you please.76 (‘As through St Edmund’s streets I past’)
These appear in the company of other texts of regional interest, writ-

ings received from members of the North family and a North
retainer, the composer John Jenkins, pieces in English and Latin by
74
pp. 4–7.
75
See Harold Love, ‘Oral and Scribal Texts in Early Modern England’, in J.
Barnard and D. F. McKenzie with Maureen Bell (eds.), The Cambridge History of the
Book in Britain, iv: 1557–1695 (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2002), 97–9.
76
‘What you please’ probably means ‘ad lib’ rather than being the name of an
actual tune. Simpson (British Broadside Ballad, 508) records it as an alternative title
to ‘A New Game of Cards’.
Cambridge writers, and continental neo-Latin pieces. Forty-two

items are designated as having been sent from London by the
compiler’s brother Thomas, an usher at the Charterhouse. A second
brother, Benjamin, also contributed items; others—including an epi-
gram by William Prynne—had been given to Watson by his father.
Other donors are ‘Buckenham M.D.’, Philip Morse (an attorney),
‘Captain Dunbarr’, Sir Henry North and his wife Sara, the Revd
Joseph Matthews, the theologian Simon Patrick (who gave Watson a
copy of Dorset’s ‘Come on ye critics’), Matthew Pool, Henry and
Bridget Paman, ‘Do Smith A.B’, ‘D[ominus] Okely pictor’, Joseph
Arrowsmith, dramatist and fellow of Trinity, Robert Peachey, fellow
of Pembroke, Thomas Townes (‘B. of Physick late of Christe College
in Cambridge’), Samuel Naylour, Thomas Bright, and John Richer
of Christ’s. His copies of two widely circulated poems by Sir William
Spring, ‘Upon the Naked Bedlams and Spotted Beasts we see in
Covent-Garden’ and ‘On the Civil Ladies in the Country’, were
entered as ‘Communicat ab uxore Dris Nath. Rowls Circiter Natal. Dnj
Jesu. 1660’—Watson having forgotten the lady’s actual name, but
not that of her husband. Three poems were by Robert Gaton, a
fellow of Queens’, who hanged himself in his college chamber in
1660. Watson found two of them, a Latin begging poem with an
English translation, in Gaton’s room after the tragedy.77 The third, a
Latin octastich describing a storm, had been given by him to Watson
in 1638. A copy of Sir Kenelm Digby’s farewell to England (‘Farewell
ye gilded follies pleasing troubles’) was from the papers of John
Nightingale, a fellow of King’s. Four pieces were contributed by
Roger Wolverton, already mentioned.
Simple names tell us little and the detailed research that might flesh
out these connections has yet to be conducted; but Watson’s concern
to record them establishes a link between the personal miscellany
and another omnipresent product of the republic of letters, the
album amicorum, in which a scholar would accumulate brief con-
gratulatory texts in the hands of other scholars.78 Watson’s miscel-
lany was never merely a collection of texts but the outcome of
77
‘Carmina (quorum archetypu[m] propriâ illius manu exaratu[m] apud me habeo)
quæ contexuerat (uti videtur statuens iis pro formâ mendicandi uti) Robertus Gaton
A. B. annos agens circiter 43; aterrimâ nec non teterrimâ die laborans melancholiâ, ad
sum[m]am reductus inopiam, paulò antequam se laqueo suspendisset, quæq[ue] super
mensam in camera, quâ misero est fato functus, reperi Novembr: 23o. 1660’ (fo. 45v).
78
On one much travelled example, see Harold Love, ‘Some Bibliographical
Aspects of the Nuyts Album amicorum’, BSANZ Bulletin, 7 (May 1974), 41–3.
relationships in which the donor must often have been more import-
ant to him than the work. In one case we can look further up the
chain of transmission than the immediate donor. On 21 February
1670 Henry Paman of John’s gave Watson a copy of the lampoon
about Charles’s declining interest in the Duchess of Cleveland,
‘When Aurelia first I courted’. (This was the poem, referred to earlier
as scattered in the ‘wits’ drawing room’ at Whitehall.) Three months
later Watson entered an anonymous reply, ‘When by Charles I first
was courted’, which he recorded as ‘Communicat a Da Peregrin
North ex Cath Crofts. May 14: 1670’. Peregrina North, mother of
the politician and Shakespearian scholar Sir Thomas Hamner, was
the daughter of Sir Henry of Mildenhall. Her court correspondent
Catherine Crofts, sister of Lord Crofts, was the mistress of the
elderly Earl of St Albans. She is mentioned in several lampoons as a
court bawd and high-level deal-broker.79 Could Crofts also have
been the source of the excerpt from Marvell’s ‘Last Instructions’ re-
ceived by Watson from Sir Henry? If so it would have been a strange
revenge on her elderly lover.
The entries in Watson’s own hand conclude on 31 May 1673 with
an English translation, sent by brother Thomas, of a previously
entered Latin distich. The remainder of the volume, which includes
poems by Dryden, Buckingham, and Rochester, is in another hand.
It is possible that it had passed by that time to Thomas in London and
that these items came to him through the Master of the Charter-
house, Martin Clifford, Buckingham’s former secretary. An episode
in its later history is given by an annotation ‘Janawary ye 2 day 1726.
Wm sailed from London to ye Iland of Maderah and from thence to
Jamaca’, apparently in the hand of a Mary Bayles. Watson’s world of
donnish jests and celebratory verse, of the country-house culture of
the cultivated North family and their relations, and of communica-
tions from university friends and provincial medical men and attor-
neys seems a world away from Whitehall as it is reflected in the
Haward anthology. Yet there are similarities that allow us to say that
both are parts of a common scribal culture. One of these is that both
compilers were bilingual in English and Latin and that both assidu-
ously collected neo-Latin satires written in Rome against grasping
popes, and Latin inscriptions and satirical epigrams in praise and
79
CSR, 58, 61, 71, 74, 151, 153.
dispraise of Louis XIV.80 Other connections will be considered after

we have discussed two further miscellanies covering much the same
period.
t h e Py e a n d C ow p e r c o l l e c t i o n s
Another compiler who recorded donors of items, though not as con-

sistently as Watson, was Sir John Pye, whose two volumes of collec-
tions are now Yale MS Osborn b 52, vols. i and ii. Pye is of value to
this discussion because of his strong Nonconformist sympathies.
There is always a danger in studying a personal miscellany that what
we might assume to be private views were an artefact of collecting.
Some pieces no doubt found their way into the volumes simply be-
cause they were hot properties, provoking discussion and easily
available; but in Pye’s case, because his miscellany also contains
reading notes of printed books, we can be sure of an ingrained hos-
tility to the post-1660 Anglican settlement.
Pye’s father Sir Robert (1585–1662) was a client of the first Duke
of Buckingham with whose aid he achieved the post of Auditor of the
Exchequer under James I. He married Mary Croker, a Gloucester-
shire heiress. Ben Jonson invokes him in a verse petition about
arrears of salary in the course of which he indicates that Pye senior
‘lov’d the Muses’.81 He hedged his bets during the civil war, at first
supporting the parliament but then giving private assurances to the
king, which unfortunately became public, of his sympathy with the
royalist cause. Meanwhile, his eldest son Robert, John’s elder brother,
made a name as a dashing military leader on the parliamentary
side before likewise falling out of favour. It is likely they were
Presbyterians who came to resent the dominance of Cromwell’s In-
dependents. John, who was born about 1626 and died in 1697,
appears on the evidence of his miscellany to have spent time at Ox-
ford, but never matriculated and may well have been driven away by
the outbreak of hostilities in 1642. Early contributions in the two
volumes have a scholastic ring. They include explications of the
Psalms (written in from the back of the second volume), a summary
80
BL MS Add. 18220, fos. 14v, 20r, 74r, 91r; Bodleian MS don. b 8, pp. 26–31,
475.
81
‘To Master Iohn Burges’, Ben Jonson, ed. C. H. Herford and Percy and Evelyn
Simpson (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1925–52), viii. 231–2.
of the arguments of a Latin disputation conducted at Oxford on

17 December 1641, and notes from a treatise by Milton’s foe
Salmasius on the theology of hairdressing (timely because of Round-
head and Cavalier differences over the matter). From this period too
may date a list, under the heading ‘pro carminibus’, of Latin phrases
intended as themes for verse exercises.
An indication that Pye was interested in a public career is given by
the presence of Robert Cecil, Earl of Salisbury’s much copied ‘The
State of a Secretaryes Place’. That his thoughts were more specifically
turned towards diplomacy is suggested by his inclusion of a tract of
1624 by Sir Robert Cotton on treaties concerned with the Spanish
marriage and the delivery of the palatinate, and ‘Some Notes out of
the Relation of France, Dedicated to his Majesty Anno. 1609’. How-
ever, he is soon transcribing texts concerned with the worsening re-
lationship of king and people. There are extensive notes from ‘A
Dialogue betweene a Counsellor of State and a Country Gentleman
who Serud in the Parl[ia]ment Anno 1621 Written in October at the
Returne of the Prince from Spaine’. We also find the text of a severe
Privy Council judgement of 1637 on a petition against ship money
and ‘The Scotts Manifestation of the Lawfulness of there Expedition
into England. Anno 1640’. These were in a broad sense oppositional
documents; and yet among the academic materials written from the
back of volume i Pye has included Archbishop Laud’s Latin letter to
the University of Oxford of 6 November 1640 accompanying the
donation of manuscripts and the university’s reply. All these appear
to have been entered before the age of 17.
There is now a gap in the dates of entries resulting from a long
European journey which, beginning in February 1643, kept Pye from
England for more than three years. His ‘Breife Narrative of my
Trauells’82 at the end of the first volume is baldly uninformative,
being almost entirely concerned with distances, times, and fares, and
giving only the most cursory accounts of his impressions of places
and persons. Although it makes no mention of him being accompan-
ied, a young man of his age and wealth would hardly have travelled
without a tutor and servant. No doubt some of Pye’s brevity was de-
liberate: more detailed records carried with him might have left him
open to accusations of spying. The notes reveal a cautious traveller,
82
MS Osborn b 52, i. 194–[205]. This is a retrospective summary based on earlier
memoranda. An account of his arrival in Holland pasted onto the second front end-
paper has more sense of being an actual travel document.
careful not to be cheated and lodging wherever it was possible at an

English inn. Even at Genoa, at a time when he should have been a
hardened grand-tourist, he preferred ‘one Zachary’s an English
house his wife a dutchwoman’. No doubt access to home news was a
factor. If the tour included any life-transforming experiences they are
not revealed to us by the reticent teenager, nor do we encounter any
evidence of the Rabelaisian sense of humour evident from his later
choice of texts for transcription. The vital Italian leg of his trip is
crowded onto half a page from which careful inspection is needed
even to establish that he visited Rome and Naples, with nothing re-
vealed about his experiences in either.
The great danger facing a young British man of family travelling in
Europe was not so much that he might be cast into the Bastille, mar-
ried to a courtesan posing as a countess, cheated of all he possessed at
dice, or murdered by a bravo for his cloak, as that he might be se-
duced from Protestantism to Romanism. A slip pasted in at the be-
ginning of volume i, unfavourably comparing indiscriminate
continental massacres of Protestants with the temperate executions
of Catholics conducted by British monarchs, always after a more or
less fair trial, looks like briefing notes for a debate with some foreseen
proselytizer. Presumably for the same reason it was decided that his
tour should begin in Protestant Holland and then move quickly to
France where Protestants still enjoyed freedoms under the Edict of
Nantes, and that he would spend time at each of two Protestant uni-
versities, Leiden in the Netherlands and Saumur in France. At Utrecht
he lodged with the scholar Hendrik Born, who presented him with an
album leaf originally inscribed by Daniel Heinsius to his son the great
scholar Nicholas Heinsius, and then by the younger Heinsius to
Born. A gift of this kind, meant for incorporation in an album ami-
corum, was also a certification of Pye’s admission to the republic of
letters as it has been conceptualized by Anne Goldgar.83 However,
there is no other mention of meetings with scholars. Visiting Huizen
Pye had noted sniffily that the inhabitants were ‘almost all Papists’
but crossing into the Spanish Netherlands he seems to have accom-
modated himself well to his new religious environment. Inspecting
the Jesuits’ college at Antwerp he was impressed to find that the 600
students ‘lye single and drinke in seuerall cups’—presumably Oxford
was different. At Ghent he called at the English Benedictine nunnery,
83
Anne Goldgar, Impolite Learning: Conduct and Community in the Republic of
Letters 1680–1750 (New Haven: Yale UP, 1995).
founded in 1624, and saw ‘Mrs Roper Lady Abbesse . . . Dame Mag-
dalen Digby and Dame Constantia Riuers’. Crossing from Flushing
to Dieppe, Pye spent three weeks at Paris, staying at the pension ‘a la
croix d’or viz au viz au college de Sorbonne’, then moved to Blois,
where he spent two and a half months, and next Saumur where he
stayed from 27 December 1644 to 21 April 1645. He also visited
towns near Saumur, including Loudun ‘where are the exorcised
Nuns’.84 At Angers he ‘lodgd au cheval blanc a protestants house’.
Visiting the Île de Ré, the scene of his father’s patron’s famously un-
successful attempt to intervene in the Wars of Religion, he noted
proudly that ‘the English slew 18. French counts at there landing
Anno 1627’. At Marennes he recorded that ‘the daughter of the
Countesse of Marennes is the handsomest woman in France’, but
without telling us whether this knowledge came from repute or direct
observation. Béziers, too, was ‘well peopled and handsome women’.
He also sought out relics. At St Martin’s in Angers he saw ‘the vrne
held the water our Sauiour turnd into wine’. At St Sernin’s at
Toulouse there were ‘the bodies of 8 of the Apostles’ as well as ‘one
of the stones wherwith St Stephen was stoned’ with ‘the blood . . . still
vpon it’. It is hard to assess the spirit of these two entries.
Returning to England early in 1646 Pye found the war ended and
the country reorganized under the parliament. The next step for a
young man of his class was marriage, which took place on 27 Febru-
ary 1649 to Rebecca Raynton. The album seems to have remained
untouched between his departure in 1643 and 1656, the date at-
tached to a funeral oration on Elizabeth, Countess of Essex. This is
followed by excised pages which originally contained Silas Titus’
anti-Cromwellian diatribe ‘Killing no Murder’. Pye’s index reference
to this is annotated ‘Torn out, have it in print—September 73’. Next
come ‘A True Copy of the Protectors Letter to Cardinall Mazzarini’,
a letter concerning Earl of Digby’s embassy to Spain in the reign of
James I, and a poem satirizing Sir Kenelm Digby’s account of ‘a town
near Tripoli in Barbary turned with all the things in it into stone’. For
the first time Pye specifies a source: ‘Had this of Ja: Howell. 1o Aprili.
1658 teste Wm Legg. and vxvx sent him (as he sayd) from Venice.’85
84
From the famous possession episode which was the subject of Aldous Huxley’s
The Devils of Loudun (1952).
85
‘Vxvx’ may be a code of some kind. It may indicate the Roman numerals v x v x
or v xv x. The latter would give the alphabetical equivalent E.P.K. Or perhaps Pye
could not remember.
The index identifies Howell, the witty author of the Epistolae Ho-
ellianae, as the poet. This is followed by a collection of seventy-four
‘Choicest English proverbs collected out of Howell’s Tetragl. and
Fuller’s Worthies’. The appearance of a Latin tetrastich dated 1663
is our first indication that the Restoration had taken place, Pye hav-
ing made no explicit comment on it. No doubt for Pye, as with many
royalist Presbyterians, the choice between acquiescence in or oppos-
ition to the Restoration settlement was not made in 1660 but only
after the unveiling of Clarendon’s new ecclesiastical policy in 1662.
Despite his acquiring a baronetcy on 13 January 1665, we find him
making copious extracts from Ralph Wallis’s More News from
Rome or Magna Charta Discoursed of (London, 1666). Wallis, ‘the
Cobbler of Gloucester’, had been the object of a long pursuit by
Roger L’Estrange, during which he continued to issue surreptitious
attacks on the church hierarchy. Finally apprehended, he escaped
punishment by promising to ‘scribble as much against the fanatics’.86
Pye made approving copies of anecdotes such as that of R. Beest
‘whose mother told me, that since he had been Bishopd [i.e. accepted
Anglican ordination] he was turn’d common drunkard and swearer
and would beate his wife’ and ‘Mr Page of Ledbury, who the first day
he went to reade Common prayer, was smitten dumbe, and neuer
spoke since’.87 Such choices, more telling than the transcription of
whole works, place Pye firmly in the anti-prelatical party, though he
was liberal enough to follow it with extracts from works by Henry
More and Edward Stillingfleet.
So far there are no lampoons; but from the time of the Black
Bartholomew they become a prominent element in Pye’s transcrip-
tions. One of the earliest was written on blank portions of i. 86–7,
following the funeral oration on the Countess of Essex, and then ex-
cised. The last few lines of the oration continue onto p. 86. Pye cut
away the lower part of the leaf at this point and then carefully
crossed out the text on the verso but enough is visible to show that
the deleted matter included the court lampoon ‘Cary’s face is not the
best’ (aka. ‘Said Roger to his brother clown’). The index lists it as
‘Verses or ballad on all the maids of honour. Anno 1664’. That Pye,
having copied the piece, later thought it prudent to remove it is under-
standable: what is unknown is the stages by which what was ori-
ginally a very exclusive court lampoon found its way into the album
86
CSP (Dom) 1664–5, 156–7. 87
p. 30. Cf. Wallis, More News, 32.
of a Puritanically inclined reader with no known connection with the

court, and who would have read it not as a courtier’s in-joke but as
anti-court propaganda. Nonconformists had ways of obtaining such
material (possibly via intermediate transmission at the Inns of Court)
and efficient means of circulating it among their own people (pos-
sibly through scriptoria associated with coffee houses). A report of
the late 1660s charges ‘The Independents and Anabaptists with some
of the fiercer Presbyterians’ with eagerness ‘to disperse any scandalous
Verses of which many have been abroad of late’.88 Pye’s index anno-
tation ‘Hampden Pye gave them to Tho: Mould’ suggests that the
piece was being circulated among his extended family.
Pye’s contacts continued to bring him court lampoons and state
satires, which appear intermingled with his other transcriptions or
squeezed into pre-existing blank spaces, as happened with ‘Claren-
don had law and sense’ (i. 135), here without title. The poem is an-
notated ‘Dr Stillingfleet his sermon of the mischief of separation.
2. May. 1680. Ra: Gregge. iunr. 22th. July. 1680’. The reference is to
a stanza that occurs in no other manuscript source of this highly
various poem, though it did find its way into POAS (1702–7) as an
isolated epigram.89
Thus haue I seene the Deane of Pauls
Irenicon withdrawn
Shifting about to blow the Coales
of Rome against dissenting Soules,
And all for sleeves of lawne.
Pye had earlier made transcriptions from Stillingfleet’s Origines

Sacrae (1662) and must surely have approved of his Irenicum, a
Weapon-Salve for the Churches Wounds (London, 1661) in which
he advocates comprehension between Anglicans and Presbyterians;
but in The Mischief of Separation, preached before the Lord Mayor
on 11 May 1680, the by then dean had adopted a church-supremacist
position. Here, then, is a version of a political satire specifically
augmented for a Nonconformist readership. It is hardly surprising
that Pye should also acquire ‘Cover le feu ye Huguenots’. He supple-
ments the ‘Thwaites’ source, recorded earlier, with his immediate
one: ‘I had it from Mr Robt Twisse. Min[ister] of the new Chappell
88
‘The State of the Non-conformists in England soon after the Restoration. From
a MS in the Possession of Thomas Astle Esq’, BL MS Stowe 185, fo. 175r–v.
89
‘On Dr. Stil——fleet Dean of St. Paul’s’, iii. 215.
Tuthill streete. Westm[nste]r—Wensday. 4th Dec[embe]r. 1666’.

His two descriptive notes, ‘By the Papists after that dreadful conflag-
ration at London’ and (in the table of contents) ‘Papists threat in
verse’, show he had no suspicions about its genuineness. The re-
maining part of the first volume includes a good coverage of ‘Mar-
vellian’ satires concerned with the fall of Clarendon and the growth
of parliamentary opposition to the crown. Pye also copied out the
articles of impeachment against Clarendon and the Commons’ vote
against the Lords’ obstructiveness. The ‘Further Advice to a Painter’
of 1671 (‘Painter, once more thy pencil reassume’) is described as a
‘Satyr on the parliament very witty’. The furiously anti-monarchical
‘Nostradamus Prophecy’ (‘The blood of the just, London’s firm
doom shall fix’) is, perhaps self-protectively, labelled ‘A vile satyr’—
still he had taken the trouble to copy it out together with an unlikely
attribution to ‘Poet Bayes’.90 Tucked in at the very end of the volume
are some stanzas from ‘A History of Insipids’ (‘Chaste pious prudent
Charles the second’). On pp. 182–5 we find ‘Ld Lucas his Speech. Ao
1670’, a key text for the emergence of the Country Party that was
also copied by John Watson and Sir William Haward. The forward
pagination of the first volume ends with a group of retrospective
pieces of diplomatic and antiquarian interest, the narrative of Pye’s
travels already referred to, and a table of contents.
The first 108 pages of Pye’s second volume are occupied by a com-
plete text of Ralegh’s ‘A Dialogue between a Counsellor of State and
a Justice of the Peace’ (also known as The Prerogative of Parlia-
ments), a work read by both Puritans and Whigs as a justification of
principled opposition to the crown. The transcription is not in Pye’s
hand but has been very closely corrected by him. The piece that im-
mediately follows is a revealing departure from the reigning tradition
of political lampoon—a solemn, religious state poem in twenty-three
stanzas called ‘A Parallell betweene Jerusalem and England’, which
predicts that ‘the Pope with ease may take the Bishops crowne’ but
also lays part of the blame on ‘Presbyter John’. The remainder of the
volume includes further state lampoons in the Marvellian tradition
and Rochester’s ‘Tunbridge Wells’ and ‘Upon Nothing’. These rub
shoulders with other political texts, a number of which are in French
or about France, along with trivia and facetiae. On pp. 170–3 there
90
Text in POASY, i. 185–9. Lord ascribes it ‘tentatively’ to John Ayloffe.
is a complete text of ‘A History of Insipids’ to supplement the in-

complete one of the first volume. The anti-royalist emphasis is over-
whelming. In ‘Ld Lucas his Ghost’ (‘From the bright Regions of
eternall day’) the three Stuart monarchs are summed up as
A Coward Scott, a Sodomite of Hell
A Rehoboam matchd with Jesabell
A lustfull satyre, heyre to all there Crimes
Hells Masterpiece, Monster of all Times
The poet’s attitude to the Restoration is also clear cut:

Curst be the man that by his blacke design
Restored to us this Exiled scottish line91
That Pye repeatedly gave space and time to such views suggests that
he was in broad sympathy with them, and that the Revolution of
1688 was a welcome event. The last item entered was ‘The Great
Bastard Protector of the little one. Done out of French. Printed at
Cologne. 1689’, a conjoined assault on the paternities of Louis XIV
and the infant Prince of Wales.92
As we have seen, Pye often indicates his sources for his material
and it is time now to consider what the annotations tell us about the
circulation of separates, and especially lampoons. Living at Twick-
enham, Pye obtained several items from neighbours.93 These in-
cluded Richard Boyle, second Earl of Burlington (misspelled
Bridlington by Pye) who on 5 August 1684 presented him ‘by Ed-
ward Page’ with a French ‘Epitaph upon the Duke of Monmorancy’
and ‘Mr Ellasby Minr of Chiswick’ who on 18 September 1680 gave
him a copy to transcribe of ‘Rochester’s Farewell’ (‘Tired with the
noisome follies of the age’), to which Pye added the further annota-
tion ‘Returnd ye originall to him agen 22th Septbr. by ye boy sealed
vp’. His most copious source, Ralph Gregge junior, who presented
him with five items overall (four of them Whig lampoons and the
fifth a letter from the Earl of Shaftesbury to the Earl of Carlisle), lived
at nearby Hammersmith. An annotation to an epigram copied from
‘the glass window of Neville Poole’s chamber in Ald. Bard’s house’
91
pp. 141–2.
92
The Cologne imprint is clearly spurious. There were several reprints.
93
The record of his baronetcy styles him ‘of Mortlake’. His son Charles was ‘of
Turnham Green, Chiswick’. However, Pye’s will, which reveals him to have possessed
considerable wealth, describes him as of Twickenham. The family also had country
estates near Derby.
first locates the house in Chiswick and then on further reflection in

Hammersmith. Three suppliers seem to have been relatives, one de-
scribed as ‘Cosen Ambrose Scudamore’, another Thomas Rainton,
presumably a member of his wife’s family, and the third Hampden
Pye who relayed ‘Cary’s face’ via Thomas Mould. A fourth, ‘Cousin
Ricd. Daniel’, who gets in as an author, was no doubt also the sup-
plier (ii. 198). Other donors mentioned by name are ‘Sr John What-
ton’ (i. 120), Colonel Clancy (i. 120), Juliana Sherwyn, who gave Pye
his copy of Marvell’s ‘The King’s Speech’ (ii. 131–3), and ‘Mr Knox
painter’ (ii. 159). The fact that Thomas Watson had also received
two items from a painter (Okely) could indicate that separates were
kept to be read by sitters. Portrait painters’ studios were also social
gathering places. While lampoon separates were certainly available
commercially, there are only two records of Pye acquiring one in this
way. The first (‘ ’Twere folly if ever’) is described as follows:
I had this Ballad of a bookeseller at the miter in Fleetestreete next the divell
taverne (whose name I know not) on fryday Afternoone 6th June. 1684 And
returnd it him agen next morning by my Coachman sealed up under a
Covert: wherein was written 7 June 1684. I here enclosed returne you the
Paper I had yester[day] from you, which I do not thinke on second reading
to be so witty, as I thought it at first; And in some places I can’t make sense
of it.94
The stationer is identified in the annotation to ‘A Letany for ye holy

time of Lent’ (‘From all the women we have whored’): ‘I had the ori-
ginall of this Letany of George Grafton Bookseller at the miter in
Fleetestreete fryday—May. 17th. 1688.’
Despite his Puritan sympathies and the reserve of his only ex-
tended personal document, Pye was far from a prude. His collection
includes Alexander Brome’s singularly gross piece ‘On Mr Robt
Napier a lawyer’s kissing of my Ld John Butler’s breech for a Guiny,
who he beshit for his paines at Orchard. Ao. 1665’. Late in the sec-
ond volume he transcribed the entire text of the hilarious Latin spoof
‘An omnis sensus est tactus’, originally delivered as a terrae filius
speech by Henry Gerard at the opening of the Sheldonian Theatre in
1669 (and for which he was immediately sent down).95 What is
important about the Pye volumes is the evidence they give of the
94
pp. ix–viii.
95
Text and translation in Felicity Henderson, ‘Putting the Dons in their Place’,
History of Universities, 16 (2000), 32–64.
circulation of lampoons and state satires by Nonconformists, in-

cluding, in two cases, Nonconformist clergy, for whom they were a
political weapon against the established Church and the monarchy.
It is likely that this circulation extended to the large number of out-
wardly conforming Anglicans who regarded the bishops as collab-
orators in the spread of popery. Viewed from this perspective, the
lampoon was not a carnivalesque form whose effect was to defuse
ideological tension but a means to strip the organs of state of dignity.
By contrast the satires contained in the miscellanies assembled by
Sarah Cowper, the great-grandmother of the poet, are more obvi-
ously part of a considered programme of personal self-cultivation.
Her many volumes of collections among the Panshanger Papers in
the Hertfordshire Record Office, now available in a microfilm
edition by Adam Matthew publications, make her one of the best-
documented readers of her century.96 These volumes contain reading
notes, original writings, and diaries, together with transcripts of all
kinds of scribally circulated texts, including a good representation of
clandestine satires. The latter are contained in the manuscripts D/EP
F36 and F/37, the first titled ‘Poems Collected at several Times from
the year 1670’ and the second, ‘The Medley’. Cowper had links with
the Buckingham circle of scribally publishing poets, both through
her husband Sir William, a client and political ally of Buckingham,
and through Martin Clifford, Buckingham’s secretary, for whom he
secured the Mastership of the Charterhouse. The Cowpers lived in
Charterhouse Yard, and constant references to Clifford in her vol-
umes make clear that he was a close friend.97 In compiling ‘The Med-
ley’, Cowper appropriated material from a large alphabetically
arranged collection of epigrams, similes, and prose maxims that was
probably by Clifford or a joint work of Clifford and Buckingham.98
That she herself believed that Clifford was the author is made clear
by her marking the first item of each new section with ‘M.C.’ Blank
pages left at the end of the alphabetical sections were later filled in
with poems by Rochester, Buckingham, and Oldham and miscellan-
eous pieces of a later date. D/EP F36 intermingles satires from the
96
For her life see Anne Kugler, Errant Plagiary: The Life and Writing of Lady
Sarah Cowper 1644–1720 (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford UP, 2002).
97
Their relationship is discussed in Harold Love, ‘How Personal is a Personal
Miscellany?’, in R. C. Alston (ed.), Order and Connexion (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer,
1997), 111–26.
98
A reconstructed text of this work is to appear in the forthcoming Oxford edition
of Buckingham edited by Robert D. Hume and Harold Love.
1670s and 1680s with material from the mid-1690s to the middle
years of Anne. Much of the latter probably came from Cowper’s
large, politically active family. Her husband may also have con-
tributed: the first item in F36, ‘On the Bencher’s Boghouse Looking
to the Water Side’ (‘Here poor mean commons and exceeding high’),
is signed ‘W.C.’
In her religious old age, Cowper became embarrassed by her col-
lections. At the beginning of ‘The Medley’ she apologizes, ‘If in the
Dayes of my youth, I had not Diverted my Thoughts with such stuff
as this Book Contains; the unhappy Accidents of my Life, had been
more than Enough to ha’ made me Madd.’ A later hand has added a
supercilious ‘stuff indeed!’ but we are in her debt that she did not suc-
cumb to the temptation of destroying a collection which is equal in
importance to Haward’s and extends to a much later date than the
other three considered. We have seen earlier that some women wrote
or adapted lampoons and that others contributed information for
them. It has also been assumed that they read them with interest as
sources of gossip and that the (usually) male writer may sometimes
have been the intermediary agent in social hostilities conducted be-
tween women principals. The case of Cowper illustrates another way
in which women might become interested in clandestine satire—not
as a conduit for gossip, in which she shows little interest, but as a
branch of literature in its own right and a source of political under-
standing. Pye, by contrast, includes little in his two volumes that is
not an expression of a practical, ideologically charged engagement
with the political world, felt by a man whose religious views had ef-
fectively excluded him from a public career. Haward’s perspective is
more that of a historian and antiquarian placed in an advantageous
position for collecting fugitive documents. For Watson, in yet an-
other contrast, scribal texts were primarily a record of affiliations
with their authors or presenters.
Having said this, we have also to acknowledge that all four were
members of a common culture and transcribed a number of texts in
common. In the list that follows the siglum BLa20 is used for
Watson, HRO for Cowper, Od8 for Haward, and Yo52 for Pye.
Exact comparison is made impossible by the differing size of collec-
tions, with BLa20 containing 164 distinguishable items, HRO36 92
(HRO37 is unsummable owing to the mass of epigrams, maxims,
and similes); Od8 a whopping 327, and Yo52 147. Time range
also differs, with Pye collecting over nearly four decades to 1689,
Cowper over at least three to about 1705, Haward concentrated in

the 1670s, and Watson active for only six years, ending at 1673.
Nonetheless, it is evident that certain texts of the late 1660s and early
1670s, along with others from an earlier period entered retrospect-
ively, possessed a particular attractiveness that led them to be tran-
scribed even by the youngest of the collectors, Sarah Cowper. Items
are identified by first lines only. Further information is added in
brackets.
BLa20/HRO/Od8
‘Under this stone doth lie’ [Buckingham’s elegy on Fairfax.]
BLa20/Od8/Yo52
‘My lords | When by the providence of almighty God’ [Speech by Lord
Lucas.]
‘Prorogued on prorogation damned rogues and whores’ [Satire on Bucking-
ham and the Cabal.]
HRO/Od8/Yo52
‘Nothing thou elder brother e’en to shade’ [Rochester’s ‘Upon Nothing’.]
BLa20/HRO
‘Here stand I’ [Epigram by Buckingham.]
‘Well Sir ’tis granted I said Dryden’s rhymes’ [Rochester’s ‘An Allusion to
Horace’.]
BLa20/Od8
‘Come on ye critics find one fault who dare’ [Mock-complimentary epistle
by Dorset.]
‘Here lies the corpse of William Prynne’ [Mock-epitaph.]
‘In all humility we crave’ [Mock-petition to Charles II.]
‘O Birkenhead how hast thou tired thy muse’ [Satire by Robert Wild.]
‘Right trusty and well beloved Madam Cresswell’ [Prose lampoon on Town
bawds and Cleveland.]
‘The wonderful year 1672 seems France to resolve’ [Prose prophecy attrib.
Ruhold.]
BLa20/Yo52
‘Cantavit gallus flet apostolus aspice flentem’ [Satirical epigram on Louis
XIV and the pope.]
‘Now whilst Whitehall wears black and men do fear’ [Mock-elegy.]
‘When daring Blood his rents to have regained’ [Epigram attrib. Marvell.]
‘When the plate was at pawn and the fob at an ebb’ [State lampoon.]
HRO/Yo52
‘At five this morn when Phoebus raised his head’ [Rochester’s ‘Tunbridge
Wells’.]
HRO/Od8
‘Here lies George Monck’ [Mock-epitaph.]
‘Since the sons of the muses grew clamorous and loud’ [Lampoon on the
poets.]
‘Sir I have not presumed in any manner to approach your royal presence’
[Letter from Clarendon to the king.]
‘Were I who to my cost already am’ [Rochester’s ‘Against Reason and
Mankind’.]
Od8/Yo52
‘As cities that to the fierce conqueror yield’ [State lampoon.]
‘As t’other night in bed I thinking lay’ [State lampoon.]
‘Chaste pious prudent Charles the second’ [State lampoon, attrib. by Lord to
John Freke.]
‘Clarendon had law and sense’ [State lampoon.]
‘Disgraced undone forlorn made fortune’s sport’ [State lampoon.]
‘Duke Lauderdale that lump of grease’ [State lampoon.]
‘From the blessed region of the eternal day’ [State lampoon.]
‘Here’s a house to be let for the Stuart hath swore’ [State lampoon.]
‘I’ll tell thee Dick where I have been’ [State lampoon.]
‘My lords and gentlemen You may remember at my meeting of this session’
[Mock-speech by the king, attrib. Marvell.]
‘Painter once more thy pencil reassume’ [State lampoon in ‘Advice’ tradition.]
‘Pride lust ambition and the people’s hate’ [State lampoon against
Clarendon.]
‘Spread a large canvas painter to contain’ [State lampoon in ‘Advice’
tradition.]
‘Ten crowns at once and to one man and he’ [Satire by Robert Wild.]
‘That he hath advised the king to raise a standing army’ [Articles against
Clarendon.]
‘The blood o’th’ just London’s firm doom shall fix’ [State lampoon in form
of mock-prophecy.]
‘Tired with the noisome follies of the age’ [‘Rochester’s Farewell’.]
The remarkable thing about this list is that nearly all the items com-
mon to two or more of a group of collections which individually em-
brace a wide variety of scribally transmitted genres are state poems
and clandestine satires. These were the classics not simply of their
own genre but of scribal publishing overall. That Buckingham’s
elegy on his father-in-law Fairfax is in three of the collections may be
the effect of two of the collectors having direct links with the duke’s
circle; yet the poem was also a political testament, stressing its
author’s links with Nonconformity and the North. The three oc-
currences of Lucas’s famous speech and the anti-Buckingham
‘Prorogued on prorogation’ testify both to the force of the ‘country’

opposition to the Cabal and to the astonishing reversal that subse-
quently took place when the emergence of a greater foe in York
turned Shaftesbury and Buckingham from villains into heroes.
Rochester was predictably the most popular poet, with concord-
ances for four of the major satires present; but inclusion of two
works by Robert Wild is just as striking, since his verse was easily
available in print.
Each of these personal miscellanies, and the many others that sur-
vive, would profit from fuller exploration than is possible here.
There are no sources apart from personal letters and diaries that
bring us closer to late seventeenth-century readers.
p ro f e s s i o n a l c o py i n g o f l a m p o o n s
a n d t h e s c r i ba l a n t h o l o g y
We have already seen that separates were extensively copied as an

article of commerce. Owing to the low rate of survival of both com-
mercial and non-commercial separates and the total absence of
production records, not much can be learned directly of this aspect
of the lampoon trade; however, the work of professional scribes and
entrepreneurs is also on display in larger anthologies of lampoons, of
which over a hundred survive from our period, either as originally
written or in copies by readers from lost originals. The gestation of
such collections can often be traced from the order of their contents.
All derive ultimately from separates. In some of the best-known
cases, including that of the Cameron scriptorium, the separates ap-
pear to have been held in bundles that might be reordered or intern-
ally shuffled between copyings. In the case of ‘rolling’ archetypes
new separates were regularly added and old ones withdrawn, allow-
ing the resultant anthologies to be dated with regard to each other. In
other cases the archetype was a bound volume, encouraging a greater
consistency in order and content between the products of the scrip-
torium. A new anthology might be created either by copying archival
material into an already bound blank volume or by writing it sheet
by sheet and only binding it when the volume was completed. The
second method was much more efficient when two or more scribes
were involved in the production of a scribal edition, since sheets
edited and styled by the principal scribe were immediately available
for copying by an assistant. In this way several volumes might be in

production concurrently. However, rapid multiple production was
probably more called for with separates than with the larger vol-
umes, which were luxury goods intended for sale at high prices. In
many cases intermediate collections intervene between the separate
and the anthology. Edinburgh MS Dc 1 3 is a sequence of six collec-
tions, each with its own title page—perhaps the archive of a scriptor-
ium.99 In some cases small surviving collections recur as elements of
larger collections. Thus, a booklet from the ‘Gyldenstolpe’ scriptor-
ium, closely related in both order and contents to Nottingham Uni-
versity Library Pw V 32, served as copy for the opening leaves of
Princeton MS Taylor 3.100
In approaching any particular volume the vital question is how
and why its contents were brought together at the time of copying. In
the case of the personal miscellany, answers may be given by the
interests and life experiences of the collector, and our knowledge of
the broader scribal communities in which he or she participated; but
in the case of the professionally written anthology, sources are gener-
ally untraceable and the primary motive for inclusion or exclusion
must have been commercial. Ideological considerations entered only
when a collection was deliberately slanted towards a buyer of Whig,
Tory, or Jacobite sympathies, as in the case of Yale MS Osborn
b 111, an anthology of Jacobite lampoons written for presentation to
the exiled James II. Most commercial anthologies accommodate
pieces of widely differing political viewpoints. This may be an ex-
pression of their post hoc quality as a secret history of the recent past:
some emphasize this interest by attaching dates (not always reliable)
to their items and arranging them in presumed chronological order.
At other times the mixing of viewpoints reflects the same managed
cognitive dissonance that we saw in Haward’s selection of items for
his personal miscellany. In every case we need to contextualize the
process of compilation to the fullest extent possible, as was mem-
orably done by David M. Vieth for Yale MS Osborn b 105 and by
W. J. Cameron in the fifth volume of POASY.101
The most celebrated among the professional suppliers of clandes-
tine manuscripts was Robert Julian, who was also a topic and
99
The ‘Milne’ MS, discovered by Peter Beal, is in the same hand.
100
For further examples, see SPISCE, 259–70.
101
In David M. Vieth, Attribution in Restoration Poetry (New Haven: Yale UP,
1963), passim.
addressee of lampoons.102 Julian enters history as the secretary to a

naval hero of the Dutch wars, Sir Edward Spragge. A number of
letters written by him on Spragge’s behalf survive in the Public
Record Office and other sources. The position of the secretary to an
admiral, as Sprague became, was a very responsible one, and not to
be given to a drunkard, as Julian is sometimes represented.103 One in-
cident in his naval career is recorded in ‘The Cabal’, a lampoon of
1680 written in a strange mixture of styles, but drawing on excellent
political information. In a passage referring to Shaftesbury we find:
Like a vile sculler he abjures the realm,
And sinks the bark ’cause he’s not chief at helm;
Then cries, All hands! to pump a leakish keel,
And stops it up with Julian’s conger-eel.
That when a ball pierc’d the broadside, e’en then
Clapp’d in the hole, and sav’d Sir Edward’s men.104
This would seem to refer to the ship being holed beneath the waterline
and the hole being plugged by some device invented by Julian, which
resembled an eel. In battle his position was at the admiral’s side on the
quarterdeck ready to write dispatches. When in the Four Days Battle
against the Dutch of June 1666 Rochester was sent by Spragge in a
small boat with a message to another ship, it was probably written by
Julian. When at the battle of 11 August 1673 Spragge twice changed
his flagship, Julian would presumably have accompanied him. If so,
he would have been a survivor when the boat overturned and Spragge
was drowned. Since his secretary’s post was a personal one, not a of-
ficial part of the naval establishment, it ceased at that moment.
Our next knowledge of Julian comes from an undated letter to
Dorset. Since the loss of his ‘dear Master’ he had been imprisoned for
debt and was temporarily bailed to attempt a composition with his
creditors.105 He may have met Dorset, then Lord Buckhurst, during
the latter’s sea service in October 1664 or May 1672. It is tempting
to think that the appeal led to his being given scribal work by Dorset
102
For his career see Beal, In Praise of Scribes, 20–30 and Love, SPISCE, 253–9,
266–7.
103
According to N. A. M. Rodger, an admiral’s secretary was ‘less a private
amanuensis than the business manager of the squadron’ (The Wooden World: An
Anatomy of the Georgian Navy (London: Fontana, 1988), 18).
104
POASY, ii, 331.
105
Text in Brice Harris, Charles Sackville, Sixth Earl of Dorset, Patron and Poet of
the Restoration (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1940), 178–9.
and his circle and this in turn to his making private sales of their
verse, which is strongly present in the list of his wares given in ‘The
Visitt’. By 1681, according to the prologue to The London Cuckolds,
he was employing two clerks to help him in transcribing.106 How-
ever, Julian’s most remarkable public presence was through a sub-
genre of lampoons constructed as letters addressed to him in person.
A listing of the Julian poems has been given by Hugh Macdonald107
and a fuller account is awaited from Peter Beal. The series may have
originated from a tiff between Julian and members of the Dorset
circle over his circulation of Mulgrave and Dryden’s attack on them
in ‘An Essay upon Satyr’, which ‘The Visitt’ claims was suppressed in
return for a bribe.108 The ‘letters’ are mostly of the conventional,
episodic type already discussed, but in their introductions they con-
vey quite a deal of, no doubt heightened, biographical information.
The best known of these, attributed to Dryden and less persuasively
Buckingham, but more probably by Dorset, grew out of the
Rochester–Scroope verse controversy. It opens with an extended
metaphor in which lampoons are compared to faeces and Julian’s
books to the jakes that receives them.
Thou Comon Shore of this Poetique Towne,
Where all our Excrements of Witt are throwne;
For Sonnet, Satyr, Bawdry, Blasphemy,
Are empty’d and disburthen’d all on thee.
The Chollerick Wight, untrussing in a Rage,
Finds thee, and leaves his Load upon thy Page:
Thou Julian! O thou wise Vespasian rather
Dost from this Dung, thy well-pict Guineys gather.
All mischeifs thine, transcribeing thou wilt stoope
From Lofty Middlesex to lowly Scroope.
What tymes are these, when in that Heroes roome,
Bow-Bending Cupid does with Ballads come,
And little Ashton offers to the Bumm . . .109
In other satires of the group Julian is described as heavily scarred, and

fond of brandy. He is addressed by the imaginary naval rank of cap-
tain, suggesting a certain professional swagger, but is also branded as
dull. He is said to have supplemented lampoon sales by pimping.
106
Danchin, Prologues and Epilogues, part 2, 329.
107
John Dryden: A Bibliography of Early Editions and of Drydeniana (Oxford:
Clarendon Press, 1939), 214–15.
108
See p. 158. 109
The list of Julian’s wares given in ‘The Visitt’ corresponds closely

to that of Yale MS Osborn b 105, produced by what I have named the
‘Hansen’ scriptorium, which was active in the latter part of 1680.110
A second, near-identical, lost manuscript, whose contents were re-
constructed by Vieth in Attribution in Restoration Poetry, was the
copy for the Rochester 1680 Poems. This collection is devoted to the
work of Rochester and other court-libertine poets. Princeton MS
Taylor 1, written in the same hand and on the same inferior paper, is
a collection of political satires of 1665–80. Other work from the
scriptorium seems to be preserved in secondary copies in other com-
pilations.111 While it would be tempting to connect Julian with this
enterprise, it could just as well represent an independent scribe or
scriptorium feeding off separates he had put into circulation. The
only manuscript that can undoubtedly be connected with Julian,
which was identified by Peter Beal, was purchased circa 1682 by
William Stanley, ninth Earl of Derby, who annotated it ‘I bought this
booke of Julian not so much for my own use as to prevent others
reading of it’.112 This sounds suspiciously like a self-protective meas-
ure of the kind that led Sir William Haward to give compromising
lampoons titles such as ‘A base song’ and ‘A base copy’, and at the
end of ‘The Dissolution’ (‘O heavens we now have signs below’) to
add two exculpatory lines of his own ‘This is a base railing, insipid
libel, not worth reading. | But fools, and knaves will be scribbling’—
to which any contemporary reader would surely have asked ‘Then
why transcribe it in the first place?’ Bedford later hid his volume in a
cavity in a chimney at Knowsley House, where, according to a sec-
ond annotation, it was found in 1718 when the building was demol-
ished. It may have been concealed during the dangerous months
following the Rye House Plot or during the reign of James II when its
possession could have been used as evidence of treasonable inten-
tions on the part of the Whig Stanleys.113 The subsidiary hand that
110
For the significance of the name, see Harold Love, ‘Scribal Texts and Literary
Communities: The Rochester Circle and Osborn b. 105’, Studies in Bibliography, 42
(1989), 219–35.
111
Shown by agreement of readings, as in several of the transmissional histories in
Rochester, Works, POASY, and Dorset, Poems.
112
Facsim. in In Praise of Scribes, 21.
113
The manuscript, in private hands, is not available for study. The fact that,
although topical in their nature and written two or three years apart, the two collec-
tions have thirteen items in common would make further investigation desirable.
wrote p. 179114 has a superficial resemblance to that of Julian’s letter

to Samuel Pepys of 30 June 1667, illustrated in SPISCE, 251, though
not sufficiently to support an identification. Julian’s career came to a
halt in November 1684 when he was imprisoned for circulating lam-
poons. The date coincides with the political eclipse of his Whig pro-
tectors. In the following June he successfully petitioned for release
and was no doubt careful thereafter to keep out of trouble. The ap-
pearance of an elegy in 1688 would suggest that he died in that year:
}
Under this weeping Monumental Stone
There lies a Scribe, who, while he liv’d was known
To ev’ry Bawd, Whore, Pimp, Fop, Fool in Town . . .
Of Spreading Libels, nothing shall be said,
Because ’twas that which brought him in his Bread.115
If public recognition was matched by productivity he must have

had an enormous influence on the circulation of lampoons both in
London and throughout the nation.
Yet, Julian was certainly not alone in this trade, which was one in
which any underemployed scrivener’s clerk could set up as an inter-
loper by making additional copies of lampoons encountered in cir-
culation. The early 1680s has left us a considerable body of work by
what I have christened the ‘Gyldenstolpe’ scriptorium. This is repre-
sented by a series of lampoon collections identifiable by their charac-
teristic readings as products of the same rolling archive. The name
was assigned in honour of the most spectacular of these, Stockholm,
Riks-Bibliotheket MS Vu. 69, a 314-page collection acquired circa
1680 by Count Gyldenstolpe, the Swedish ambassador to Eng-
land.116 A closely related collection, Badminton House MS FmE
3/12, has been described by Michael Brennan and Paul Ham-
mond.117 A third anthology, derived from the same archive, Leeds
University Library MS Brotherton Lt 54, contains two notes of dir-
ection to a Captain Robinson whose address is given as ‘att Cpt
Eloass [Elwes] near ye Watch house in Marlburrough street’.118 This
114
Illustrated at Beal, In Praise of Scribes, 27.
115
Poetical Recreations (London, 1688), pt. ii, p. 65.
116
Facsimile edition as Bror Danielsson and David M. Vieth (eds.), The Gylden-
stolpe Manuscript Miscellany of Poems by John Wilmot, Earl of Rochester, and
Other Restoration Authors (Stockholm: Almquist and Wiksell, 1967).
117
Paul Hammond and Michael Brennan, ‘The Badminton Manuscript: A New
Miscellany of Restoration Verse’, English Manuscript Studies, 5 (1995), 171–207.
118
Described in Paul Hammond, ‘The Robinson Manuscript Miscellany of
Restoration Verse in the Brotherton Collection Leeds’, Proceedings of the Leeds
appears to be Charles Robinson of the first foot guards. One of

Robinson’s regimental colleagues, Lenthal Warcup, who is identified
in a satire of the ‘Letter to Julian’ kind written in June 1686 as a cir-
culator of lampoons, can plausibly be associated with this archive,
though possibly more as a front man and distributor than as their ac-
tual publisher.119 The scriptorium also produced a smaller collection
possibly designed to be bound up with the 1680 Rochester Poems on
Affairs of State, as is the case with the Pepysian copy. A second ver-
sion, Nottingham Pw V 32, bears the title A Supplement to Some of
my Lord Rochester’s Poems. A third was one of the sources for
Princeton MS Taylor 3.
The third major archive is that of the scriptorium identified and
thoroughly investigated by W. J. Cameron in a foundational article
of 1963 and his POASY volume of 1971.120 Active between the
late 1680s and the accession of Anne, this can be associated either
directly or through secondary copies with over twenty surviving
manuscript anthologies.121 These are divided into three different
compilations, which Cameron styled the ‘Venus’, ‘William’, and
‘Restoration’ groups. It is tempting to associate this scriptorium with
the addressee of Jack Howe’s ‘A Letter to Somerton’ (‘Dear Somer-
ton, once my beloved correspondent’) of 1688–9, written in imita-
tion of the verse letters to Julian.
Dear, Somerton, once my beloved correspondent,
Since scandal’s so scarce, though the world is so fond on’t,
That poor Brother Julian of pay does miscarry
As well as the List, Civil, and Military,
And the brains of our poets as empty are grown,
As his Majesty’s coffers, or (faith) as their own;
Nor Monmouth’s love, Sidley’s spleen, Wolseley’s ill nature
Will supply thee with sonnet, with speech, nor with satyr,
Take these limping metres from a young beginner,
They may pay for thy lodging, at least for thy dinner: . . .122
One of Tom Brown’s Letters from the Dead to the Living (London,
Philosophical and Literary Society, Literary and historical section, 18/3 (1982),
277–324.
119
For the poem, see CSR, 159–65.
120
Cameron, ‘Scriptorium’, passim; POASY, v. 528–9.
121
Listed in POASY, v. 542; SPISCE, 271–6.
122
POASY, v. 535. Cameron regarded it as ‘unlikely’ that Somerton was the
master of the scriptorium I have called by his name; but gives no reason for this belief.
1702), addressed posthumously to Julian, describes Somerton to him

as ‘your Successor’, and reports that he had become insane, with
the result that ‘Lampoon has felt a very sensible decay’.123 ‘On
Mr Pr——r’s Letters to Mr Shepherd’ (‘A threefold cord the wisest
man said true’), in which Dorset and Sheppard are pictured con-
spiring with Prior and Montagu, contains the lines
But if the Plotts are any way made known,
If they expose our faults about the Town;
By my advice we’ll stop the Current there
And threaten Sommerton, if he but dare124
Whoever the director of the scriptorium was, he had a close relation-

ship with Dorset, whose later verse, along with that of Sheppard,
Montagu, and Prior, is well represented in its compilations. The
products of this impressive enterprise have a retrospective ‘secret his-
tory’ character, best represented by the inflated ‘Restoration group’,
which survives as two enormous manuscripts, Victoria and Albert
MS Dyce 43 (841 pp.) and Österreichische Nationalbibliothek, Cod.
14090 (880 pp.), and two extra-scriptorial copies which each repre-
sent half of the larger compilation.125 These sources contain virtually
the same contents in virtually the same order. With the other groups
there seems to have been some minor tailoring of books to readers,
suggesting that they were of a bespoke nature. The archive possessed
two versions of ‘A Song on Danby’ (‘What a devil ails the parlia-
ment’), of which the longer and more insulting one only appears in
one of its volumes, Nottingham MS PwV 42, pp. 41–9. Danby was
not only still alive at the time, but as Marquis of Carmarthen and
later Duke of Leeds a figure of considerable power. Otherwise the
scriptorium products display a high level of textual stability.
Cameron’s examination of their variants ‘demonstrated quite clearly
that professional scribes introduce fewer variants than are intro-
duced during the normal processes in the printing shop’.126
The activities of the ‘Cameron’ scriptorium seem to represent a
consolidation within the book trade of earlier providers of lampoons
who had either dealt directly with their clients or at second hand
through Town wits acting as frontpersons. Both booksellers and
123
pp. 69–70.
124
Yale MS Osborn b 204, p. 75. The version in POASY, v. 110–12 follows an-
other source’s error of ‘Somers’ for ‘Somerton’.
125
See SPISCE, 274. 126
POASY, v. 529.
authors now knew where to turn, the first to bespeak copies for
interested clients and the second to place new work where it would
be read and preserved. While a number of scribal hands appear in its
volumes, they generally conform to a characteristic form of presen-
tation, layout, and even calligraphy. The apparent exceptions are
bootleg or private transcriptions of a scriptorium manuscript. How-
ever, while dominating its field during the 1690s and early 1700s, the
scriptorium did not have it to itself. British Library manuscript
Harleian 7319 is another huge, professionally written manuscript of
the period with a high degree of overlap with scriptorium products
but, as far as has been tested, textually independent of its archive
copies.127 George Grafton, already referred to, may have been an-
other operator in the field. There is more to be discovered about all
the scriptoria mentioned and the other more modest operations that
produced only two or three surviving volumes.128 Much can be
learned from the order of items; however, this needs to be backed up
by collations of all surviving copies of a range of poems and the
construction of stemmata, a task which, with the exception of
Cameron’s work in POASY, v and a few editions of canonical
authors, has been little essayed. The collations in my own edition of
Rochester will be found useful for this purpose.
r e a d e rs a n d v i c t i m s
At this point we at last bring the lampoon to the hands or to the ears
of the reader, which is where I shortly propose to leave it. Another
book would be required to explore how clandestine satire was under-
stood and experienced by contemporary and near-contemporary
readers. The investigation of historical ways of reading is far from a
simple matter. We have already encountered a number of kinds of
evidence, including the expressed opinions of readers, the recorded
reactions of contemporaries, the contents of anthologies and com-
monplace books, the dicta of wits and critics of the time, and the
physical form of the records with all their mute testimony to the
scribe’s intention and the purchaser’s use. We have seen that lam-
poons were often performance pieces, either sung or read, and as
127
The title-page date is 24 April 1703, but compilation was evidently complete
several years earlier.
128
Examples in SPISCE, 265–70.
such part of the culture of social dining and drinking. In cases such as
the Whig dinner at Wapping they were used to encourage political
bonding. They were also an element of the culture of visiting, to be
read, discussed and exchanged, representing both a crystallization of
current gossip and a prompt to spoken censure, whether of the victim
or the writer. Many contemporaries abhorred their lubricity and
spite; others welcomed them for exactly this reason, and still others
tolerated them as a necessary means of enforcing Town civility and
stimulating political controversy. There seems to have been a general
recognition that claims made in lampoons were often untrue and that
political issues in particular were simplified to the point of caricature;
on the other hand, when repeated from piece to piece in the mechan-
ical way demonstrated in Chapter 2, they must have had an enor-
mous influence on how members of the ruling class were regarded by
their peers and the nation at large. In factional conflicts they were a
weapon like any other. We have seen that the relationships of reader
to author, subject, and performer were often intricate ones.
Any consideration of how lampoons might have been viewed by
particular readers needs to begin with the particular class of readers
who were the victims of lampoons. It was common for a lampoon to
be surreptitiously delivered to a victim and this fact to be specified in
the title or first line. In the case of Temple and Hobart the lampoon
was sung to its victim’s face by a supposed friend who had altered the
poem but kept the name of the author. Their effect, as is shown in
D’Urfey’s theatrical representation of Sophronia, could be deeply
mortifying. It was also possible to take the opposite view and defy
the lampooners to do their worst, or to welcome any mention, how-
ever malicious, as a sign that one was still a person of consequence
and the subject of envy. The author of ‘Tunbridge Lampoon 2d’
(1690) took it for granted that women were keen readers of pieces in
which they themselves were abused:
Since I came last I’ve seen a Lampoon here
The Ladys talk and Read it every where,
And thô ’tis leud almost in every place
Not the least Blush adorns the Palest face:129
Yet it is to be doubted whether many victims were really as blasé as
that. In 1680 Frances Brudenell wrote to Lady Hatton, ‘The lam-
poons that are made of most of the Town ladies are so nasty that no
129
Huntington Library, MS Ellesmere 8770, pp. 170–1. See pp. 209–10 above.
woman will read them, or I would have got them for you.’130 This
may represent a perfectly justified moral revulsion but could also
spring from the bad press that her family inevitably got from the
lampooners. A lampoon supposedly written by a woman (‘Surly
mankind has long despised lampoon’) complains that
In this so very well deserving Town
We the ungenerous Whip have felt alone
Envy has our Fam’d Chastity defac’d
Each reverend Matron made a Baudy Jest131
Despite D’Urfey’s mollifying assurance that

Yet we Love ye most,
When with Satyrs we move ye most . . .132
many individuals and families must have suffered acutely from the
lampooners’ routine accusations of unchastity. Relationships and
marriages must surely have been blighted by them and careers under-
mined, as in the attested case of Buckingham, whose reputation to
posterity as well as his own time was irreparably damaged by his
status as a lampoon star. An accusation that one was a libertine or
whore must often have drawn unwelcome sexual attentions; much as
a charge that one was a prude, or had the pox, would have discour-
aged desired ones. If Keats was really snuffed out by a review, it is en-
tirely likely that illness or even suicide sometimes resulted from being
made the object of this merciless form of public shaming. In some
cases family coercion may have resulted, as in the case in the pro-
logue to Lee’s The Rival Queens of the
silly She, who for your sake
Can Vanity, and Noise, for Love mistake;
’Till the Cocquet, sung in the next Lampoon,
Is by her jealous Friends sent out of Town.133
130
CSR, p. xvi, citing Joan Wake, The Brudenells of Deene (London: Cassell,
1953), 184.
131
BL MS Harl. 7319, fo. 211v. See also pp. 172–3.
132
‘Another Song Belonging to the Last’, Thomas D’Urfey (ed.), Wit and Mirth: or,
Pills to Purge Melancholy, introd. Cyrus L. Day, 6 vols. (New York: Folklore Library,
1959), ii. 251. The ‘last’ is ‘To Phillis upon her Complaint for being Lampoon’d’
(pp. 248–9) which argues that a woman with an ‘ogling Eye’ should ‘Blame not Wit if
Rhimes express, | The Vice of things so vain’.
133
The Works of Nathaniel Lee, ed. Thomas B. Stroup and Arthur L. Cooke (New
Brunswick, NJ: Scarecrow Press, 1954), i. 224.
One must also allow for the human tendency for victims of a lam-
poon to seek an object for their rage in the person of an author.
Marcy North in a highly original study of a range of Elizabethan and
early Stuart writing has explored the rich variety of ways in which
both authors and readers exploited different modulations of
anonymity and pseudonymity.134 Many of her distinctions would
apply mutatis mutandis to Restoration scriptorial satire but the most
common reaction was probably one of being the victim of concealed
enemies. The anonymous lampooner might be anywhere—smiling at
you to your face or sniggering at you just behind your back. Infor-
mation about you might have come from those you assumed to be
your closest friends.
A real-life reaction to being lampooned must often have been a
compulsion to fix the blame on someone towards whom one had
other reasons for feeling hostile and a determination to revenge the
slight upon them. Behn’s Love-Letters between a Nobleman and his
Sister contains a fictional picture of a lampoon victim’s reaction that
rings disturbingly true. A young man is addressing his crusty old
uncle:
But you are Wise and Grave, and hate all Women, Sir, till about Forty, and
then for Generation only: You are above the Follies of vain Youth. And let
me tell you, Sir, without Offending, Already you are charged with a Thou-
sand little Vanities unsuitable to your Years, and the Character you have
had, and the Figure you have made in the World. I heard a Lampoon on you
the other day,—Pardon my Freedom, Sir, for keeping a Beauty in your
House, who they are pleased to say was my Mistress before. And pulling out
a Lampoon, which his Page had before given him, he gave it to his Uncle. But
instead of making him resolve to quit Silvia, it only serv’d to incense him
against Octavio; he rail’d at all Wits, and swore there was not a more dan-
gerous Enemy to a civil, sober Commonwealth: That a Poet was to be ban-
ish’d as a Spy, or hang’d as a Traytor: That it ought to be as much against the
Law to let ’em live, as to Shoot with white Powder, and that to write Lam-
poons should be put into the Statute against Stabbing. And cou’d he find the
Rogue that had the Wit to write that, he wou’d make him a warning to all
the Race of that Damnable Vermin; what to abuse a Magistrate, one of the
States, a very Monarch of the Commonwealth!—’twas Abominable and not
to be born,—and looking on his Nephew,—and considering his Face awhile,
he cry’d,—I Fancy, Sir, by your Physiognomy, that you yourself have a hand
in this Libel: At which Octavio blush’d, which he taking for guilt, flew out
134
North, The Anonymous Renaissance: Cultures of Discretion in Tudor-Stuart
England (Chicago: Chicago UP, 2003).
into terrible Anger against him, not suffering him to speak for himself, or
clear his Innocence. And as he was going in this Rage from him, having for-
bidden him ever to set his Foot within his Doors, he told him,—If, said he,
the scandalous Town, from your Instructions, have such Thoughts of me, I
will convince it by Marrying this fair Stranger the first thing I do: I cannot
doubt but to find a welcom since she is a Banish’d Woman, without Friend
or Protection; and especially when she shall see how civilly you have handled
her here, in your Doggerel Ballad: I’ll teach you to be a Wit, Sir; and so your
Humble Servant.135
The passage identifies a lampoon’s capacity to trigger attacks of

paranoid rage. To show a person a lampoon in which they were men-
tioned might be to make that person an enemy. To smile or blush at
an accusation would be seized on as evidence of guilt. The lampoon
victim was not only forced to recognize that he or she had a secret foe
but confronted with the additional possibility of having become a
public laughing-stock. From this it was easy to pass into a delusion
that one was the object of a vast conspiracy of denigration signalled
by winks, smiles, and hypocritical assurances of friendship. There is
a telling account of such an experience in Robert Hooke’s diary of a
visit to see Shadwell’s The Virtuoso which he was convinced was a
satire on himself.136 Haward preserves a real-life counterpart to
Behn’s fictional one in a reader’s reaction to a lampoon against his
wife:
Vpon, Suspition, that some Verses reflecting vpon the Lady Hoskins
Widdow of Sir Edmund, and newly marryed to Mr Francis Coventrey, were
made by Sir Nicholas Carew, this insueing was pasted upon Bedington-wall,
the Copy whereof was giuen mee by Sir Nicholas Carew:
Whereas a Libell (vainely) intended against the honour of some Persons of
my Relation, is lately crept abroade, whilst the Authour thereof stayes att
home. This is to declare to all the World, that whosoeuer hath made the sayd
Libell, and shall not owne itt, is a malitious Coward, and Poultron, and if he
shall owne it, is a Villaine, and a Rascall.
Subscribed
Francis Coventrey.137
135
The Works of Aphra Behn, ed. Janet Todd, 7 vols. (London: Pickering and
Chatto, 1992–6), ii. 290–1.
136
The Diary of Robert Hooke, ed. Henry W. Robinson and Walter Adams (Lon-
don: Taylor & Francis, 1935), 235.
137
Bodleian MS don. b 8, p. 235.
But this kind of reaction, in drawing further attention to the original

insult, was always self-defeating, and can hardly have been wel-
comed by the lady. A sadder case is that of the printed Sophronia
(1681 and therefore preceding D’Urfey’s use of the name in The
Richmond Heiress). This intemperate defence of Mary, Lady Grey
against ‘a late scandalous libel’ was not only ill judged in itself but al-
most immediately devalued by its subject’s participation in the pub-
lic scandal involving her sister, her husband, and Monmouth, which
provided the basis for Behn’s Love-Letters.138
As has been suggested, awareness of the effect that reading a lam-
poon attack would have had on the victim must have informed read-
ings of the same piece by others. Any reading by a further party
would have been a kind of overhearing of that primary insult, mak-
ing the experience even more voyeuristic than is openly the case with
this inherently voyeuristic genre. As well as offering the pleasures of
straightforward Schadenfreude, the lampoon enticed both authors
and readers to enter that shadowy territory where an individual’s
consciousness of power and weakness jostles with the public realities
within which lifetimes have somehow to be negotiated. That clan-
destine satire conferred power over others and to an extent over
one’s fellow participants in the Town and the state is not to be
doubted; but by the same token it was often a public confession of
powerlessness—the last resort of social, political, or sexual failure,
or the last refuge of exploded authority. The lampooner was after all
a sneak. To be known to have written a lampoon was to place one at
the opposite pole to the male who met his enemy face to face in the
field or the female who was prepared to front down her rival in the
drawing room. The lampoon writer’s and reader’s relationship with
power, in all its manifestations, deserves further consideration, but
not in a top-down Foucauldian way which erases the very important
differences that exist between the different styles and periods of lam-
pooning and the manifold occasions of their making. The connec-
tions we need to establish at the present time are situational,
beginning with a closer inspection of the ways in which lampooning
affected the power relationships of particular communities. The
present study has attempted to do this for broad communities
138
See CSR, 245–6. The libel was A True Relation of a Strange Apparition which
Appear’d to the Lady Gray (London, 1681) in which she was accused by implication
of a liaison with Monmouth. In The Lady Gray Vindicated (London, 1681) its
authors are accused of being papists.
designated the court, the Town, the City, and the country; but only
as a means of providing a general map of the tradition within which
more closely focused and I would hope more productive examin-
ations will become possible.
The passage of time is also an issue for any study of the lampoon.
In restricting my study to the Restoration decades I have tried to hold
to a span of years in which the genre can be approached as a congru-
ent entity; but this has involved assumptions about consistencies in
purpose and function that are clearly questionable. Another study
might have given more attention to the ways in which a lampoon of
the age of Queen Anne was a different kind of contraption from one
of the early years of Charles II, or how two lampoons written side by
side in 1675, say, might proceed from quite different assumptions
about the tasks and methods of the genre. Consistency in some of the
functions of clandestine satire can be traced from the sixteenth cen-
tury forward to the early nineteenth; but others were a response to
possibilities for engaged poetical action that only appeared briefly
and then were gone or that recurred, but only at intervals. These dif-
ferences can sometimes be observed in the ways existing lampoons
were reread over decades; but these rereadings are themselves only to
be observed through a study of revisions and rewritings. Actual con-
temporary criticism of individual lampoon texts is largely restricted
to short comments such as those of Pye’s two volumes quoted earlier.
A historically informed reading of clandestine satire requires a much
more detailed and focused study of contexts than I have been able to
give—initially the contexts of particular, complex poems, later those
of anthologies and commonplace books, and later still those of sub-
genres and work written over particular short time spans—but it also
requires that we find new, imaginative ways of making sense of how
writing attempts to change the world. North’s study of anonymity
and Dubrow’s interrogations of space relationships and ‘overhear-
ing’ in lyric offer avenues forward. Other possibilities may be sug-
gested by comparison with similar writings of different nations and
ages, such as Pompeian graffiti, Samizdat literature under the former
Soviet Union, or the carnival songs of present-day Andalusia. What
will not be particularly helpful is the kind of theory-heavy analysis
based on the recirculation of a handful of once seductive but now
rather tired paradoxes which assumes as a given that writing cannot
really affect the world at all. Naturally, as interpretative readers we
are entitled to read lampoon texts, like any others, in whatever way
we like; but we must not confuse interpretation with historical

explanation.
All historical instances speak but none, as we know so well, speaks
simply or transparently. As Hume has pointed out in Reconstructing
Contexts, the shaping of a context for a historical text is a highly the-
oretical and risk-fraught undertaking. That of siting a constructed
reader within that constructed context is even riskier, calling for
both scholarly and critical sophistication of the highest order if it is
to carry any conviction. Such an activity is a very different one from
the exercise of interpreting a text or textual relationship by accom-
modating it to our preferred contemporary models of textual inter-
course. We will draw, of course, on our experience as knowing,
educated twenty-first-century readers, much as we will also draw on
our intuitive responses to the texts themselves. (In the case of lam-
poons these will often be strongly negative ones.) These things will
offer us insights and clues but are incapable in themselves of allow-
ing us to share the experience of readers who constructed their men-
tal lives on a very different basis from ours and whose material
existence was also very different. To get a sense of how they con-
structed their world we must first learn their language, one superfi-
cially like our own but linked to very different constellations of
significance and proceeding along very different cognitive grooves.
Only then can we begin to think effectively about what they may
have thought.
By this time, if we have been proceeding correctly, the ‘they’ will
have collapsed into a heterogeneous assemblage of he’s and she’s, all
of them different from each other and all of them fiercely resistant to
being assimilated into our own no less deeply ingrained preconcep-
tions. Yet in order to reason about these people and their experiences
it is incumbent upon us to generalize. The right balance of typicality
and individuality is a hard one to strike. There is much to be gained
from in-depth studies of individuals, especially those such as
Sir William Haward, John Watson, Sir John Pye, and Sarah Cowper.
Kevin Sharpe has left us an intriguing model in his study of
Sir William Drake as a reader.139 A methodological basis for such
studies is suggested by recent work in sociolinguistics, particularly
139
Reading Revolutions: The Politics of Reading in Early Modern England (New
Haven: Yale UP, 2000).
that of Barbara Johnstone.140 But while we would certainly discover

similarities between them, the more profound outcome must in-
evitably be a discovery of deep and irreconcilable differences—the
innumerable differences that arise from each human being, apart
from identical siblings, being a biologically unique individual.141
There was never a ‘typical’ Restoration reader, nor a typical Town,
Whig, or Jacobite reader. Nor, in a world in which Aphra Behn,
Margaret Blagge, Nan Capell, Margaret Cavendish, and Katherine
Sedley might all have been present in the same chamber at Whitehall,
was there a typical woman reader. Individuals drawing on the same
circles of distribution, and meeting in the same chocolate houses, or
attending the same chapels, churches, or conventicles, cannot be
assumed to have read clandestine satire, if they read it at all, in the
same way. Nor can they individually be assumed to have read in con-
sistent ways from year to year or even day to day. Much as the same
person’s responses to the oral and the printed text can often be
shown to have differed from his or her response to the scribal text, so
even the written lampoon could be read in very different ways de-
pending on time, circumstances, and the predicaments of life.142 In-
depth studies of individuals must not try to iron out these differences,
but rather to look through the variety and inconsistencies of their re-
sponses to texts towards the wider body of possibilities available at
the time to all readers. Exploring the variety of ways in which a given
text might have been read at a given period, and, just as importantly,
those ways in which it was unlikely to have been read, is likely to
prove more rewarding than the much more difficult task of dis-
covering how it actually was read by a given individual on a given
occasion—which is not to say that evidence of the last is not to be
treasured whenever it is encountered.
140
In The Linguistic Individual: Self-Expression in Language and Linguistics
(New York: Oxford UP, 1996).
141
These issues are further discussed in Love, Attributing Authorship (Cambridge:
Cambridge UP, 2002), 4–13, 223–7.
142
Cf. Love, ‘Oral and Scribal Texts’, 119–21.
Appendix
First-Line Index to Selected Anthologies
of Clandestine Satire
This list offers a guide to the principal scribal sources of clandestine satire
and the broader field of libertine and state verse, and to the most important
printed source—the original Poems on Affairs of State series in the four-
volume set of 1702–7. It has been compiled from detailed indexes to the in-
dividual sources originally prepared under an Australian Research Council
Grant by Meredith Sherlock, which were later supplemented and reviewed
by Felicity Henderson and Harold Love. An edition on microfilm of a large
selection of these sources is planned from Adam Matthew Publications, to
which the present index will be a finding list. It is also hoped that both a fuller
form of the first-line index and the indexes to individual sources can eventu-
ally be made available on the internet.
When a satire has been referred to by first line in the previous chapters, a
text may be sought in one of the sources indicated. However, the following
points should be noted.
The number following the siglum is not that of a page/folio but indicates
the item’s numerical sequence in the volume concerned. While this will
assist with locating the item in the volume, its primary purpose is to allow
the user to check whether two or more lampoons survive in the same se-
quence, or near contiguity, in more than one source.
The list does not give a complete list of sources for all of its items and could
not be used, for instance, for determining the number of satires surviving
from the period in single copies as a percentage of the whole. The defi-
ciency is likely to be largest in widely copied pieces, such as the best-
known Rochester poems, which sometimes survive in forty or more
contemporary transcriptions. Additional sources should be sought
through the indexes cited in James Woolley, ‘First-Line Indexes of English
Verse, 1650–80: A Checklist’, East-Central Intelligencer, ns 173 (Sept.
2003), 1–10 and Michael Londry, ‘On the Use of First-Line Indices for Re-
searching English Poetry of the Long Eighteenth Century, c.1660–1830’,
Library, 7th ser. 5 (2004), 12–38; from Peter Beal’s two IELM volumes,
from collections such as POASY and Wilson’s Court Satires, and from schol-
arly editions of individual poets. Some sources are also recorded in the
304 Appendix
Calendars of State Papers and the Reports of the Historical Manuscripts

Commission. Many appear in other early printed sources beside POAS
(1702–7), though it must be remembered that these are often late, cen-
sored, and textually corrupt. The contents of POAS (1702–7) are avail-
able for consultation in the Literature on Line (LION) electronic archive.
It is likely that the index covers a very high proportion of the overall sur-
viving corpus of court, Town, and state satire and of libertine verse and
satirical prose circulated in manuscript during 1660–1702. In other
words, searching unindexed sources is more likely to produce additional
copies of popular pieces than additions to the corpus as a whole.
Neither does the index always include the best manuscript source for any
particular poem, in the sense of that closest to the author’s holograph; but
its items do represent the poems in the form in which they were most
widely read.
First lines have been standardized to a single modern-spelling form, usu-
ally the majority one but sometimes that judged to be the more textually
plausible or generically suitable. To take an example, the line entered
under the BLa60 reading ‘From easing female sex in pain’ is found in
HRO36 as ‘For easing females of their pain’, in Np46 as ‘From easing fe-
males of their pain’ and in Yo70 as ‘From easing females in pain’. In seek-
ing concordances to a poem found in an unindexed source one might have
to search imaginatively through a range of entries. Where a poem begins
variously with ‘while’ and ‘whilst’ or ‘you’ or ‘ye’ it has only been indexed
under one of these alternatives. In the first case it may also be useful to
check under ‘when’.
In cases where only the last lines of a work survive and it remains uniden-
tified or when a work has been so defaced as to be unidentifiable, it has not
been listed; however, when it can be identified from a text fragment, a
catchword, or a volume index, it has been included, since this is still use-
ful evidence for the relationships of sources.
What may appear to be anomalies in the alphabetical and numerical order
of the lists of sigla have been imposed by the software employed and are
consistent in themselves.
Preference in inclusion has been given to collections entirely or almost en-
tirely composed of satires. These have been indexed in their entirety apart
from the very occasional omission of a completely irrelevant work (say a ser-
mon or treatise) and when items have been excised or mutilated beyond
recognition. Because of this policy of inclusion, some non-satirical material
will be encountered: Shakespeare’s Venus and Adonis and The Rape of
Lucrece are in the index because they were included in the fourth volume of
the original POAS—possibly as warnings against female government and
Stuart tyranny respectively. Letters, petitions, personal lists, parliamentary
First-Line Index to Anthologies 305
speeches, monumental inscriptions, and even prayers also appear, though

many of these are not as innocent as they might seem. Much neo-Latin satir-
ical verse and prose of both English and continental origin will be found—
some of the finest short satirical texts of the period come under this category.
That non-satirical material should be transcribed into collections with a
strong satirical bent may be a clue to how it was interpreted, and can also be
a valuable marker of relationships between collections.
Personal miscellanies, in which satires are intermingled with other kinds
of literary and non-literary texts and personalia, have generally been ex-
cluded from the index as likely to encumber it with too many irrelevant
items. The exceptions are the four collections given special attention in
Chapter 8: the Cowper, Haward, Pye, and Watson miscellanies. Of these
Cowper is represented by a selection of relevant material from HRO36,
HRO37 being excluded. Haward is represented by an extensive but not
complete selection from his extremely varied collection. From Pye, only the
satirical material has been included in the index. In each of these cases, there-
fore, gaps exist in the item series. Watson’s miscellany, however, has been in-
dexed in full owing to its importance as an archive of neo-Latin material.
The eventual enlarged index to be made available on the internet will include
complete indexes to a number of personal miscellanies here omitted and the
full contents of the four selectively listed.
sources and sigla
Printed
02pa Poems on Affairs of State (London, 1702–7) [As explained above
the reference set for this publication is the commonly encountered
one in four volumes containing Case 211 (1) (e)1702 [02pa1]; 211
(2) (a) 1703 [02pa2]; 211 (3) (a) 1703 [02pa3]; and 211 (4) (a) 1707
[02pa4]. The two pagination sequences of 02pa1 are distinguished
by preliminary superscript 1 and 2 respectively.]
Manuscript
Ab12 Avon, Badminton House, MS FmE 3/12
BLa20 British Library, Add. MS 18220 (‘Watson miscellany’)
BLa22 British Library, Add. MS 23722
306 Appendix

BLh12 British Library, Harleian MS 7312
BLs55 British Library, Sloane MS 655
CAL68 Los Angeles, University of California Library, MS coll. 170/68
CKh14 Cambridge, King’s College, Hayward MS H 11 14
Cmp Cambridge, Magdalene College, Pepys Library, PL 810(2)
DA Manuscript owned by Pierre Danchin
Ed3 Edinburgh University Library, MS Dc. 1 3/1 (in 6 sections, not
here distinguished)
Fm12 Folger Shakespeare Library, MS M b 12 (in 3 sections, indicated
by Fm12.1, Fm12.2, Fm12.3)
He24 Harvard University Library, MS Eng. 624
He36 Harvard University Library, fMS Eng. 636
He85 Harvard University Library, MS Eng. 585
HRO36 Hertfordshire Record Office, D/EP F36
HUe70 Huntington Library, MS Ellesmere 8770
ILr Illinois University Library, MS uncat., ‘Rochester’s Censures’
Lb38 Leeds University Library, Brotherton Collection, MS Lb 38
Lb54 Leeds University Library, Brotherton Collection, MS Lt. 54
Lb55 Leeds University Library, Brotherton Collection, MS Lt. 55
LIa4 Lincolnshire Record Office, Anc 15/ B/4
M35 University of Minnesota, MS 690235 f
Mc14 Manchester, Chetham’s Library, Mun. A 4. 14
NLI93 Dublin, National Library of Ireland, MS 2093
NLSa12 National Library of Scotland, Adv. MS 19.1.12
Np07 Nottingham University Library, MS Portland Pw2 V 7
Np32 Nottingham University Library, MS Portland Pw V 32
Oa01 Oxford, Bodleian Library, Add. MS A 301
Oa05 Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Add. b 105
Oa06 Oxford, Bodleian Library, Add. MS B 106
OAc16 Oxford, All Souls College, Codrington Library MS 116
Od08 Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Don. b 8

Od57 Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Douce 357
Od76 Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Don. e 176 (Sparrow gift)
Oep18 Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Eng. poet. d 18
Of15 Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Firth c 15
Of16 Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Firth c 16
Of06 Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Firth e 6
Orp81 Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Rawl. poet. 81
Pc99 Princeton University Library, MS CO199
Pt1 Princeton University Library, MS Taylor 1
SA30 Society of Antiquaries, London, MS 330
SKv69 Stockholm, Kungl. Biblioteket, MS Vu. 69 (‘Gyldenstolpe’ MS)
V90 Vienna, Österreichische Nationalbibliothek, Cod. 14090
VAd43 Victoria and Albert Museum, Dyce Collection, Cat. no. 43
Yo05 Yale University Library, MS Osborn b 105
Yo08 Yale University Library, MS Osborn fb 108
Yo34 Yale University Library, MS Osborn fb 334 (Hartwell MS)
Yo52 Yale University Library, MS Osborn b 52 (in two vols. indicated
by Yo52.1 and Yo52.2)
Yo60 Yale University Library, MS Osborn c 160
YoD Yale University Library, MS MS Vault File: Denham
first lines
1588 the Spaniard did invade our right Pt5*9

A bad woman Heavens bless us sirs who dare Np07*7
A badger once did ravage all the fields 02pa2*26
A butcher’s son judge capital 02pa3*75, LIa4*2, Yo27*3, Yo54*125
A certain brewer whose liquor of life 02pa2*37
308 Appendix
A certain fox had stole a neighbour’s goose Pt5*145

A certain man four children had Yo11*145
A certain priest had hoarded up 02pa3*4, Oa05*15
A choir of bright beauties in spring did appear Lb54*131, Yo11*37
A countess of fame BLh13*48, BLh14*41, BLh19*39, LIa4*26,
NLSa12*22, Np43*18, Np45*22, V90*178, VAd43*191, Yo70*12
A country clown whilst cleaving of a block Yo88*224.1
A country fellow very poor Pt5*147, Pt5*149
A courtier and a sailor Fm12.3*38, Np44*63
A curse on such representatives BLa62*34, Lb55*31, Od08*230
A dean and prebendary BLa60*14, BLh14*87, Pt5*196
A dolphin taken mighty ill Pt5*146
A dunghill cock was raking in the ground Pt5*123, 02pa2*12
A dying Latinist of great renown SA30*78
A et ω Deus optimus maximus BLa20*159
A famous poetress has lately writ BLh13*50, LIa4*27, Np38*47
A farmer bought a partridge for his use Pt5*139
A fatal war two angry sisters waged 02pa1*28
A femme sole seized to her and her heirs forever Od08*261
A fierce dispute ’twixt birds of night 02pa2*40
A fierce wild boar of monstrous size and force 02pa2*15, Pt5*126
A generous race of croaking frogs 02pa2*30
A German widow once of jolly mien BLh19*7, V90*51, VAd43*56.1
A glorious figure did J once make BLh15*61, Lb38*15, Oep18*112
A grave physician used to write for fees Pt5*151
A half famished wolf met a jolly fat dog 02pa2*42
A hare did once into a garden get 02pa2*22, Pt5*133
A hawk that of yore 02pa2*34
A hog in armour is no common sign Yo54*204
A horse and ass were journeying on their way 02pa2*13, Pt5*124
A la gloire immortelle de Jacques second Yo52.2*60
A labouring swain had been at work 02pa2*25
A lady fair I dare not name BLa94*53, Pt2*62
A land there is as maps do tell 02pa2*33
A late expedition to Oxford was made 02pa2*120, BLa94*88, BLh15*47,
Lb38*1, Np46*27, Oep18*28, Of06*11, Pt3*84, Yo11*230
A leopard of no vulgar birth or size Pt5*143
A load of guts wrapped in a sallow skin Ab12*77, BLh13*34, Np38*31
A long preludium where the matter’s full BLh19*75, He85*72,
NLSa12*128, V90*149, VAd43*159
A lord baron bish Of06*63, Yo70*101
A lusty horse not long ago 02pa2*27
A man much troubled with a sprite Lb54*68
A man with expense and infinite toil BLa94*227

A medley of ruffians bound up in a band Yo11*232
A mighty great fleet the like was ne’er seen 02pa1*2108, BLa97*106,
BLh17*83, Pt3*85, Yo11*106
A mighty lion heretofore 02pa2*50
A mighty weasel of renown 02pa2*32
A milk white rogue immortal and unhanged 02pa2*47
A monument of dullness to erect Pt5*155
A muse’s power though fate has stopped his breath BLh15*111,
Fm12.3*36, Lb38*67, Np44*60
A new sprout to quench the fire 02pa3*84
A noble figure once J sate BLa97*70, Of06*9
A number of Princes though poor ones ’tis true 02pa2*151, BLa94*50,
M35*151, Yo11*113
A pampered heron of lofty mien in state Fm12.3*70, Np44*97
A papist died as ’twas Jehovah’s will 02pa3*3, BLa97*44, Oa05*16
A parish priest was of the pilgrim train Oa05*30
A parliament with one consent 02pa3*125
A parliament the people’s god BLa20*161
A peaceful sway the great Augustus bore 02pa1*210
A peevish wight who many years was wont Fm12.3*72, Np44*99
A petition of the Lord Windsor praying that as soon as he is married
BLa94*147, Np46*103
A pim al rent Yo54*33
A poet once the Spartans led to fight Od08*177, Yo11*194
A poll and land tax are now coming forth 02pa2*155, BLa94*51,
BLa97*105, HUe70*67, Pt3*88, Pt5*63, Yo70*1, Yo11*201
A pox of all plots it’s the national evil Ed3*157
A pox of the plotting and caballing of late Mc14*90, Np39*9
A pox of the troubles men make in the world Od57*83
A priest ranging the park did find Oa01*79
A prison or an isle are much the same 02pa4*75
A prison’s but the emblem of a grave Oa01*41
A protector what’s that it is a stately thing Yo52.2*37
A Protestant muse yet a lover of kings 02pa3*140, Pt5*13
A Protestant priest a man of great fame 02pa3*171, Pt5*60, Yo11*84
A Quaker is a monster whose father is a Presbyterian SA30*77
A reverend dame late sick did lie Orp81*28
A Rome l’on y voit la motte d’Agrippine BLh14*91
A rump d’ye call’t that is too sweet a word Yo40*16
A sad mischance I sing alas Yo05*62
A scribbling puppy has of late designed BLa62*118
A serious ass of sober face Pt5*142
310 Appendix
A session of ladies was held on the stage BLh17*42, BLh19*116,

Np42*58, Of15*66, Of16*114, Pt2*53, V90*238, VAd43*258
A session of lovers was held t’other day 02pa2*71, BLa62*128, BLa97*46,
BLh17*41, Lb54*111, Np07*1, Np42*57, Od57*132, Of15*65,
Pt2*51, V90*237, VAd43*257, Yo08*6
A shitten king bewrayed the usurped throne BLa97*75, BLh17*64,
M35*16, Yo11*144
A stale virgin pessime olet stinks above ground Oa01*50
A thief that bravely bears away the prize BLa94*99, Np43*72, Np46*38,
Oep18*35, V90*249, VAd43*269, Yo08*27
A thin ill-natured ghost that haunts the king 02pa2*85, BLa94*114,
BLa97*85, BLh15*73, BLh17*74, BLh19*160, Fm12.3*5, HRO36*41,
HUe70*43, Lb38*27, Np44*5, Np46*55, Oep18*53, Of06*66,
Yo11*220
A threefold cord the wisest man said true BLa94*114, Fm12.3*5,
BLa97*85, BLh15*73, BLh17*74, BLh19*160, HUe70*43, Lb38*27,
Np44*5, Np46*55, Oep18*53, Of06*66, Yo11*220, Yo70*78
A tous presens et advenir qui ses prentes tres verront Od08*154
A traitor why whose counsel and Monk’s aid BLa20*27
A treacherous friar who died the other day Mc14*20
A treatise to prove that it is possible his majesty may become Od08*76
A trifling song you shall hear BLa94*202
A true dissenter here does lie indeed 02pa1*261, M35*166
A veil of thickened air around them cast Np40*115
A wanton sloven of a priest 02pa2*39
A wealthy matron now grown old 02pa2*51
A Welshman from his hills come down 02pa2*44
A widow young whose name is Bess BLh13*73
A wife I adore if either she’s constant and civil Yo54*154
A wife who never did her husband claim Oa05*57
A wolf complained that he had lost a lamb 02pa2*14, Pt5*125
A wolf retiring from Whitehall 02pa2*19, Pt5*130
A wretched churl was travelling with his ass 02pa2*18, Pt5*129
A year of wonders now is come V90*246
A youth of pregnant parts and wit 02pa2*23, Pt5*134
A youthful lion in the wood 02pa2*31
About the time that one shall be 02pa2*86, Mc14*21, Np07*24, Od57*129
Abroad as I was walking Ed3*148
Absent from thee I languish still LLt27*28
Abundance is a trouble want a misery Yo52.2*47, Yo52.2*58
Accables de malheurs menaces de la peste BLh14*118
Accept my lord of this poor glittering thing 02pa4*10, BLa60*38,
BLh14*98, Np43*107
Accept these tablets from Leander fraught Np40*57

[Accounts for a church dated 8 March 1696 /7] Orp81*19
Acuto in pessimis ingenio obtusa in optimis M35*190
Adam did eat of the tree of life Pt3*97
Add all to man that man’s perfection makes V90*133, VAd43*143
Adesse montis quotquot estis Incolae BLa20*58
Adieu false Britons false to your vows adieu BLa94*24, Yo11*1
Adieu to the joys of good fellowship quite BLa40*26
Aemula divini suavissima carminis ales SA30*122
Aesop o’ercome with wind and spleen 02pa2*38
Aestuat altisonans bombarda gravique tumultu BLa20*79
Aeternae infamiae civitatis Leydensis 02pa4*99
After a blustering tedious night M35*183
After a pretty amorous discourse DA*17
After a two months’ fast I hope at length Mc14*65
After death nothing is and nothing death Ab12*7, Ed3*16, He36*31,
Lb54*30, Np40*85, Od08*196, Pt5*86, SKv69*8, Yo05*14
After so many sad mishaps He36*44
After some threescore years of caterwauling M35*164
After that sort of academic wit Fm12.1*49, ILr*3, Mc14*67, V90*113,
VAd43*122
After the fiercest pangs of soft desire Yo05*78
After thinking this fortnight of Whig and of Tory BLh14*40, BLh19*44,
Ed3*97, He85*33, LIa4*35, Mc14*76, NLSa12*4, Np39*41, Np43*16,
Np45*4, Od57*130, Of16*12, Pt4*24, V90*175, VAd43*188
After two sittings now our lady state 02pa1*112, BLa20*33, BLa40*1,
CAL68*20
Again my muse nor fear the steepy flight 02pa4*42, BLa94*166
Again prorogued to the seventeenth of May BLa62*89
Against the charms our bollocks have Ab12*32, He36*23, Np40*24,
SKv69*32, Yo05*34
Ah Cambridge famous for unlucky hits BLh19*104, NLSa12*152
Ah cruel bloody fate Yo54*142
Ah father Nuncio what woeful times are these Pt5*14
Ah filthy shabby tarse Yo54*201
Ah glory glory who are these appear BLa97*39
Ah Jenny since your eyes do kill Ed3*156
Ah mighty prince by too great birth betrayed Od08*206
Ah no ’tis all in vain believe me ’tis Oa05*14
Ah Raleigh when thou didst thy breath resign 02pa1*115, BLa22*25,
BLh15*22, BLh17*19, Ed3*133, He24*25, Lb55*32, NLSa12*37,
Np40*74, OAc16*28, Od08*229, Od57*128, Pc99*7, Pt1*22, Pt3*58,
Pt4*1
312 Appendix
Ah the charms of a beauty disdainful and fair Mc14*92, Yo54*74

Ah to what sorrows am I led ILr*4, Mc14*68
Ah tyrant Love did ever I one hour BLa62*55
Aid me Bellona what strange news is this He85*52, Np43*20, V90*180,
VAd43*193
Aider of the poor and punisher of trespass SA30*158
Alas for poor Saint James’s Park BLh13*60, BLh17*24, LIa4*45, Of16*3
Alas I now am weary grown BLh14*42, He85*79, Np43*27, V90*189,
VAd43*202
Alas what’s man who knows but this did bear Oa05*61
Albion disclose thy drowsy eyes and see 02pa4*56
Albion where’s thy champions gone Yo11*22
Alderman Holt his debt 9000 pound Yo54*47
Alex For your ungodly letter BLh12*9
Algernon Sidney fills this tomb 02pa1*148, NLSa12*109, Od57*157
All Dutch and English that are left M35*202, Yo11*122
All earthly glory is but a farce BLh19*82, Lb54*107
All government is overturned by obedience and established BLa94*213
All hail to my Ben-dilly once again Pt4*14
All human things are subject to decay Ab12*52, BLh13*3, Ed3*61,
He36*47, ILr*11, Lb54*1, NLI93*9, Np38*3, Np40*41, SKv69*48,
Yo05*61
All in amaze at what is done I stood M35*67, Pt5*92, Yo11*33
All in the king’s name BLa40*16, OAc16*32, Od08*238
All in the town of London BLa62*7, He24*13, Od08*51, Pc99*26,
Yo40*36, Yo54*245
All moneys received by him out of his majesty’s exchequer Od08*39
All my past life is mine no more Ab12*41, BLa40*27, CKh14*9, Ed3*54,
He36*60, Lb54*43, LLt27*22, Np40*33, Np43*84, SKv69*38,
Yo05*31, Yo13*3
All private wranglings and intestine jars Np43*54, Np46*23.1,
Oep18*23, VAd43*243.1
All the materials are the same 02pa4*47
All the news that’s stirring now Od08*31
All the world can’t afford Ab12*78, BLa94*86, BLh13*35, Np38*32,
Np46*20
All things are common amongst friends thou sayst HRO36*13
All things submit themselves to your command LLt27*26
All things went well in church and state BLa60*61
All things were hush as when the drawers tread Yo08*51
All this with indignation have I hurled Ab12*3.1, CMp*2, Ed3*20,
Ed3*35.1, He36*32.1, NLI93*4, Np32*11, SKv69*4 <Also as part of
some versions of ‘Were I who to my cost . . .’>
All vices cure themselves as some folks think Od57*149

All ye that know men and for virgins would pass He85*100, NLSa12*134,
Np42*48, Of15*54, Pt2*50, V90*206, VAd43*222
All you good men who are BLh19*152
All you in whose gardens green laurels do grow BLa94*49
All you that have Protestant ears to hear BLa94*107, HUe70*24,
Np46*46, Oep18*41, Of06*29
All you that would no longer to a monarch be subjected Od57*35
Alma quies aderat genti conclusaque Jani SA30*176
Almighty cunts whom Bolloximian here BLh12*36, Pc99*1a
Although the many calumnies and dismal stories Pt5*51
Although you now are in great state Od08*128
Always at home abroad I range CAL68*41
Amara tantum gaudia existunt iis SA30*192
Amintor loved and lived in pain Ab12*44, CMp*6, DA*15, Lb54*46,
Np32*7, Np40*36, Pt3*6, SKv69*43
Amisit tandem sua sceptra Philippus a vita SA30*88
Among the little pages that were sent 02pa4*36, Fm12.3*71, Np44*98,
Np46*109
Among the race of England’s modern peers 02pa3*58, BLa22*48,
Ed3*29, Fm12.1*3, Lb54*21, LIa4*16, Np39*1, V90*4, VAd43*4,
Yo27*16
Among the writing race of modern wits 02pa3*59, BLa22*49, BLa62*76,
Ed3*113, Fm12.1*10, Lb54*22, LIa4*17, NLSa12*90, Od08*304,
V90*31, VAd43*33, Yo27*17
Amongst all the errors under which mankind generally labours CAL68*37
Amongst the high church I find there are several BLa94*221
Amongst the myrtles as I walked Yo52.2*4
Amstrother all men she comes near she engages Od08*191
An act for the preservation of the Protestant religion Yo70*35
An age in her embraces passed LLt27*25
An aged fox that ravaged woods and plains 02pa2*24
An apple falling from a tree 02pa2*43
An argument proving the Cevennois rebels by the Earl of Nottingham
02pa3*208, BLa60*35
An assignation is an amorous zeal Of06*35
An eagle out in search for prey Pt5*141
An eighty-eight year brought in Spain’s armado Oa01*5.1
An engrossed bill from the lords entitled an act BLa60*8
An excellent composition of Sir Henry Vanes’s affection BLa20*31
An honourable sale of Dunkirk was made BLa20*30, He24*9
An invasion from Dutchland is all the discourse Np43*68, V90*245,
VAd43*265
314 Appendix
Ancient person of my heart LLt27*34

And after singing psalm the twelfth Yo54*205
And can Theaner think the world to cheat BLa62*129
And hast thou left old Jemmy in the lurch 02pa2*108, M35*200, Pt5*110
And have you sir at length resolved to take Pt5*55, Yo11*85
And I do swear that I will never by threats injunctions Od08*215
And must our deaths be silenced too I guess He24*33
And must the hero that redeemed our land 02pa2*182
And now ’tis time for their officious haste 02pa1*12, BLa20*147,
BLh15*33, He36*50, Np40*78, Od76*16, Oep4*33, Pt1*35
And now this tale thus far being ended 02pa4*83
And now whatever can be said we do BLa20*112
And since men wandering in a wood by night 02pa2*54
And truth sweet virgins it were a vile miscarriage Yo08*92
And why to me this letter of complaint BLh15*112, Lb38*68, Np44*44
And wilt thou go great duke and leave us here Yo54*18
And you auspicious prince our other care 02pa2*165
Anglia te prodit tua gens quia quae libet odit Od57*22
Anglica terra fuit sicut est Nilotica tellus SA30*139
Anima hominis est abrasa tabula BLa20*115
Annals and statutes have the heroes graced 02pa2*170
Anne diu qui fit cum tam feliciter annos Yo54*11
Anno milleno centeno septuageno SA30*159
Another prorogation what’s the reason BLa62*21
Antiquae litem natura diremit mortem SA30*93
Antiqui quanti fuerint nos edocet ingens BLa20*105
Apes we are all until twenty-one M35*147
Apollo concerned to see the transgression 02pa1*160, Ed3*75, Lb54*2,
Np40*55, Np43*1, Od08*42, Od57*154, V90*157, VAd43*167,
Yo40*45
Apollo Pallas and the muses all Yo54*43
Apollo whose kind influences produce HRO36*31
Appear thou mighty bard to open view 02pa1*244, BLa97*28, Of16*83
Apply a cure unto those wounds you gave Yo52.1*75.2
Appulsus nostris Batavus leo rugiit oris SA30*103
Are all the poets dumb and is there none Yo54*42
Are all those lights that gild the street M35*81
Are ladies then so excellent in rhyme CAL68*7
Argento pauper Petrus pauperrimus auro BLa20*69
Arise my muse and to thy tuneful lyre BLh19*148, Yo70*27
Arise O thou once mighty Charles arise Mc14*44
Arise thou orb of beauty in whose sphere Mc14*3
Arithmetic nine digits and no more Yo54*52
Armed with Love’s artillery CAL68*52

Arserat ut meritis regia alba ast impia flammis 02pa3*179, BLh14*74
Art and Nature both alleges Mc14*39
Art thou a sinner and wouldst merit heaven BLh19*144
Art thou joyful I am joyful BLh19*96
Art thou returned my sister concubine 02pa4*76
Arthurus veniet clypeo seu nomen ab auro Of06*64, Yo70*89
Artibus iste pater famosus in omnibus Adam SA30*172
Articulis sacris quidam subscribere jussus BLa20*42
As a young lawyer many years will drudge 02pa4*29
As Billy and Molly together were Yo11*177
As brave Sir George Toulouse did beat 02pa4*45, Fm12.3*76, Np44*104
As by the rigid laws of Rome Of06*28, Yo11*179, Yo70*88
As cities that to their fierce conqueror yield 02pa1*224, BLa22*1,
BLa40*14, BLh15*10, Lb55*10, LIa4*52, NLSa12*41, Np40*65,
Od08*127, Pt1*10, Pt3*40, Pt5*78, V90*18, VAd43*19, Yo40*37,
Yo52.1*60
As Cloris full of harmless thoughts Yo05*19
As Collin fed his sheep the other day Yo70*13
As Colon drove his sheep along 02pa1*132, Ab12*54, BLa22*20,
BLa40*8, BLh13*15, BLh17*27, Ed3*55, He36*76, Lb54*8, LIa4*5,
Mc14*29, Np32*9, Np38*15, Np40*48, NLSa12*83, Od08*272,
Od57*74, Pt3*8, SKv69*52, V90*100, VAd43*108, Yo05*71,
Yo27*8, Yo54*146
As crafty harlots use to shrink Ab12*19, Ed3*82, He36*35, Np40*8,
Od76*26, SKv69*18, Yo05*41
As dearest friends who when cold Death is nigh Mc14*91
As down the torrent of an angry flood 02pa1*259, Od57*175, Of16*109,
Yo08*64
As fair Olinda sat beneath a shady tree 02pa2*117
As from a darkened room some optic glass Mc14*46
As gentle Strephon sang and played BLh19*142, Of06*44
As Hodge and Dick who lately came 02pa4*46
As I a-walking was the other day 02pa3*88, NLSa12*78, OAc16*57,
Od08*291, Yo54*229
As I about the town do walk Od57*49
As I walked by myself M35*5, Yo11*136
As I was going last night to Whitehall BLa97*32, BLh17*43, Of16*85
As I was pondering one evening late BLa94*33, BLh17*79, M35*74,
Yo11*131
As I was walking in a shady grove Mc14*11
As I went by St James’s I heard a bird sing 02pa3*126, BLh19*121,
Of16*126, Yo08*24, Yo54*78
316 Appendix
As I’m informed on Monday last you sat Np42*39, Of15*45, Pt2*40,

VAd43*231
As in a dream our thinking monarch lay 02pa2*135, BLa94*124,
BLa97*100, BLh15*78, BLh19*157, Fm12.3*14, HUe70*60, Lb38*32,
Lb54*136, Np07*30, Np44*17, Np46*70, Oep18*68, Yo11*132
As in a shipwreck some poor sailor tossed Oa05*8
As in the days of yore was odds 02pa1*228, BLa62*62, He36*69, LIa4*49,
NLSa12*40, OAc16*43, Od08*228, Od57*77, Pt3*19, Yo40*85
As in those climes where poisonous plants abound BLa94*220
As in those nations where they yet adore BLa40*23, M35*30, Np43*7,
Oep4*60, Pc99*28, SA30*5, VAd43*174
As Indians when a valued hero dies 02pa4*71
As Killigrew came t’other day Od57*140
As Lambeth prayed so was the dire event Orp81*31
As late at funeral pomp I sat BLh15*103, Lb38*59, Np44*35
As leaves which from the trees blown down 02pa1*286
As men with stones do break the smoothest glass Yo52.1*35, Yo52.1*42
As moody Job in shirtless case Yo11*88
As Mother Cook went t’other day Of16*46
As needy gallants in the scrivener’s hands 02pa3*17, Od08*176, Yo11*193
As Nero once with harp in hand surveyed He24*10, Mc14*53, Pt3*74
As none though ne’er so ugly mount the gallows M35*187.2
As on his death-bed grasping Strephon lay 02pa1*2102, BLh13*13,
CAL68*6, Ed3*14, ILr*5, NLI93*22, Np38*13, Oa05*11, Yo54*131
As our Saint Patron with his eagle eye Yo40*61
As Phillis with her black cunt sat Ed3*151
As Ralph and Nick i’th’ field were plowing Yo08*42
As reading of romances did inspire 02pa1*291
As restless on my bed one night I lay 02pa1*166
As Sampson’s lion honey gave Od57*76
As seamen shipwrecked on some happy shore Oep4*64, SA30*56
As some brave admiral in former fight Ab12*6, BLa22*32, BLa40*25,
Ed3*95, He36*1, Lb54*27, NLI93*20, Np40*82, Od08*151,
Oep4*72, Orp81*4, Pt5*80, SKv69*7, Yo05*8, Yo40*87
As some raw lad by careful friends sent down M35*188.2
As soon as I saw that stock of bright charms Np07*8
As t’other night in bed I thinking lay 02pa1*135, BLa22*6, BLh15*11,
CAL68*9, Fm12.1*18, Lb55*15, NLSa12*66, OAc16*1, Od08*152,
Pc99*5, Pt1*11, V90*38, VAd43*42, Yo52.2*32
As the late character of godlike men 02pa1*240, BLa97*22, Of16*69
As through St Edmund’s streets I past BLa20*142
As through the temple gate I late did pass Yo54*243
As to the bill it was thrown out by five voices Oep18*70
As trembling prisoners stand at bar Ab12*47, Np40*39, Pt3*7, SKv69*46

As truant Cupid on the rake BLa97*143
As trusty broom-staff midnight witch bestrides Pt5*183
As wearied kings that quit the throne Of06*18
As when a bully draws his sword Ab12*49, CKh14*5, Ed3*65, Np40*69,
Oa05*39, Oep4*81, SA30*46, Yo05*46
As when a comet does appear HRO36*33
As when proud Lucifer aimed at a throne 02pa1*173, BLh13*65, Ed3*69,
He85*43, LIa4*55, NLSa12*3, Np45*3, Od57*151, Of16*7, V90*99,
VAd43*107
As when the queen of love engaged in war BLa94*141, Np46*90,
Oep18*88
As when two streams divided gently glide 02pa1*218
Ascend Alecto from thy den and come Ed3*77
Ascende Hospes and Circumspice BLa20*153
Ashton found guilty surely ’t cannot be Yo11*43
Aspectare licet pallentis lampada phoebes SA30*111
Assist me muse that in a glorious strain Yo70*2
Assist me satyr since I find ’tis grown Np46*106
Assist me some auspicious muse to tell Lb55*5, Od08*63, Yo40*67
Assist me some good sprite Np43*98, Od08*284, Yo54*215
Assist me Stanhope whilst I sing BLh13*58, BLh19*37, He85*40,
NLSa12*21, Np45*21
At a time when the eyes of all Europe are directed towards Od08*327
At Anna’s call the Austrian eagle flies 02pa3*199
At bello audacis populi vexatus et armis BLa62*82, Od76*3
At court when none but knaves and fools prevail BLh19*46, Ed3*51,
He85*45
At dead of night after an evening ball BLa94*151, BLa97*97, BLh17*78,
HUe70*26, M35*75, Np46*118, Oep18*109, Yo11*170
At dead of night imperial reason sleeps Np07*25 Np44*55
At dead of night when peaceful spirits sleep BLa94*212
At five this morn when Phoebus raised his head 02pa1*283, BLa62*9,
BLh12*3, BLl36*1, Ed3*72, He36*41, HRO36*46, Od57*153,
Pt3*61, V90*72, VAd43*80, Yo05*55, Yo13*2, Yo40*52, Yo52.2*40
At length my dreams of virtue passed Yo70*17
At length to complete my life and my glory Yo11*213
At Mr Crooms at the sign of the Shoe and Slap Yo54*72
At seventy years Tom Kestell’s silver hairs Oep4*7, SA30*17
At the pastoral staff Yo70*70
At the sight of my Phillis from every part BLh14*20, Fm12.1*34,
Od08*160, V90*78, VAd43*86
At Tunbridge Wells a New England apostle Yo54*136
318 Appendix
At Wallingford House not far from the court Np43*104

At your first sight of this letter you will think I am Lb54*129
Attend all you curious and to your own fate Fm12.3*30, Np44*42,
BLh15*106, Lb38*62, BLh14*85
Attend good people and to me give ear Od08*115
Attend good people lay by scoffs and scorns Od08*164
Attend ye good people all I pray BLa60*4
Aude aliquid brevibus gyaris et carcere dignum M35*169
Augustissime Caesar Domine Clementissime Sacrae Caesarae Od08*10
Aula profanâ M35*128
Aureus umbo rosae sibi adhamat et urit ocellos BLa20*86
Aurum puncta dabunt argentum par[i]que simplex Yo54*198
Auspicious day the best in all the year BLa94*111, BLh19*112, Np46*51,
Oep18*46, Yo70*69
Austriacum Batavis Dominum detraximus olim Yo11*114
Avarus inter opes haberi inops cupit SA30*193
Awake awake fair goddess of this place Yo54*168
Awake awake Heaven’s winged messenger doth call Oa01*59
Awake dull muse the sun appears Oep4*57, SA30*9
Awake sad Britain and advance at last Od57*30
Awake vain man ’tis time the abuse to see Mc14*52
Away with azure violet blue BLa20*84
Away with your ballads begone with old Simon 02pa4*48, Fm12.2*24,
Np42*67
Azure semy of flower de lices Od08*32
Baber to whose stupendous natural parts LIa4*37, Np39*31
Backed with confederate force the Austrian goes 02pa4*54, BLh14*93,
Fm12.3*75, Np44*102, Orp81*24
Barbarae genere moribus et innocentia illustris Od08*23
Base metal hanger by thy master’s thigh Ed3*57, He36*26, Mc14*36,
Pt3*64, V90*76, VAd43*84, Yo54*202
Bawds fiddlers whores buffoons of the age Np43*3
Be dumb unhallowed oracles and more Oep4*37
Be not puffed up with knighthood friend of mine Pt5*168
Be pleased when nothing offers better BLa94*194
Be still my soul let not these various storms Yo88*190
Be wise as Addison as Browne be brave 02pa4*33
Be wise as Somerset as Somers brave BLa94*190, BLh14*102, HRO36*71
Beat on proud billows Boreas blow M35*152, Yo08*83, Yo11*32
Beauty and wit so barely you requite HUe70*47
Beauty is nature’s quaint disguise He36*62
Beauty itself lies here in whom alone Yo54*50.1
Beauty thou active passive ill Oa05*53
Because the lords lieutenants and deputy lieutenants Od57*171

Before the clergy did of marriage taste Od57*48
Before the end of September near BLa62*42
Before you’re at one tedious page’s end BLh19*83
Begin be bold and venture to be wise Np40*116, Oa05*52
Begin we now a second time BLh19*78, He85*81.1, NLSa12*117
Behold a new thing under sun Od57*126
Behold Dutch prince here lie the unconquered pair 02pa3*176
Behold the covenant and the kingdom quit Oep4*39, SA30*72
Behold the genius of our land NLSa12*103
Behold the man who to be great abroad Mc14*87
Behold the man whose blood was rudely spilt BLa94*44, M35*104,
Yo11*47
Behold the race whence England’s woes proceed Yo11*197
Being about to enter into the nearest Christian communion Od08*102
Being called by a sick and I think a dying bed Pt5*52
Believe me Will that those who have least sense 02pa1*267
Bella fugis bellas sequeris belloque repugnas BLa62*40, M35*145,
Oa05*23, Od08*47, Pc99*14, SA30*92, Yo36*6.1, YoD*6.1
Bella inter geminos plus quam civilia fratres M35*168
Bellipotens virgo septem regina trionum BLa62*29
Ben Hoadley Johnson Julian and Oates BLa60*71, BLa94*219
Beneath this place 02pa1*2106, Pt3*89
Bentinck the goblet holds Carmarthen fills BLa97*93, M35*69,
Orp81*14, Yo11*166
Between Father Patrick and his highness of late 02pa1*235, BLa40*10,
NLSa12*67, OAc16*24, Od08*153, Yo40*77, Yo70*80
Beware ye Christian doctrines all M35*4.1
Big with the thoughts of pleasure down I came BLh19*64, He85*51,
NLSa12*140, Of16*40, V90*147, VAd43*157
Blackmore strove long with holy crafts to please Pt5*173
Blame not the sages of the law Mc14*89
Bless me what sight is this invades mine eyes M35*188
Bless me you stars for sure some sad portent V90*79, VAd43*87
Bless the good ladies and good food 02pa4*84
Bless this our meat and bless our king and queen HRO36*88
Bless us good lord from that dull sect that say Od57*43
Blessed is the man that walketh not in the council BLa22*10
Blessed mother of the church be in the list Oep4*4, SA30*63
Blessed once with all the joys that women yield Mc14*84
Blessed spirit what a pious cheat thou hast given Oep4*8
Blest age when every purling stream BLh13*71
Blest he that with a mighty hand 02pa1*282
320 Appendix
Blood in a cassock hides the crown and flies Od57*90

Blood underneath the holy coat this was Yo40*58
Blown up by faction and by guilt spurred on BLa94*172, BLh14*80
Bludius ut ruris damnum repararet aviti Lb55*9.1, Od57*87, Pc99*21,
Yo52.2*33
Boast not too much your powerful charms Np07*9
Bold Bacchus must the muses now attend Oa01*28
Bold thy attempt in these hard times to raise Pt5*181
Boni et mali rationes aeternae et indispensabiles BLa20*116
Born high yet bastard well bred but grew base M35*26
Born under kings our fathers freedom sought 02pa4*101
Both good and wise of many thousands one Oep4*52, SA30*54
Both kind and fortunate the year begun Pt5*204
Both shores were lost to sight when at the close Oa05*31
Brave Englishmen once now base cowards esteemed BLh17*53, Yo11*19
Bright Lucifer son of the morning star Oa01*61
Bright soul instruct us mortals how to mourn He24*36
Bring me a man with animating strokes OAc16*67, Od57*179
Britain expect from heaven no happy fate BLa94*25, Yo11*203
Brother I can’t but take it very ill BLa94*232
Buckingham swears and drinks Yo54*2
Burnetus ditescunt et fursonius audax M35*9
Burst forth in tears thou heart of adamant Yo52.2*35
Bursting with pride the loathed impostume swells Ab12*25, Ed3*27,
Np40*17.1, SKv69*24, Yo05*66, Yo54*189
But here ’tis fit I choose a nobler verse He85*84.1
But no man gets a groat that doth not swive Yo54*92
But now let our prayers grow a little more civil BLa97*81.1, Of06*8.1
But painter cease here draw your largest veil Yo52.2*11
But Sunderland Godolphin Lory HRO36*54
But t’other day from exile not by force 02pa3*102, BLa62*81
But that ’tis dangerous for man to be V90*192, VAd43*205
But were you really so mad as to fancy all the ships Fm12.3*48, Np44*74
But wherefore all this pother about fame Oep4*82, SA30*45
But why this fury all that e’er was writ BLh13*70, BLh19*50, He85*19,
LIa4*65, Np42*29, Of15*35, Pt2*27, V90*176, VAd43*189,
Yo13*17
But will you now to peace incline Od57*51
By a bold people’s stubborn arms oppressed BLa62*82.1, NLSa12*101,
Od76*4
By a false Scot a lying treasurer and a French whore BLa62*108, Pt3*54
By all love’s soft and mighty powers Ed3*85, He36*24, Np40*10,
Yo05*35
By Bacchus and by Venus swear BLa60*6

By Britain’s true monarchs great William and Mary BLa94*39, HUe70*33,
Of06*14, Yo11*97, Yo70*73
By fools and knaves pursued ensnared and caught BLa62*86
By heaven a hellish tribe so cursed a crew Yo11*160
By heaven I’ll tell her boldly that ’tis she SA30*3
By hell ’twas bravely done what less than this Ed3*53
By Jove a noble audience today BLh12*35
By nature meant by want a pedant made Pt5*150
By parents’ care instructed to feed poultry Od57*161
By this time madam I hope every looking glass Of06*69
By wandering up and down I now have found Yo88*214
By what I did hear the little bird sing BLa94*94, BLh15*52, BLh19*130,
HUe70*5, Lb38*6, Np46*33
By what power was love confined Fm12.1*61, V90*140, VAd43*150
C Clifford A Arlington B Buckingham A Ashley L Lauderdale Od08*58
Cambrai whilst of seraphic love you set 02pa4*18
Cambridge is dead and Kendall is riding post BLa62*27
Can learning’s orb when such a star expires 02pa1*284
Can my own blood betray me to disgrace 02pa3*219
Canonical black coats like birds of a feather BLa94*91, BLh15*51,
Lb38*5, Np46*30, Oep18*30, Of06*46, Yo11*62
Cantavit Gallus flet apostolus aspice flentem BLa20*29, Yo52.1*31
Captus amore procus caecaque Cupidine ductus Oa01*8, Of16*57
Cary’s face is not the best Od08*43, Yo52.1*21 <Also as ‘Roger told . . .’>
Caesar ubi Gallis Romam tulit arma redactus Yo88*222
Caesaris irati Ligarius ante tribunal Oa05*9
Caveant Doctores regentes et non regentes M35*40, SA30*99, Yo52.2*63
Cease cease from thy complaints disquieted soul BLa20*60
Cease cruel conquests and set free your swains Np07*37
Cease hypocrites to trouble heaven M35*58
Cease now thy talk of wonders nothing rare Od76*37
Cease rural conquests and set free your swains BLa60*43, Fm12.3*77,
Np44*105
Celestial was her language every phrase Yo52.2*56.2
Celia now my heart has broke 02pa1*287
Celia that faithful servant you disown LLt27*27
Celia this sullen pride forsake HUe70*22, Of06*58
Celinda loved by every swain BLh15*118, Lb38*74
Cernitis Aethiopem certe non cernere fas est SA30*112
Charissimo filio Johanni Trottio Yo36*14
Charleroy and Maastricht Pt4*17
Charles at this time having no need BLa40*4.1, BLa94*8, BLa97*3.1,
322 Appendix
BLh17*22, Ed3*8, Lb54*13, M35*32.1, Mc14*56.1, Np42*6.1,

Od08*276.1, Orp81*7.1, Pt2*13.1, V90*165.1, VAd43*176.1,
Yo13*20.1
Charles Berkly talks aloud Yo40*19
Charles by the grace of God king of Great Britain BLa22*15
Charles for help to his old friends doth call OAc16*37
Charles I take it very kindly that you write LLt27*7
Charles the second by the grace of God Od08*16
Charon O Charon hie and come away BLa62*20
Chaste Halifax and pious Wharton cry BLa94*187
Chaste pious prudent Charles the second 02pa1*137, BLa22*17,
BLa40*21, BLh15*21, ILr*14, Lb55*33, NLSa12*38, Np40*77,
OAc16*9, Od08*225, Od57*115, Pt1*21, Pt3*25, V90*37, VAd43*41,
Yo40*56, Yo52.1*76, Yo52.2*43
Cheer up my grieved soul and do not fear Yo54*208
Chloe in love grown nice BLh14*61
Chloe in verse by your command I write Ab12*2, BLa40*38, CAL68*2,
CKh14*11, CKh14*3, Ed3*64, Fm12.1*8, He36*6, LLt27*1, NLI93*15,
Np40*101, Np46*3, Od08*193, Od76*22, Oep18*3, Pt5*74, SKv69*2,
V90*27, VAd43*29, Yo05*5
Chloe the brightest of her sex BLh14*62, HUe70*21
Chloe’s the wonder of her sex Of06*57
Christian sheep we celebrate today a great gospel Yo54*100
Cingite odoriferis fragrantia tempora sertis SA30*132
Clara micanti auro spernas Romane sepulcra SA30*175
Clarendon had law and sense 02pa1*141, BLa22*53, BLa62*101,
He24*26, Lb54*26, NLSa12*91, Np39*28, OAc16*48, Od08*296,
Pt3*43, V90*15, VAd43*15, Yo52.1*40 <Also as ‘My muse and I . . .’>
Clauserat obscuro cum me medicaster in antro BLa20*157, Oa01*7,
Od76*6
Cleveland was doubtless to blame BLh13*33, BLh14*10, Ed3*37,
Np40*61, Od08*68, Od08*85, V90*28, VAd43*30, Yo40*38,
Yo70*9
Clito the wise the generous and good 02pa2*75
Cloaks for the senate are they say decreed Oa01*53
Close and obscure a wit of small renown Pt3*69
Close by a stream whose flowery banks might give Ab12*70, BLh13*25,
LIa4*19, Np38*24, Np40*93, Yo05*79, Yo27*24
Close hugged in Portsmouth’s smock thy senses are Yo52.2*51
Close in a hollow silent cave NLI93*23
Close to my owner I adhered M35*131, 02pa3*106
Close wrapped in Portsmouth’s smock thy senses are BLa40*5, BLa62*33,
BLh17*21, Ed3*114, LIa4*15, Of16*38, Pt3*46, Yo27*18, Yo54*150
Cloyed with the city and the fears that it brings Yo54*127
Coelo natus ex coeno nec orbus nec posthumus fui M35*194
Cold Muscovy as story tells 02pa2*45
Come all tricking papists Lady Abbess and nun BLa97*51, Od57*173,
Of16*108
Come all ye youths that yet are free BLh13*57, BLh14*30, BLh19*36,
Ed3*138, He85*9, LIa4*32, NLSa12*20, Np38*54, Np42*27,
Np45*20, Od57*108, Of15*33, Pt2*35, V90*122, VAd43*132
Come all you brave boys whose courage is bold Oa01*1
Come all you whores and bawds that are in this nation Yo40*9
Come brave boys now let us sing Yo11*10
Come bring us out the widest bowl Oep4*54
Come buy my new ballet BLa94*211
Come Celia let’s agree at last BLh19*52, V90*184, VAd43*197
Come cheer up your hearts boys and all hands to work Pt5*102
Come come great Orange come away 02pa3*128
Come come let’s mourn all eyes that see this day Yo54*232
Come cut again the game’s not done Np39*30
Come fill up our glasses until they run o’er Od57*96
Come heavenly spirits comfort bring Pt5*27
Come here my Bentinck and indulge thy charms Yo11*143
Come hither Topham with a hey with a hey NLSa12*56, OAc16*66,
Od57*62
Come Holy Ghost send down those heavenly beams Yo88*213
Come keen iambics with your badgers’ feet 02pa3*16
Come lay aside your murmuring M35*76, Yo11*134
Come listen good people to what I shall say BLa22*40, Lb54*25,
OAc16*21, Od08*273, Yo54*128
Come on come on brave Irish boys Yo11*25
Come on ye critics find one fault who dare Ab12*50, BLa20*45,
CKh14*4, Ed3*30, He24*22, He36*66, Lb54*6, NLI93*18, Np40*68,
Oa05*37, Od08*98, Od57*158, Oep4*74, SA30*38, Yo05*44
Come painter take a prospect from this hill 02pa3*143
Come pence a piece in brick and stone Fm12.1*67
Come weavers come butchers come cobblers come all Od57*36
Come White prepare to grave that man once more BLh17*84, M35*84,
Yo11*52
Come ye old English huntsmen that love noble sport BLa94*210
Coming by chance into St Laurence Kirk Yo11*91
Compertum est alibi in memorandum huius scaccarii Od08*13
Con Ruf Hen Steph Hen Rich I Hen Tres Edque Rich Hen tres BLa20*134
Concerning non-residence and the ill example which the clergy give
BLa20*135
324 Appendix
Conductors come away Yo54*27

Contains all the places and offices of command turned out of employment
02pa3*31
Contents 68 Non contents 59 M35*114
Contre quinte et quatorze on peu fair[e] un beau jeu BLa60*7.1
Convocat ecclesiae proceres qui sceptra paventis Yo11*63
Cooper designs Sawpitt dares not oppose Yo40*55
Corinna in the bloom of youth HUe70*20, Of06*56
Corinna keep those globes of light Pt3*96
Corsici violatae Gallinae legationis rei BLa20*28
Corvus adest ceteri bene nota Caystria penna SA30*118
Could I but climb the Ciceronian pole Mc14*10
Could then thy lazy thought to know my friend Np07*12
Courage dear Mall and drive away despair BLa94*139, Np46*88,
Oep18*87, Pt3*102
Cover le feau ye Huguenots BLa62*11, Yo40*63, Yo52.1*49
Coxcomb Bates For captain I do scorn to call thee Od08*79
Crane and Tuke are flanting flirts BLa62*100
Creator spirit by whose aid Oa05*19
Crown crown the goblet quaff the sparkling wine BLh19*133, Fm12.3*44,
Np44*69
Crushed by that just contempt his follies bring Ab12*24, Ed3*26,
Np40*17, SKv69*23, Yo05*65, Yo54*188
Culmen opes sobolem pollentia regna triumpha SA30*156
Cum ego Eduardus Spence in oratione a me coram Pt5*94
Cum piscatores textor legit esse vocatos BLa20*43
Cum primum Batavo solvit tua littore classis Yo11*150
Cum queritur mundus nos nostrum occidere regem M35*20.2
Cum queritur mundus nos nostrum vendere regem M35*20.1
Cum Strephon extremas moriturus duceret horas 02pa1*2104, ILr*5.1,
Oa05*10
Cum Titus Auriacae libaret basia dextrae Yo11*162
Cunctis mella dabo sed nullis spicula figo BLa20*18
Cupid I hear thou hast improved HRO36*25
Cupid once when wearied grown BLa20*94
Cupid the slyest rogue alive Oa05*20
Cur ego servitium temerarius ambio regum Yo54*238
Cur indignemur mortales morte perire SA30*174
Cur tacet hic mutus non est tibi lingua potesne SA30*113
Currit ubi Hibernas securus Belga per undas M35*68, Yo11*126
Curse on such representatives 02pa3*23, BLh15*18, Pt1*18, M35*80
Curse on those critics ignorant and vain Ab12*71, BLh13*26, BLh19*20,
Ed3*125, He85*30, Lb54*63, NLSa12*92, Np38*25, Np39*2,
Np39*43, Np42*17, Of15*23, Pt2*19, Pt3*45, V90*67, VAd43*129,

VAd43*73
Cursed be the day and doubly cursed that morn BLh12*42
Cursed be the head that first invented play Pt5*200
Cursed be the man what do I wish as though 02pa3*9
Cursed be the sages which did ordain That Whigs BLa94*41, M35*44
Cursed be the stars that did ordain Queen Bess 02pa2*152, BLa94*40,
BLa97*86, BLh14*72, BLh17*87, M35*45, Of06*68, Yo11*188,
Yo11*189, Yo70*92
Cursed be the timorous fool whose feeble mind 02pa1*140, BLa62*127,
NLSa12*107
Cursed be those dull unpointed dogg’rel rhymes BLh19*102, He85*105,
NLSa12*157, Np42*52, Np46*25, Oep18*25, Of15*59, Of16*84,
Pt2*79, V90*224, VAd43*244, Yo08*59, Yo70*56
Cursed be those thoughts whom contemplation move Mc14*24
Cy gist icy Charles roy d’Espagne 02pa2*100
Cy gist Saint Evremont de célèbre memoir BLa60*22
Cygnus adest siluere aquilae siluere columbae SA30*121
D’ye hear the news of the Dutch dear Frank 02pa3*123
Daily disgracer of our English satyr BLa94*12, Of16*92, Yo19*4
Damn that opinion which will not allow He85*102, V90*151,
VAd43*161
Damn ye my lads what ne’er a word to say BLh12*39
Damon forbear and don’t disturb your muse BLa94*205, BLh15*137,
Lb38*93
Damon if thou wilt believe me BLa94*113, HUe70*28.1, Np46*52.1,
Oep18*49
Damon that author of so great renown 02pa2*73, He85*86, NLSa12*122,
Np43*79, Yo70*43
Dampnum mihi contulit tempore brumali SA30*165
Daphnen Phoebus amat fugit illa ab nomen amantis SA30*131
Dat veniam Corvis vexat censura He36*82
Daughter M we are five against you one BLa20*137
Dead is the man whom England once did fear HRO36*61
Dear cousin why so melancholy why 02pa4*95
Dear Dick howe’er it comes into his head BLa94*236
Dear friend I fain would try once more BLh17*32, BLh19*87, Fm12.1*65,
He85*80, NLSa12*114, Of16*42, V90*154, VAd43*164
Dear friend I hear that you of late are grown Oa05*1
Dear friend I hear this town does so abound Ab12*12, BLa40*17,
CKh14*2, He36*2, Lb54*33, LLt27*31, NLI93*2, Np40*2, Od76*24,
Pt5*77, SKv69*13, Yo05*1
Dear friend When last I did discourse you of my love Lb54*137
326 Appendix
Dear friend when those we love are in distress 02pa2*63, BLh17*16,

Np43*75, Od57*156, Of16*25, Yo13*30
Dear friend Your letter I with grief perused 02pa3*39, BLh12*11
Dear friends you know I keep two chairmen BLh17*38
Dear friends you know I keep two pages BLh17*39
Dear Julian having missed thee a long time Np43*34, V90*197,
VAd43*210
Dear Julian twice or thrice a year 02pa2*65, BLh17*33, BLh19*73,
Np43*95, Yo13*38
Dear madam It shall not be my present business to harangue Mc14*41
Dear maudaum me ha’ sent me ladies bill so very sheap Oa01*78 <Also as
‘Mush honord Maudaum . . .’>
Dear Mr Henningham I make bold to send this ballad BLh15*80,
HUe70*62, Np44*16, Oep18*69.1
Dear painter it is hard for me to tell BLa62*66
Dear Sir a lady cried that’s much renowned BLa94*136, Np46*85
Dear sir the great conclusion Solomon made Od57*99, Yo54*107
Dear Somerton once my beloved correspondent BLa94*127, BLh15*82,
HUe70*57, Lb38*36, Np44*14, Np46*74, Od57*164, Oep18*73
Dear sweet Richards William BLh14*49, BLh19*108, Np43*39,
Of16*87, V90*210, VAd43*226
Dear Thomas didst thou never pop 02pa4*26
Dear Tom I have just time to give you an account BLa94*222, BLa94*229
Dear wife let me have a fire made 02pa3*149
Dear Will We two have plotted twenty years and more BLh17*56,
Yo11*214
Dearest George Once I thought that thou hadst been the perfection Mc14*85
Death who’ll not change prerogative with thee Yo54*50
Declining Venus has no force o’er love 02pa3*174, BLh15*90, Lb38*46,
Np44*23, Np46*81, Oep18*85
Deel confound each senseless loon Yo11*39
Deel faw mine eyne BLa97*119, M35*116, Yo11*38
Deep in an unctuous vale ’twixt swelling hills BLh19*5, BLh12*29,
Ed3*43, He36*7, V90*82, VAd43*90
Deep waters silent roll so grief like mine BLh19*25
Delirat rex triumphat cunnus BLa62*37
Denham is dead and Cleveland is fled Yo40*75
Denied the press forbid the public view Lb54*90
Describe the Roman clergy who can do’t Yo54*59
Deserted and scorned the proud Marlborough sat BLa97*103, HUe70*65,
Oep18*77, Yo70*47
Deserted out of Colonel Bellasis Richmond’s regiment BLh15*91,
Lb38*47, Np44*24
Despairing beside a clear stream CAL68*55

Deus bone quid ego in me suscepi Od08*35
Devils can change their shapes but not their natures Od57*81
Did any punishment attend HRO36*20
Did ever Nature prodigal appear Yo08*72
Did you ever hear of such a thing as this battle Od57*170
Did you hear of the news an invincible fleet BLa94*98, Np43*71,
Np46*37, Oep18*34, V90*248, VAd43*268, Yo08*25
Die wretched Damon die quickly to ease her BLa94*112, HUe70*28,
Np46*52, Oep18*48
Dieu et mon droit Od08*231
Dignified things may I your leave implore 02pa3*113, Of16*117
Diras viator et mali ominis verba Yo11*73
Discolor exuitur vultus turbataque rerum 02pa1*215
Discreet and apprehensive sir if the iniquity of men were as easily BLa20*67
Disgraced undone forlorn made fortune’s sport 02pa3*61, Ab12*58,
BLa22*44, BLa62*93, BLa94*3, BLh13*7, Ed3*105, Fm12.1*25,
He36*68, Lb54*14, LIa4*11, Mc14*37, Np38*7, Np39*5,
NLSa12*80, OAc16*35, Od08*289, Od57*69, Pt3*11, SKv69*57,
V90*57, VAd43*62, Yo13*11, Yo27*13, Yo52.2*52
Dives opum virtute potens clarusque triumpho SA30*149
Divine Thalia charmer of my breast 02pa4*70
Divorum domus an regum stupor urbis an orbis BLa20*124
Do not most fragrant earl disclaim BLa60*53, BLa94*158, BLh14*110
Do you not know How a fortnight ago Od57*53
Do you observe Lindamor that domestic animal the vassal BLa20*76,
Od76*38
Domino Cornelio D’ Witt urbis hujus consuli Od08*91, SA30*146
Dorinda’s sparkling wit and eyes BLh15*96, Fm12.3*21, Lb38*52,
Np44*29, Oa01*43
Dorset no gentle nymph can find BLh13*61, BLh14*39, BLh19*43,
Ed3*88, He85*32, LIa4*46, NLSa12*6, Np43*15, Np45*6, Of16*4,
V90*174, VAd43*187
Dost hear the bells ring and the great cannons roar Yo11*120
Down down discoverers who so long have plotted Of16*21
Drake Howard the impudentest bawd in town Of06*59, Yo70*26
Draw England ruined by what was giv’n before 02pa1*110, BLa22*36,
BLh15*5, He24*3, Lb54*114, Lb55*3, NLSa12*63, Np40*73,
Od08*73, Oep4*92, Pc99*9, Pt1*5, SA30*28, Yo36*5, Yo70*66,
YoD*5
Draw me a lord standing in separation Yo54*231
Draw me a lord that hath less wit than years Od08*99
Drawn by my pensive thoughts into a field Ed3*13
328 Appendix
Dreaming last night of Mistress Farley Ab12*18, Ed3*81, He36*34,

Np40*7, Od76*25, SKv69*17, Yo05*40
Drunk as a beggar or a lord BLh12*23
Drunk with excessive joy for victory Yo11*87
Dryden thy wit has caterwauled too long 02pa1*253
Duke Lauderdale that lump of grease Od08*211, Pt4*15, Yo52.2*26
Duke [word missing] who led up the dance BLh14*94
Dull sonnet writing now runs dry Np43*92, Of16*39, Yo13*34
Dum Batavi terra cedunt mare deserit Anglus Od08*158
Dum Bruti effigiem sculptor de marmore ducit SA30*173
Dum linguas acuunt gentis scinduntque Britannae Yo52.1*29
Dum Marte amissos reparatum is Marte triumphos Yo54*9
Dum regina subit constanti pectore mortem 02pa3*169, M35*115,
Orp81*25
Dum vixit rex et valuit sua magna potestas SA30*162
Dunkirk is sold Dutch French and Dane our foes BLa20*6
Duped by the bells I rose from bed M35*162
E Scotia presbiter profugus BLh15*77, Lb38*31, M35*156, Oep18*78,
Of06*27, Pt5*36, Yo11*74
Each man has private cares enough Np43*32, V90*195, VAd43*208
Easing my body t’other day He85*93
Ecce jacet in tumulo qui sedere noluit in throno BLa20*48
Ecce libens morior sed frustra infamia ligni Yo11*41
Ecce virum stabiles cui gens Augusta penates BLh14*83
Ecclesiae militantis praesul ocreatus M35*11
Ecclesiae speculum patriae vigor ava reorum SA30*150
Egrimunda thin lies here in this box Od76*35
Eia agite O juvenes vernantes ibimus hortos SA30*126
Eli Eli clamat mortem passurus Jesus BLa20*71
Emmanuel sent my Lord Keeper out a teacher they say Od57*8
En auditores virum dixero an rectius deum quendam SA30*107
En et ecce prodit rex ille venator cum omnibus suis canibus M35*186
En faveur de la France et L’Espagne BLa60*7
En nubes tangit Marlburi cella columna CAL68*47
En Stephanus Perry qui conventîcla flagellat BLa20*144
Enflamed with love and led by blind desires Oa01*8.1, Of16*57.1
England by all thought Beauty’s natural soil BLa62*72, Yo54*133
England taught her virtue but Amsterdam Pt5*96
England thy proper native thee betrays Od57*23
Enjoy thy bondage make thy prison know BLh19*1, Fm12.1*41, V90*93,
VAd43*101
Enjoy yourselves sweet souls ’tis far below BLa62*54.1
Ere we to play this match prepare 02pa4*51
Errabat Lysidas telis Armatus amoris CAL68*51

Erumpit atro Christus umbrarum specu SA30*100
Escape by all the gods he never shall BLa97*25
Est animal myrmecoleon quâ voce notatur BLa20*128
Eternal mind by whose most just commands Yo11*2
Eve’s sins o’er souls gave Father Petre power M35*73, Yo08*36.1
Even as the sun with purple coloured face 02pa4*58
Even joined in one the good the fair the great Fm12.1*51, V90*115,
VAd43*124
Every baron hath these privileges Od08*19
Every object we meet with in the world may serve to raise Pt4*29
Ex solo iamdudum venerabili et impolluto M35*130
Excellent Brutus of all human race 02pa3*6
Excellentissime Domini Etsi non detur amplius te coram SA30*84
Expectant iam forsan vestrum nonnulli ut ego tum M35*39
Facunda terra potat BLa20*88
Fading and fugitive alas Pt5*202
Fain I would if I could by any means obtain Yo40*14
Fain thou wouldst know whom I would choose Of15*77, Pt2*75
Fair Amoret is gone astray BLh15*104, Fm12.3*27, Lb38*60,
Np44*39
Fair Cloris in a pigsty lay Ab12*39, He36*30, Lb54*39, Np40*31,
SKv69*37
Fair Philomela to you I could not send my heart Mc14*47
Fair royal maid permit a youth undone 02pa1*144, He85*66, NLSa12*34
Fair was the morn when bloody-minded Mars V90*26, VAd43*28
Fairest and latest of the beauteous race BLa60*28
Faithless unkind ungrateful though you are Np07*45
Faelix in Christus gentrice creditum Yo88*225
Falleris hac qui te credis sub imagine pingi Orp81*42
Fame who does over the universe scatter Yo11*227
Faemina venifluo si sis de sanguine sana BLa20*68
Fare well alas I have not time to tell ILr*16
Farewell chief envy of malignant fate Pt5*73
Farewell damned Stygian juice which does bewitch 02pa1*290, 02pa4*69,
M35*46
Farewell fair Arminda my joy and my grief Ed3*152
Farewell false friends farewell ill wine Orp81*21
Farewell false women know I’ll ever be Np40*51
Farewell fond love upon whose treacherous coast BLa62*10
Farewell my dear Danby my pimp and my cheat 02pa3*47, BLa22*46,
OAc16*17, Od08*267, Pt4*9
Farewell my witty witty king OAc16*12
330 Appendix
Farewell Petre farewell cross 02pa3*131, BLa97*68

Farewell thou best of kings and human race Yo88*241
Farewell ye gilded follies pleasing troubles BLa20*100, CAL68*5
Farthing unconstant proved yet no disgrace Oa01*47
Fast pray and weep swear and forswear decay BLa40*35
Fat ruddy and dull 02pa3*103
Felices animae superis quae ducitis ortum Yo54*10
Female lampooners a new fashioned thing Mc14*48
Fetch me Ben Jonson’s skull and fill’t with sack 02pa3*8
Fide sed ante vide quo fidis [ ] bene vidit Yo88*230
Fill me a bowl of sack and I’ll carouse Oep4*22
Finish me one task more for critic muse Of16*93, Yo19*4.1
Finish me one task more for Whiffler muse BLa94*13
First draw an arrant fop from top to toe Od08*190, Yo40*84
First draw the sea that portion which between Yo40*24
First Heaven resolved William should reign and then Yo08*13
First his majesty of Great Britain promiseth Yo54*124
First I am not averse to the reading of the king’s declaration M35*3
First I will with Westmorland begin Np38*53
First That it may continue the king’s favour M35*2
First the sweet speaker Will Williams I saw He85*53, Lb54*84, LIa4*66,
Np43*22, V90*182, VAd43*195
Five satyrs of the woodland sort 02pa2*52
Flea-bitten synod an assembly brewed SA30*18
Flesh within and bones without CAL68*42
Fly hence ye gentle muses all Of16*54
Fool fuckster and knave in Piazza does dwell BLh19*90
Fools must be meddling in matters of state BLa97*16, BLh19*94,
NLSa12*135, Np07*5, Np42*45, Np46*17, Oep18*17, Of15*50,
Of16*50, Pt2*46, V90*200, VAd43*213
For an apple of gold Orp81*38
For as much as sundry records and testimonies of great Od08*18
For as much as the providence of God hath established Od08*27
For cheating huffing frisking and for swiveing BLa20*145
For every prince that hit my fancy CAL68*50
For faults and follies London’s doom shall fix 02pa1*118
For Gloucester’s death which sadly we deplore BLa97*131, BLh15*141,
Lb38*97
Formica vectus tanquam est elephante Menander CAL68*45
For missing thee how canst thou Burting blame M35*158
For shame ye doting fools for shame be wise BLa94*218
For shape and beauty ’mongst the female train BLh14*84
For she whom jointure can obtain Yo52.1*75.1
For standing tarses we kind Nature thank Np40*12, SA30*4, BLa97*140,

Yo05*39
For the few hours of life allotted me Np40*118
For the love of the smock Yo54*219
For the miracles done 02pa2*150, BLa94*43, HUe70*54, Lb54*134
For this additional declaration 02pa1*234, Of16*110, Of16*111,
Yo08*23
For tyrants dead no statues we erect 02pa2*149
For war the horse we never keep Od76*2
For Warwick she keeps two stallions in pay BLh19*59, He85*21,
NLSa12*26, Np43*23, Np45*26, V90*183, VAd43*196, Yo70*4
For your ungodly letter 02pa3*37
Forgive me if your looks and thoughts Np07*44
Forte tonans medio dum quaerit in aere fulmen SA30*87
Fortuna saevo laeta negotio et BLa62*85
Fortune made up of toys and impudence 02pa2*111, BLa62*85.1
Four impudent cits stock-jobbers I mean BLa94*230, Orp81*34
Fran: Flani concerdunt Hispan: cum viribus urgent M35*144
France aims at all BLa94*180
Franklyn’s beauty does surprise HUe70*18, HUe70*37, Of06*43
Frantic love to what extremes Yo54*98
Fraudibus and fastu levitate libidinis aestu BLa20*119
FRE fremit in mundo DE deprimit alta profundo SA30*154
Fret not dear Tom that you have lost the race Oep18*121
Fret not dear Withy why should ought control CAL68*38
Friend for Jesus’ sake forbear Yo54*155
Friend The second epistle of the sixth day of the seventh month
Oa01*75
Friends like to leaves that on the trees do grow Np40*110
From a bundle of lies and a fardel of nonsense Yo11*100
From a Catholic head of a heretic church Pt3*52
From a dozen of peers made all at a start BLa60*81
From a proud sensual atheistical life 02pa3*35, BLa22*39, BLh12*13,
BLh14*5, BLh15*14, He36*67, Np40*43, Pt1*14, Pt3*51, V90*13,
VAd43*13, Yo05*70, Yo54*75
From a woman who thirty long winters has seen M35*179
From all the women we have whored 02pa3*120, BLa97*47, LIa4*69,
Np43*105, Od57*177, Yo08*68, Yo52.2*64
From an impudent town that was always unjust BLh17*54, M35*12,
Of06*21
From an old inquisition and new declaration Of16*119, Yo08*48
From conscience the second and prerogative pother BLa62*110,
OAc16*51, Od08*306
332 Appendix
From councils of six where treason prevails BLa97*9, Lb54*70, Np43*94,

Yo13*37
From deepest dungeon of eternal night Np43*25, V90*186, VAd43*199
From deposing of kings as a damned popish tenet BLa97*111,
Yo11*101
From easing female sex in pain BLa60*30, HRO36*65, Np46*110,
Yo70*6
From famed Barbados on the western main Of16*62
From Father Hopkins whose vines did inspire him Of16*41, Of16*43
From G——n that wasp whose talent is notion 02pa3*215
From hunting whores and haunting play He85*91, Lb54*103,
NLSa12*130, Of16*36, Of16*75, VAd43*218
From impudent town that was ever unjust BLa94*31
From Jesuitical polls who proudly expose Of16*104
From kings that sell their subjects’ lives BLh19*145
From kings that would sell us to pay their old scores 02pa3*90,
BLa62*112, Od08*301
From London Paul the carrier coming down BLa94*206
From measuring devotion with beads or with sand Od57*103
From Nottingham ale and Halifax law Oep18*63
From parting clouds the German eagle brings 02pa2*131
From peace with the French and war with the Dutch Yo40*74
From pensioners papists and rusty dragoons Lb55*11, Pc99*25, Yo54*226
From Rome’s infallibility take one grain Of16*59
From sable regions of eternal night Of06*34
From sawing the crown ’twixt fanatics and friars Ed3*21, Fm12.1*53,
V90*117, VAd43*126
From shamming three nations by new-coined inventions Yo11*98
From such a face whose excellence Yo54*14
From Swedish wolf see you yourself secure Yo54*242
From the besieged Ardea all in post 02pa4*57
From the blessed regions of eternal day 02pa1*147, BLa22*24, Lb55*19,
NLSa12*39, Od08*235, Pt3*57, Pt4*4
From the boat of old Charon in the Stygian ferry 02pa3*186
From the brat of a king by a queen of the stage Of16*97
From the bright regions of eternal day Yo52.2*30
From the dark dungeons of eternal night Mc14*45
From the dark Stygian lake I come 02pa1*139, BLa22*19, BLh15*36,
Lb54*74, NLSa12*72, OAc16*5, Od08*253, Pt1*38, Pt3*31, Pt4*2,
Pt4*38, Yo54*110
From the deep vaulted den of endless night 02pa2*62, BLh13*79,
Fm12.1*43, He85*28, V90*97, VAd43*105, Yo13*19
From the dull noise and business of the town Pt5*32
From the Dutch coast when you set sail BLa97*79, BLh15*64, BLh17*52,
BLh19*155, Fm12.3*10, HUe70*29, Lb38*18, Lb54*138, M35*28,
Np44*12, Np46*64, Oep18*62, Yo11*151
From the embraces of a harlot flown 02pa3*71
From the lawless dominion of mitre and crown 02pa3*93, BLa62*114,
Ed3*123, NLSa12*2, Np43*11, Np45*2, OAc16*60, Od08*319,
V90*170, VAd43*183
From the morals of Peyton Od08*251
From the race of Ignatius and all their colleagues 02pa3*141, BLa97*65
From the Spanish king the Dutch we freed long since BLh17*52.1,
Yo11*114.1
From the top of ane my thraust Yo40*64
From unnatural rebellion that devilish curse BLa97*81, BLh17*63,
M35*48, Of06*8, Yo11*99
From villainy dressed in a doublet of zeal 02pa3*14
From whence was first this fury hurled Fm12.1*58, V90*137, VAd43*147
From William’s ambition his pride and vain glory Yo11*102
From William’s Dutch Hogens courtiers and sharks BLa94*74
From York to London town we come Od08*278.1, Yo54*174
Fruition was the question in debate BLh12*25, CMp*5, Ed3*33, Pt3*38
Fucksters you that will be happy Ab12*14, BLh12*26, CMp*3, He36*59,
Np32*4, Np40*4, Pt3*4, Yo05*73, Yo70*10
Fulmine Caesareo fretus Jovis ales ab alto 02pa2*130
Funis cum lignis a te miser ensis et ignis SA30*164
Gens invicta mari quae multâ classe superba SA30*134
Gentle reproofs have long been tried in vain 02pa1*280, Ab12*1,
BLa94*1, BLh12*1, BLh13*1, CMp*1, DA*14, Np32*1, Np38*1,
Pt3*1, SKv69*1
Gentle Sir George to himself keeps his miss NLI93*14
Gentlemen Now is the time acquit your selves like men 02pa3*96
Gentlemen of England this I let you understand Od57*2
Gentlemen When last you were here this house was to be let 02pa3*89,
BLa62*90, Od08*295
Gentlemen your civil kindness last year shown Oep4*66, SA30*58
Gentles you must expect no compliment BLa20*113
Gentlest air thou breath of lovers 02pa3*213, Yo70*61
Gentlest blast of ill concoction 02pa3*214, Yo70*62
Georgica dum magnus proprio Maro carmine condit SA30*116
Give Celia but to me alone Np46*53, Oep18*50
Give me leave to rail at you Ab12*38, BLa40*34, DA*6, Fm12.1*21,
Lb54*37, LLt27*4, Np40*30, SKv69*36, VAd43*45, Yo05*24
Give me ye gods each day an active whore V90*80, VAd43*88
Give o’er ye dull sots BLh13*51, He85*12, Np38*48
334 Appendix
Give o’er ye poor players depend not on wit BLa97*18, BLh17*34,

Np07*4, Np43*82, Of16*71, Yo08*11
Gloriae stirpis tumidaeque pompae Lb55*7.2
Go empty joys Od57*19
Go gold aspiring muse Yo11*6
Go little brat respected by the just 02pa3*117, Yo08*9
Go Love thy banners round the world display Oa05*40
Go on brave heroes you whose merits claim 02pa3*68
Go perjured man and if thou dost return Yo54*49
Go sots home to your gammons go and boast OAc16*58, Od08*171
Go take that monstrous bowl from hence Oep4*54.1
Go tell Aminta gentle swain Lb54*72
God and my right shall after all prevail Orp81*40
God bless our good and gracious king BLh14*9, V90*24, VAd43*26
God bless our gracious sovereign Anne 02pa3*206, BLa60*34,
HRO36*67, Np42*68
God bless the king God bless our faith’s defender Oep18*126
God hath a controversy with our land 02pa2*55
God prosper long our gracious Will BLa94*152, BLh15*60, Lb38*14,
Np46*119, Oep18*110
God prosper long our noble king M35*203
God’s and thy right made thee our hope before 02pa1*295
God’s anger doth not atheists now oppress SA30*185
God’s life we’re undone a pox of your son BLa22*33, Od08*255
Goddess of numbers and of thoughts sublime 02pa2*142
Gold rules within and reigns without these doors BLh14*77, BLh15*135,
Fm12.3*51, Lb38*91, Np44*77
Gondemar’s policy and Spain’s ambition will triumph over your scripture
BLa20*136
Good Halifax and pious Wharton cry BLa60*50, BLh14*106, Orp81*27
Good people and’t please you give ear unto me Ed3*23, V90*161,
VAd43*170
Good people come buy 02pa3*137, BLa97*61, Yo08*60
Good people do but lend an ear Yo11*207
Good people draw near I’ll tell you a tale BLh17*51, Yo11*129
Good people draw near if a ballad you’ll hear BLa62*6, Od08*49,
Yo40*31
Good people fast For what is past BLh17*70, Yo11*104
Good people I pray 02pa3*138, BLa97*64, Pt5*12
Good people I pray ye come hither BLa97*110, M35*102, Yo11*159
Good people pray now attend to my muse 02pa3*146
Good people This same theatre here being intended for pious and virtuous
representation BLa94*169
Good people what will ye of all be bereft M35*100, 02pa2*113, Pt5*97,

BLa97*125
Gout I conjure thee by the powerful names Od08*163
Grace will and art assist me for to see Yo88*220
Grande Pater venerande Mater imple ure corusca Pt3*56
Grandia pollicitus quanto maiora dedisti M35*6
Grant me gods a little seat BLa97*142
Grant me indulgent heaven a rural seat M35*180
Gratias tibi agimus benignissime Pater pro fundatoribus ac benefactoribus
nostris BLa20*16
Gratulor vobis academici rediviva comitia iam primum SA30*98
Grave Vaughan is dead Frank North appears Pt3*50, Yo40*59
Great Charles who full of mercy wouldst command 02pa1*117, BLa22*8,
BLh15*9, Ed3*128, He24*24.1, Lb54*109.1, Lb55*16.1, Mc14*2,
NLSa12*69, Np40*76, OAc16*3, Od08*178.1, Od57*121, Orp81*2,
Pt1*9, Pt3*49, Pt5*88, Yo40*80, Yo52.2*6.1, Yo70*44.1
Great George escaped the narrow seas and storms Of16*130
Great good and just could I but rate 02pa3*13, CAL68*16, Fm12.1*11,
Lb54*130, M35*31, VAd43*34
Great Hannibal who shook the Capitol BLa60*68
Great heart who taught thee so to die Yo54*13
Great heir to Louis called thirteen BLh19*137
Great little queen who half thy life does sit Pc99*20
Great Nassau from his cradle to his grave 02pa2*181, Fm12.3*68,
Np44*95, Oa05*26
Great Nassau rise to glory BLh19*126
Great prince and so much greater as more wise 02pa1*19, BLa22*35,
BLh15*4, He24*2.1, Oep4*91.1, Pt1*4, SA30*27, Yo36*4, Yo40*29,
YoD*4
Great Schomberg say what’s due unto thy name Yo11*108
Great sir disdain not in this piece to stand Yo40*25
Great sir If any thing that miracle can do Np43*33, V90*196, VAd43*209
Great sir Since it is your gracious pleasure Od08*147
Great sir whene’er your gracious voice we hear Od08*132
Great sir your land self-conquered was and poor Oep4*16, SA30*22
Great soul of nature source of all our joys 02pa3*224
Great Strafford worthy of that name though all Od57*11, Yo54*29
Great things you’ve promised greater yet you’ve done us M35*6.1
Great Tom of Lincoln M35*60
Great truckling soul whose stubborn honesty 02pa2*92
Great William concerned to leave his gulled boobies BLa94*76,
BLh15*108, Lb38*64
Greek text from Anacreontea ‘he ge melaina pinei’ BLa20*87
336 Appendix
Greek text from Anacreontea: Eros pot en rhodisi BLa20*92

Grief does o’erwhelm my heart SA30*76
Grieve mighty power grieve thy house is down Of06*54
Guidé par Cadogan et son bouillant genie BLh14*116
Hâc alieni raptor honoris BLh19*127, Of16*100, Yo08*73
Hâc Laurentius ille parte Sarson BLa20*102
Had Alexander your bright charms surveyed BLa60*46
Had I but world enough and time Od08*97
Had parts and merit gained the chair BLa94*184
Had she but lived in Cleopatra’s age 02pa3*50, Ed3*118, Lb54*54,
Np39*39, Pt3*34
Had the late famed Lord Rochester survived 02pa1*265
Hadst thou but lived in Cleopatra’s age BLh14*24, Fm12.1*39, V90*91,
VAd43*99
Hah my old friend Mr Bayes 02pa1*238
Hail day of wonders now we may Oa01*63
Hail gentle love and soft desire Of06*53, Pt2*63, Yo70*31
Hail happy picture of a nymph divine Np07*13
Hail happy warrior hail whose arms have won 02pa3*42, BLh12*14,
He36*57, V90*53, VAd43*58
Hail happy William thou art strangely great 02pa2*156, 02pa3*164,
BLa94*66, BLa97*126, M35*59, Orp81*17, Pt5*99
Hail holy thing Od08*189
Hail mighty Charles joy of our life and eyes Od08*269.1
Hail mighty James a king without a crown BLa94*135, BLh15*85.1,
Lb38*40, Np46*84, Oep18*83.1
Hail mighty prince this poem on you waits 02pa3*133
Hail pious drab of an impostume brat Pt2*66
Hail poet laureate of this barren isle He85*27, NLSa12*23, Np43*89,
Np45*23, Yo13*25
Hail queen of hearts to whose true English praise Fm12.3*73, Np44*100
Hail reverend primate justly so renowned Fm12.3*62, Np44*88
Hail reverend Tripos guardian of the law 02pa1*247
Hail sacred day that each returning year BLa94*79, Fm12.3*43,
Np44*68
Hail to the myrtle shade Ed3*45, Yo54*141
Hail to the standing pricks Ed3*46
Hail tuneful pair say by what wondrous charms 02pa3*197, BLa60*21,
BLh14*96, Fm12.1*68, Fm12.1*69
Hail well returned triumphant day Np43*31, V90*194, VAd43*207
Hail ye mighty seven our church’s chief glory Yo11*49
Half dead the Church of England lies Yo11*59
Hanc legat and tutus cùm moriturus erit BLa20*97
Hans Carvel impotent and old BLa94*173, BLh15*142, Fm12.3*59,

Lb38*98, Np44*86
Happily housed these lares are 02pa4*14, BLa94*75, BLh14*103,
Np43*108
Happy are they who wisely do foresee BLh15*109, Fm12.3*29, Lb38*65,
Np44*41
Happy great prince and so much happier thou BLh13*80, BLh14*53,
BLh19*55, He85*58, NLSa12*29, Np42*34, Np45*29, Of15*40,
Pt2*78, V90*110, VAd43*118
Happy the man if yet that man there be CAL68*32
Happy the people where no priest gives rules 02pa2*171
Happy the star that ruled that glorious day Mc14*13
Happy those men whose hearts do lie Yo70*32
Hard by Pell-Mell lives a wench called Nell BLh17*9, Pt4*7
Hard stools are caused by costive claret Oa01*34
Hark gentle nymphs I hear Thalia call Yo08*75
Hark hark my jolly soul methinks I hear Mc14*49
Hark in what soft and moving strains Of06*61
Harmonious strings your charms prepare BLa94*146, Np46*101,
Oep18*102
Hast thou at last that mother church too quitted BLh19*79, NLSa12*142,
Np43*42, V90*215, VAd43*232, Yo70*83
Hast thou no friend so kind to let thee know BLh19*91, He85*87,
NLSa12*121
Hast thou surprised me Britain I defy 02pa4*90
Haste o haste hither you ungrateful eyes Yo52.2*36
Hate and debate Rome o’er the world hath spread Yo52.1*34
Hats are for use and ornament but why Od57*4
Have at you sluggish drones who only live BLa62*54
Have you heard of a lord of noble descent Ab12*76, BLh13*32, Np38*30,
Od08*313
Have you heard of the knight that was sent to the Tower BLa62*103,
NLSa12*43
Have you not heard how our sovereign of late Yo40*83
Have you not heard of an army complete Yo70*59
Have you not in a chimney seen He36*27, Mc14*26
Have you seen the raging stormy main Np40*13, Yo05*54
Having committed the justice of my cause and recommended M35*133
Having first signified unto you her majesty’s pleasure Od08*25
Having thanked me so much for the news in my last BLh15*140,
Fm12.3*56, HRO36*44, Lb38*96, Np44*82
He first deceased she for a little tried Fm12.1*12, VAd43*35, Od76*36
He is a bawd to the mouth that kills his own stomach M35*153
338 Appendix
He is one whose generation was before Adam BLa20*56

He makes kings declares the pretended prince of Wales king 02pa4*94
He now lies low but high his fame does rise Yo88*240
He that can read a sigh or spell a tear Yo54*8
He that first said it knew the worth of wit 02pa1*274
He that in Arthur’s trash has penance done Pt5*178
He that loves glass without a G Yo52.1*36
He that of yore defamed a godly plot BLa94*32
He that owns with his heart and helps with his hand BLa94*174
He that reads authors good and great BLa20*82
He that trusts before he try Yo88*230.1
He that would learn how to fence for his life BLh14*22, BLh19*10,
Od08*258, V90*84, VAd43*92, Yo54*7
He who wilfully breaketh the fifth command Yo11*182
He’s a critic that writes animadversions upon the fairest copies Oa01*71
He’s dead heaven shut the cloister of mine eyes BLa20*46
He’s gone alas the mighty man is dead Yo11*46
Hear Britain hear a rough unpractised tongue 02pa4*72
Hear me dull prostitute worse than my wife NLSa12*25, Np45*25,
V90*126, VAd43*136
Hear me great empress of my heart or I Yo70*50
Hear me great Jove from him professing physic BLh19*88
Heartly wounds I’ll not to ploughing not I sir Ed3*145
Heavens are we all asleep all for our ease Yo54*104
Heavens bless King James our joy and Charles his baby Od57*27
Heavens we thank you that you thundered so Oep4*49, SA30*68
Hence common eyes spare your ambitious tear Oep4*5, SA30*15
Hence hence thou vain fantastic fear Ed3*159
Hence London dames into the country run BLa60*51
Henceforth no more in thy poetic rage Pt5*152
Henrici missae quintae sunt hîc tabulatae SA30*166
Henry the prince fell by his trembling sire 02pa3*100
Her father gave her dildoes six Yo54*113
Her faults and follies London’s doom shall fix Np40*71, OAc16*29
Her name an army well doth represent Yo88*195
Here a health to the king about let it pass Yo11*11
Here a poor minister of Christ doth lie He24*34
Hear all ye friends to knighthood CAL68*53
Here be the sacred bones SA30*31
Here by this pillar interred doth lie Orp81*10
Here comes to the wells Yo54*54.1
Here cruel Ned BLa62*16.1
Here day and night conspire a cunning flight BLa94*189
Here Doctor Lambe the conjurer lies Yo40*8

Here ends notwithstanding her specious pretences Oa01*55
Here entombed lies good Sir Harry Np39*12
Here gallants find their arms and so ’tis meet Oep4*71, SA30*64
Here Hobbinall lies our shepherd while e’er Yo54*16
Here’s a house to be let for the steward hath swore OAc16*27, Yo27*10
Here is a mine an ocean full of treasure BLh12*40
Here let me careless and unthoughtful lying Oa05*51
Here lie the relics of a martyred knight 02pa2*138
Here lies a blessed virgin Yo54*140
Here lies a creature of indulgent fate 02pa2*87, BLa94*21, BLh14*37,
Fm12.2*17, NLSa12*113, Np42*53, Of15*56, Pt2*56, V90*146,
VAd43*156, Yo08*17, Yo70*64
Here lies a cunt that had all nations tried Mc14*55
Here lies a horse beneath this stone 02pa2*82
Here lies a judge will lie no more BLh17*28, OAc16*26
Here Lies a peer BLa94*46, BLa97*114, BLh17*81, HUe70*48,
Oa01*57, Of15*75, Pt2*68, Yo11*70
Here lies a priest who teaching from without BLa62*87
Here lies a thong of the old Hyde BLa62*24
Here lies Ambrose Pudsey of Barford esquire Od08*124
Here lies an old worthy of what but the gallows BLh19*120, Np43*65,
V90*242, VAd43*262
Here lies entombed sweet smiling Ann Np07*16
Here lies George Monck BLa62*25, HRO36*36, Od08*53
Here lies Jack Pym with deep remorse Pt5*84
Here lies James Cadone under this stone Od08*194
Here lies learning loyalty Yo11*89
Here lies little Lundy a yard deep or more BLh14*68
Here lies M. F. the son of a bear ward Np07*19
Here lies Master Andrew Gray Fm12.3*63, Np44*90
Here lies murder treason and ambition Yo40*12
Here lies Ned Hyde Od08*44
Here lies notwithstanding her specious pretences M35*126, Orp81*20
Here lies old Father Hackett BLa20*55
Here lies on her back as still fucking she lay Ed3*158
Here lies one whom heavens forbade Od57*17
Here lies our pretty witty king Pt5*42
Here lies Queen Anne Bullen Yo40*2
Here lies the corpse of William Prinn BLa20*54, Od08*246, Yo40*3
Here lies the governor of kings Yo70*103
Here lies the great the loyal wise Dundee M35*89, Of06*26, Yo70*81
Here lies the last King Charles of Spain 02pa2*100.1
340 Appendix
Here lies the Lord have mercy upon her Np07*18

Here lies the relics of a martyred knight M35*50, Pt5*103
Here lies the sacred bones 02pa1*170, He24*6, Yo36*8, YoD*8
Here lies the shame of the mitre Of16*106
Here lies the worthy warrior Od08*29
Here lies thy urn O what a little blow Fm12.1*40, V90*92, VAd43*100
Here lies wise and valiant dust 02pa3*12, Od57*18
Here lies within this holy place Orp81*32
Here lies wrapped up within this bed of clay Yo54*37.1
Here lieth buried honest Ned Hide He24*8
Here lieth buried Rachel the wife of William Gee SA30*79
Here lieth interred the body of John Smith BLa20*36
Here lieth Jack Gill Lb54*67
Here lives a man whose age is fifty-four Of16*135
Here lives a merry king BLa22*5
Here lives a peer raised by indulgent fate Fm12.2*18, Np42*54, Of15*57,
Of16*58, Pt2*57, Yo08*15
Here lives the wolf justice a butcherly knave 02pa3*78, BLa22*51,
BLa62*78, OAc16*23, Yo54*143
Here poor mean commons and exceeding high HRO36*1
Here reading how fond Adam was betrayed Oa05*44
Here rests And for the repose of mankind Oep18*127
Here sits the man let him preach if he can BLa20*25
Here stand I BLa20*152
Here strangers lies proud Sam of Oxon BLh19*127.1, Od57*18,
Of16*100.1, Yo08*73.1
Here take this Warcup spread it up and down 02pa2*67, BLh19*85,
Fm12.1*66, He85*83, Lb54*105, NLSa12*118, Of16*31, V90*155,
VAd43*165
Here under rests the body of a person who Yo36*16
Here uninterred suspends though not to save 02pa1*167, BLa62*109,
Np40*79
Here’s a health to the king to the king that prevails BLa97*108, Yo11*12
Here’s a health to the king whom the crown doth belong to BLa97*78,
He85*17, Of06*25, Pt5*54, Yo11*7
Here’s a health to the king whom the people have chose Yo70*45
Here’s a health to the knight 02pa4*3
Here’s a health to the tackers about let it pass BLa94*183
Here’s a health to the tackers my boys BLa94*171
Here’s a house to be let 02pa1*156, BLa22*50, BLa62*63, Ed3*110,
Fm12.1*37, LIa4*6, NLSa12*76, Od08*294, Pt3*32, Pt4*18, V90*88,
VAd43*96, Yo52.2*50
Here’s artificial beauty to the life Oa01*49, Oa01*69
Here’s that will challenge all the fair Ed3*140

Here’s to him and to’t and to him that shall do’t Yo54*139
Here’s your pure love thus must true lovers woo Oa01*31
Hereafter Sir John BLa62*17
Heroic soul I saw thee die Pt4*5
Hic iacet Anglorum tortor tutor Venedorum SA30*160
Hic iacet ecclesia Anglicana M35*93, Oa01*2, Yo11*58
Hic iacet errorum princeps ac praedo virorum SA30*161
Hic iacet intus SA30*108
Hic iacet Julius Mazarinus 02pa1*236, SA30*105, Yo36*12, Yo52.1*26,
Yo52.1*44
Hic inhumanus Humatur Vaughanus BLa62*16
Hic jacet corpus Herberti Thorndik BLa20*151
Hic jacet E. A. 02pa4*6
Hic jacet Egrimundus Rarus Od76*34
Hic jacet Gulielmus Dux Devoniae Orp81*37
Hic jacet J. D. M. Orp81*36
Hic sonus in templo tot regi Nestoris annos Yo88*212
His holiness has three grand friends 02pa3*79, BLh17*8, Ed3*60,
NLSa12*9, Np45*9
His look a book wherein seemed to be writ Yo52.2*56.1
His majesty hath received an address from you Od08*134
His majesty hath with that wisdom and elegance expressed Od08*41
His majesty is sorry that the difficulty Od08*106
His majesty received the address of this house Od08*316
His majesty’s affairs must needs now thrive Od08*159
Hisce aedibus dominatur M35*125
History speaks of men of great fame BLa97*59
Ho brother Teague dost hear de decree 02pa3*110, BLa97*58, Pt5*11
Hobbes his religion Hide his morals gave BLa22*4, Od08*48
Hoc iacet in tumulo viridis sapientia sylvae SA30*90
Hoc sine mirandam est obliquo tramite solem SA30*96
Hoccine mirandum est obliquo tramite solem SA30*177
Hocus pocus or Macchiavel Ecclesiasticus Pt5*107
Hold England’s friend your needless labour spare BLh15*143, Lb38*99
Hold fast thy sword and sceptre Charles 02pa3*81, Np43*102, OAc16*19,
OAc16*70, Od57*114, Yo27*1, Yo54*149
Hold Madam Modena you come too late Np42*62, Of15*69, Pt2*64
Hold off presumptuous eyes she is divine Oep4*55, SA30*10
Holla ye pampered sires of Rome forebear BLa62*60
Holland that scarce deserves the name of land M35*37
Honestly done however though the stuff He24*32
Honoured cousin Although I never affected the title Oa01*21
342 Appendix
Honoured cousin I have now conformed and think I have Oa01*23

Honoured Sir I have not that vanity to believe Yo36*15
Hora quota est te pica loquax interrogat horam SA30*117
Horror becomes the best I would fain write Yo52.2*9
Hot lust within her reigns in ev’ry part BLh12*22
How blessed was the created state Ab12*43, DA*10, He36*21, Lb54*45,
LLt27*23, Np40*35, SKv69*40, Yo05*32
How can I stir and leave this happy place Mc14*69
How can the kingdom thrive Pc99*23
How can this nation ever thrive BLa22*3
How cruel was Alonso’s fate 02pa1*292, HRO36*18
How dare ye more demand than Stubb and Fall Pt5*71
How dull and how insensible a beast 02pa1*152, Ab12*55, BLa22*43,
BLa62*73, BLh13*4, BLh17*14, Ed3*1, Lb54*9, LIa4*4, NLI93*8,
NLSa12*36, Np32*10, Np38*4, Np40*94, Od08*292, Orp81*11,
Pt3*9, SKv69*53, Yo08*93, Yo13*8, Yo27*5
How durst thy railing muse vain wretch pretend Pt5*185
How easy ’tis to sail with wind and tide 02pa4*77
How easy our minutes whilst our conscience is clear Yo11*24
How far are they deceived who hope in vain Ab12*22, CAL68*17, Ed3*24,
NLI93*10, Np07*34, Np40*15, SKv69*21, Yo05*63, Yo54*186
How far it doth diminish or alter the exercise Yo08*69
How fleeting is honour who’d strive to be great 02pa4*28
How frail O England are thy natives’ mind Yo11*199
How glorious Marlborough shall we sing thy praise 02pa4*102
How happy and blessed Are the folk in the west Yo88*226
How happy Cloris were they free BLa40*32, LLt27*21, Yo05*30
How happy is the man of even frame Np07*36
How happy was that night ye gods BLh12*6
How happy were good English faces BLh19*168, Lb38*87, Np44*58
How hath my passion made me Cupid’s scoff Oep4*83, SA30*47
How ill an army does thy name present Yo88*219
How is it Sophronius how goes the world now Pt5*62
How just is then the tribute of our eyes 02pa4*65, BLa94*93, BLh15*50,
Lb38*4, Np46*32, Oep18*32, Of06*32
How justly now might I aspire 02pa4*55
How kind is malice managed by a sot Pt5*165
How liberty of conscience that’s a change 02pa2*72, BLa97*20,
BLh19*105, Mc14*88, NLSa12*155, Of16*70, Pt5*23
How like a moth that hovers at a light Mc14*16
How like Elysium is the grove Lb54*92
How like Erasmus’ ghost in Scottish mist Yo40*15
How long great poet shall thy sacred lays Oa05*18
How long may heaven be bantered by a nation 02pa2*144

How long must the restorer of our state 02pa2*134
How long shall we wait this horrible funeral Od57*21
How lovely’s a woman before she’s enjoyed Yo70*18
How many fools at court bawl out aloud BLh19*158, HUe70*58,
Yo11*225, Yo70*36
How nobly did our grateful city join 02pa2*159
How nobly did the city Dublin join Oa05*24
How now my John what is’t the care Yo40*1
How our good king does papists hate 02pa3*45, BLa62*51, BLh14*16,
BLh17*7, BLh15*45, BLh19*23, Ed3*121, Fm12.1*32, NLSa12*1,
Np45*1, Od57*119, Pt1*47, V90*66, VAd43*71
How quickly are love’s pleasures gone Np43*48, VAd43*238
How Salmacis with weak enfeebled streams Oa05*33
How Sir Godfrey is killed how his corpse they do hide Of16*33
How strange is the fate Yo11*141
How sweet are the joys and how pleasant the charms Ed3*155
How the first bout parson ’tis not your due BLh13*21, Np38*21
How unhappy a lover am I Yo54*64
How we are met in a knot Yo40*11
How well this war’s prolonged when time to fight Yo88*221.1
How will the grateful senate praise 02pa4*24
Huc Venus huc Pallas nymphae musaeque venite SA30*94
Humana mens vacabit sola dum suis SA30*197
Humbly sheweth Should you order Tom Brown 02pa2*91
Humbly shew That having lost our lives limbs and estates BLa94*102,
BLh15*49, Fm12.3*1, Np46*41, Oep18*36
Humbly sheweth That we your majesty’s poor slaves <See ‘Sheweth
That . . .’>
Husband thou dull unpitied miscreant 02pa1*175, BLh12*15, ILr*7,
Mc14*33, NLSa12*55, Np40*103, Pt3*39, Pt5*85, V90*22, VAd43*24
I AB do truly swear Yo11*64
I A.B. declare that I do owe no allegiance M35*22
I A.B. do sincerely promise and swear that M35*103
I am a senseless thing with a hey with a hey 02pa3*26, BLh14*7, BLh15*27,
Lb55*24, Np40*46, OAc16*8, Od08*248, Pt1*28, V90*20,
VAd43*21, Yo40*82
I am by fate slave to your will LLt27*6
I am convinced and will henceforth no more Oep4*56, SA30*7
I am like to have a good beginning on’t Yo54*96
I am now at home where I hope soon to hear from you Lb54*124
I am sorry to find your stay in town Lb54*127
I am the king and the prince of drunkards Yo54*94
344 Appendix
I am well pleased to see my commands done Yo40*41

I ask not wit nor beauty do I crave Np07*15
I can no other way be safe in the evils I have done Yo11*138
I can’t conceive why in decline of life Of16*134
I cannot change as others do Ab12*26, Ed3*86, Np40*18, SKv69*25,
Yo05*3
I cannot express how mightily I am refreshed Pc99*4
I cannot hold hot struggling rage aspires M35*35
I charge the knight in great Apollo’s name Pt5*186
I come like those that offer at a shrine BLa62*48, BLa62*56
I come my future fate to seek BLa97*27, Of16*102
I could love thee till I die Oa01*9
I defy the blind boy and his mother Ed3*149
I did believe ’twas not in the power of mortals Lb54*117
I did but crave that I might kiss BLa20*3
I did intend in rhymes heroic 02pa1*242, BLa97*56, Of16*125
I did resolve never to trouble —— more but upon considering Lb54*128
I do forsake entirely the Protestant Church Lb55*13
I fain would know which is the wiser man BLa60*24
I fast by heaven not I I never yet Pt3*100
I fuck no more than others do Ab12*27, BLa97*139, Ed3*87, Np40*19,
SKv69*26, Yo05*38
I greatest am and likest reign Yo11*112.1
I had an easy dose of wine o’er night 02pa3*41
I have been sir where so many puritans dwell Np40*50, Pt3*63, Pt5*83
I have often admired what should be the cause BLa94*30, Yo11*180
I have too long endured her guilty scorn 02pa1*153, NLSa12*58, Np43*80
I heard of one is lately gone Od57*15
I hold as faith what England’s church allows M35*14, Mc14*82,
Od57*144
I hope Charles when you receive this and know that LLt27*8
I know no virtue yet am placed M35*135
I love with all my heart The independent part BLa62*69, Yo52.2*13
I love with all my heart The Prince of Orange part BLa97*104, M35*105
I meus et salso calamus de flumine tinge SA30*130
I need not mickle trouble myself what is meant by Sion Od57*44
I once was a dotard which wrought me much evil BLh14*21, V90*81,
VAd43*89
I pass all my hours with a lusty young whore He36*74, Pt3*66
I prithee good Tommy stay at home with thy wife Yo11*206
I received three pictures and am in great fright LLt27*9
I rise at eleven and I dine about two Ab12*4, Ed3*124, Np40*87,
SKv69*5, Yo05*21
I rise on the bank of Thames LIa4*40

I said dear Lord that I would sin no more Yo88*192
I said to my heart between sleeping and waking Oa05*59
I saw a pack of prick-eared knaves Of16*22, Pt3*78
I saw you yesterday so concerned at the opera Of06*70
I send you here some rude strokes of an unpolished Fm12.3*53
I should be glad to see Kate going 02pa3*44
I sing a woeful ditty 02pa3*25, BLa22*29, BLh15*24, Od08*64,
Od57*123, Pt1*24
I sing not of Jove’s mighty thunder 02pa3*188
I sing of a duel in Epsom befell BLh19*135, Of06*38
I sing of no heretic Turk or of Tartar BLh19*114, Np43*60, V90*233,
VAd43*253
I sing the adventures this year did befall Yo70*58
I sing the famous city BLa94*225
I sing the funeral of an earl’s grandmother Yo27*7
I sing the happy and the glorious flight Od08*116
I sing the man that raised a shirtless band BLa94*22, BLh15*57, BLh17*61,
HUe70*15, Lb38*11, Of06*17, Yo11*228
I sing the praise of a worthy knight 02pa2*89, BLa22*2, BLh12*20,
BLh15*13, He36*58, LIa4*50, Np40*58, Pt1*13, V90*54, VAd43*59,
Yo05*69, Yo40*73
I sing the praises of a dirty thing BLh13*56
I sing the story of a scoundrel lass BLh19*111, Np42*49, Of15*60, Pt2*41,
V90*106, VAd43*114
I stand but on one leg yet do sustain 02pa3*105
I tell thee Dick where I have been BLh19*8, Ed3*40, Fm12.2*3, Np42*7,
Of15*7, Pt2*5, VAd43*169
I thank thee for the character of a Popish successor BLa94*5, Fm12.2*7,
Np42*15, Od57*79, Of15*21, Pt2*16
I that have robbed so oft am now bid stand BLa62*15, Oa01*13
I that my country did bewray Yo54*17
I that was once a humble log 02pa3*54, BLa97*29, NLSa12*150,
Np43*81, Od57*139, Of16*63, Yo08*50, Yo70*54
I think I shall never despair 02pa4*43, BLa60*44, Fm12.3*80, Np44*108
I think indeed that whoso may and can BLa20*158
I think there’s none that in our court can tell Yo88*205
I to my husband scorn to be a slave Lb54*38
I told you sir it would not pass 02pa2*106, Np44*48
I used to wonder when I read That one false woman HUe70*19
I used to wonder when I read That treacherous mankind HUe70*19.1
I vow I’m angry you your selves will say BLa20*114
I was as a glass my life was as water Np07*20
346 Appendix
I who from drinking ne’er could spare an hour 02pa3*46, BLa62*125,

BLh17*3, BLh19*51, Ed3*136, LIa4*34, NLSa12*27, Np45*27,
OAc16*69, V90*123, VAd43*133
I who of divers villains sung before BLh13*44, Np38*43, Np39*36,
Np43*87, Yo13*15
I will not only let —— know his two last letters Lb54*121
I will sing in the praise if you’ll lend but an ear 02pa1*2107
I won’t wed Paula true she’s grave and sage Pc99*29
I would be glad to see Kate going BLh14*15, BLh15*42, Fm12.1*31,
Pt1*44, V90*64, VAd43*69
I yield I yield and can no longer stay Np07*35
I’d had an easy dose of wine o’er night Fm12.1*35, V90*83, VAd43*91
I’ll act I’ll fuck what nature prompts me to Yo54*46
I’ll have a new test which neither shall own BLa94*132, BLh14*82,
BLh15*88, Lb38*44, Np46*79, Oep18*82, Yo11*137
I’ll show you the captains of Aubrey Vere BLh13*69, He85*22
I’ll sing in the praise if you’ll lend but an ear M35*38, Pt5*56, Yo11*231
I’ll sing you a song my brave boys BLh14*113
I’ll tell thee Dick where I have been 02pa3*22, BLa40*12, BLh15*17,
Lb55*30, Od08*224, Pt1*17, V90*160, Yo52.2*45, Yo54*126
I’ll tell thee Estcourt a pleasant tale BLa60*65, BLa94*201
I’ll tell you a story a story anon Fm12.3*58, Np44*85
I’m apt now to think BLh13*49
I’m come my future fate to seek 02pa1*257
I’ve given my painter instructions to draw BLh17*82
I’ve heard the muses were still soft and kind 02pa1*157, Lb54*19, LIa4*18,
NLSa12*77, Np43*4, V90*163, VAd43*171, Yo27*21
Iam adit et virgo redeunt ?fenicia regna Yo88*237
If abdicate James BLa94*105, BLh15*62, Fm12.3*3, HUe70*23,
Lb38*16, Np44*3, Np46*44, Oep18*39, Yo70*86
If any ask who here doth lie Od08*125, Od08*66
If any do the author’s name enquire BLa62*1
If Aphra’s worth were needful to be shown 02pa2*68, BLh19*71,
He85*67, NLSa12*110, Np43*24, V90*185, VAd43*198, Yo13*39
If both the Indies were my own BLh19*146, Of06*51
If Cecil the wise 02pa1*256
If Charles thou wouldst but grow so kind Yo40*7
If devout Pawlet Mary BLh14*48, BLh19*101, He85*101, NLSa12*146,
Np42*47, Of15*53, Pt2*49, V90*205, VAd43*221
If e’er you’ll leave us in a lasting peace 02pa3*20
If ever tender virgin’s prayer BLa94*175
If faith alone can save us and good works do not merit Od57*3
If fate be not then who can it foresee Lb54*52, Od08*197
If Greece with so much mirth did entertain 02pa1*217

If heaven be pleased when sinners cease to sin 02pa3*91, Of06*71
If I can guess the devil choke me Ab12*20, Ed3*83, He36*36, Np40*9,
SKv69*19, Yo05*42
If I could find a man whom I durst hate Orp81*30
If I could have persuaded myself my letters would have been Lb54*118
If I live to grow old as I find I go down 02pa3*211, CAL68*19
If idle travellers ask who lies here Od08*67, Od08*126
If injured monarchs may their cause deplore BLa94*116, BLa97*122,
BLh17*65, HUe70*34, Lb54*115, Np46*59, Oep18*57, Yo11*133
If liberty of conscience e’er was good BLa97*34, Mc14*80, Of16*73,
Yo08*89
If life be measured by the count of years SA30*80
If monsters painter thou hast skill to draw Yo11*93
If mortals die as soon as breath departs M35*143, Oa05*2, Pt5*108
If now you’re smart blame not the heavenly powers M35*121
If pagan papists tell us they brought in BLh19*147, Yo70*85
If papist Jew or infidel BLa94*106, HUe70*25, Np46*45, Oep18*40,
Yo70*77
If prayers and tears Yo08*46
If Rome can pardon sins as Romans hold Ed3*89, Np40*99, Pt5*203
If senseless noise and Cambridge puns will please M35*187
If Sulla’s ghost made bloody Catiline start BLh13*66, BLh19*34, Ed3*50,
He85*35, LIa4*57, Np42*26, Od57*165, Of15*34, Of16*8, Pt2*28,
V90*127, VAd43*137, Yo13*5
If Tarquin’s act were grateful from what laws BLa40*19
If vanquished monarchs may their cause explore BLh19*153
If we into our selves or round us look 02pa2*179
If wit as we are told be a disease Pt5*184
If you are pleased I am pleased LLt27*13
If you love a woman tol tol tol Np40*105
If you meet with any of my brethren the clergy Yo54*184
If you would know whose dust lies here Yo52.2*7
If you’ll lend an ear M35*150
If your adorer still you will retain CAL68*27
Ignari medici me dicunt esse nocivum Yo54*12
Ignoto prorsus dederas quam charta iuvenco BLa20*32
Il n’est pas bien la la la BLh14*89
Ill under the colour of a pure godly man Pt3*105
Ille furit demens qui fulvi parcus acervi est SA30*188
Ille Ille ah quàm vox refugit seclusa sub ora BLa20*73
Illustrious muse on thee we call Yo54*38
Illustrious steed who should the zodiac grace 02pa2*140, BLa60*10
348 Appendix
Illustris genitor Ludovici rex Ludovicus SA30*151

Immortal man of glory whose brave hand Od57*28
Immortal powers inspire me whilst I sing BLh13*74, LIa4*36
Imo Christianissimus He24*18
Imparem imperium habet pars Mc14*74
Impatient with desire at last Oa05*42
Imperial prince king of the seas and isles 02pa1*17, BLa22*27, BLh15*2,
He24*1.1, Od08*81, Oep4*89.1, Pt1*2, SA30*24, Yo36*2, Yo40*27,
YoD*2
Improba gens legis pereant numerosa superba BLa62*65
In a dark gloomy grave whose hellish station Pt3*68
In a dark silent shady grove 02pa2*122
In a famous street near Whetstone’s Park Ab12*60, BLa62*98, BLh13*9,
Np38*9, Np39*32, Np43*86, Od57*64, Of16*13, Pt3*10, SKv69*56,
Yo13*13, Yo27*23
In Aesop’s new made world of wit 02pa2*11, Pt5*122
In Aesop’s tales an honest wretch we find 02pa2*101, BLh14*81,
Fm12.3*64, HRO36*56, HRO36*63, M35*201, Np44*91
In Albion’s isle shall rise a monk Yo54*164
In all humble wise sheweth etc. Thomas Earl of Arundell Od08*15
In all humility we crave 02pa2*79, BLa20*162, BLa40*4, BLa94*7,
BLa97*3, Ed3*7, Fm12.2*2, Lb54*12, M35*32, Mc14*56, Np42*6,
Od08*276, Of15*6, Orp81*7, Pt2*13, V90*165, VAd43*176,
Yo13*20
In Cloris all soft charms agree He85*23
In coffee house begot the short-lived brat Pt5*170
In compliance to you dull serious maggot 02pa3*40, BLh12*12
In council wise in war so great a man 02pa2*115
In days of yore when Albion’s kings did break 02pa4*27
In days of yore within this bower BLh14*58
In dead of night when the pale moon BLh19*32, Ed3*98, LIa4*60
In doggerel rhymes we seldom use 02pa1*296, BLa94*87, Np43*52,
Np46*26, Oep18*26, V90*223, VAd43*242
In early days ere prologues did begin BLa94*144, BLh15*102, Fm12.3*24,
Lb38*58, Np44*34, Np46*99, Oep18*101
In grey-haired Celia’s withered arms BLa94*137, Np46*86, Oep18*80
In happy days was Sacharissa’s reign 02pa3*193
In haste towards Ireland two fierce princes go Yo11*109
In his Holiness’ name BLh19*131
In hope of sudden resurrection BLa94*90, HUe70*7, M35*4, Np46*29,
Oa01*17, Oep18*29, Of06*12, Pt5*31, Yo11*57
In Lombardy’s land great Modena’s duchess Od57*169
In London city near Cheapside Pt5*188
In Mercury of London it lately appears BLh15*91.1, Lb38*47.1, Np44*25

In Milford Lane near to Saint Clement’s steeple 02pa1*158, Ab12*11,
BLh12*28, BLh13*24, Ed3*80, NLSa12*61, Np32*3, Np46*10,
Oep18*10, Pt3*3, SKv69*12, V90*48, VAd43*53
In my last I begged I might soon have an answer to it Lb54*126
In no coffee house I dabble BLa62*45
In old times an old prophecy found in a bog Of16*65
In one thousand six hundred eighty and one BLa62*115
In parem imperium habet par 02pa2*57
In pious times ere buggery did begin BLh15*92, Lb38*48, Np44*21,
Np46*82, Oep18*86
In place one day as I was standing 02pa4*81
In Rome there is a most fearful rout 02pa3*145, Pt5*19
In sable weeds I saw a matron clad 02pa1*250
In sable weeds your beaux and belles appear 02pa2*136, BLa60*11
In sixteen hundred seventy eight Ab12*75, BLh13*31, Np38*29
In sounds of joy your tuneful voices raise BLa94*215
In spite of the Dutch Yo11*14
In tadpole’s brain there moves a maggot Oep4*87, SA30*60
In the bowels of love I salute thee O king Yo54*227
In the days of George and Nanny Yo08*82
In the fields of Lincoln Inn Ab12*46, He36*4, Np40*38, Od08*264,
SKv69*44, Yo05*17
In the isle of Britain long since famous grown 02pa1*145, BLa22*16,
BLh15*23, BLh17*37, Ed3*79, He36*77, Lb54*73, Lb55*29,
Mc14*7, NLSa12*44, OAc16*6, Od08*263, Pc99*10, Pt1*23, Pt3*65,
Pt4*8, V90*43, VAd43*49, Yo70*11
In the merry month of may Pt3*70
In the mild close of a hot summer’s day BLa20*24
In the name of God amen I Thomas Moore Od08*118
In the name of the most Holy Trinity in the M35*132
In the year of grace BLa20*39
In theatro Bellator spectator in campo M35*193
In these our pious times when writing plays Np43*49, V90*220,
VAd43*239
In this cold monument lies one Pt3*77, Pt5*87
In this corner is the portraiture of a church Od08*318
In this great debate concerning the king’s speech M35*15
In this our saucy age we daily see BLa62*99
In those dark ages when the world was blind Oep4*1, SA30*12
In time when princes cancelled nature’s law 02pa3*152, BLa97*82,
HUe70*16, Np46*116, Oep18*107, Of06*20, Pt5*53, Yo11*169,
Yo70*95
350 Appendix
In vain dear Celinda I lately have strove Oa01*44

In vain for help from your old friends you call BLa62*107, Od08*232
In vain she frowns in vain she tries Lb54*97
In vain the Bourbon and Plantagenet BLa94*28, BLh17*66, Of06*2,
Yo11*171
In vain the French before Turin prepare 02pa4*93
In vain the fulsome errors of the age BLh17*5, BLh19*53, He85*50,
NLSa12*137, Np42*33, Of15*37, Of16*10, Pt2*31, V90*131,
VAd43*141, Yo13*27
In vain the harassed people strive 02pa2*93
In vino latitat malus anguis ubique sacerdos BLa20*117
In Westminster four wonders seen the like were never heard Oep4*58,
SA30*59
In what esteem did the gods hold Fm12.1*59, V90*138, VAd43*148
In woeful plaints my sad muse renders Oep4*84, SA30*50
In your letter to me you desire to know BLh15*138, Fm12.3*54, Lb38*94
In your letter you tell me you are willing to know BLh14*79
Incerta mortis hora hodie ventura suspecta debit Christiano BLa20*22
Infamous priest that darst profane the place Yo11*54
Infelix religio infeliciores subditi Oa01*2.1
Infessis fumis adamato vimine pulsam BLa20*63
Infolded here in silent dust doth lie BLa20*50
Ingrata Colchis sis parentibus tuis SA30*194
Ingrata quae tui ipsius sis proditrix SA30*191
Ingrate Narcissus did impart Lb54*61
Injurious charmer of my vanquished heart Lb54*142, LLt27*32
Innumeris quassata globis rimisque fatiscens SA30*101
Inque tubâ genitas haurire et reddere flammas M35*62
Insipid fool I thought to temporise Yo11*90.1
Inspire me truth whilst I the praises sing Od57*104
Inspired with high and mighty ale Np46*1, Oep18*1, V90*7, VAd43*7,
Fm12.1*6
Insulting ass who basely couldst revile 02pa2*162
Insulting rival do not boast Lb54*96, Of06*31
Intelligence was brought the court being sat Np43*2, Od57*155, V90*158,
VAd43*167.1
Inter privatos optimus M35*191
Inter rosas Cupido BLa20*93
Intolerable racks M35*185
Intuitu vix digna tuo te charta salutat SA30*178
Intulerant miseranda duae sibi bella sorores 02pa1*27
Invading William did at first pretend Yo88*238
Inventâ sciuit primus qui nave profundum SA30*136
Invidious Whigs since you have made the boast BLa60*73, BLa94*233
Invidus infausto jam morbo saucius ultrò BLa20*85
Is a monster whose father is a Presbyterian Oep4*59
Is any church more catholic than we Yo54*6
Is Fullwood gone then woe is me Oa01*16
Is Heaven turned bankrupt do the gods conspire Oep4*11
Is John departed and is Lilburne gone Yo54*237
Is there a sanctity in love begun BLh19*9
Is this the heavenly crown are these the joys 02pa1*231, Fm12.1*27,
Pt4*20, V90*60, VAd43*65
Is Wolly’s wife now dead and gone Oa01*42
Is your fit of passion over Np07*40
It chanced not long ago as I was walking He24*15
It chanced of late a shepherd swain Oa05*43
It happened in the twilight of the day 02pa1*119, BLh15*37, Fm12.1*29,
Lb54*75, Mc14*42, NLSa12*47, Np40*45, OAc16*18, Pt1*39, Pt4*3,
V90*62, VAd43*67, Yo54*109
It hath been a laudable practice in other times Oa01*58
It is a hard task to satisfy even friends Od08*2
It is alleged that there are 18000 pedlars etc Yo54*44.1
It is an old proverb and you know it well Yo52.2*22
It is an old say that the House called Common BLh19*171
It is contrary to common justice amongst men Od08*88
It is expected that this epilogue now Mc14*35
It is not that I see any reason to alter my opinion in 02pa2*2
It is rather a sense of compassion than of love Od08*33
It shall be known how Lackworth came so great 02pa3*207
It wants an epithet ingratitude Yo08*80
It was an unreasonable and extravagant opinion Od08*109
It was my hap spectator once to be 02pa4*61
It was observed the British bards of old Ed3*99
It was when Christians kneel and did entreat Oep4*28
It was when the dark lanthorn of the night BLh12*30, Ed3*78, Mc14*31,
Yo70*20
It will be a clear asserting of the people’s right Pt5*26
It’s an eyesore to all modest women it devours OAc16*53
It’s briskly begun ladies but how poorly we come off M35*188.1
It’s odd indeed indeed it’s wondrous odd M35*161
It’s true Tallard when fickle chance denied 02pa4*23
Ite lares Italos et fundamenta malorum Yo52.2*24
Iudicium agnoscunt atque associatio eundem Orp81*15
Iuno tonat lingua sed fulmine Iupiter urget Oa05*4
Iuramenta libens popularia suscipit anglus Yo11*78
352 Appendix
J.R. Whereas by misrepresentation Yo70*40

J’ai vendu Dunckirque BLh14*76
January This year of wonder 1672 France seems a second Julius Caesar
BLa20*130
Johannes utrinque instigatione Diaboli episcopus M35*92
John Bell broken browed Np07*17
John Dryden enemies had three 02pa3*183, BLh14*78, Oa05*3
Judas preserved mankind from perishing M35*140
Jul. 21 1657 Video meliora proboque [. . .] In the name of God Amen.
BLa20*41
Julian how comes it of late we see BLh13*64, BLh17*1, BLh19*42,
Ed3*68, He85*4, LIa4*33, NLSa12*12, Np45*12, Of16*6
Julian I’ve long been idle loath to write BLh17*31
Julian in verse to ease thy wants I write 02pa3*56, Ab12*48, BLa22*34,
BLa97*1, BLh13*2, BLh19*18, CMp*10, Ed3*102, Fm12.1*24,
NLSa12*84, Np32*8, Np38*2, Np40*40, SKv69*47, V90*56,
VAd43*61, Yo13*7, Yo54*191
Julian with care peruse the lines I send BLh13*68, He85*42, LIa4*59,
Of16*9
Julius Mazarini Cardinalis divini virga furoris in Gallos Yo36*11,
Yo52.1*45
Juno shall not be jealous Venus fair Fm12.1*16, V90*35, VAd43*39
Juno we thank thee and congratulate Oep4*27
Junxerat ante rosas Henricus regna Jacobus 02pa4*106
Jupiter in terris tecum Lodoice probaret BLa20*121
Jure et amore tui modo spes nunc gloria regni 02pa1*294
Justice is here made up of might Od57*45
Justitiae defensor eras defensor honesti 02pa2*158
Keep to the church while yet you may BLa97*31, Of16*89, Yo08*10,
Yo08*74
Kendal is dead and Cambridge riding post BLa22*13, He24*7, Pc99*19,
SA30*32, Yo36*9, YoD*9
Kind Jesuits you have but justly done BLa62*64, Yo54*179
Kind neighbours and countrymen listen I pray Od08*82
Kind William came over to rescue this nation BLa97*141
Kindness in drink is often shown Of16*39.1
King James say the jacks as other kings do 02pa3*177
King William concerned to leave his gulled loobies M35*63
Kings like to God reward as we deserve M35*109
Knewst thou whose these ashes were Yo54*15
Knighthood to heroes only once was due Pt5*176
Knowing that I must immediately give an account to God M35*113
L’Estrange the fop that arbitrary tool Yo54*207
L’on ne ocut pas que ie baisse Oep54*24

Ladies I know not how to salute you mistake me not Oep4*88, SA30*37
Ladies take heed a northern blast approaches BLh13*63, LIa4*42
Lana caprina or the complete wrangler SA30*48
Laomedonteâ sic fulsit purpura Troiâ SA30*129
Last night when I to sleep my self had laid BLa97*19, BLh19*106,
Of15*62, Of16*68, Pt2*58, Yo08*45
Last Sunday by chance 02pa3*139, BLa97*62
Last year in the spring 02pa2*141, BLa60*12, BLa94*72, BLa97*127,
BLh15*105, Fm12.3*28, Fm12.3*61, Lb38*61, M35*57, Np44*40
Last year our English travellers would be Yo88*208
Lauderdale the pretty Mc14*71
Law physic and divinity He24*37
Lay by your pleading law lies a-bleeding HRO36*39
Lay by your reason Truth’s out of season BLa94*52, Yo11*187
Le brave comte de Tallard BLh14*88
Le dieu qui repand sa lumiere BLh14*59
Le jubile dernier Lysander fit dessein BLh14*92
Le roi j’avois beau la premiere partie Od08*201
Le roy Jaques s’avance dans le sacre pourpris BLh14*90
Learn hence ye Whigs and act no more like fools 02pa1*260
Leave off thy paint perfumes and youthful dress HRO36*10
Leave off your ogling Francis BLh14*27, BLh19*61, He85*64, Lb54*83,
NLSa12*105, Np42*32, Of15*38, Of16*18, Pt2*18, V90*108,
VAd43*116, Yo13*31
Legite parentes vanissimus hominum ordo Yo36*13
Lent all the year faith that’s too much Yo54*214
Leopoldus imperator Caesar Pius Faelix Augustus Od08*4
Let a woman be damn’[d] Pt3*92
Let all in Wickhambrook lament BLa20*139
Let all old England’s freeborn sons Np43*103
Let all the muses now assist my quill Yo11*45
Let all this meaner rout of books stand by Oep4*14
Let ancients boast no more 02pa1*293, Ab12*63, BLh13*12, NLSa12*85,
Np38*12, Np39*34, Pt3*15, V90*16, VAd43*16
Let Bl[ackmo]re still in good King Arthur’s vein Pt5*153
Let braves who into armies go Lb54*29
Let Charles so swive Od76*12, Oep4*86, SA30*71
Let creeping players whose pliant fancies cast 02pa4*68
Let cynics bark and the stern Stagirite Of16*118, Yo08*79
Let each one take his glass Ed3*41, NLSa12*14, Np45*14
Let England bewail Yo11*29
Let England rejoice with heart and voice BLa97*74, BLh15*66,
354 Appendix
Fm12.3*4, HUe70*32, Lb38*20, Np44*4, Of06*13, Pt5*47, Yo11*105,

Yo70*90
Let Englishmen sit and consult at their ease Od57*13
Let equipage and dress despair BLh14*43, He85*78, Np43*28, Of16*26,
V90*190, VAd43*203
Let him that will ascend the tottering seat Yo54*225, Yo88*223.1
Let Homer sing of Ilium’s queen Oep4*46, SA30*21
Let knaves dispute the rights of kings Yo11*13
Let Mary live long Yo11*21
Let mighty Caesar not disdain to view 02pa2*157
Let my Britons now boast BLa94*162
Let no man commend me for doing of it Yo54*19.1
Let noble Sir Positive lead the van 02pa3*157, BLa94*143, BLh15*100,
Fm12.3*26, Lb38*56, Np44*37, Np46*97, Oep18*99, Yo70*60
Let Oliver ne’er be forgotten BLh14*51, Np43*56, Of16*112, Pt2*55,
V90*228, VAd43*248
Let Ormond for the knaves provide Yo40*33
Let Tollemach preach to his dull simple crowd BLa62*111, BLh13*46,
Np38*41
Let the ambitious statesman be Pt3*95
Let the Commons hunt after plots with a hey with a hey BLa22*45,
BLh19*15, Ed3*44, NLSa12*16, Np45*16, Yo54*165
Let the hector and whore that’s afraid of the dying Ed3*154
Let the malicious critics snarl and rail Pt5*169
Let the parliament know BLa40*11
Let the Parnassian immortal choir Yo11*117
Let the walks of my satyr beware BLh19*165
Let the Whigs repine LIa4*43, Np39*27
Let us advance the good old cause Np39*22, Od57*137
Let’s laugh and let’s kiss let’s dance and let’s sing Yo54*166
Let’s toss up our bonnets my Sanny Yo11*27
Leuconoe I distrust the gods no more Mc14*61
Lewis of France hath been the Protestants’ scourge 02pa3*97
Libenter omnes deserunt sortem malam SA30*195
Life is a journey from our mothers’ wombs Yo88*198
Life is but a mixture of profit and pleasure Yo54*162
Lift lift your heads up O ye gates Oa01*62
Like a dog with a bottle fast tied to his tail BLa20*106, M35*176
Like a true Irish merlin that misses her flight BLa60*54, BLh14*57,
HRO36*92
Like dancers on the ropes poor poets fare Pt5*75
Like the dumb man who found his tongue when he saw Lb55*12
Like the vain curlings of the watery maze 02pa4*59, Oep4*30
Like to a hermit poor in place obscure Yo52.2*5

Lilium in meliore parte manebit et intrabit BLa20*101
Lion of war whose roar the Dutch dismayed 02pa1*214
List of Bury St Edmunds beauties since 1660 Yo54*98.1
List of Lord Chief Justices since 1660 Yo54*82
List of the members of the royal household Np39*4
Little George of Denmark BLa97*118
Little rogue is departed this life BLa20*26
Lo two rude waves by storms together thrown M35*36, Od76*13
Long beerdis hartles SA30*171
Long days of absence dear I could endure Od08*203
Long did Nassau his Belgic valour try 02pa4*7
Long flourish the Orange and Rose Yo11*154
Long had my pen lain dull and useless by HUe70*6, Np42*63, Of15*70,
Pt2*65
Long has great Lewis formed the vast design 02pa3*194
Long has the poet his just licence waived Yo70*25
Long our divided state 02pa3*168
Long racked with torturing despair Np07*41
Long since two loyal earls the court forsook BLa94*160
Long time had Israel been disused from rest 02pa2*1
Look how the country hobbs with wonder flock 02pa4*74
Lord God we thank thee in a full and ample manner Pt5*41
Lord in thine anger put me not to shame BLa20*8
Lord let me know the period of my age M35*171
Lord we thank thee in a large and ample manner Od57*34
Lorraine thou stol’st by fraud thou gott’st Burgundy Lb55*27.2, M35*149
Lost or stolen from the new Archbishop or his brethren M35*88
Louis the great for all his glories past Lb54*108
Love a woman thou’rt an ass Ab12*45, BLa40*30, DA*13, He36*61,
Lb54*47, Np40*37, SKv69*45, Yo05*22
Love bad me hope and I obeyed Ab12*36, BLa40*29, DA*8, He36*20,
Lb54*35, LLt27*19, Np40*28, SKv69*34, V90*44, VAd43*47,
Yo05*28
Love brave virtue’s younger brother Pc99*13
Love is the fart Yo54*153
Love’s a dream of mighty treasure Np07*43, Of16*103
Love’s goddess sure was blind this day HRO36*21
Lovely Aurelia why d’ye bear Lb54*133
Loving friend This is to desire thee to go to a vulture-like man HRO36*64
Luca dedit lucem tibi Luci Pontificatum SA30*148
Ludo vicisti gentes Ludovice potentes Od08*186
Ludovicus magnus Cui simul omnia quae vix uni singula contigere Od08*7
356 Appendix
Ludovicus XIVus Francorum et Navarrae rex Od08*3

Lumine Aeon dextro caveat Leonella sinistro M35*17
Lumine dum lustro magnum per mane vaganti BLa20*110
Madam as victors when they quit the field Mc14*77
Madam I am at last come to Adderbury LLt27*14
Madam I cannot but congratulate Np40*107, Of15*78, Pt2*60
Madam I come ten thousand thanks to pay Fm12.1*62, VAd43*151,
V90*141
Madam I humbly thank you for your kind letter LLt27*12
Madam I loathe the censures of the town BLa94*95, BLh15*48, HUe70*2,
Lb38*2, Np46*34, Oep18*33, Yo08*44
Madam I received an account from Abbott Montague Od08*74
Madam I’ve heard how surly knight BLa60*42, Np44*103
Madam if it were worthy anything to be beloved by me LLt27*11
Madam If my friend’s poem in proper season Oa01*32
Madam If you’re deceived ’tis not by my cheat Ab12*23, CAL68*18,
Ed3*25, NLI93*11, Np07*33, Np40*16, Od08*274, SKv69*22,
Yo05*64, Yo54*187
Madam Immured with rocks of ice no wretches left 02pa1*269
Madam In the preamble to your proclamation BLa97*113, Yo11*174
Madam look out your title is arraigned BLa60*74, BLa94*223
Madam My gratitude thinks you are too kind Oa01*29
Madam once more the obsequious muse 02pa2*167, Oa01*67
Madam take care BLa60*69
Madam The poets tell how once enamoured Jove CAL68*24
Madam Thus with yourself have you presented been CAL68*26
Madam We address you today in a very new fashion 02pa3*223,
HRO36*66, Np42*71
Madam While vulgar souls their vulgar loves pursue Lb38*92
Madam You’re happy sure you do the spring disclose Oep4*21
Madam Your Majesty has so often declared your just concern 02pa2*126
Magne aedes major Dominus miracula posthac CAL68*43
Magne dux qui titulum M35*170.1
Magne Leo qui marte potes Germania vires 02pa1*212
Maidens of England sore may ye moan SA30*170
Maids need no more their silver piss-pots scour 02pa1*281, BLa94*64
Majestas hac fronte sedet magnum sedet intus BLa20*120
Make use of your next vowel M35*41
Malus adest mensis non interdicta secundis SA30*125
Man and wife are all one BLa94*104, BLa97*72, BLh15*54, HUe70*8,
Lb38*8, M35*90, Np46*43, Oep18*38, Of06*40, Of15*68, Pt2*73
Man eat and sinned and fell vain shadow say Oep4*3
Mannock that fair lovely maid OAc16*31
March on march on brave Irish boys BLa97*94

Mark but this flea and mark in this Yo88*242
Mark how the greedy rabble flock to see Od08*279
Marlburii famae frustra est erecta columna CAL68*48
Marriage the greatest cheat that priesthood e’er contrived Np43*47
Marriage thou curse of love and snare of life Yo54*199
Married Sir Robert can the news be true BLa94*133, BLh15*89, Lb38*45,
Np44*22, Np46*80, Oep18*84
Martilla’s prudent wise discreet 02pa3*220
Mary the wonder of her sex Yo11*175
Mary Waters daughter and co-heir of Robert Waters Yo54*236
May a want-weakened body care-torn mind BLa20*64
May England see her errors ere too late BLh17*59, Yo11*20
May I live to see William and Mary grow old BLh19*140
May it please etc Way hundred and fifty elect of the gown Orp81*35
May it please your Highness How great and just Fm12.1*52
May it please your majesty I am commanded by the lords Yo54*157
May it please your majesty We have with great satisfaction observed
Od57*102
May plagues like those which abdicated kings Yo70*71
May she to nauseous Scarsdale prove BLh15*124, Lb38*80
May the ambitious favour find He85*25
May’t please here is a wearied bee from hive BLa20*62
Me have of late bin in England Od57*46
Me miserum quò me vertam nec vivere possum BLa20*99
Medela Romae Scaevola vulnus fuit SA30*190
Melinda who had never been He85*82, Lb54*76
Mella dabunt Gallis Hispanis spicula verum SA30*145
Men brethren fathers sons of holy love Ed3*47, Np43*97
Men on this age sad grievances do heap Pt5*58
Menin deide thea taphiniadio kambroio Orp81*3.1
Menon the Thessalian was extremely covetous and ambitious BLa94*216
Mens bona non vaga sors virtus non gratia regis Yo52.2*34
Methinks I cannot but commiserate Np40*107.1
Methinks I see our mighty monarch stand 02pa1*229, Ab12*66, BLa62*95,
BLa94*82, BLh13*19, BLh19*22, Fm12.1*55, Lb54*62, NLSa12*97,
Np38*19, Np39*6, Np46*9, OAc16*59, Od08*298, Oep18*9, Pt3*37,
SKv69*63, V90*119, VAd43*128
Methinks I see you newly risen 02pa1*142, BLa62*94, BLh13*18,
BLh15*44, Ed3*117, NLSa12*17, Np38*18, Np39*16, Np45*17,
Od08*299, Pt1*46, Pt3*44, SKv69*61, V90*65, VAd43*70
Methinks my poor prick has been troubled too long Np40*62
Midst pretty tricks and quaint device 02pa2*129
358 Appendix
Milo’s from home and Milo being gone M35*165

Mine and the poet’s plague consume you all BLh19*84, He85*75,
NLSa12*120, Np42*36, Of15*42, Of16*24, Pt2*34, V90*152,
VAd43*162
Miraris dulces de ponto nascier amnes Yo54*10.1
Mirifica aedificant Galli haec sua tecta tonanti BLa20*125
Miror de Gallicis cuius sunt ordinis Od08*6
Miss Danae when fair and young BLa60*45, BLa94*159
Mittis vina mihi mihi Pamphile vina supersunt SA30*140
Money plague on you where run you Pt5*111
’Mongst all the hard names that denote reproach BLh17*62, M35*49,
Yo11*72
Monmouth the bunch is fox am I Of06*50
Monmouth the witty Lb54*132, Od08*250, Yo40*54, Yo54*5
Monsieur Le sieur Campy Savoyard de nation Yo54*4.1
Mors est maesta nimis magnos q[uam] iungit in imis SA30*163
Mors solet innumeris morbis abrumpere vitam Yo88*231
Mortality would be too frail to hear 02pa1*151
Most academical most knowing judges I will willingly Pc99*30
Most good and gracious God we thy sinful creatures M35*86
Most gracious omnipotent Od57*25
Most mighty monarch They that change their lords before Yo54*93
Most modern wits such monstrous fools have shown Od08*240
Most of our civil broils may date their spring BLa62*126, Ed3*137,
LIa4*38, Yo70*65
Most reverend grave judicious sirs Pt5*118
Most trusty hearty and undeserved father this is written by the way of
BLa20*140
Mountown thou sweet retreat from Dublin cares 02pa4*21
Mourn all ye nymphs with me lament your state Of16*29
Mr Masters When non-resistance was run out of breath Yo11*86
Mr Mayor your servant gentlemen yours damn you all Oep18*103
Mr Speaker I have troubled you little of late for indeed BLa94*138,
BLh15*86, Lb38*41, Np44*20, Np46*87, Oep18*79
Mr Speaker In the front of Magna Charta it is said Yo54*213
Mr Speaker The petition now presented unto you in behalf BLa94*59
Mr Speaker | The present times require our most earnest and serious
thoughts BLa94*17
Mrs Die’s fair hand BLa60*9
Much has been said of strumpets of yore BLh14*29, BLh19*60,
Fm12.1*56, He85*56, V90*121, VAd43*131, Yo13*26
Much wine had passed with grave discourse Ab12*13, Ed3*116, He36*5,
Lb54*32, Np40*3, SKv69*14, Yo05*4, Yo40*51
Much wine had passed with much discourse Np42*51, Np46*22,

Oep18*21, Of15*61, Pt2*43, V90*225, VAd43*245
Muse bark no more satyr thy bristles couch BLa62*67.1
Muse let us change our style and live in peace Ab12*72, BLh13*28,
BLh19*28, Fm12.2*11, He85*36, Np38*26, Np42*20, Od57*152,
Of15*27, Pt2*22, V90*102, VAd43*110
Muse put on wings and straight go muster all Oep4*24
Mush honord Madame Me ha here wit sent your good laship de dildoa
Yo54*53 <Also as ‘Dear Maudam . . .’>
Music has learnt the discords of the state 02pa3*222
Must good men still die first and is there gone Yo54*37
Must he be ever dead cannot we add Yo54*21
Must I complain and yet find no relief Pt5*72
Must I then passive stand and can I hear Pt5*156
Must I with patience ever silent sit 02pa1*225, Ab12*69, BLa62*74,
BLh13*23, Ed3*127, Fm12.1*2, Lb54*16, LIa4*7, Mc14*38,
NLSa12*88, Np38*23, Np39*18, Od08*297, Od57*70, Pt3*36,
SKv69*64, V90*3, VAd43*3, Yo13*4, Yo27*9, Yo54*244
My Bernicia since I do not find Lb54*116
My dear Lord Carlisle I very much approve of what my Lord Mordaunt
Yo52.2*27
My dear Sabina why should you and I NLI93*17
My dearest dear in whom my life depends SA30*75
My dearest friend that lov’st me so BLa94*97, Fm12.2*20, Np42*61,
Np46*36, Of15*76, Pt2*70
My fleets my castles and my towns BLa94*101, Np46*40, Yo08*34
My friend will shortly be in town BLa94*15.1
My friends forsooth grow godly and precise Yo54*91
My husband me and I my court have left 02pa4*96
My little lodge tease me no more Oep18*124
My little lord methinks ’tis strange Od57*47
My lord Cornwallis The breach of the king’s peace Yo54*88.1
My lord duke I did send Mr Humble Yo54*178
My lord I’d praise your lordship but you’ve had your share 02pa3*147
My lord out of the love I bear to some of your friends M35*177
My lord These unlucky queries falling by great providence Od08*239
My lord Though to advise may seem presumptuous Od08*30
My lord treasurer The king’s most excellent majesty Od08*131
My lord We pity such as are by tempest lost BLh19*70
My lords and all you gentlemen BLa94*153, Np46*124, Oep18*119
My lords and gentlemen I am afraid you’ll think this time BLh15*93,
Np44*28, Oep18*120
My lords and gentlemen I am commanded by his majesty Lb55*17
360 Appendix
My lords and gentlemen I am informed notwithstanding all BLh15*93.1

My lords and gentlemen I believe you will expect BLh15*93.2, Np43*99
My lords and gentlemen I can never enough extol the divine goodness
BLa94*48
My lords and gentlemen I greet ye BLa94*155, Np46*126
My lords and gentlemen I have been very desirous to meet you HRo36*69
My lords and gentleman I told you at our last meeting 02pa3*33,
BLa62*120, BLh15*31, Lb55*22, Np40*59, NLSa12*52, Yo52.2*25
My lords and gentlemen You may remember at the meeting of this session
Yo52.2*31
My Lords and my Commons ’tis my resolution BLa97*80, Np46*120,
Of06*15, Yo11*123, Yo70*104
My lords I have often troubled you with my discourse Yo54*1
My lords I have received a letter BLh15*107, Lb38*63
My lords It is a bill deserves to be burnt Yo54*193
My lords The matter now expounded is of marvellous weight M35*1
My lords When by the providence of almighty God BLa20*98, Od08*57,
Yo52.1*64
My lords Your appointing of the consideration of the state of England
NLSa12*99
My masters and friends and good people draw near He36*46, Yo54*57
My masters you that undertake the game Od57*9
My muse and I are drunk tonight LIa4*54, Od57*127 <Also as ‘Clarendon
had . . .’>
My muse shall rehearse such blue-coats on horseback Of06*55
My muse thus ventures to open her ware Yo52.2*14
My noble lords and gentlemen Yo11*125
My part is done and you’ll I hope excuse He36*54, Np40*104, Pc99*6,
Yo05*57, Yo54*83
My petition good people of Ag—sham hear 02pa4*49
My son yes lord my only son my Isaac he Oep4*2
My soul dost thou resolve an easy life Yo88*197
My tap is run then Baxter tell me why 02pa2*59
My text beloved I could divide into three and thirty BLh12*34
Mynheer H. Bentinck begs of King William for him M35*163
Mysterious day which no time can BLa20*13
Mysterious riddle of the state BLa20*9, BLa62*41, Yo40*34
Naked I came when I began to be M35*182
Naked she lay clasped in my longing arms Ab12*8, BLa97*40, BLh12*24,
Ed3*15, He36*38, Np40*80, SKv69*9, Yo05*6
Nan and Frank two quondam friends <See ‘Of civil dudgeon . . .’)
Nassau knight errant of our church chose rather Oa01*4.1
Natalium lux et magnificentia BLa20*66
Nature does strangely female gifts dispense BLh19*57, He85*63,

Lb54*86, Np43*91, Of16*20, Yo13*32
Nay blackcoats now look to’t you must away Oep4*45, SA30*19
Nay painter if thou darst design that fight 02pa1*16, BLa22*26, BLh15*1,
CAL68*22, He24*1, Lb54*112, Od08*80, Oep4*89, Pt1*1, SA30*23,
Yo36*1, Yo40*26, YoD*1
Ne’er blame the hero for the kingdom’s fall M35*82
Near Covent Garden theatre where you know BLh19*164
Near Epsom at the King of Bantam’s marriage Fm12.1*9, Np46*5,
Oep18*5, V90*30, VAd43*32
Near Hampton Court there lies a common 02pa1*233, BLa97*26,
NLSa12*153
Near Holborn lies a park of great renown 02pa1*136, BLa22*21,
Od08*62, Od57*122, Yo54*234, Yo70*8
Near Isis spring the muses’ poor retreat 02pa4*62
Near Lethe’s banks where the forgetful stream Pt5*179
Near to an ancient famous house of prayer M35*204, Yo11*83
Near to the Rose where punks in numbers flock 02pa2*147
Neighbours I have read the paper you delivered me Od08*110
Nell Gwyn’s mother found drunk Yo54*122
Nero to rule by law once pledged his troth Mc14*81
Never be long about a match Lb54*10
New forms of prayer are sent the realm throughout BLa94*38, Yo11*146
News to expect from Houghton Hall Oa05*49
Nil minus immenso fecit Lodoicus in orbe BLa20*123
Nil mirere tribus suppositum regibus unum BLa20*20
Nil sub sole novum sapiens rex dixerat olim BLa20*80
No by my faith she lies it cannot be CAL68*28
No cover le feau ye Catesbyots BLa62*12
No Gods nor heaven there is says Selius SA30*182
No longer blame those on the banks of Nile 02pa2*64, BLa97*8,
BLh14*60, He85*18, Lb54*69, Mc14*93, Np46*13, Oep18*13,
VAd43*78, Yo13*33, Yo70*21
No longer may the English nation boast BLh19*45, He85*46, Np43*29,
V90*191, VAd43*204
No man hath a greater veneration for the royal family Od57*113,
Yo54*195
No man is qualified to reprove other men’s faults 02pa2*143
No man love’s fiery passions can approve Mc14*17
No more my muse of lawless fop or fool BLh17*40
No more of your admired year Od57*176
No pedigree nor projects Od57*42
No poor Dutch peasant winged with all his fear He36*49
362 Appendix
No sacred pages never more repine 02pa4*19

No scornful beauty e’er shall boast Yo54*67
No she shall ne’er escape if gods there be Yo05*58
No sooner had the royal senate met BLa94*128, BLh15*71, Fm12.3*9,
HUe70*61, Lb38*25, Np44*11, Np46*76, Oep18*75
No sooner our hero to Flanders was got M35*159
No wonder storms and winds destructive prove Np42*70
No wonder winds more dreadful are by far 02pa3*196, BLa94*197,
BLh14*97, Np42*69, Np46*107
Noble sir this epistle most humbly complains BLh15*116, Fm12.3*32,
Lb38*72, Np44*51
Noctis avem dicunt exorto sole poetae SA30*119
Non orbis gentem non urbem gens habet ulla BLa20*108, Lb55*26,
Pc99*15, SA30*142, Yo54*221
Nor hell itself nor gloomy fate can save Pt5*4
Northampton happier in his choice Od57*166
Nostra damus cum falsa damus num fallere nostrum est Yo88*227
Not a hard bed i’th’ country to procure Od08*161
Not all the Baths nor Tunbridge can assuage BLh17*47
Not all the threats or favour of a crown 02pa1*239, BLa97*21, Od57*168,
Of16*67, Yo08*77
Not being at home I have but little or no time Lb54*141
Not Celia that I am more just 02pa3*210
Not hell itself now gloomy fate can fare 02pa1*248
Not long ago I drank a piss-pot Pt5*68
Not many miles from Tunbridge town BLa97*130, Np07*32
Not Rome in all her splendour could compare 02pa1*226, BLa22*52,
BLa62*96, BLh19*17, Fm12.1*4, Lb54*17, NLSa12*87, OAc16*45,
Od08*307, Of15*13, Pt2*7, Pt3*55, SKv69*58, V90*5, VAd43*5
Not thicker are the stars i’th’ milky way BLa97*5, BLh17*4, He85*2,
NLSa12*24, Np45*24, V90*124, VAd43*134, Yo13*22
Nota mori vetus et justum est sed iniqua deorum BLa62*88
Nothing adds to your fond fire Ab12*38.1, BLa40*34.1, DA*6.1,
Fm12.1*22, Lb54*37.1, LLt27*4.1, SKv69*36.1, VAd43*45.1, Yo05*25
Nothing but my having been the most desperately in the spleen Lb54*125
Nothing thou elder brother e’en to shade Ab12*33, BLa40*22, BLa97*45,
CAL68*1, Ed3*6, He36*15, ILr*10, M35*29, M35*29.1, M35*29.2,
Np40*25, Od08*305, Od76*15, Pt5*90, SKv69*31, Yo05*15,
Yo27*6, Yo52.2*44
Nothing thou shadow of the chaos world Mc14*14
Now at last Fitzharris has expounded Np43*101
Now at last the riddle is expounded Np43*100, Od08*312, Od57*95,
Pt3*20
Now being old I need not go with speed Yo88*245

Now beloved if we are not happy whose fault is it BLa94*193
Now Christian trot with heavy heart Pt5*115
Now curses on ye all ye virtuous fools Ab12*53, He36*53, Np07*2,
Np40*44, Pc99*3, SKv69*50, Yo05*56, Yo54*77
Now did the saffron morn her beams display Oa05*29
Now Echo on what’s religion grounded—Roundhead Od57*58
Now Ferris is dead BLa40*18
Now fie upon him what is man BLa20*77, M35*175
Now had Apollo heard in verse and prose BLa94*56
Now had the sun sunk down to’s liquid bed Fm12.3*25, Np44*36,
Yo70*51
Now Hadleigh adieu BLa20*83
Now happy were good English faces BLh15*131
Now having gone thus far in the description of rebellion NLSa12*50
Now Heaven defend thee Bassett and protect Lb54*71, LIa4*62
Now in our extreme danger when foreign forces threaten Od08*268
Now joy to the saints from the north and the west Np43*37, V90*208,
VAd43*224
Now let proud Albion cease to mourn Yo11*16
Now listen good friends and I’ll tell you how ’twas Yo54*101
Now Lord have mercy on us all a strange thing I’m to tell Yo54*45
Now Louis all thy numerous trophies boast 02pa2*99
Now love and war the selfsame art is grown M35*160
Now may the metaphors for prayers be said SA30*8
Now now the prince is come to town 02pa3*134
Now now the Tories all shall stoop BLa62*2
Now now the work’s done Np39*33
Now painter try if thy skilled hand can draw 02pa1*230, Pt3*87
Now Phoebus did with frowns the world survey BLa60*67
Now soar my muse on thy sublimest wing BLh15*121, Lb38*77
Now that the world is all in amaze M35*174
Now the job’s done and who will say Fm12.1*15, ILr*2, V90*34,
VAd43*38
Now the reformer of the court and stage 02pa1*176, Ed3*52, Fm12.1*19,
Pt3*53, V90*39, VAd43*43
Now the veil is pulled off and this pitiful nation Yo11*185
Now wars dissensions want and taxes cease BLa94*117, Np46*60,
Oep18*58
Now what’s the result of this mystical summons M35*139
Now whilst Whitehall wears black and men do fear BLa20*23, Yo52.1*27
Now with a better face affairs appear 02pa1*216
Nullis mella dabo sed cunctis spicula figo BLa20*17
364 Appendix
Nunc superes tu qui super es successor honoris SA30*152

O all ye people of this land BLa94*47.1, HUe70*55.1, Yo11*217
O all ye young ladies of merry England BLa40*15, BLh17*35, Od08*188
O Anna see the prelude is begun Orp81*39
O Anna think thou poor unhappy queen BLa94*207
O Anna thy new friends and prick-eared court BLa94*191, BLh14*105
O are you come ’tis more than time 02pa3*144
O assist me ye powers who have rhymes at command Ed3*22, Pt5*109
O Birkenhead how hast thou tired thy Muse BLa20*40, Od08*114
O bright exemplar of the British youth CAL68*54
O Cambridge famous for unlucky hits Of16*64
O Celimena of my heart SA30*1
O could my thoughts but suit the vast design Oa05*25
O cruel death whose rage without remorse is Pt5*201
O d’open the door sweet Betty Yo70*29
O daughter fairer copy than the other Mc14*62
O doctor you’re mistaken ’twas not at Mount Ida BLa60*33
O fading beauty which so soon art gone BLa60*27
O fair Aminta never fly Lb54*99
O glory glory who are these appear 02pa3*116, NLSa12*123, Of16*47
O God we pray remove the cause BLh17*71, Yo11*103
O happy England free from this foul sin Od57*150
O happy people you must thrive M35*124
O Harry canst thou find no subject fit 02pa2*107, BLa60*1, BLh15*115,
Lb38*71, Np44*47
O heaven were she but mine or mine alone Yo54*200
O heavens the weakness of my unkind father 02pa3*95
O heavens we now have signs below 02pa3*67, BLa62*35, BLh15*39,
BLh17*11, OAc16*49, Od08*303, Od57*66, Pt1*41, Yo54*123
O how great William’s name Yo11*157
O how rigid is our fate M35*107
O last and best of Scots who didst maintain 02pa3*162, BLa94*103,
BLh15*56, HUe70*9, Lb38*10, Np46*42, Oep18*37, Of06*23
O Lord how well in thee Doth life and death agree Yo88*203
O lord of hosts hear England’s cry Oa01*52
O Love how cold and slow to take my part Ab12*34, BLa40*39, DA*5,
He36*16, ILr*15, Lb54*34, LLt27*2, Np40*26, SKv69*33, Yo05*7
O matchless genius whose exalted lays 02pa4*40, BLa94*165
O monachi vestri stomachi BLh14*50
O my J.T. was good and firmly stood BLa97*134
O my Myrtillo whose unjust complaint NLI93*1
O Nigrocella don’t despise Yo08*58
O Paduae fautor quae tibi nota geni BLa20*155, Yo54*161
O patriots renowned open your eyes 02pa3*19

O pity poor England O pity I say BLa62*18
O qui potentem ducis originem Oa05*58
O Salisbury people give ear to my song Yo54*60
O Scotland lament the loss of thy friend Yo11*40
O solitude my sweetest choice 02pa1*289
O S—rs T—t D—itt M—gue Pt5*158
O stay a while and drop a tear Oa01*60
O strange what is’t I hear the man Yo54*144
O temporising wretch thus to abuse Yo11*90
O that I could by some chemic art Ed3*96, He36*28, ILr*13, Pt3*73,
Yo05*75
O that she had lived in Cleopatra’s age 02pa3*51
O the plot’s discoverers Oates Bedloe Dugdale Prance Ed3*161
O the sad day HRO36*6, Yo40*44
O times o manners Cicero cried out HRO36*22
O Venus joy of men and gods Oep18*123
O Venus regina Cnidi Paphique Oep18*123.1
O vos qui de salute vestra securi estis 02pa1*298, BLa94*47, HUe70*55,
Yo11*216, Yo70*74
O what a damned age do we live in BLh14*3, Of15*9, V90*11, VAd43*11
O ye Britons draw near 02pa4*13
O ye yes if anyone can tidings tell Yo54*134
O yes henceforward sit omnibus notum BLa60*49, BLa94*178,
BLh14*107, HRO36*91
O you hurt me she cried Lb54*98
O you sweet rural beauties who were never BLa20*96
Obadiah Walker of University College Pt5*43
Obdormit Stephanus quanta hac patientia BLa20*70
Occasionally as we discoursed of queen and church and nation 02pa3*189,
BLh14*101
Ocius ista ruunt quae sic cumulata locantur SA30*138
Octogesimus octavusque Hyspanicus annus Oa01*5
’Ods life we are undone Yo54*111
Of a great heroine I mean to tell Ab12*80, BLh13*37, BLh19*31,
He85*39, Np38*34, V90*105, VAd43*113
Of a hectoring bully 02pa3*135
Of a new vast supremacy the plot Od08*50
Of a splenetic nation I sing BLh14*65
Of a tall statue and of sable hue 02pa1*120, BLa62*92, BLh17*18,
Mc14*57, Np43*96, Od08*282, Pt3*60
Of all dissembling gypsies thou’rt the worst Np46*92, Oep18*94
Of all great nature fated unto wit Oep4*79, SA30*43
366 Appendix
Of all my sons by tyranny bereft 02pa2*128

Of all quality whores modest Betty for me Ab12*64, BLh13*14, BLh14*6,
Np38*14, Np39*10, Pt3*16, V90*17, VAd43*17, Yo13*23
Of all the brisk dames Messalina for me SA30*61
Of all the cheats and shams that have of late 02pa2*83
Of all the follies that infest the age LIa4*48
Of all the fools these fertile times produce Ab12*84, BLh13*41, Np38*38,
Od08*325
Of all the grain our nation yields 02pa2*56
Of all the handsome ladies BLa60*80
Of all the plagues mankind possess 02pa2*70, BLa94*85, BLa97*10,
BLh19*103, He85*85, Lb54*104, NLSa12*149, Np42*46, Np46*19,
Od57*147, Oep18*19, Of15*52, Pt2*48, V90*199, VAd43*212
Of all the plagues with which this world abounds Ab12*73, BLh13*29,
BLh14*55, BLh19*29, He85*37, NLI93*24, Np38*27, Np42*21,
Np46*15, OAc16*62, Od57*98, Oep18*15, Of15*28, Pt2*24, Pt3*18,
V90*103, VAd43*111
Of all the sots with which the nation’s cursed BLa97*4, BLh17*2, BLh19*65,
He85*1, Np43*21, Of16*37, V90*181, VAd43*194, Yo13*21
Of all the things which at this guilty time Lb54*91, Np40*111
Of all the torments all the cares BLh15*126, Fm12.3*47, Lb38*82,
Np44*73
Of all the vermin that did e’er debase BLh13*75, BLh17*23, He85*29
Of all the wonders since the word began 02pa1*227, Ab12*5, BLh13*5,
Ed3*2, Lb54*58, LIa4*14, Np38*5, Np39*25, Np43*83, Pt3*23,
SKv69*54, Yo13*1, Yo27*15
Of Catesby Fawkes and Garnet BLa20*160, Lb54*79
Of civil dudgeon many a bard 02pa2*60, Ab12*85, BLh13*42,
BLh19*27, He85*68, NLSa12*156, Np38*39, Np42*23, OAc16*65,
Of15*30, Pt2*26, V90*86, VAd43*94, Yo13*10
Of Clineas’ and Dametas’ sharper fight BLa94*16, Np43*41, Of16*96,
V90*212, VAd43*228, Yo19*7
Of famous nuptials now we’ll sing BLh17*49, BLh19*119, LIa4*70,
Np43*67, V90*244, VAd43*264
Of fields I write famous for mighty lust BLh13*45, He85*6, LIa4*24,
NLSa12*31, Np38*45, Np45*31
Of kings renowned and mighty bards I write 02pa2*96
Of lovers hail ye happy pair Np07*38
Of monsters fell and wondrous wights 02pa4*60
Of oats new threshed at Tyburn take two pound 02pa3*121, Of16*60
Of old the very name of Drake 02pa4*53, Np07*42
Of ramblings and follies you oft have been told 02pa4*103, BLh15*110,
Fm12.3*31, Lb38*66, Np44*43
Of the herbs of hypocrisy and ambition of each one Pt5*2

Of the old heroes when the warlike shades 02pa1*114, BLa40*2,
Od57*60
Of villains rebels cuckolds pimps and spies Ab12*82, BLa94*83,
BLh13*39, BLh17*25, Ed3*134, Np38*36, Np43*10, Np46*12,
Od08*324, Oep18*12, V90*169, VAd43*182, Yo13*14
Of wars and blood and foughten fields I sing Mc14*1
Of what I now am going to write Yo11*139
Oft am I by the women told Np40*117
Oft has our poet wished this happy feast Orp81*8
Oft have I seen the heavens so black you’d think Oa01*11
Oft have we heard of impious sons before BLh17*67, Of06*3, Yo11*172
Old Bayard take care and look well to your hits Yo11*204
Old Jemmy is a lad Yo11*26
Old Priscian’s rule henceforth must hold no more BLa62*14
Old Sarum was built on a dry barren hill Yo54*60.1
Old Simon strove his maid to f[uc]k Ed3*144
Old stories of a tiler sing 02pa3*142, BLa97*66, Of16*124, Yo08*32
Old stories tell of elegant discourses Of06*36
Old Wainscot is i’th’ right with a hey with a hey Ab12*81, BLh13*38,
Np38*35, VAd43*75
Old Westminster the seat of kings whose law BLa97*24, Np43*55,
Od57*167, Of16*82, V90*227, VAd43*247
Older and wiser has a long proverb been BLh19*98, He85*94, Lb54*88,
NLSa12*133, Np42*41, Of15*47, Pt2*39, V90*201, VAd43*214
Omnipotens et sempiterne Deus penes quem fons est bonorum omnium
BLa20*15
On a day of great triumph when lord of the city 02pa3*163
On a well chosen piece of ground Pt5*116
On avoit cru jusqu’à ce jour BLh14*100
On Lord Fairfax Crom & Vane BLa62*3
On Monday the chamberlain made a long speech Yo54*129
On my hard fate as late I pondering lay 02pa2*148
On ne veulut pas que je f—t Np39*15
On Saturday night we sat late at the Rose 02pa3*108, M35*54, Np43*58,
Of16*101, V90*230, VAd43*250, Yo08*86
On the obedience passive still to dote BLh19*107, Mc14*86, NLSa12*154,
Yo08*88
On Tunbridge walks two bona robas justle Yo54*137
On voit regner le crime avec la violence Yo52.1*47
Once had I doted on this jilting town NLSa12*145
Once happy church no longer censure Rome Yo11*94
Once happy land no longer censure Rome BLa94*27
368 Appendix
Once how I doted on this jilting town 02pa1*154, He85*88, Lb54*94,

Np43*50, V90*221, VAd43*240
Once in a certain family 02pa4*86
Once more a father and a son fall out 02pa1*162
Once more take pen in hand obsequious knight Pt5*162
Once more the needy poet sells his pen Of16*23
Once on a time the hands and feet 02pa2*36
One being asked what’s best to learn said this Yo52.2*46
One compact two nuptials threeform war BLa62*104.1
One day I heard a zealous shout Pt3*75
One day the amorous Lysander Ab12*17, BLa97*41, He36*39,
SKv69*16, Yo05*48
One fatal day a sympathetic fire 02pa2*109
One labour more O Arethusa yield VAd43*18
One month a lawyer thou the next will be HRO36*27
One morn when a thick fog had spread BLh19*113
One night Saint Peter in a rage from Rome Np43*61, V90*235, VAd43*255
One of our friars late devoutly vaunted BLa20*81
One Saturday she sent for divers persons of quality M35*157
One while I think and then I am in pain Yo88*191
One whole piece of the Duchess of Cleveland’s honesty 02pa3*30,
BLa22*22, BLh15*29, Lb55*18, Np42*12, OAc16*55, Od08*172,
Of15*18, Pt1*30, Pt2*14, VAd43*181, Yo40*76
One whore is dead Yo05*76
Oratori in artem invehenti academici ignoscatis oro SA30*106
Orbem terrarum Judas salvavit ab Orco Np07*28
Ore tibi pauci sed nulli in carmine dentes SA30*141
Others below the dignity of rhyme 02pa3*173
Our bard most bravely draws up his militia Oep4*77, SA30*40
Our Canterbury’s great cathedral bell Yo54*30
Our church alas as Rome objects does want 02pa3*2
Our councils are governed by Hugo Boscawen Pt3*93
Our dainty fine duchesses have got a trick Od08*188.1
Our Father which art in Rome Yo54*106
Our fathers took oaths as husbands take wives BLa60*77
Our Faux Alexander having new crossed the seas Np46*123, Oep18*116
Our glorious realm o’er all the earth renowned 02pa1*268
Our God and soldier we alike adore M35*209
Our hearty thanks we humbly pay 02pa4*85
Our justices whose prudence does disclose HUe70*49
Our labour more indulgent muse inspire BLh19*110
Our ladies fond of Love’s soft joys BLa97*87, HUe70*51, Np43*106,
Yo11*224, Yo70*28
Our land is distracted with fancy and zeal OAc16*44

Our monarch’s whore from France is come BLh14*28, BLh19*49,
He85*15, NLSa12*18, Np42*24, Np45*18, Of15*31, V90*109,
VAd43*117
Our play’s a parallel the holy league LIa4*56
Our priests in holy pilgrimage 02pa3*109, BLa97*67
Our prologue wit grows flat the nap’s worn off 02pa1*262, NLSa12*94
Our rebel party of late BLh14*44, He85*62, NLSa12*138, Np43*35,
V90*198, VAd43*211, Yo13*35
Our trade is truth to seek and truth to tell BLa20*111
Our wise reformers wise and gay Yo11*191
Our zealous sons of mother church BLa94*110, BLh15*69, HUe70*39,
Lb38*23, Np46*50, Oep18*45, Of06*62, Yo70*94
Out of stark love and arrant devotion BLa22*31, CMp*8, Ed3*73,
Lb54*48, NLI93*21
Ovid who bid the ladies laugh HRO36*7
Oyes oyes oyes can any bring BLh19*129
Pacto uno binis thalamis belloque triformi BLa20*5, BLa22*11,
BLa62*104, Od76*14, Pc99*16, SA30*65
Paint me St Albans full of sup and gold BLa20*33
Painter I’ve seen a picture represent 02pa4*52
Painter once more thy pencil re-assume And draw 02pa1*125, BLa22*9,
Lb55*2, NLSa12*64, OAc16*50, Od08*60, Od57*117, Pc99*11,
Yo40*66, Yo52.1*57, Yo70*48
Painter once more thy pencil reassume Draw me Od08*269
Painter prepare thy pencil yet once more Od08*192
Painter where was’t thy former work did cease 02pa1*111, BLa22*37,
He24*4, Oep4*93, SA30*29, Yo36*6, YoD*6
Pallas destructive to the Trojan line 02pa3*198
Papa noster qui es in Roma Yo54*118
Par domus est caelo sed par est nulla triumphis SA30*143
Par urbi domus est urbs orbi neutra triumphis BLa20*126, Lb55*25
Parce precor lacrymis fuit in gravare quid urges Yo88*228
Pardon dear Hero that I send to thee Mc14*51
Parson What makes thee thus like silly widgeon BLh12*10
Parties by turns make us all court slaves BLa60*70
Parvula haec urna illum includit SA30*89
Pasquine, quis est Papa BLa20*52
Passant apren quen l’incertitude des chose humaines Yo52.2*55
Passenger who e’er thou art BLa20*141
Passive obedience and non- BLa94*108, BLh15*65, HUe70*50, Lb38*19,
Np46*47, Oep18*42
Pater Alpha and Omega Deus BLa20*49
370 Appendix
Pauca haec Urbani sint verba inscripta sepulchro BLa20*19

Paupertas me saeva domat dirusque Cupido SA30*137
Pax peregrina diu binas nunc uniet oras 02pa1*211
Pax regit Augusti quem vicit Julius orbem 02pa1*29
Peace absent long two states to union brings 02pa1*213
Peace mourning friend forebear to weep for him Yo11*48
Pego resurrexit mediaque in nocte medullas Yo54*102
Pejoris fruges aris M35*195
Pellorum locii tot lunas moenia solus SA30*200
Persons in absence ought to notify returns LLt27*15
Perusing the list of the tackers in print 02pa4*1
Peter of Wells that blessed abhorrer Od57*93
Peter Since thy departure for Jamaica we have seen here Oa01*76
Phaeton’s sister though ’twas thy desire Oa01*30
Phillis be gentler I advise Ab12*40, BLa40*28, CKh14*8, Ed3*74,
Fm12.1*23, He36*19, Lb54*41, LLt27*5, Np40*32, SKv69*41,
V90*41, VAd43*46, Yo05*26
Phillis men say that all my vows Pt2*74, Yo70*23
Phillis regardless of her charms BLh15*119, Lb38*75
Phillis talk no more of passion Lb54*135
Phillis the fairest of love’s foes BLa97*129, BLh14*63
Philomela now it plainly does appear Mc14*47.2
Phoebus adest fuscos abscondat noctua vultus SA30*120
Piss out your fires you Huguenots Mc14*22
Pity the private cabal Np39*38
Places thus very near our pious schools HUe70*59, Np46*75, Oep18*74,
Of15*74, Pt2*71
Plaude licet magno laetis successibus anno 02pa4*105
Pleasure from which the universe did spring Mc14*28
Plenipotentiary to the states BLa94*192
Poems and prose of different force lay claim Pt5*164
Poetry is an intellectual mint Od76*5, Oep4*43, SA30*14
Poets of late such monstrous fools have shown Pt5*76
Pone Levian titulum quid prosit gratia coeli M35*8
Poor Celia once was very fair BLa20*2
Poor Fuckadilla now grown past Mc14*54
Poor Job lost all the comforts of his life Pt5*166
Poor Mountfort is gone and the ladies do all Of15*73, Pt2*69
Poor poet why didst spin this thread BLa62*19, Od08*52
Poor Strafford worthy of no name at all Od57*12
Poor Tom of Lincoln Pt5*3
Pope Rospigliosi the late pope said to an Englishman Od08*262
Porter made forty of his best friends die Np07*29
Post varios casus post tot discrimina M35*99

Pox o’ this playhouse ’tis an old tired jade Mc14*64
Pox on the rhyming fops that plague the town LIa4*10, Yo27*20
Praebere flammas gentibus aliis decus SA30*196
Pray listen a while I’ll a rascal describe BLa94*204
Pray listen all unto our tale Od57*16
Pray noble Diodorus show me why Mc14*47.1
Pray pardon John Bayes for I beg your excuse 02pa3*69, BLh17*12,
HRO36*50, Np43*12, V90*171, VAd43*184, Yo11*61
Pray sir did you hear of a late proclamation 02pa2*154, BLa94*70
Prepare O you cits your charter to lose Ed3*71, LIa4*58
Preserve O Lord this our inconstant nation Yo11*147
Preserved by wonder in the oak O Charles 02pa2*81, BLa22*54,
BLa40*13, BLh12*33, BLh19*11, Ed3*104, NLSa12*74, OAc16*40,
Od57*112, V90*89, VAd43*97
Presto popular Pilkington Of16*14
Prick down the point who ever hath the art Oep4*69
Prick nature’s pump cunt’s pioneer CMp*7, He36*8, Pt3*30
Pride lust ambition and the people’s hate 02pa1*172, BLa22*12, BLa62*5,
BLh15*7, Fm12.1*1, He24*11, NLSa12*62, Od08*72, Od57*162,
Pt1*7, SA30*66, V90*2, VAd43*2, Yo40*35, Yo52.1*55
Prima domus Christi fuit almae virginis alvus Yo88*232
Prima domus Christi fuit almae virginis alvus Yo88*236
Primâ fronte rogas cur panagrammate non sit M35*7
Primus ab Angliacis Hibernas qui petit oras Yo11*4
Primus huic omnium tremulus M35*196
Principium vitae detur et detur exitus ingens Yo88*233
Prithee Jerry be quiet cease railing in vain 02pa4*25
Prithee now fond fool give o’er LLt27*29
Prithee tell me gentle swain Np07*11
Pro Jacobo secundo sine regno rege BLa94*134, BLh15*85, Lb38*39,
Np46*83, Oep18*83
Pro rege saepe pro republica semper CAL68*49
Propter oves et boves He24*17
Prorogue upon prorogue damned rogues and whores 02pa3*21, BLa20*131,
BLa22*30, BLa62*23, BLh15*12, Fm12.1*7, He24*23, Lb55*6,
Od08*69, Pc99*12, Pt1*12, V90*19, VAd43*20, Yo40*39, Yo52.2*3
Protect our state and let our Marlborough thrive 02pa4*97
Proud dust swelled bubble you whose towering mind Oa01*65
Proud with the spoils of royal cully 02pa3*212
Provided also and be it further enacted by the authority Od08*168
Proximus et similis regnas Ludovice tonanti Yo11*112
Pruriunt digiti Auditores vae omnibus istis M35*170
372 Appendix
Puissant prince the object of our fears M35*98, Yo11*153

Pulvis ad hydropinos accedit Tunbrigienses Yo54*54
Purus erat dum natus erat ?alvus Adamus Yo88*235
Pythagoras his transmigration Pt5*93
Quae scombros quae thus metuit damnatur ad ignes Yo11*76
Quacks set out bills Jack Pudding makes harangues 02pa3*202
Qualis ab exacto Dux classis marte solutus Orp81*5
Qualiter in cineres latialis Roma sepulta SA30*133
Qualiter in medio scintillans fulgeret auro SA30*109
Quam bello hoc bellum trahitur tum tempus agendi en Yo88*221
Quand ce quoc icy chantera SA30*167
Quantus sub Titane lepos dominatur Eoo SA30*144
Queis Augusta malis quum moenia vexarentur Of06*41
Quem tu summe Deus semel BLa20*44
Qui ca pit/ret uxo rem/re poe nam/na ca pit/ret Oep52*73
Qui mihi discipulus puer es cupis atque doceri SA30*124
Qui placidus summas regni moderatur habenas SA30*189
Quid contemplaris molem hanc saxeam SA30*81
Quid iuvat excelso cineres tumulare sepulcro SA30*187
Quid mirum adfertis socii si per tribus unum BLa20*21
Quid prosunt monumenta ortusvè satusvè superba Lb55*7
Quid queror an proprio sub pondere magna fatiscunt 02pa3*184
Quidam sublimes nimium dixere gigantes SA30*110
Quidni credibile est ignem portare Dianam SA30*86
Quis negat auriacum natum sub stirpe Neronis Oa01*4
Quo festinanti properatis in aequora velo SA30*102
Quod sim mortalis novi sed quando peragro CAL68*46
Quoquo defugiam iam orbatus utroque parente Yo52.2*48, Yo52.2*59
Quos deus vult perdere hos dementat 02pa2*97
Quot subito attraxit splendentis pompa theatri SA30*91
Quoth Louis to James pray tell me the truth Oa01*51
Quoth the Duchess of Cleveland to Counsellor Knight Ed3*150, He36*72,
Np40*86, Yo40*46
Quoth the duke to the countess how like you my farce Yo40*81
Quoth the king to the parliament Yo11*124
Quoth the king to the wise Lord Arlington He24*12
RH they say is gone to sea BLa40*6, Mc14*19, OAc16*13, Yo54*115
Rail on discourteous knight if modest Tate Pt5*171
Rail on poor feeble scribbler speak of me Ab12*31, BLa40*37, Ed3*12,
He36*12, HRO36*49, Lb54*50, NLI93*7, Np40*23, Np40*84,
Od76*31, SKv69*29, Yo05*13, Yo54*90
Rambling last night dear Jack half drunk BLh17*88
Rash fool that happy in a private sphere Yo54*239
Rat too rat too rat too rat tat too rat tat too Ed3*28, Yo05*60
Reader beneath this turf I lie M35*207
Reader if Whig thou art thou’lt laugh Yo11*67
Reader this book is an aceldema Fm12.1*17, V90*36, VAd43*40
Rebellion hath broken up house M35*155
Recte ardere iubet captorum scrinia Caesar SA30*198
Reform great queen the errors of thy youth 02pa3*28, BLh15*26,
Ed3*108, LIa4*53, NLSa12*75, Np40*64, OAc16*25, Od08*61,
Pt1*26, Yo40*65
Regibus obsequium dum binis obligat unum M35*208, Orp81*16
Reginae fundata manu regina scholarum SA30*97
Regnis minatur multa regentium 02pa1*23
Rejoice good people all and some M35*110
Rejoice ye sots your king is come again M35*129
Religion is a thing if understood 02pa2*48
Religion’s a politic law BLa97*38, BLh15*46, Np44*84, Of16*55,
Pt1*48, Pt3*35, Yo70*46
Religione vana aula prophana Od08*46
Remember Damon oft you vowed Np07*39
Remember maids that Christmas now draws near HRO36*38
Renowned Blake what trumpet may be found 02pa2*125
Renowned Phiz kept evidence in awe 02pa4*87
Res a pulicibus gestae illustrissimo Nipskinno Rege Orp81*3
Resolved that no commoner of England committed by order Od08*220
Resolved that the full proof of adultery committed against her husband
BLa94*126, Np46*72, Oep18*71
Resolved that the maxims and policies of the most renowned BLa94*201
Resolved that the proceedings of the House of Lords Yo52.1*54
Retreat base Monck into some loathsome gaol Yo40*17
Revelation 18 verse 9. Here you see Babylon must down Yo54*218
Revenge revenge my injured shade begins 02pa3*148
Reverend brethren I know no way better to communicate Yo54*182
Reverend pater Yours I received all goes well Od08*78
Reverend sirs I fain would know M35*65, Oa01*56, Yo11*92
Rex and Grex have both one sound 02pa3*86, Yo52.2*53
Rex omnibus ad quos etc. salutem cum boni principis Od08*14
Rex princeps infans status minor ager ut omnes Yo88*234
Rhetoricis alii celebrent tua funera verbis SA30*95
Richard the third was a hog BLh14*66
Riddle: What is faith Yo54*114
Riding of late to take a little air 02pa2*10, Pt5*121
Right heir to Flutter Fop o’th’ last edition BLa94*10, Of16*88, Yo08*61,
Yo19*1
374 Appendix
Right trusty and right well beloved cousins Pt5*18

Right trusty and well beloved Madam Cresswell and Damaris Page
BLa20*109, Od08*54
Rightly those names are joined when both agree Yo52.2*62
Rise Absalom rise to God’s dread prophet tell BLa94*2
Rise lofty numbers rise from scenes of light 02pa2*172
Rixantque pueri antiquam M35*198
Roger told his brother clown He24*20, Yo40*20 <Also as ‘Cary’s face . . .’>
Romanis sua stagna iugis septena superbis SA30*104
Romantic bards that were of old Od08*117
Rome’s story tells of a triumvirate He85*55
Room boys room room boys room HRO36*19
Room for a pedant with those forms of speech BLa94*42, Fm12.2*21,
HUe70*40, Np42*64, Of15*72, Pt2*72
Room for the bedlam Commons BLa62*52, BLh15*16, Pt1*16
Room for thund’ring Orange with his men of war BLa62*44
Room room for a blade of the town Np40*11, Yo05*36
Rouse genius rouse something that’s lofty say Yo08*2
Rouse up brave monarch of this potent land M35*96
Rouse up my sons redeem your lost renown Ed3*19
Rusticus hem cunctos cum congemerat et ad ictus Yo88*224
Sacheverell is at liberty BLa60*72
Sacrae Caesarae majestati vestrae procul dubio satis Od08*12
Sacrilegus dum fit imitata veste sacerdos Od57*91
Sacro nomini Annae magnae Britanniae, etc. reginae 02pa4*104
Salvete par regum impar Oa01*80
Sam Wills had viewed Kat Betts a smiling lass BLa94*198
Sandwich in Spain now and the duke in love 02pa1*18, BLa22*28,
BLh15*3, He24*2, Lb54*113, Lb55*4, Oep4*91, Pt1*3, SA30*26,
Yo36*3, Yo40*28, YoD*3
Sanguineis nescit miles se mergere rivis 02pa1*21
Satyr is grown so dull that fops increase Np39*29
Satyr’s despotic now none can withstand BLh13*67, BLh19*35, He85*49,
LIa4*61
Say Echo who this new religion grounded Yo40*6
Say gentle muse is this a prophecy Od57*24
Say goddess muse for thy all-searching eyes 02pa4*41, BLa94*163,
Pt5*193
Say Heav’n-born muse for only thou canst tell He36*55, Np40*81, Yo05*9
Say Mariana what strange change is this Fm12.3*42, Np44*67
Saying that nightly work would produce an heir M35*70
Says his grace to Will Green whom he found at his stall 02pa3*158
Says Watkin to Cotton I thought my Lord Gower Oep18*122
Scarce did the grey-eyed dawn appear HRO36*87

Scorning religion all thy lifetime past Of16*45
Scots are no rebels why they’re conquerors Yo54*23
Scrape no more your harmless chins HRO36*24
Second to Jove alone in whom unite 02pa2*110, Pt3*99
Second to royal Jove great Russell’s thunder Oa01*5.2
Sede sedens istâ iudex inflexibilis sta SA30*157
See Britons see one half before your eyes 02pa2*90, Fm12.3*60, Np44*87
See how the parted flames aspire Oep4*47, SA30*13
See saw sack a day Od57*136
See thou disturber of the world’s repose 02pa2*133
See two rude waves by storms together thrown Od57*40
See worthy friend what I would do BLa20*1
Seek not to know a woman for she’s worse BLa20*133
Selius seems safe whilst that he doth aver SA30*184
Send forth dear Julian all thy books BLh13*55, BLh14*35, BLh19*38,
Ed3*115, He85*8, LIa4*31, NLSa12*104, Np38*52, Np39*21,
Np42*25, Od57*106, Of15*22, Pt2*17, V90*143, VAd43*153,
Yo13*40
Seraphic lord whom heaven for wonder meant 02pa1*2102, Pt3*83
Serenissime potentissime et invictissime Romanorum Od08*11
Sermo salutaris nihili tibi prorsus habetur BLa20*72
Seven sages in our happy isle are seen BLa60*40, BLh14*112
Seven sages in these latter times are seen 02pa4*17
Seventy four articles of war in large imperial paper 02pa3*32, BLh15*30,
Fm12.2*6, Np42*14, Of15*20, Pt1*32, Pt2*15
Several privateers were taken a year ago M35*111
Shall the world be thus abused and I sit still LIa4*44
Shall we stand tamely mute and see our England sunk Yo54*235
Shame of my life disturber of my tomb 02pa3*63, Ab12*59, BLa22*47,
BLa94*4, BLh13*8, Fm12.1*20, He36*78, Lb54*18, LIa4*9, M35*33,
Mc14*43, Np38*8, OAc16*34, Od08*288, Od57*71, Pt3*21,
V90*40, VAd43*44, Yo13*18, Yo27*12
Shame of thy country and thy ancient name Np44*9
Sharpius exercet dum saevas perfidus iras BLa62*31, Yo54*230
She first deceased he for a little tried Np07*21
She is so charming fair Lb54*140
She ran in virtue’s race till thirty-two Pt5*95
She that designs to make a virtuous wife BLh19*80, V90*150, VAd43*160
She that for money will her love constrain Yo52.1*75
She was so exquisite a whore BLh14*23, Mc14*8, V90*85, VAd43*93
She’s dead thanks to the jury’s pious care 02pa4*20
She’s exiled now and it’s not strange to see M35*181
376 Appendix
She’s gone the beauty of our isle is fled 02pa1*277

Sheweth That we your majesty’s poor slaves 02pa1*243, BLa97*49,
LIa4*68, Np43*59, Od57*143, Of16*113, V90*231, VAd43*251,
Yo08*31
Shine forth ye planets with distinguished light 02pa3*205
Short are our powers though infinite our will Pt5*174
Should I be called where cannons roar Np07*14
Should you order Tom Brown M35*146
Shows why this tale in verse is wrote 02pa4*80
Si probitas sensus virtutis gratia census SA30*153
Si recte memini causae sunt quinque bibendi Od08*95
Sibi iam caveat terrarum orbis, hasce enim inter pluvias SA30*82
Sic ascitos nasos de clune torosi SA30*180
Sic Catharina ferat Carolus sic gignat ut illa Od76*11
Sic civile chaos dum bellum gessit et una 02pa1*25
Sic hypochondriacis inclusa meatibus aura SA30*181
Sicelides dominus domus est Busiridis ara Lb55*26.1
Sicilian goddess whose prophetic tongue 02pa2*177, BLa60*17, Fm12.3*67,
Np44*94, Np46*112, Orp81*23
Sicilian muse begin a loftier flight 02pa2*173, BLa60*15, Fm12.3*66,
HRO36*64, Np44*93, Oa05*45, Orp81*22, Pt4*40, Pt4*41, Pt4*42,
Pt4*43, Yo08*81
Sicilian muse begin a loftier strain 02pa2*174
Sicilian muse thy voice and subject raise 02pa2*178
Sidera si possint pecudesque feraeque mereri SA30*115
Sigh o my soul sigh till thy loins do swell Yo52.2*2
Silence Gentlemen troopers Yo08*85
Simultates et privatas inimicitias Np43*53, Np46*23, Oep18*22,
VAd43*243
Since ’tis your study and your care BLa94*78
Since Adam striving to be overwise BLh19*138, Of06*39
Since all must certainly to death resign Np46*91, Oep18*91, Of06*60
Since all the actions of the far famed men 02pa3*60, BLh19*19, Fm12.1*5,
Lb54*20, NLSa12*86, Np39*3, SKv69*62, V90*6, VAd43*6
Since all the mighty monuments of fame Yo70*16
Since all the world’s grown mad I’ll e’en go sing BLh13*76, LIa4*39,
Np39*23
Since at a tavern I can’t meet you BLh17*89, BLh19*162, Yo11*82
Since being rough the learned doth enrage Pt5*30
Since by just flames the guilty piece is lost 02pa2*69, BLa94*9, BLa97*14,
Fm12.2*16, Lb54*93, Np42*40, Of15*46, Of16*27, Pt2*38
Since B—y’s nonsense to outdo you strive Pt5*159
Since Celia’s my foe Yo54*68
Since Cleveland is fled 02pa3*82, Od08*287

Since Cob gives the feast BLa60*63
Since dearest Harry you will needs request Oa05*6
Since death on all lays his impartial hand BLa94*45, Yo70*33
Since Dorset’s grown dull HUe70*68, Yo11*218
Since ev’ry foolish coxcomb thinks it fit BLh19*21, Ed3*126, Fm12.2*9,
He85*31, Lb54*64, NLSa12*93, Np39*44, Np42*18, Od08*281,
Of15*25, Pt2*20, V90*120, VAd43*130
Since every mountain where the muses come 02pa4*79
Since fasts and Lenten sermons do no good HUe70*42, Yo70*15
Since heaven from Albion’s once-loved isle estranged 02pa4*78
Since I came last I’ve seen a lampoon here HUe70*52, Yo70*30
Since it came in my mind of late to turn poet Yo70*68
Since it hath pleased this wise and newborn state Oep4*62, SA30*16
Since Justice Scroggs Pepys and Dean did bail 02pa3*76, BLa62*77
Since ladies were ladies I dare boldly say BLa97*116, Oep18*117,
Yo11*142
Since love and verse as well as wine He85*89, Lb54*101, NLSa12*129,
Of16*74, VAd43*216, Yo70*22
Since love intrigues are out of date Yo08*12
Since Manwaring and learned Perry BLh14*71, BLh15*113, Lb38*69,
Np44*45
Since now my Silvia is as kind as fair 02pa1*174, Ab12*16, CMp*4,
He36*40, Mc14*32, NLSa12*54, Np32*5, Np40*6, Np46*11,
Oep18*11, Pt3*5, SKv69*51, V90*49, VAd43*54, Yo05*47
Since oaths are solemn serious things Pt5*49, Yo11*81
Since Orange is on British land 02pa3*130
Since plagues were ordered for a scourge to men 02pa2*74
Since plotting’s a trade BLa62*123
Since popery of late is so much in debate Od08*208
Since popery’s the plot BLa62*124, Od57*101
Since prose won’t move we’ll try what verse can do BLa97*48, BLh17*45
Since revelling ballet and masquerade Np43*19, V90*179, VAd43*192
Since rhyming’s in season with or without reason Od08*202
Since satyr is the only thing that’s writ BLh19*58, Ed3*70, He85*44,
NLSa12*32, Np42*30, Np45*32, Of15*36, Pt2*30, V90*128,
VAd43*138
Since scandal flies thick BLa97*11, BLh14*46, BLh19*99, He85*98,
NLSa12*126, Np42*43, Of15*48, Of16*52, Pt2*44, V90*203,
VAd43*219
Since that I’ce find by sa’l good wits will jump Oa01*32.1
Since the ladies ’gainst men Pt5*65
Since the law’s at a stand OAc16*33
378 Appendix
Since the liberty of the subject to free quarter M35*189, Oep4*44

Since the senate is mad and the lords are such tools BLh15*138.1,
Fm12.3*55, Lb38*94.1, Np44*81
Since the sons of the muses grew numerous and loud DA*1, Ed3*76,
He36*43, HRO36*52, Lb54*3, Np40*97, Od08*265, Yo05*52,
Yo54*99
Since the times are so nice BLh15*134, Lb38*90
Since the united cunning of the stage 02pa1*155, He85*76, NLSa12*115,
Np43*26, Of16*28, V90*187, VAd43*200
Since there are some that see with me the state 02pa1*143, NLSa12*19,
Np45*19, Pt4*23, Yo70*49
Since to restrain our joy that ill-bred rude 02pa1*159, Ed3*63, He36*25,
NLSa12*11, Np45*11
Since truth begins to scatter radiant light Fm12.3*49, Np44*75
Since Whitehall scribblers do our clubs abuse Od08*280
Since you have forgot BLa97*12, BLh14*47, BLh19*100, He85*99,
NLSa12*127, Np42*44, Of15*49, Of16*53, Pt2*45, V90*204,
VAd43*220
Since you resigned your dear commission Yo11*229
Since you will needs be kind to me BLh14*12, Ed3*91, V90*45, VAd43*50
Sir ’Tis not in me your miseries to redress BLh19*143, Of06*37
Sir ’Twas Sarsfield Parsons and Mun Sherman’s wit BLh13*52, He85*7,
LIa4*28, Np38*49, V90*95, VAd43*103
Sir All my endeavours all my hopes depend 02pa2*66, He85*77,
NLSa12*148, Np43*74
Sir Decennio parturit elephas sed elephantum Oa01*25
Sir Edmundbury Godfrey Od57*142
Sir For that order mentioned in your letter I find Od08*108
Sir History and experience have plenally certified Yo52.2*56
Sir Humphrey Wynch one of the council for trade Od08*86
Sir I give you many thanks for your kind letter Oa01*22
Sir I send you here some rude strokes Np44*79
Sir I should think myself happy in any occasion Oa01*26
Sir I took my dose BLa20*4
Sir I understand that there is a great interest Yo54*183
Sir In your letter to me you desire to know Np44*80
Sir John for so in times preceding 02pa3*36, BLh12*8
Sir John I have a commission here BLa40*7
Sir Knowing how desirous you are to have a clear Od08*234
Sir Matthew Camprey a Savogard friar of the order of Saint Bennet
Oa05*56
Sir My son being absent I thought best myself to satisfy Od08*119
Sir Ovid of old in merry verse Oa05*46
Sir Roger from a zealous piece of frieze 02pa3*10, Od57*7

Sir Seeing that you are pleased to think fit that these papers should
02pa1*13, BLa20*148
Sir That evening Prior came to town He36*81
Sir The vacancy of the seat of Chief Justice Yo54*80
Sir Though I never received a favour from you nor can now hope BLa94*55
Sir Who spares to ask can ne’er expect to speed Oa01*36
Sir William in arcta custodia lies 02pa3*72
Sir With what unwillingness I entered upon my answer Od08*107
Sir you have obliged the British nation more Od57*159, Oep4*75,
SA30*39
Sirs I’ve been where so many puritans dwell Yo08*1
Siste viator et lege 02pa4*5, BLh14*114, Orp81*29
Siste viator hic jaceo celebris Batavorum respublica BLa20*143
Sister don’t you hear the news ’tis said Oep18*125
Sit mihi non voto descendat sanguine regnum Yo54*10.2
Sit or sit not by law or sword 02pa3*101
Sitting beyond a river’s side Yo54*117
Sitting by the streams that glide BLa20*10
Six of the female sex and purest sect Ab12*67, BLh13*20, Np38*20
Six tedious months our senate sits M35*83
Sleep locks up sense and lets the soul go free Oep4*40
Sleep may our wearied senses prisoners take Oep4*41
Slight not the following lines 02pa3*99, Yo54*132
Smectymnuus the goblin makes me start 02pa3*11
Smooth was the water calm the air HRO36*26
So comes the mighty Juno from above Np43*45, V90*218, VAd43*235
So far the work of Reformation Pt5*119
So have I seen a Dean of Paul’s 02pa3*98, BLa62*75
So his bold tube man to the sun applied 02pa1*113, BLa40*1.1, CAL68*21
So kind he was that in our greatest need Lb55*8
So long was I deprived of my rest Mc14*40
So represented have I seen BLa94*226
So shipwrecked passengers escaped to land Oep4*65, SA30*57
So soft and amorously you write Ab12*21, Ed3*84, He36*37, Np40*14,
SKv69*20, Yo05*43
So soon as you against me took the field CAL68*29
So spake the god and heav’nward took his flight Oa05*28
So sweet the joys by love and beauty giv’n Oa05*36
So swift yet with so regular a pace Fm12.3*41, Np44*66
So the bright taper useless burns He24*29
So two rude waves by storms together thrown Oep4*42
So we some antique hero’s strength BLa20*104
380 Appendix
Soap and suds or the Ethiopians address to the queen of Sheba 02pa3*209
Solid and heroic virtue as it often bestows a crown Od08*278
Solomon in his divine apothegms affirms M35*52
Solus ad imperium evasit M35*192
Some few from wit have this true maxim got Np40*96
Some may deride our grief say tears are vain Oep4*12
Some men there are that swear and whore and rant Yo11*35
Some praise the hogshead some the sober well Oep4*54.2
Some say a physician of late 02pa2*94
Some scribbling fops so little value fame Pt5*157
Some thieves by ill hap with an honest man met BLa97*77, BLh15*59,
Lb38*13, M35*123, Pt5*45, Yo11*180.1
Some years are past since by his Majesty’s command Pt5*70
Son of a whore God damn thee canst thou tell BLh12*31, BLh14*18, ILr*12,
Mc14*27, Np42*4, Of15*4, Pt3*72, Pt5*91, V90*74, VAd43*82
Son Petres Yours I received by the infernal post Np43*66, V90*243,
VAd43*263
Soon after writing the song of Like a Dog with a Bottle BLa20*107
Soon as the dismal news came down BLa94*145, BLh15*101, Fm12.3*23,
Lb38*57, Np44*33, Np46*100, Oep18*100
Soon as you read my theme I’m sure you’ll ask Ed3*42, NLSa12*15,
Np45*15
Soon as you read these lines I know you’ll ask V90*52, VAd43*57
Sooner I may some fixéd statue be Od57*29
Sooner than I’ll from vowed revenge desist HRO36*34
Sore sick a lady late did lie BLa94*185
Sorrell transformed to Pegasus we see BLa94*148, Np46*104
Spargaret audaces cum dira per aethera crines Np40*67
Speak satyr for there’s none can tell like thee 02pa2*4
Spes patris ac timor M35*197
Spread a large canvas painter to contain 02pa1*116, BLa22*7, BLh15*8,
BLh17*17, Ed3*111, He24*24, Lb54*109, Lb55*16, NLSa12*68,
Np40*75, OAc16*2, Od08*178, Od57*120, Orp81*1, Pt1*8, Pt3*48,
Yo36*10, Yo40*79, Yo52.2*6, Yo70*44
Squab puppy who canst bark but never bite Of16*90, Yo08*63, Yo19*3
Sta viator sive tu Veneri seu Baccho vixeris idoneus 02pa1*299, Yo70*75
Stain of thy country and thy ancient name BLa94*120, BLh15*67,
BLh19*149, Fm12.3*7, HUe70*36, Lb38*21, Np46*63, Oep18*61,
Of06*65, Yo70*84
Stamford is her sex’s glory Ab12*79, BLh13*36, Np38*33, Pt3*26
Stamford’s countess led the van Ab12*74, BLa62*117, BLh13*30,
BLh14*25, BLh17*6, BLh19*30, He85*38, Np38*28, Np42*22,
Od08*314, Of15*29, Pt2*25, Pt3*27, V90*104, VAd43*112
Stand forth thou grand impostor of our time 02pa1*270, BLa97*33,

Od57*146, Yo08*5
Stand up Smectymnuus and hear thy trial Od08*166
Stand With reverend fear amazed look in BLa20*103
Stay here fond youth and ask no more be wise HRO36*45
Stay O sweet and do not rise Yo88*243
Stephen Pope of Newtown BLa94*179
Sternhold and Hopkins had such qualms Oa05*22
Stet quicunque volet potens Yo54*223, Yo88*223
Stigmata maxillis bajulans insignia laudis BLa20*75
Still still O ye furies of Mars BLa20*127
Stop the chafed boar or play Fm12.1*60, V90*139, VAd43*149
Stout Hannibal before he come to age Ed3*18, Np43*17, V90*177,
VAd43*190
Straight from behind I heard the gentle tread Mc14*15
Straight his train of parasites appear M35*77
Strange news from Barbary learned Digby tells Yo52.1*24
Strange news from Westminster the like was never heard 02pa3*92
Strephon a youth of sodomitic strain Np39*37, Np40*92
Stretched in the shades of a thick cypress grove DA*16, Pt5*37
Study thy self and read what thou hath writ Yo88*202
Success which can no more than beauty last Od08*84
Such a sad fate prepare to hear BLa97*136, BLh12*27, BLh14*13,
BLh19*4, Ed3*58, He36*70, Np42*2, Od08*55, Of15*2, Pt2*2,
V90*46, VAd43*51, Yo40*68, Yo70*19
Such has been this ill-natured nation’s fate 02pa2*127
Such is the mode of these censorious days BLa94*119, HUe70*56,
Np46*62, Oep18*60, Yo70*105
Such perfect bliss fair Cloris we He36*3
Such pleasures we find Pt3*91
Such was our builder’s art that soon as named BLa94*168
Sunt tua criminibus videntia tempora tonsor SA30*155
Sure as ye live who Arthur’s fate deplore Of06*64.1, Yo70*89.1
Sure it may do us both a prejudice to meet any other way Lb54*122
Sure Nature never did design Yo54*167
Sure that wise man who undertook Np44*38
Sure there are some that with me see the state Fm12.1*47, Od57*107,
V90*111, VAd43*120
Sure we do live by Cleopatra’s age 02pa3*52
Surly and sour thou dislikst mankind HRO36*29
Surly mankind has long despised lampoon BLh19*92, Of16*123
Sustinuit tumidos pellis caprina gigantes SA30*114
Sweet as short slumbers to a troubled mind Of06*41.2
382 Appendix
Sweet lovely youth let not a woman’s crime Np46*4, Oep18*4, V90*29,
VAd43*31
Sweetest bud of beauty may BLa40*24, Pc99*27
Take a fresh plate and to the life express M35*85
Take a gallon of poor passive Church of England water M35*211
Take a turd 02pa3*80, Od08*260, Yo54*119
Take courage noble Charles and cease to muse 02pa2*180, Fm12.3*69,
Np44*96, Oa05*27, Yo70*7
Take of Lory Hyde the head HRO36*58
Take of Sir H. James’s affection to the ministry Yo40*5
Take two ounces of Whigs of Tories the same BLa94*196
Taken ods death and in the tower too Pt5*17
Taking of snuff is a mode at court Od08*71
Talk Strephon no more of what’s honest and just 02pa2*121
Tame age and diseases this year did conspire Od08*100
Tears are but hackney griefs the vulgar eye Oep4*9
Tell me abandoned miscreant prithee tell Np40*98, Yo05*59
Tell me Armida tell me why BLh13*43, He85*41, Np38*40, Np43*93,
Yo13*36
Tell me dear charming Lydia tell me Mc14*59
Tell me Dorinda why so gay 02pa2*160, BLa94*61, BLh14*64, BLh15*97,
BLh19*166, Fm12.3*22, Lb38*53, Np44*30, Yo88*239
Tell me insipid lecher now the tide Mc14*63
Tell me Jack I prithee do He36*80
Tell me my friend who would a favourite be Yo08*43
Tell me no more I am deceived Lb54*40
Tell me no more of constancy Od08*242
Tell me no more where you have been Np43*44, V90*217, VAd43*234
Tell me not of lords or laws Yo11*183
Tell me O tell me some powers that are kind Yo54*173
Tell me sage Will thou that the town around BLa97*107, BLh17*85,
BLh19*163, Yo70*76
Tell me thou confident of what is done SA30*25, Oep4*90
Tell me thou safest end of all our woe BLa62*58
Tell me thou treasury of spite BLa97*23, BLh19*109, He85*106, Np07*6,
Np43*40, Od57*138, Of16*81, V90*211, VAd43*227, Yo08*22
Tell your great master it was fate not choice M35*142
Tellus epotat sitibundis faucibus imbrem BLa20*90
Ten crowns at once and to one man and he He24*28, Od08*162,
Yo52.1*41
Ten pounds to a crown who will make the match NLSa12*111
Th’inspiring muses and the god of love BLa60*39
Thank heavens we have a king BLa97*117
Thanks for this miracle for it is no less HRO36*89

Thanks to our good King William Yo11*116
Thanks to the goodness Lydia why Oa01*38
Thanks ye kind powers I am at last got free BLh12*17
Thanks ye kind powers I am at last in love BLh12*18
That a prince who falls out with laws breaketh with his best friends
BLa94*54, Fm12.3*18, Np44*26
That according to the law of the land the king Lb55*21
That author needs must take great pains Oa01*81
That author sure must take great pains Yo11*119
That Crowder would from whites abstain Yo70*67
That every teacher and preacher must be sent from God Lb55*14
That forasmuch whereas whereby and by which the major part Np39
That he hath advised the king to raise a standing army Yo52.1*53
That his majesty be pleased to equip pay and maintain Od08*24
That I have only answered mum Np46*2, Oep18*2, V90*8, VAd43*8
That in the year 1660 upon his majesty’s Restoration Od08*38
That kings should from their thrones be rudely torn M35*23, Of06*7,
Pt3*76, Yo11*60
That lowly vicar may in order rise HRO36*72
That man is cowardly base and deserves not the name Yo54*19
That nauseous Ruthen would for France BLh15*123, Lb38*79
That rib forsooth of which a woman came Np39*26
That so much rhyme you in one month have writ BLa94*15, Of16*95,
Yo19*6
That the Earl of Clarendon designed a standing army Od08*36
That the king did not declare his judgement in council BLa94*18
That the king’s answer to the House of Commons Od08*137
That the said lady hath and still doth cohabit Od08*315
That thou dost shorten thy long nights with wine HRO36*14
That with much wealth and large increase my lord Yo70*5
The air shows the state of our souls Pt4*32
The Almighty’s image of his shape afraid Np46*14, Oep18*14, Of06*47
The Archbishop of Canterbury BLa20*118
The author sure must take great pains 02pa3*166, BLa97*112, M35*127
The bards of old who were inspired with wit V90*70, VAd43*77
The beauteous Sunderland much brighter shines BLa60*26
The best of his artillery was prayer Yo52.2*8
The best of prelates in a factious age BLa94*214
The bishop being angry looked grum Yo54*206
The Bishop of Durham Yo11*96
The blackest ink of fate sure was my lot Yo52.2*23
The blazing comet and the monstrous whale BLa62*80, Yo54*58
384 Appendix
The blessed virgin this day Jesus brought Yo88*201

The blind lord giving sight to the man born blind 02pa4*22
The blood o’th’ just London’s firm doom shall fix BLa62*36, Lb55*1,
Od08*70, Pc99*24, Yo52.1*61
The breed’s described now satyr if you can 02pa2*6
The British Arthur as historians tell Pt5*187
The camp you shun beauties adore abhor you do BLa62*40.1
The cause of absence is not less of love Mc14*78
The censuring world perhaps may not esteem BLh17*26, BLh19*63,
He85*47, V90*132, VAd43*142
The cestrian roach will prove a fine fish 02pa3*221
The chertreux wants the warning of a bell Np40*114
The city hath a mayor which mayor is a lord He24*14
The city monument is this 02pa3*85
The city’s viewed now satyr turn thine eye 02pa2*145
The clergy now the good Calixtus hate BLa62*13
The clog of all pleasure the luggage of life Ab12*9, BLa62*91, BLh14*8,
BLh17*29, CAL68*15, Np32*2, Oa01*10, Pt3*2, SKv69*10, V90*23,
VAd43*25
The cocks may crow in the morn BLa40*20
The committee which is to enquire into the causes Od08*59
The conquests Anna by her chiefs has won 02pa4*89
The court of St Germain’s is served up in state BLh14*104
The court was scarce up when the sluices broke in BLh19*117, Np42*59,
Of15*67, Of16*116, Pt2*54, V90*239, VAd43*259
The covetous man is a heap of absurdities Oa01*72
The critics that pretend to sense 02pa1*252, BLa97*55, Of16*127, Pt5*8
The desire in general is to have all knights’ services Od08*123
The earth with thirst did gape but now I think Oa01*12
The eleventh of April is come about BLh17*55, Yo11*128
The elms are lopped Pt4*0.1
The end of satyr is reformation and the author though he 02pa2*3, Pt5*190
The failing blossom which a young plant bears BLh12*7
The fame of virtue ’tis for which I found 02pa2*7
The farm of Parnassus is beggared they say Yo52.2*12
The faults of princes and of kings BLh15*84, HUe70*64, Lb38*38
The fear of God is freedom joy and peace CKh10*2
The fields now resume their former verdure Pt4*35
The first appears with an uneasy crown BLa94*35, BLh17*76, Yo11*178
The first was the exercising of the king’s guards Yo40*43
The fourth more blacker than fifth of November BLh17*69, Of06*24,
Yo11*167
The fox last night so sore did bite Pt5*5
The freeborn English generous and wise 02pa1*131, BLa97*60, BLh13*17,

Fm12.1*48, LLt27*30, NLSa12*82, Np38*17, Pt3*47, V90*112,
VAd43*121, Yo08*67, Yo54*197
The globe of earth on which we dwell is tacked unto the poles BLa60*48,
BLa94*176
The glories of our birth and state BLa20*65, Lb54*106, Lb55*7.1,
M35*118, Yo54*65
The glory of our English arms retrieved BLa60*37, BLa94*156, BLh14*99,
HRO36*68, Np42*73, Np46*129
The God of Day descending from above BLa94*142, Np46*93, Oep18*95
The gods and the goddesses lately did feast Ed3*9, Mc14*75, Od08*308,
Pt5*57
The gods are not more blest than he 02pa2*112
The gospel and law allow monarchs their due 02pa3*153
The government being resolved Of16*121
The grave House of Commons by hook and by crook 02pa3*64, BLh19*33,
Ed3*120, Fm12.2*4, LIa4*23, NLSa12*57, Np42*10, Od08*283,
Of15*16, Of16*15, Pt2*10, Pt3*71, Pt4*21, V90*167, VAd43*178,
Yo27*28, Yo54*196
The great conveyer both of truth and lies BLa94*228
The great loyal clergy are met with intent M35*25
The hawks were once at mortal jars 02pa2*21, Pt5*132
The heaven drinks every day a cup Np43*6, VAd43*173
The heavens look big with wonder and inform Od08*93
The holy brotherhood of zealous Scots Yo54*28
The House of Commons having lately sent Od57*14
The House of Commons is the people’s god OAc16*20, Pt3*74
The House of Commons taking into serious consideration Yo54*181
The humble atheist who acknowledge can Oep4*51, SA30*53
The husband’s the pilot the wife is the ocean 02pa2*76, BLh12*41
The idle person is the devil’s day labourer Oa01*74
The illegitimate Smectymnuan brat Yo54*56
The Jacobites their cause t’advance BLa97*109
The jurors upon their oaths do say Pt5*100
The king duke and state BLh19*54, Ed3*139, He85*13, Np39*8
The king having left to her great sorrow M35*106
The king is encircled in the rays of the sun Od08*5
The king knights Will for fighting on his side Od57*1
The king of all beasts and the tailor’s long measure BLa20*35
The ladies I hear take it in great scorn BLh19*128
The lark that shuns on lofty boughs to build Oa05*5
The lark’s awake that gilds the morn Ed3*146
The last letter I received from your honour LLt27*10
386 Appendix
The law is at a stand BLa62*38

The letter C with the Latin word ave BLa20*34
The lion having held the reins Pt5*138
The Londoners gent 02pa1*123, BLh15*15, Fm12.1*28, Lb55*20,
NLSa12*100, Od08*256, Pt1*15, Pt3*24, Pt4*6, V90*61, VAd43*66
The Lord my pasture shall prepare Np40*112
The lords and commons having had their doom 02pa3*34, BLa40*3,
BLh15*40, Np40*49, Od08*275, Pt1*42, Yo54*145
The lords craved all and the queen granted all Yo54*20
The lords do take notice of the House of Commons Od08*217
The lords do unanimously declare that they are of opinion Od08*219
The Louvre to Paris that to the world compare Lb55*25.1
The man dear Brett that wears a condom BLa60*56, BLh14*111
The man I sing BLa94*234
The man that’s just and resolutely good CAL68*36
The man that’s resolute and just 02pa4*8, HRO36*73
The man that’s uncorrupt and free from guilt Oa05*35
The members of parliament all BLa97*76
The merry world does lotteries deride Pt5*135
The mighty monarch of this British isle 02pa3*124
The mighty nine in full assembly meeting BLh19*81
The mighty puss not long since ruled the state 02pa2*28
The modest poet was unkind Ed3*94
The miracle’s done This year ninety and one M35*95, Yo11*53
The moment I received your last I acknowledged it Lb54*119
The moon was in eclipse with a hoi Of16*129
The moon was set no stars in the skies did shine Yo54*41
The morning come the slaves await 02pa2*29
The most learned Galileus by a familiar demonstration Od08*1
The most undoubted kings have heretofore been forced M35*119
The mouldering earth we tread upon may justly put us Pt4*33
The necessity of the liberty of the press Np07*26
The night is come like to the day He24*35
The noise of foreign wars Yo08*19
The nymph who oft has been exposed to view BLh14*109
The observation of all this is not so hard to make BLa94*19
The parched earth when one would think BLa20*91, Mc14*30
The parliament did demand where’s all the money gone Od08*286
The parliament thrifty to make up their wages M35*61
The parsons all keep whores BLh14*1, He36*75, Lb55*23, Np46*7,
OAc16*30, Od08*209, Oep18*7, Pt5*81, V90*9, VAd43*9, Yo05*72
The pawns have all the sport and all their say Od57*55
The people grumble all Yo40*32
The people of Scotland most illustrious patriots Pt5*136

The pigeons worried by a kite Pt5*144
The pillars of popery now are blown down 02pa3*151
The play great sir is done yet needs must fear Od57*57
The play is at an end but where’s the plot Yo52.2*17
The plot being so suddenly contrived as you hear V90*162, VAd43*170.1
The poets tell us idle tales to please us 02pa1*264, Np43*62, Od57*174,
V90*236, VAd43*256
The praises I sing of our treasurer Lory Of16*56
The preacher Maurus cries all wit is vain Pt5*175
The Prince of Whigland swaggers in Whitehall Np43*90, He85*60,
Lb54*82, Yo13*28
The princes once did all combine 02pa2*35
The proctor’s being always much inclined Yo08*91
The prodigal’s returned from husks and swine 02pa3*49, Of16*32,
Od57*134
The prospect of a promising harvest to contemplate Pt4*36
The proud man is one who measures his length Oa01*73
The queen a message to the senate sent BLa60*18, BLh15*145, CAL68*39,
Fm12.2*22, Np42*65
The queen deceased so pleased the king so grieved 02pa3*170, M35*115.1,
Orp81*25.1
The queen like heaven shines equally on all BLa94*181
The rabble hates the gentry fear 02pa1*164, BLa22*55, BLa62*113,
Ed3*109, Lb54*66, LIa4*51, NLSa12*95, Od57*97, V90*21, VAd43*23,
VAd43*72, Yo54*160
The rage of jealousy then fired his soul Oa05*32
The rattle-headed ladies being assembled at Kate’s Od08*34
The ravens formerly were looked upon Pt5*148
The reason why I conceal myself is to save you the pains Od08*266
The rising morn had summoned night away CAL68*25
The rising sun complies with our weak sight 02pa3*15
The royal ghost raised from his peaceful urn BLa60*64
The same allegiance to two kings he pays M35*208.1, Orp81*16.1
The senseless world perhaps may not esteem Of16*11
The sheep a people void of strife BLa60*47
The sight of the title gives the reader to understand Pt5*137
The soldier now forgets the sanguine sea 02pa1*22
The sound of thy renown being borne on the wings of an angel of victory
BLh15*98, Np44*31, Np46*96, Oep18*96
The Spaniards gravely preach in politic schools BLh17*36, BLh19*14,
Ed3*122, LIa4*22, OAc16*42, Od57*78, Pt3*42, V90*14, VAd43*14,
Yo27*27
388 Appendix
The stage has been and yet improved shall rise 02pa3*201
The stakes three crowns four nations gamesters are Yo54*22
The stars are fit resemblances of the angels of God Pt4*31
The story of King Arthur old Yo70*41
The sun and that’s my crime I’m told 02pa4*91
The sun had loosed his weary train DA*19
The surplice now is worn Od57*41
The talk lately went Yo08*55
The talk up and down 02pa3*66, BLh14*56, BLh19*123, Np43*64,
Of16*122, V90*241, VAd43*261
The thirsty earth drinks up the rain BLa20*89
The thought was great and worthy of a cit Pt5*182
The thunder-breathing brass grew hot and spoke BLa20*78
The Tories wish for James again BLh19*150
The town has thought fit BLh13*47, He85*10, LIa4*25, Np38*44
The town is in a high dispute BLh15*114, Lb38*70, Np44*46
The trial of Charles Lord Cornwallis 1676 Yo54*88
The tyrant queen of soft desires Oa05*7
The utmost grace the Greeks could show LLt27*33
The widows and maids 02pa3*107, BLa97*15, BLh14*45, BLh19*95,
He85*97, NLSa12*125, Np43*36, Of16*51, V90*202, VAd43*215
The witty Northumberland BLa97*91
The wonderful year 1672 seems France to resolve Od08*87
The world no nation has no nation town Yo54*222
The world’s a tennis court man’s the ball BLa62*59
The worst mine enemies could have done to me M35*79
The year before The figures four Yo70*98
The year of wonder now is come 02pa1*246, BLa97*50, Np43*69, Of16*99,
VAd43*266
The youth was beloved in the spring of his life BLh14*36, BLh19*72,
Fm12.2*13, Np42*35, NLSa12*112, Of15*41, Pt2*33, V90*144,
VAd43*154, Yo70*63
The youth whose fortune the vast globe obeyed Of15*79, Pt2*77
Then dare not for the future once rehearse HRO36*35
Then let us boast of ancestors no more 02pa2*9
Theniles an apostle brother long BLa94*161
Theologis animas subjecit lapsus Adami M35*72, Yo08*36
There are some things accounted real 02pa3*218
There being lately lost whilst the devil was removing OAc16*54, Od08*317
There dwelled a farmer in the west 02pa2*53
There happened of late a terrible fray Od08*113
There is a bawd renowned in Venus’ wars BLa62*84, Od57*75
There is a little thing which is in divers lands BLa97*120
There is a monarch in an isle say some <See ‘In the isle . . .’>
There is a paper spread about the town Pt5*20
There is lately found out by some state physicians Od57*63
There is no fear that you shall poets lack BLa62*46
There is not half so warm a fire Yo40*62
There is not in nature so merry a life Ed3*153
There lodgeth a lady of late Od57*105
There sighs not on the plain DA*4, Np40*56
There was a good man had daughters twain M35*137
There was a jade Nelly lived in the Pall Mall OAc16*4
There was a jolly blade DA*20
There was a king of a Scottish race 02pa2*161
There was a lass in Scotland Yard BLa62*102
There was a monarch whose imperial sway 02pa2*46
There was a prophecy lately found in a bog 02pa3*122
There was a weaver and he married his daughter to Np40*106
There was an eagle built his nest 02pa2*49
There was an old prophecy found in a bog BLa97*58.1, Yo70*91
There was wondrous intriguing at th’assembly BLh15*132, Lb38*88
There’s little Sedley for simile renowned HRO36*55
There’s no harm in sound cunts nor in arseholes He36*13, Pt3*59
There’s no such thing as good or evil BLh14*4, Of15*10, V90*12,
VAd43*12
There’s none but the traitor rejoins at the gallows Ed3*160
There’s Orange with his long nose Yo11*164
There’s some at court that would be critics called Yo88*204
There’s Sunderland the Tory BLh14*34, BLh19*62, He85*69, NLSa12*33,
Np45*33, V90*136, VAd43*146
These are the names of those that did actually sit M35*199
These are to give notice to all gentlemen and others M35*47
These lines had kissed your hands October last 02pa3*18, He24*21
These lodgings are ready let and appointed Od08*65
These most magnetic cliffs our hopes must crown Oa01*37
These nations had always some tokens BLa94*208
These scaterand Scots SA30*169
These sons and grandsons are to us their mothers CAL68*40
They are a congregation without teachers M35*210
They came to mine own heart hence to my head 02pa3*217
They talk of a plot on this side and that Of16*34
They talk of raptures flames and darts 02pa1*288
They who before the earliest down doth shade Oep4*23
Thine is the only muse in British ground Pt5*180
This bee alone of all his race NLI93*16
390 Appendix
This day our prince our rising sun Yo11*5

This fabric which at first was built M35*205
This goblin honours which the world adores Yo52.1*33
This government either can’t or will not maintain itself Pt5*195
This illustrious bearer is my ambassador LLt27*16
This is a truth so certain and so clear 02pa3*5
This is happy John who now must leave to rest Yo88*218
This is my oath for ever to despise Yo11*65
This is the house that Jack built BLh14*67
This is the place where bliss itself does lie Mc14*18
This is the rhetoric that Fisher Paganus Yo40*13
This life of man breathed forth at first with cries BLa62*57
This making of bastards so great BLh19*66, He85*61, Lb54*77,
NLSa12*139, Od57*135, Of16*16
This mystic knot unites two royal names 02pa3*165, Yo11*3
This page I send you sir your Newgate fate M35*42
This rumour ent’ring angry Titan’s ears 02pa1*223, BLa62*83, Ed3*3,
OAc16*39, Od57*110
This shall be to warn you now you are lawfully summoned Pt5*66
This strolling presbyter from Scotland came Oep18*78.1, Yo11*75
This trick of trimming is a fine thing 02pa3*57, BLh14*33, BLh19*68,
Fm12.2*12, Lb54*80, NLSa12*108, Np42*31, Od57*133, Of15*39,
Of16*35, Pt2*32, V90*135, VAd43*145, Yo13*29
This warrant was granted to me by the right worshipful Pt5*6
This was the house that was built by Harris Lb55*25.2
This was the man the glory of the gown Od57*37
This way of writing I observe by some BLh13*54, BLh19*41, He85*5,
LIa4*30, NLSa12*8, Np38*51, Np45*8, V90*172, Np43*13,
VAd43*185
This window’s like a mean estate Yo52.2*21
This world is but a bubble Yo88*229
This worthy corpse where shall we lay 02pa3*115, BLa97*52
Thomas did once make my heart full glad Yo54*121
Those beams of love which from my heart Oa01*39
Those justly may a real greatness own Oep4*15
Those showers are best which don’t o’erflow but fill Oep4*25
Those stars by which the weary traveller’s led Oep4*20
Those who write ill and those who ne’er durst write Od08*83
Those wonderful wise men nicknamed antiquaries Yo11*196
Thou art so fair and cruel too Yo54*172
Thou best of poets and thou best of friends 02pa1*278
Thou common shore of this poetic town 02pa3*65, Ab12*57, BLh13*6,
BLh19*12, CAL68*23, CMp*9, Ed3*17, NLSa12*73, Np32*6,
Np38*6, Np40*42, Np42*8, Od57*73, Of15*12, Pt2*6, Pt3*17,

SKv69*49, V90*55, VAd43*60, Yo05*67, Yo13*6, Yo54*190
Thou Cooper guardian of the British laws HRO36*70
Thou damned Antipodes to common sense Ab12*51, CKh14*6, Ed3*31,
He36*65, Lb54*5, Np40*88, Oa05*38, Oep4*73, SA30*49, Yo05*45
Thou doting fond besotted am’rous fool BLh13*53, Ed3*103, He85*11,
LIa4*29, Np38*50, V90*96, VAd43*104
Thou dull insipid wretch who couldst not choose BLh12*16
Thou equal partner of the royal bed ILr*6, Mc14*66
Thou filthy hypocrite of a dean BLa97*95, Yo11*66
Thou fund of nonsense was it not enough Pt5*161
Thou genius to Padua’s friend BLa20*156
Thou great Nassau hadst the best wife and queen Oa01*68
Thou mercenary renegade thou slave Of16*30, Of16*44
Thou mighty princess lovely queen of holes He85*16, NLSa12*35
Thou quibblest well hast craft and industry HRO36*12
Thou sayest thou’rt Mars’s scholar and ’tis true He85*92
Thou strutst as if thou wert the only lord HRO36*11
Thou that for Cromwell was so fierce Od08*75
Thou that of yore detaindst a godly plot M35*13
Thou who the pangs of my embittered rage BLa94*235
Thou worst of flesh in superstition stewed Np40*47, Od57*124,
Yo54*233
Thou’rt more inconstant than the wind or sea BLh12*2, Ed3*62,
NLSa12*10, Np45*10, Od08*236
Thou’rt out to think thyself by Judas meant Orp81*42.1
Though actors cannot much of learning boast Oep4*68
Though all are statesmen now and ’tis the guise Od76*10
Though he is dead the immortal fame BLa20*47
Though I was in a way of recovery before I received Lb54*120
Though it is not in my power to see or hear from you Lb54*123
Though ladies of quality’s cunts often itch He36*71
Though my spirits are brought very low BLa94*177
Though our town be destroyed Yo54*97
Though poets praise those most who need it least 02pa3*187
Though royal sir your every act does show Fm12.1*38, Lb54*11, LIa4*8,
Np40*95, V90*90, VAd43*98, Yo27*19
Though satyr does admonish every year BLh19*97, He85*96, NLSa12*147,
Np43*78, Of16*49
Though teaching thy peculiar bus’ness be BLh19*56, Fm12.1*46, He85*59,
NLSa12*30, Np45*30, VAd43*119
Though thanks were grudged you for your past success BLa60*79
Though the duke take physic to make himself clean BLa62*105
392 Appendix
Though when I cry Oep4*61, SA30*73

Though you my Lyce in some northern flood BLa97*84
Thoughts what are they M35*184
Thraso ecclesiasticus Yo11*80
Three doctors of late 02pa2*98
Three large volumes of the Duke of Monmouth’s politics Od57*100
Three Meere squirrels a tyke and a whore Yo27*11
Three nymphs as chaste as ever Venus bred BLh13*72, He85*20, Yo70*3
Three peers as wise as ever England bred LIa4*64
Three saints to Fulham went as people hope M35*10
Thrice blessed be that womb whose plenteous birth Oep4*48, SA30*67
Thrice happy barque to whom is given 02pa4*107
Thrice happy I thrice blessed was that night BLh12*32
Through Chloe’s room as Strephon sighing passed BLa60*66
Through storms of wind and swelling seas which roar 02pa2*168
Thus boar and sow when some black storm is nigh Oa05*21.1
Thus death in all its gloomy pomp I see Yo11*42
Thus drinking round hath end ah fond delight Oa01*15
Thus God does bless our sovereign Anne 02pa4*50
Thus goes it on and pity ’twere indeed BLl36*3
Thus in the zenith of my lust I reign BLh12*37, Np40*1, Pc99*1b,
Pc99*2a, V90*50, VAd43*55
Thus is at length the horrid hydra slain 02pa4*11
Thus like a deluge war came roaring forth HRO36*4
Thus ’tis when two religions squabble Pt5*46
Thus ’twas of old then Israel felt the rod 02pa3*119
Thy famed and arbitrary farce I saw Yo40*40
Thy groans dear Armstrong which the world employ 02pa1*133, BLa94*84,
BLh19*74, Fm12.1*63, Np46*16, Oep18*16, V90*145, VAd43*155
Thy life on earth was griefs and thou art still Yo88*211
Thy numerous name with this year doth agree Od57*31
Thy saviour thou canst help eat earn proud brags Oa01*66
Till by Lucifer taught Yo11*121
Till it shall be understood BLa20*38
Timely wise Sir you did foresee our fate BLa62*53
Tired with the business of the day BLa94*123, Np46*69, Oep18*67
Tired with the noisome follies of the age 02pa1*138, Ab12*65, BLa62*68,
BLa97*2, BLh13*16, BLh15*43, BLh17*13, Ed3*135, ILr*8, Lb54*60,
M35*34, NLSa12*102, Np38*16, Od08*293, Od57*94, Pt1*45,
Pt3*13, SKv69*59, Yo13*9, Yo52.2*54
’Tis a sport to our prince 02pa3*136
’Tis a strange thing to think on 02pa1*258
’Tis billa vera I must smart Oa01*14
’Tis certainly my lord the duty of every good subject Od08*9

’Tis common in the world when great men die BLa20*51
’Tis common we know for goblins to walk BLh15*55, Fm12.3*2,
HUe70*14, Lb38*9, Np44*2, Np46*115, Oep18*106, Of06*48,
Yo11*71, Yo70*100
’Tis conceived and that very candidly without prejudice Od57*72
’Tis I ’tis I with my empty purse BLa62*39
’Tis late and time to rest but stay BLa20*11
’Tis not dear sir the least ambitious aim Fm12.1*33, V90*71, VAd43*79
’Tis not that I am weary grown Ab12*10, BLa40*33, He36*17, LLt27*3,
CKh14*10, Lb54*28, SKv69*11, Yo05*16
’Tis not the threats of an enraged mob Yo11*34
’Tis rare that kings by common deaths depart BLh14*73
’Tis said that favourite mankind 02pa3*7
’Tis said when George did dragon slay 02pa3*87, BLh19*16, LIa4*21,
Np43*8, V90*166, VAd43*177, Yo27*26, OAc16*46
’Tis strange that gentlemen to all beholders Od57*5
’Tis strange that you to whom I’ve long been known 02pa1*130, BLa62*79,
BLh13*78, BLh17*10, NLI93*25
’Tis strange to think on BLa97*54
’Tis the Arabian bird alone 02pa2*78, BLa94*6, Np42*5, Of15*5,
Pt2*12, VAd43*175
’Tis the critics’ objection to Lucan that his poem Pt5*192
’Tis thought tall Richard first possessed Ab12*62, BLh13*11, Lb54*55,
Np39*24, Np38*11, Pt3*22, SKv69*65
’Tis to every one known Of16*79
’Tis true ’tis break of day what though it be Yo88*244
’Tis true great name thou art secure 02pa1*14, BLa20*149, BLh15*34,
CAL68*8, He36*51, Od76*20, Oep4*34, Pt1*36
’Tis true my heart has gone astray Of06*45
’Tis true that I have lately seen BLh19*86, He85*84, NLSa12*119,
V90*156, VAd43*166
’Tis true vile name thou art secure Od76*21
’Tis well he’s gone O had he never been 02pa1*168, CAL68*12, Np40*53,
Od76*9, Oep4*32
’Tis well you’ve thought upon the chiefest cause 02pa1*150
To a king and no king an uncle and father M35*19, Yo11*8
To a rebellious house I’m sent from far Yo11*56
To all Christian people to whom these presents Od08*112
To all present and to come which these present letters Od08*92
To all their menial servants and those of their family Od08*149
To all you ladies now at land BLa60*78
To be acted on midsummer day at stiff King John BLa60*55
394 Appendix
To be emphatically wicked who would grudge M35*9.1

To charming Celia’s arms I flew BLa94*71, Pt5*106
To day hark heaven sings BLa20*12
To give the last amendments to the bill 02pa3*190, Pt5*191
To God an injured prince commits his case Orp81*41
To honourable court there lately came Ab12*68, BLh13*22, Lb54*65,
Np38*22, Np43*9, V90*168, VAd43*180
To James our lieutenant this greeting we send Pt5*33
To lampoon ladies thus for everything Yo54*135
To make Charles a great king and give him no power Od57*39
To make it the blackest of crimes in the fanatics to depose Charles
02pa3*156
To make my self for state employment fit 02pa1*220, BLh15*32, DA*3,
Np40*66, Np43*5, Od08*257, Pt1*34, V90*164, VAd43*172,
Yo40*60
To Norfolk House lords knights and beaux repair Of16*132
To our monarch’s return we our glasses advance BLa97*98, M35*94,
Yo11*9
To purchase kingdoms with a single vice Yo11*202
To rack and torture thy unmeaning brain Ab12*30, BLa40*36, Ed3*11,
He36*11, HRO36*48, Lb54*49, NLI93*6, Np40*22, Np40*83,
Od76*30, SKv69*28, Yo05*12, Yo54*89
To Saint Giles’s I went He85*26, Np43*88, Od57*145, Yo13*24
To say this comedy pleased long ago Oep4*63, SA30*2
To speak with drownded eyes and mournful looks Yo11*184
To Sylvia’s bower I transported stole BLa97*135
To take degrees by leaping though of quick Yo88*199
To testify unto the world how far my mind hath ever Od08*40
To that prodigious height of vice we’re grown Np43*73, Of16*80
To the celestial hands of that infinite pearl of perfection BLa20*129
To the essence of beauty and virtue the incomparable BLa20*146
To the eternal infamy of the city of Leyden 02pa4*100
To the hall to the hall He24*16
To the ladies whom we hope to find Fm12.1*50, V90*114, VAd43*123
To the right honourable Robert Earl of Aylesbury Od08*20
To the utmost of your mortal power knit the knot of this match BLa20*138
To this moment a rebel I throw down my arms Ab12*37, DA*9, Lb54*36,
LLt27*20, Np40*29, SKv69*35, V90*42, VAd43*48, Yo05*29
To those again whom death did wed Yo88*189
To thy first stanza poetry laid by BLa94*14, Of16*94, Yo19*5
To Tunbridge I went BLh13*62, BLh14*38, BLh19*47, Ed3*100,
He85*34, LIa4*47, NLSa12*5, Np43*14, Np45*5, Of16*5, V90*173,
VAd43*186
To what intent and purpose was man made He36*63

To you grave speaker and the rest beside Od57*38
To you great sir whose power does extend Fm12.1*14, ILr*1, V90*33,
VAd43*37
To you who hang like Mecca’s tomb NLSa12*132, Np43*76, Of16*77
To you who live in chill degree He85*90, Lb54*102, NLSa12*131,
Of16*76, VAd43*217
Toast of Great Britain for the year 1708 BLa60*59
Tobacco is an Indian weed M35*134, Yo08*54
Today a mighty hero comes to warm 02pa2*132, Fm12.3*65, Np44*92
Today man dressed in gold and silver bright Oa05*60
Tolle caput caelo sublimis Lupara non est BLa20*122
Tom I know thou art allowed to be impudent NLSa12*53
Tom Jolly’s nose I mean to abuse He36*79, Yo54*163
Tomorrow morn is to be shown SA30*20
Tony and Louisa upon a merry pin Yo54*152
Too conscious of her worth a noble maid BLh15*144, Lb38*100
Too long the wise Commons have been in debate 02pa3*27, Ed3*129,
Ed3*93, Od08*150, Od76*17, Pt1*27, Pt3*29, V90*69, VAd43*76,
Yo40*78
Too long we have troubled the court and the town Fm12.2*15, He85*74,
Np42*38, Of15*44, Pt2*37, V90*188, VAd43*201
Too weak are laws and edicts vain BLh19*169, Np44*71
Too weak my eyes on her to gaze BLa60*31
Tot tantaque sunt a me in dominationum vestrarum SA30*83
Touch now touch now the tuneful lyre BLa94*63
Towards Ireland in haste two princes go BLh17*68
Towards the latter end of January last past a woman BLa20*7
Traitor to God and rebel to thy pen BLh19*93, NLSa12*124, Od57*163
Traitor to God damned source of blasphemy Ed3*132
Trajicit heroum turbâ freta cinctus Iason SA30*128
Transcendent Sorrel worthy heaven to grace Np46*105, BLa94*149
Traveller stand what I invite thee to Oa01*28.1
True English men ever approve yourselves loyal Yo11*233
True Englishmen drink a good health to the mitre 02pa1*249, Yo11*50
Trust not false man th’ experienced Prisca cries BLa60*57
Truth I could chide you friends why how so late Od57*50
Tu Lotharos raptu Burgundos fraude petisti Lb55*27.1, M35*148.1,
Od08*184, Pc99*18
Tu quae Romanos voluisti spernere leges SA30*147
Tuesday the 14th of April 1676 I sent my gondola Od08*22
Tunbridge which once has been the happy seat BLh19*76, He85*73,
NLSa12*141, V90*148, VAd43*158
396 Appendix
Tune ducem vixisse doles O improbe Felton Yo54*11.1

Turn in my lord my heart’s a homely place Yo88*210
Turn thee about lo thus thou ought’st to stand Od57*54
Tush look for no ease from Hippocrates BLa20*37
’Twas a foolish fancy Jemmy BLh14*26, Fm12.1*45, Of16*17, V90*107,
VAd43*115
’Twas at an hour when busy nature lay 02pa1*241
’Twas in the days of old when women had no hair Np40*109
’Twas near no purling stream nor shady grove He36*73, Pt3*28
’Twas near the mighty Senate House where lie BLh19*156, Oep18*51
’Twas noon when I scorched with a double fire Np40*108
’Twas on the evening of that day 02pa3*167, Yo11*115
’Twas still low ebb of night when not a star 02pa1*266, Of16*86
’Twas when the sable mantle of the night BLh14*54, V90*75,
VAd43*83
’Twas when the seas was roaring Np07*46
’Twas when with doling eyes and crazy brain BLl36*2
’Twere folly if ever 02pa1*165, NLSa12*60, LIa4*67, Yo52.1*4
’Twixt that rotund and yours there’s no comparison Od08*237
Two famous wights both Cheshire knights Od08*227
Two fierce young bulls within the marshes strove 02pa2*17, Pt5*128
Two justices with valour mickle Od76*1
Two kind turtles when a storm is nigh Oa05*21
Two knights six projectors four squires and Tom Twitty Yo70*39
Two royal youths we boast from George’s loins Of16*131
Two sharpers once to gaming fell 02pa2*41
Two Toms and a Nat together sat 02pa1*251, BLa97*35, LIa4*63,
Od57*172, Yo08*37
Two travellers an oyster found 02pa2*20, Pt5*131
Two Welshmen partners in a cow 02pa2*16, Pt5*127
U R I C Poor Canterbury in a tottering state Od57*10
Ud’s life we are undone A pox on your son BLa62*50, NLSa12*46,
Od57*82
Ulmus ego patulam quae praebeo frondibus umbram SA30*123
Ultime Scotorum potuit quo sospite solo 02pa3*161
Un orateur en chaire Np39*13
Una dies Lotharos Burgundos hebdomas una Lb55*27, M35*148,
Od08*183, Pc99*17
Unctos a Domino divellere presbyteranos Yo11*79
Under five hundred kings three kingdoms groan Od57*80
Under this marble lies the dust BLa94*231, Orp81*33
Under this stone does lie 02pa1*128, BLa20*150, DA*2, He36*42,
NLSa12*143, Od08*0.1, Od57*131, Yo05*53, Yo54*103
Under this weeping monumental stone He85*54

Undone undone the lawyers are Od57*26
Ungrateful boy I will not call thee son 02pa3*62, Ed3*106, Fm12.1*26,
Lb54*15, LIa4*12, NLSa12*81, Np39*35, OAc16*36, Od08*290,
Pt3*1, V90*58, VAd43*63, Yo27*14
Ungrateful wretch canst thou pretend a cause 02pa3*118, BLh19*122,
Yo08*53
Unhappier age whoe’er saw 02pa1*255
Unhappy age and we in it M35*108
Unhappy I who once ordained did bear 02pa2*88, BLa94*29, Oep18*111
Unhappy island what hard fate ordains 02pa3*53, Od57*148, Yo70*42
Unhappy isle what made thy sons rebel BLa94*36, M35*66, Orp81*13,
Yo11*200
Unhappy man who through successive years Fm12.3*46, Np44*72
Unhappy prince with dismal moan Pt5*28
Unhappy state condemned to worst of things 02pa4*4
Unhappy tyrant prithee stay Yo54*69
Unto my aid I would a painter call BLa62*22, OAc16*38, OAc16*41,
Od08*212
Unwieldy pedant let thy awkward muse Pt5*154
Up up wronged James’s friends what can you be Yo11*15
Upon Saturday the Lord Stafford was brought to the bar Yo54*216
Upon the downs when shall I breathe at ease He85*95, Of16*48
Upon the pleasant famous river’s side BLa94*26, Yo11*51
Upon the slippery tops of human state Yo54*224, Oa05*50
Usurping William now is very great Yo88*217
Ut prior illa domus violento corruit igne Yo54*85
Vale fortuna Yo54*175
Vandyke had colours force and art 02pa3*192, BLa60*25
Velleribus primis Apulia Parma secundis SA30*135
Vendidit ut Judas Christum sic Scotia regem M35*20
Vendit Alexander claves altaria Christum Orp81*12
Venus one day as story goeth Pt4*27
Versailles and Marly never did appear Yo88*207
Versailles no more shall of her wonders boast CAL68*44
Veste tegis raptam dum sacra Blude coronam Od57*88
Victorious day which hast charmed up to eyes BLa20*14
Videor mihi auditores puerperae cuiusdam audire gemitus SA30*85
Viderat Hadriacis Venetam Neptunus in undis Lb55*28
Vidua quaedam dives a vicina petebat ut BLh19*6, VAd43*56
Villiers has all the charms has all the arts Np07*31
Vincent the great comptroller of us all Yo52.2*38
Vinum bonum et suave Od08*96
398 Appendix
Vinum quando bibo tristari non bene quibo Od08*94

Virtue’s triumphant shrine who dost engage 02pa1*219
Virtutes fruticum iam iam cecinere poetae SA30*127
Vis duci summo tristis captivus in arcu SA30*199
Vos primae violae sat notae Od57*33
Vouchsafe O God to hear the mournful cries Yo54*3
Voulez-vous passer la vie Np39*14
Vulcan contrive me such a cup Ab12*15, He36*18, Np40*5, SKv69*15,
Yo05*18
Vulcan thou cities’ foe to whom Oep4*53
Wake drowsy Britain and prevent your doom BLa60*76
Walk on dull Stoic since the world goes round Mc14*4
Walking the park I to my horror there Yo11*173
Wanton Cupid runs away CAL68*33
Warmed with the pleasures that debauches yield BLa97*96, BLh17*50,
Lb54*110, Np42*50, Of15*63, Pt2*42, V90*234, VAd43*254
Was ever man before like me Pt3*67
Was ever man so to himself unjust Yo54*55
Was this the justice Sir you came to do BLa94*34, BLh17*60, M35*101,
Of06*6
Wave Fancy Beauty’s arched brow Yo52.2*61.1
We act by fits and starts like drowning men LIa4*41
We are a game at cards the cabal deal BLa62*43, Yo54*220
We bid thee not give o’er the killing trade Pt5*160
We fasted first and prayed the wars might cease Od57*52, Yo54*31
We Father Godden Gregory and all BLa97*17, BLh17*58, Of16*66,
Yo08*8
We have a gracious king indeed M35*141
We have a king but he is gone Yo11*28
We have of late been entertained with many pretty whims in divinity
02pa3*216
We have raised a legion of lusty young wenches BLh17*30
We have raised an army of lusty young fellows BLa22*41, Yo54*112
We know thy skill Sir Pleadwell in the laws BLh14*108
We know you are harrassed with petitions from all quarters Pt5*64
We must resign heaven his great soul does claim 02pa1*15, BLh15*35,
CAL68*11, He36*52, Np40*52, Od76*8, Oep4*31, Pt1*37
We present our sad apprehension of the dismal consequences Od08*167
We read in profane and sacred records 02pa1*122, BLa22*23, BLa62*28,
BLh15*20, Ed3*107, Lb55*34, LIa4*20, Mc14*23, NLSa12*45,
OAc16*7, Od08*254, Od57*118, Pt1*20, Yo08*4, Yo27*25
We your Majesty’s most dutiful etc. Being informed by that bright orator
BLa94*217
We your majesty’s most loyal and most dutiful subjects Np39*11,

Np42*11, Np45*28, NLSa12*28, Od57*84, Of15*17
We’ll first begin with Warwick’s praise Of16*1
We’ll remember the men 02pa4*2, BLa94*167
Wearied with business and with cares oppressed 02pa1*254, BLa97*63,
BLh17*48
Weep marble weep so shall my pious eyes Oep4*10
Welcome great monarch to the throne we gave 02pa3*155, BLa94*118,
BLh15*63, BLh19*154, Fm12.3*11, HUe70*41, Lb38*17, Np44*13,
Np46*61, Oep18*59
Welcome great prince to life again at least Pt3*79
Welcome great prince unto this land BLh19*13, Fm12.1*36, He36*64,
Pt4*16, V90*87, VAd43*95
Welcome great princess to this lonely place BLa94*130, BLh15*87,
Lb38*42, Np46*78, Oep18*81, Yo11*17
Welcome great Russell from the coast of Spain BLa97*123
Welcome great sir unto a drooping isle 02pa3*132
Welcome my health physicians all adieu Yo88*193
Welcome my honest long expected friend BLa94*11, Of16*91, Yo08*62,
Yo19*2
Welcome sad night Od57*20
Welcome thou friendly earnest of fourscore BLa94*199, 02pa4*35
Welcome welcome again to thy wits Yo54*171
Welcome ye noble souls from the base seat Yo11*55
Welcomes are sometimes pious here profane Oep4*17, SA30*34
Well Charles when thy last days shall come Pc99*8
Well did the Fates guide thy unlucky arm BLh19*89, NLSa12*144, Np42*42,
Np46*18, Oep18*18, Of15*51, Pt2*47, V90*207, VAd43*223
Well done my sons ye have redeemed my cause 02pa3*77, Pt4*12
Well for a careful prudent bawd say I Mc14*34
Well may our lives bear an uncertain date 02pa4*67
Well met my faithful steward where hast been Yo54*246
Well since we are met our business is to try 02pa3*200
Well sir ’tis granted I said Dryden’s rhymes Ab12*28, BLa20*154,
BLa62*130, BLa62*71, CAL68*3, He36*9, HRO36*47, Lb54*51,
NLI93*19, Np40*20, SKv69*30, Yo05*10, Yo54*70
Well then Lysander since you would be great CAL68*34
Well then ’tis true wherever princes move V90*101, VAd43*109
Well-wishers of arbitrary government 1678 Yo54*185
Were I a spirit to choose for mine own share CAL68*14
Were I to choose the greatest bliss Pt5*38
Were I to choose what sort of corpse I’d wear 02pa2*176, 02pa1*2105,
BLh12*5, Ed3*36, He36*33, Od08*245, Pt3*62, Pt5*82, Yo05*3
400 Appendix
Were I to cure the nation’s fears Yo11*23

Were I who to my cost already am Ab12*3, BLa40*40, BLh12*4,
CAL68*13, CKh10*1, CKh10*3, CKh14*1, CKh8*1, Ed3*35, He36*32,
ILr*9, NLI93*3, Np40*100, Od76*23, Od08*195, Oep4*70, Orp81*6,
Pt5*79, SKv69*3, Yo05*2, Yo40*53
What a bustle of late have we had to no purpose BLh19*139, Of15*71,
Pt2*67
What a de’el is the stir we make with war 02pa3*159
What a devil ails the parliament 02pa3*73, LIa4*1, Od08*247,
Od57*125, Pt4*13, Yo27*2 <See also ‘Zoons what . . .’>
What a rope ail these seamen so loudly to rail Yo11*208
What are you mad you damned confounded dog SA30*6
What art thou O thou new-found pain 02pa1*161, He85*103, He85*3,
Lb54*89, V90*214, VAd43*230
What business or what hope brings thee to town HRO36*9
What can be the mystery Charing Cross 02pa3*24, BLa62*30, BLh15*19,
Ed3*130, Fm12.1*64, NLSa12*70, Np40*72, Od57*116, Od08*223,
Pt1*19, Pt3*41, V90*153, VAd43*163
What can I say what arguments can prove BLa60*16
What can resist our two great navies joined BLa60*5
What chance has brought thee into verse BLa94*115, BLa97*90, BLh14*69,
BLh15*74, BLh17*75, BLh19*161, HRO36*43, HUe70*44, Lb38*28,
Np44*6, Np46*56, Oep18*54, Yo11*222
What cruel pains Corinna takes Ab12*35, BLa40*31, DA*7, Lb54*42,
LLt27*18, Np40*27, SKv69*39, Yo05*27, Yo05*27
What day is this what Belgic Boreas cloud Yo11*168
What do members now ail 02pa3*55
What doleful cries are these that fright my sense Np40*90, SKv69*60,
Yo05*50
What down in the dirt by St Leonard her grace 02pa3*94
What every day thus long fie fie arise Pt3*82
What fast and pray 02pa2*118
What fast for the horrid murder of the day Pt5*105
What folded up the wretches then begin Yo11*161
What fools are they who use to cry 02pa1*297
What frenzy has possessed thy desperate brain Pt5*167
What Greece when learning only flourished knew He36*48
What hand what art can form the artful piece 02pa2*175, BLa60*13,
BLh15*120, Lb38*76, M35*154, Np44*53, Pt4*39, Yo70*57
What hands divine have planted and protect Oa05*41
What have the changes cost M35*117
What if by chance a man can’t stand Np40*54
What is termed popery to depose a king BLa94*23, Yo11*31
What is’t to us who guide the state BLa97*73, HUe70*13, Of06*42,

Yo18*13
What jolly shepherd’s voice is this He24*30
What liberty of conscience that’s a change Yo08*16
What makes thee thus like silly widgeon 02pa3*38
What mean you Sir John in the fear of God will you desist Od08*322
What means the sun to rise with double light Np43*43, V90*216,
VAd43*233
What means this silence Sirs what’s here become BLa62*61
What means this silence which may seem to doom Oep4*6, SA30*33
What Nosterdame with all his art can guess BLa94*122, BLa97*83,
HUe70*31, Lb54*139, M35*27, Np46*67, Oep18*65, Of06*30,
Yo11*195, Yo70*93
What only feared to wrap up soap or plums Yo11*77
What power of words can equal thy renown 02pa4*16
What pray spectators do you come to see Mc14*9
What proud bravadoes this that still doth crack Od76*32
What rage does England from itself divide HRO36*3, Od57*59
What rage provokes me thus to squabble Yo54*35
What reason have I to complain 02pa3*185
What revolutions in the world have been Lb54*85
What rub and kiss and on the mistress rest Oa01*35
What shall a glorious nation be o’erthrown Oep18*113, Yo11*192
What shall each patron’s ripening smile infuse 02pa3*178
What shall I do or what shall I say Yo11*18
What shall the honest silently permit BLh17*44, Of16*72
What should I ask my friend which best would be 02pa1*146, He85*104,
NLSa12*59, Of16*61
What sir I see you’ve answered what I writ BLh12*19
What slender youth with his perfumed embrace Mc14*58
What stirs the heavens which gave life to all Oep4*13
What strange mechanic thoughts of god and man 02pa2*146
What strange vicissitudes our age has known BLa94*92, Np46*31, Oep18*31
What strepitantious noise is it that sounds 02pa1*149
What sullen wary shepherd’s voice is this He24*31
What the priests gospel call 02pa2*58, Mc14*73, M35*21
What think you of this age now 02pa3*111
What thou saidst for me Aga William when thou wert Turgiman BLh15*99,
Np44*32, Np46*96.1
What though her sire be but a potter Oa01*48
What though the sky be clouded o’er M35*173
What Timon does old age begin t’ approach Ab12*5, Ed3*59, He36*56,
Lb54*31, NLI93*13, Np40*91, SKv69*6, Yo05*51
402 Appendix
What tortures can there be in hell Oa05*12

What wantst thou that thou art in this sad taking Yo11*212
What wenys King Edward with his Long-shanks SA30*168
What whimsical vicissitudes of fate BLa60*41
What woman could do I have tried to be free DA*18
What words what sense what night piece can express BLh19*24, Ed3*67,
Fm12.2*8, Np42*16, Of15*24, Pt2*23, V90*142, VAd43*152
What you please you always cry Pt5*112
What’s a protector ’tis a stately thing Yo40*10
What’s orthodox and true believing M35*120
What’s prudery ’tis a beldame Oa05*54
What’s this your justice sir you come to do Yo11*152
Whate’er the eye discovers is a ring Oep4*50, SA30*35
When a church and a hill to the Danube advance 02pa4*9, BLa94*157,
Fm12.2*23, Fm12.3*79, Np42*66, Np44*107, Np46*130
When a knight of the north is lopped in Ax-yard 02pa2*124, BLa94*68,
M35*51, Orp81*18, Pt5*104
When a prince resolves to stand by his friends Fm12.3*19, Np44*27
When Adam beheld Mother Eve newly born BLh15*122, Lb38*78
When Adam proper names on beasts conferred Ed3*131
When Alexis lay pressed SA30*62
When all mankind in Adam lay in the graves of death Yo52.1*51.1
When all the elements above conspire M35*43, Np46*121, Oep18*114,
Yo11*110
When Anjou stepped into the Spanish throne 02pa4*88
When Anna was the church’s daughter 02pa4*12
Whenas King William ruled this land BLh14*86, BLh15*139, Lb38*95,
Np44*89
When Aurelia first I courted BLa20*53, Yo40*42
When Aureng-zebe usurped his father’s chair Yo11*130
When bashful daylight once was gone Yo54*51
When Baxter’s self has seized on petty cannon Pt5*25
When beauty doth in all its pomp appear Oa01*46
When birds had rules of government Pt5*140
When blessed Mary did cast down her eye Yo88*196
When blooming beauties first appear Yo08*76
When brewers and bakers BLa97*121
When British Isle their sovereign lord had left Oa01*54
When Briton bold of Spanish birth Yo52.1*28
When buried corpse are seen in the air Od57*141
When Burnet perceived that the beautiful dames 02pa3*175, BLa60*2,
BLa94*77, BLh15*129, Fm12.3*35, HRO36*40, Lb38*85, Np44*57,
Yo70*14
When by Charles I first was courted BLa20*59

When Caesar quitted Gaul and marched home Yo88*222.1
When Catesby and Faux with the rest of the gang M35*64
When civil war through all the chaos reigned 02pa1*26
When Clarendon had discerned aforehand 02pa1*169, BLa22*38,
BLh15*6, He24*5, Od57*178, Pt1*6, SA30*30, V90*1, VAd43*1,
Yo36*7, YoD*7
When crowding folks with strange ill faces 02pa1*275
When Cupid did his grandsire Jove entreat BLa60*60, Pt4*26,
Od57*89
When daring Blood his rents to have regained 02pa1*124, BLa20*132,
BLh15*25, Lb55*9, NLSa12*65, Pc99*22, Pt1*25, V90*25, VAd43*27,
Yo40*57, Yo52.2*33.1, Yo54*156
When death shall part us from our kids Orp81*9
When death shall part us from these skies Pt3*81
When Dryden’s tuneful celebrated muse 02pa4*39, BLa94*164
When duns were knocking at my door Ed3*4, He36*45, Yo54*241
When eighty times eight and three times three Od08*173
When English coin shall have a face BLa94*60, M35*138
When enraged Southesk Np07*3
When envy does at Athens rise 02pa2*104, Oa05*17
When Fairfax hath o’errun the land Yo54*84
When figures four set on their head Yo70*97
When fired by glory Philip’s godlike son Pt5*172
When first I did begin to love Mc14*50
When first in Love’s court fair Eminda was tried Oa01*45
When first our poet set himself to write SA30*52
When first Pastora came to town HRO36*32
When first rebellion struck at the crown He36*14
When first royal Nancy she mounted the throne BLa94*150, Np42*72,
Np46*108
When first the Indian trade began 02pa4*82
When first the world from the black chaos rose Yo08*7
When first with beauty I was catched Mc14*70
When gazing on his Phyllis’ eyes Pt5*29
When God almighty had his palace framed 02pa1*263
When God to punish Adam’s sons inclined BLa60*3
When Grafton that clown Yo11*69
When great men fall their fall makes weeping eyes BLa62*106
When great Nassau is dead and gone 02pa4*32, BLa60*20, BLh14*95,
Fm12.3*74, Np44*101, Np46*111
When Harry’s fury first grew tame V90*94
When haughty monarchs their proud state expose 02pa2*164
404 Appendix
When Heav’n surrounded Britain by the main BLh15*58, Lb38*12,

M35*78, Np46*114, Oep18*105, Of06*19, Yo11*198, Yo70*102
When Heaven’s great power had made the world’s vast frame BLh15*125,
Lb38*81
When Henry’s fury first grew tame Fm12.1*42, Np39*42, VAd43*102
When here a Scot shall think his crown to set Od08*233
When Hodge first spied the labour in vain 02pa3*83, Pt4*10,
Yo54*108
When Hodge had numbered up how many score 02pa1*121, BLa22*18,
BLa62*32, BLh15*38, NLSa12*49, Np40*60, Od08*252, Pt1*40,
Yo54*147
When I sigh by my mistress and gaze on those eyes Oa05*13
When in a constant quest my thoughts did muse Yo88*215
When Israel first provoked the living Lord 02pa3*48
When Jacob from offended Laban fled Lb54*23
When Jacob stole the flower of every flock Of16*128
When James and his army shall run from the Boyne 02pa2*153
When James our great monarch so wise and discreet 02pa1*221, Np43*70,
V90*247, VAd43*267
When James takes possession again of the throne BLh19*136
When James the 3rd did first from Dunkirk sail Yo88*209
When James with his army shall run from the Boyne BLa94*69
When Job contending with the devil I saw M35*206, Pt5*163
When Jove to Ida did the gods invite 02pa3*195, BLa60*23, BLa60*32
When lately King James whom our sovereign we call BLh19*115, Np43*51,
Of16*115, V90*222, VAd43*241
When lawless men their neighbours dispossess BLh17*80, HUe70*12,
Np46*117, Oep18*108, Of06*10, Pt5*48, Yo11*158
When lazy Time had spent a summer’s day Mc14*12
When Lydia thou the rosy neck and arms Mc14*60
When man was lost Christ’s pity went about Yo88*194
When MDC shall join with L Od08*309
When men of god will do the devil’s work 02pa4*64
When Monmouth the chaste read these impudent lines BLa97*89,
BLh14*70, BLh15*75, HRO36*42, HUe70*45, Lb38*29, Np44*7,
Np46*57, Oep18*55, Yo11*221, Yo70*38
When mother church had Anna for her daughter BLa94*170
When Mother Clud had risen from play BLa94*203
When my Carlos first adored me SA30*36
When Naboth’s vineyard looked so fine Pt4*28
When Nature’s God for our offences died 02pa3*112
When Nebat’s famed son had undertook the just cause 02pa3*154,
BLa94*57, Fm12.3*34, Np44*56
When noble Prince George BLh14*31, Fm12.1*57, He85*71, V90*129,

VAd43*139
When once we yield men all their vows retract BLa94*73
When only fools and villains rule a state Yo70*96
When Orange landed first upon our shore M35*91, Yo11*181
When our good God gave life unto my heart Yo88*206
When people find their money spent 02pa2*84, BLa94*154, Np46*125,
Oep18*118, Yo11*118
When Phillis does in dreams appear Oa01*40
When plate was at pawn and fob at an ebb 02pa1*171, BLa94*81,
BLa97*69, Ed3*39, Fm12.1*54, NLSa12*96, Np46*8, Oep18*8,
V90*118, VAd43*127, Yo54*87
When popular men do mount above this height BLh19*118, Np43*57,
V90*229, VAd43*249
When Portsmouth did from England fly BLh19*48, Ed3*34, Mc14*72,
NLSa12*13, Np45*13, OAc16*68, Pt4*22
When pride is in price BLa20*57
When pride provoked old Satan to rebel BLa60*19
When quack me lodged in dark obscure cell Oa01*7.1
When rebels first pushed at the crown BLh14*17, V90*73, VAd43*81
When Sarah led by fancy fate or scorn BLa60*58
When Shakespeare Fletcher Jonson ruled the stage Ab12*29, BLa62*70,
CAL68*4, CKh14*7, Ed3*10, He36*10, Lb54*4, NLI93*5, Np40*21,
Od08*326, Od76*29, SKv69*27, Yo05*11, Yo54*86
When shall I be at rest will pleasing peace 02pa3*204, Fm12.3*78,
Np44*106
When shall we see old England wise again sir Yo11*30
When shame for all my foolish youth had writ Yo70*52
When she through my eyes Lb54*100
When Sieur Tour That son of a whore Yo70*99
When sin grows ripe then judgement enters in Od08*101.1
When soul of Jeffreys did to hell come BLh17*57, BLh19*134, HRO36*37,
HUe70*10, Pt3*103, Pt5*69, Pt5*197, Yo11*68
When souls unite in generous friendship joined 02pa1*285
When stormy winds do blow Yo52.2*49
When Tewksbury mustard shall travel abroad 02pa1*2100, BLh15*94,
Lb38*50, Np46*94, Oep18*92, Pt3*101
When that remnant of royalty Jemmy the cully Pt5*34, Yo08*40
When the Almighty did his palace frame 02pa3*1, BLa97*30
When the bold Carthaginian 02pa2*114
When the Danish ambassador Guldenlieu came into England Od08*21
When the dragon of Beau shall look over the Tower Yo08*26
When the dry sun had left his burning course Mc14*6
406 Appendix
When the House of Commons had in debate the making NLSa12*51

When the joy of all hearts and desire of all eyes 02pa3*129, Yo08*28,
Yo70*55
When the king leaves off Sedley and keeps to the queen BLh14*52,
BLh17*46, BLh17*46, Np42*55, Np46*24, Oep18*24, Of15*64,
Pt2*59, V90*232, VAd43*252, Yo08*90
When the king’s distracted BLa62*37.1
When the last of all knights and the worst of all knaves 02pa1*2101,
BLh15*95, Lb38*51, Np46*95, Oep18*93, Pt3*104
When the old heroes of the warlike shades NLSa12*136
When the plate was at pawn and the fob at an ebb BLa20*61, BLa62*8,
Yo40*18, Yo52.1*52
When the proud sea with bellowing waves did swell Mc14*83
When the seal is given to a talking fool NLSa12*42, Od08*243
When the twenty brave pleaders culled out of the throng BLa94*209
When the world was drowned Od76*33
When thou art asked to sup abroad HRO36*8
When thousand hundreds six and forties two are gone Od57*68
When times were yet but rude thy pen endeavoured CAL68*56
When to the great the suppliant muses press BLh15*117, Fm12.3*33,
Lb38*73, Np44*52
When to the king I bid good morrow Np40*63, BLh14*2, OAc16*10,
Of15*8, V90*10, VAd43*10, Yo05*74, Yo40*49
When Tories and parsons cant and pray BLa94*62
When tuneful ladies strike the trembling lyre 02pa4*98
When we through age could neither read nor write Yo70*53
When weary Time had spent a summer’s day Mc14*25
When William the wise BLa94*67
When William’s hand Oates with his lips approached BLa94*37,
Yo11*162.1
When with the noise of court and city cloyed Od08*300
When with the rolling tides of fate 02pa1*24
When zeal for God inspires the breast Oa01*6, Od76*7
Whence comes it that each base malicious pen BLa94*96, HUe70*3,
Np46*35
Whene’er those lovely eyes I view Yo70*34
Whenever tyrants fall the air 02pa1*129
Where are our clergy gone what damp hath killed BLa62*67
Where are the muses are there none to tell Yo11*44
Where are you ladies which your morning pass Oep4*35
Where are you run you engines of all ill OAc16*52
Where divine Gloriana her palace late reared Pt4*25
Where ever God erects a house of prayer 02pa2*5
Where gently Thames in stately channels glides BLh15*133, Lb38*89

Where is there faith and justice to be found 02pa1*245, Of16*120,
Yo11*165
Where Medway’s gentle streams do glide Of16*133
Where music and more powerful beauties reign 02pa3*191
Where such a garden doth appear Oep4*36, SA30*11
Whereas a libel vainly intended against the honour Od08*77
Whereas by misrepresentation 02pa1*276
Whereas divers wicked and malicious persons M35*97
Whereas I have been ever from my infancy bred up Yo54*71
Whereas it hath pleased almighty God in his great mercy M35*167
Whereas the Jacobites do brag BLa97*99, M35*178, Yo11*149
Whereas there are in this kingdom two thousand and more Np42*13,
Od08*172.1, OAc16*56, Of15*19
Wherever I am and whatever I do Ed3*142
Whether 18000 Irish men cannot conquer England Pt5*114
Whether a fitter anagram can be made of the name Od08*101
Whether by sea our mighty Ormond flies 02pa2*163
Whether Father Patrick be not Muckle John’s natural son 02pa3*29,
BLa94*80, BLh15*28, Np46*6, Oep18*6, Of15*11, Pt1*29,
VAd43*22
Whether the author did by this intend Pt3*98
Whether the graver did by this intend BLa94*109, BLa97*101, BLh15*68,
BLh17*77, Fm12.3*15, Lb38*22, Np44*18, Np46*48, Oep18*43,
Yo11*156
Whether we mortals love or no Np43*46, V90*219, VAd43*236
Which is the greatest thing to brag on Oep4*85, SA30*51
Whigs the first letter of his odious name BLa94*200
While Alexis lay pressed Ed3*141
While blooming youth and gay delight Oep18*72
While crowding folks with strange ill faces HUe70*1, Of06*33
While Europe is alarmed with wars Of06*22
While fanatics and papists and quakers agree BLa94*186
While flattering crowds officiously appear 02pa4*73
While I in the camp BLh14*32, BLh19*69, He85*70, V90*130, VAd43*140
While lazy prelates leaned their mitred heads 02pa1*127, NLSa12*71
While lewd Whitehall burning in justest flames 02pa3*180
While mounting with expanded wings Oa05*34
While on those lovely looks I gaze Ab12*42, DA*11, He36*22, Lb54*44,
LLt27*24, Np40*34, SKv69*42, Yo05*33
While Phaon to the flaming Etna flies DA*12
While slaughtered Ottomans advanced your fame BLa94*140, Np46*89,
Oep18*90
408 Appendix
While there’s a monkey or buffoon V90*193, VAd43*206

While vulgar souls their vulgar loves pursue BLh15*136
While William van Nassau with Bentinck Bardashau BLa97*71, BLh17*73,
HUe70*4, Np46*113, Oep18*104, Of06*4, Yo11*140
While with a strong and yet a gentle hand 02pa1*11, CAL68*10, Np40*70
While you my lord with an extensive hand 02pa4*38
Whilst all the world vows to fresh glory pay Oep4*19, SA30*70
Whilst blooming youth and gay delight BLa94*20, Np46*73
Whilst brave Sacheverell saps the ground we find BLa94*224
Whilst crowding folks with strange ill faces Yo11*215
Whilst cruel Blood wore the priest’s coat ’tis strange Od57*92
Whilst duns were knocking at my door Np40*102, Yo05*68
Whilst episcopal mouse and presbyter frog Od08*90
Whilst Europe’s alarmed with wars M35*112
Whilst happy I triumphant stood Np40*89, Yo05*49
Whilst in the sky with blazing train Np40*67.1
Whilst Lewis the tyrant Te Deum does sing 02pa2*169
Whilst priestly pens the glorious theme decline 02pa4*66
Whilst princes meet whence all rebellion springs Yo11*111
Whilst she was the church’s daughter Orp81*26
Whilst that our English church in ashes lies Oa01*3
Whilst there’s a monkey or buffoon Np43*30
Whilst thirst of praise and vain desire of fame Oa05*55
Whilst thou blest John wert in thy mother’s womb Yo88*216
Whilst thou hadst all my heart and I all thine HUe70*17, Np42*60,
Oep18*89, Of06*67, Of15*58, Pt2*61
Whilst thou sitst drinking up thy loyalty HRO36*15
Whilst wicked prosperous Selius doth deny SA30*183
Whilst with a strong and yet a gentle hand BLa40*9, Oep4*29
Whilst with fierce flames Whitehall was compassed round BLh14*75
White Hall a palace impious and accursed 02pa3*181
White innocence that now liest spread BLa62*47
White maid well met what may I call thy name Yo52.2*56.3
Whither going Damon whither in such haste Lb54*87
Whither O whither wander I forlorn 02pa1*126, BLa62*116, OAc16*64,
Od08*320, Od57*61
Whither ye impious Britons do ye run 02pa2*139, BLa94*65
Whither young Damon whither in such haste Fm12.2*14, Np42*37,
Of15*43, Pt2*36
Who Bess she ne’er was half so vainly clad BLa20*95
Who can but wonder at this season BLa97*13, BLh19*77, He85*81,
Np43*77, NLSa12*116
Who can forbear and tamely silent sit Pt5*189
Who can on this picture look 02pa1*232, Ed3*119, Lb54*53, NLSa12*89,

Np39*40, Od08*302, Pt3*33, Pt4*19, Yo40*86
Who does not extol our conquest marine 02pa4*44
Who governs his own course with steady hand Np40*113
Who is a bashful woman Yo54*159
Who says the times do learning disallow Od57*56
Who will be saved he must believe BLh15*72
Who will this day at church lose dinners Of06*16
Who would have thought but Damon’s love Yo54*170
Who would have thought my ruin was so near Yo40*4, Yo52.1*48
Who would have thought that Rome’s convert so near BLa94*129,
BLh15*83, Fm12.3*16, HUe70*66, Lb38*37, Np44*19, Np46*77,
Oep18*76, Yo11*219, Yo70*72
Who’d be the man lewd libels to indite 02pa1*237, BLh13*27, Ed3*112,
Fm12.2*10, Lb54*24, Np38*42, Np42*19, Od08*285, Of15*26,
Pt2*21, V90*59, VAd43*64, Yo13*16
Who’s he that’s nobody’s friend 02pa3*104, M35*136
Who’s there a Whig and one of quality BLa94*238
Whoe’er thou art that darst with lying lays BLa60*52
Whoe’er thou art who tempts in such a strain Oa05*48
Whoever looks about and minds things well 02pa1*134
Whosoever doth accompany the Duke of York to dinner Od08*271
Whosoever will be saved he must believe Lb38*26, Np46*49, Oep18*44
Why am I daily thus perplexed 02pa1*272, BLa97*57, Pt5*21
Why are these hours which Heav’n in pity lent Np07*47
Why d’ye with such disdain refuse BLa60*29, BLh15*127, Fm12.3*37,
Lb38*83, Np44*62
Why does the Prince of Orange with his heretics rage BLa22*10.1
Why fair vowbreaker hath thy sin thought fit Yo52.2*41
Why Granville is thy life confined Oa05*47
Why how now Pasquin since the last election 02pa4*30
Why is great Phoebus styled the god of lays 02pa4*34
Why is your faithful slave disdained Np07*10, Pt2*76
Why nymphs these pitiful stories BLh15*131.1, BLh19*168.1, Lb38*87.1,
Np44*59
Why should one blockhead’s speech make such a noise Yo08*35
Why should so much beauty dread He36*29, Yo54*203
Why should the tears our cheeks thus trickle down Oa01*70
Why sits my gentle Thirsis thus forlorn Yo11*36
Why so serious why so grave M35*172
Why to the French should England be so civil BLa97*124
Will it please you to hear a new song He24*19
Will Pickering be damned and his rascally gang OAc16*47
410 Appendix
Will’s wafted to Holland on some state intrigue 02pa4*31

William Nassau with another Armade Pt5*10
William the third lies here the Almighty’s friend 02pa2*119
Williams thy tame submission suits thee more 02pa3*70, BLa97*36,
BLh19*125, Fm12.2*19, Np42*56, Np46*21, Oep18*20, Of15*55,
Of16*98, Pt2*52, V90*226, VAd43*246
Wilt thou then passive see the sacred bays Pt5*177
Wise Aesop thought it no mistake 02pa4*63
Wise men suffer good men grieve Yo11*148
Wisely an observator said 02pa3*172
With a grave leg and courteous smile BLa94*121, BLa97*92, BLh15*70,
BLh19*159, Fm12.3*8, HUe70*53, Lb38*24, Np44*10, Np46*66,
Oep18*64, Yo11*127
With a loud voice through every field and wood Fm12.2*1, Np42*1,
Of15*1, Pt2*1
With clouted iron shoes and sheepskin breeches 02pa2*8, BLh19*170,
Fm12.3*50, Np44*76, Yo70*37
With envy critic you’ll this poem read Oep4*78, SA30*42
With equal grace and force he walks and writes NLI93*12
With force united my soft heart he charmed Lb54*7, Lb54*95
With Job-like patience we’ve our burthens bore M35*55
With joy we see this circle of the fair 02pa3*203
With love though rude we crowd this hallowed place 02pa2*166
With Monmouth cap and cutlass by my side HUe70*35, Np46*68,
Oep18*66, Yo70*87
With negro phiz and impudence replete Fm12.3*52, Np44*78
With scorn the world but I with pity see He85*57
With the king in his closet the count did contest Fm12.3*57, Np44*83
With the sad tidings of the day oppressed 02pa2*95
With Tuck of Toledo up stands the brave Swale Od08*45
Within a fleece of silent waters drowned Yo54*48
Within my breast I felt a sudden flame CAL68*35
Within this house are rooms appointed BLa22*14, BLa62*26
Within this house lives Justice Scroggs Yo54*120
Without your form we did design to pray BLa94*38.1, Yo11*146.1
Wolseley though much I love thy generous rage Np07*23
Woman in the beginning as ’tis said Pt3*86
Woman thou damned hyperbole in sin BLh12*21
Woman thou worst of all church plagues farewell 02pa2*123
Woman’s ornament is hair the best of all Oa01*33
Women make us love and love makes us sad Yo54*138
Wonder not Nelly He85*14, Np38*46
Wonder not sir that praises ne’er yet due Oep4*80, SA30*44
Wonder not why these lines come to your hand BLa20*74, M35*56
Worth would be thought a fair one Yo13*31.1
Worthy brethren I have received your letter from Dr Bisby Pt5*40
Worthy sir Though weaned from all those scandalous delights 02pa2*61,
Ab12*61, BLa62*97, BLh1310, Ed3*56, Lb54*59, LIa4*13, Np38*10,
Np43*85, Od57*65, Pt3*14
Worthy sir Yours hath refreshed me exceedingly Yo54*228
Worthy that man to scape mortality 02pa1*279
Would God say they if any be content SA30*186
Would the world know how Godfrey lost his breath 02pa3*74, Pt4*11
Would they who have nine years looked four 02pa3*182
Would you be a man in favour 02pa3*127
Would you be a man in favour Yo08*52, Yo11*135 <Reply to
previous>
Would you be a man in power Of06*1, Yo08*30
Would you be a man of honour BLh19*124
Would you be famous and renowned in story 02pa3*114, Pt5*24, Yo08*87
Would you be preserved from ruin BLa94*100, BLh15*53, Lb38*7,
Np46*39
Would you be true to serve the nation OAc16*16
Would you have a new play acted 02pa3*150
Would you have a place at court Sir BLh19*151, Of06*49
Would you know if I should change my life 02pa2*116
Would you see an army leaving Yo08*29
Would you send Kate to Portugal 02pa3*43, BLa62*49, BLh14*14,
BLh15*41, BLh17*20, Ed3*38, Fm12.1*30, NLSa12*79, Np39*7,
OAc16*15, Od08*249, Od57*160, Of15*15, Pt1*43, Pt2*9, Pt3*80,
Pt5*89, V90*63, VAd43*68, Yo54*151
Would you Sir attain that honour BLh19*132
Wouldst thou be free I fear thou art in jest HRO36*16
Wouldst thou in grace to high perfection grow Yo88*200
Wounds set thee upright he that dares be lame Yo52.2*10
Wretch whosoe’er thou art that longst for praise BLh17*15, NLSa12*151,
Np43*38, Of16*78, V90*209, VAd43*225, Yo08*39
Ye Britons that are yet not weary of living BLa94*58
Ye children that do serve the lord M35*53
Ye commons and peers Pray lend me your ears BLa60*62
Ye English nations put your mourning on 02pa2*137
Ye freeholders most dear 02pa4*15
Ye gentle swains who pass your days and nights BLa60*36
Ye glorious trifles of the East Od57*32
Ye heaven and earth now hear my declaration Yo11*155
Ye heers and hogens all we greet you well 02pa4*92
412 Appendix
Ye hypocrites for what d’ye fast and pray M35*87

Ye hypocrites that fast and pray M35*18
Ye Jacks of the town and Whigs of renown BLa94*188
Ye ladies and damsels pray why all this bustle BLa60*75
Ye learned doctors of the Smectymnian creed Od08*165
Ye London lads be sorry Ab12*83, BLh13*40, BLh14*11, Fm12.1*13,
Np38*37, Np39*20, Od08*321, V90*32, VAd43*36
Ye members of Parliament all 02pa3*160, BLh17*72, HUe70*11,
M35*24, Np46*122, Oep18*115, Of06*5, Pt5*44, Yo11*163
Ye men of might and muckle power 02pa4*37
Ye mighty lampooners who grow in fashion BLh15*76, Fm12.3*6,
HUe70*46, Lb38*30, Np44*8, Np46*58, Oep18*56
Ye mitred fathers of the land Yo08*14
Ye Musgrave Clarges Harley Foley Lowthers 02pa2*103, Np07*27
Ye puny sinners cease from tears Yo11*209
Ye sacred nymphs of Lebethra be by BLh13*77, Np44*54
Ye sages of London of states high and low Yo11*226
Ye she-friends and he-friends whoever inherit Yo54*192
Ye sons of my church who were ever of such BLa94*182
Ye townsmen of Oxford and scholars draw near BLa62*119, OAc16*61,
Od57*86
Ye true born Englishmen proceed HRO36*57, HRO36*59, Np07*22
Ye vile traducers of the female kind 02pa2*105, BLh19*167, Fm12.3*39,
Np44*64
Ye Whigs and ye Tories Repair to Whitehall Yo11*176
Ye wily projectors why hang ye the head Od57*6
Ye worthy patriots go on 02pa2*102, BLa97*128, BLh15*130, Fm12.3*40,
Lb38*86, Np44*65, Pt5*199
Yes fickle Cambridge Perkin found it true 02pa1*273, BLa94*89, Np46*28,
Oep18*27, Pt5*117, V90*213, VAd43*229
Yes I could love if I could find Yo54*95
Yes now in apparition doth she live Oep4*38
Yet once more peace turns back her head to smile OAc16*63
Yet were Bidentalls sacred and the place Yo54*24
Yonder meadows and groves shall repeat my sad moan Yo54*169
You are absolutely the worst of men and have committed Yo54*217
You are pleased to command me to give you some account Od08*310
You are to take a messenger with you and find out the dwelling house
BLa94*131, Np46*78.1
You catholic statesmen and church men rejoice 02pa1*271, BLa97*37,
Mc14*94, Np43*63, Of16*107, V90*240, VAd43*260, Yo08*71
You darker clouds films o’er the glorious eye Oa01*64
You English men all that lie under the curse BLa94*125, BLa97*102,
BLh15*79, Fm12.3*12, HUe70*63, Lb38*33, Np44*15, Np46*71,

Oep18*69, Yo11*95, Yo70*24
You gallants all that love good wine HRO36*23
You good men of Middlesex country men dear BLa22*42, BLh19*26,
Ed3*32, Fm12.1*44, LIa4*3, NLSa12*98, OAc16*22, Od08*277,
V90*98, VAd43*106, Yo08*84, Yo27*4, Yo54*130
You happy youths whose hearts are free He85*24
You know I long have loved and do so still Mc14*95
You ladies all of merry England 02pa2*77, BLh17*86, BLh19*3, Np42*3,
Of15*3, Pt2*4, V90*47, VAd43*52, Yo11*223
You laymen of England both virtuous and good BLh19*141
You Lorraine stole by fraud you got Burgundy Od08*185
You loyal lads be merry Lb54*81
You madcaps of England which soldiers would be BLa97*115, Yo11*107
You make the year so auspiciously begin Oep4*26
You meaner beauties of the night BLh19*2
You must know that England wholly subsisted Od08*89
You need not wonder why we change our spheres Oep4*67, SA30*74
You nursed me and bathed me and hugged me ’tis true Yo54*247
You said that I was loved you knew by who Mc14*79
You say ’tis love creates the pain HUe70*27, Oep18*47
You say tomorrow you’ll enjoy your life Mc14*5 #
You scribblers that write still of widows and maids BLh13*59, BLh19*40,
Ed3*66, He85*48, NLSa12*7, Np38*55, Np39*19, Np42*28,
Np45*7, Od57*109, Of15*32, Of16*2, Pt2*29, V90*125, VAd43*135
You see gallants the effects of lechery BLh12*38, Pc99*2 b
You sots that are joined to a woman Pt5*67
You that to write and judge are able Yo70*79
You told me you loved me Ed3*147
You very well know that the strongest temptations Pt5*50
You Whigs and you Tories you trimmers and all BLh19*67, He85*65,
Lb54*78, NLSa12*106, Of16*19, V90*134, VAd43*144
You your brother and your whore OAc16*11
Young Coridon and Phyllis BLh15*128, Lb38*84, Np44*61,
Np46*128
Young gallants o’th’ town leave your whoring I pray Ed3*5, Od08*259,
V90*68, VAd43*74, Yo40*23
Young Jemmy was a lad Yo05*77
Young Phaeon strove the bliss to taste Ed3*143
Your aid my muse this once I only ask Yo08*78
Your book our old knight errants’ fame revives Oep4*76, SA30*41
Your hours are choicely employed Np44*65.1
Your husband tight LLt27*17
414 Appendix
Your lean petitioner sheweth humbly BLa97*88, HUe70*38, Np46*54,

Oep18*52, Pt3*94
Your Nottingham ale and Halifax law HUe70*30, Np46*65, Of06*52,
Yo70*82
Your pardon John Bayes for I beg your excuse BLa97*53
Your primitive players first acted in a cart Fm12.3*45, Np44*70
Your prophecy came very opportunely to my hands Od57*67
Your ships are all taken your merchants are stripped Yo11*205
Your station ’twixt these globes doth prompt our pen Oep4*18, SA30*69
Zoons what ails the parliament Ed3*101, Np42*9, Of15*14, Pt2*8,
NLSa12*48, Yo54*116, OAc16*14 <See also ‘What a devil . . .’>
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—— In Praise of Scribes: Manuscripts and their Makers in Seventeenth-
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—— The Politics of Court Scandal in Early Modern England: News Culture
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—— ‘The Reputation of Robert Cecil: Libels, Political Opinion and Popular
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—— and Hughes, Ann (eds.), Conflict in Early Stuart England: Studies in
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Ezell, Margaret, Social Authorship and the Advent of Print (Baltimore:
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Fisher, Nicholas (ed.), That Second Bottle: Essays on John Wilmot, Earl
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Fox, Adam, ‘Ballads, Libels and Popular Ridicule in Jacobean England’,
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—— ‘Libels, Popular Literacy and Public Opinion in Early Modern Eng-
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—— Oral and Literate Culture in England 1500–1700 (Oxford: Oxford
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Fraser, Peter, The Intelligence of the Secretaries of State and their Monop-
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Gowing, Laura, Domestic Dangers: Women, Words, and Sex in Early
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Gray, Douglas, ‘Rough Music: Some Early Invectives and Flytings’, YES
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Index
Addison, Joseph 147, 253 ‘Cuckolds All A-row’ 251; ‘Health to

adultery, attitudes to 72–3, 214–15 Betty, A’ 249–50; ‘I am the Duke of
advice to a painter poems 107–16, 119, Norfolk’ 251–2, 255–7; ‘John Dory’
243, 258, 279; see also Marvell 255; ‘Old Man With a Bed full of
Albermarle, Ann Monk, Duchess of Bones, An’ 251; ‘Packington’s
25–6, 114–15 Pound’ 87, 134, 252; ‘Peg’s Gone
Albermarle, Christopher Monk, second Over the Sea with a Soldier’ 250;
Duke of 34 ‘Sage leaf ’ 2–3, 180–1
Albermarle, George Monk, first Duke of Barlow, Lucy 131–2, 136
285 Barrow, Isaac 49
Albermarle, Joost Keppel, first Earl of Barry, Elizabeth 62, 79, 95
142 Bath 30, 36, 47–50, 207, 209
Allen, Mr 169 Bayles, Mary 272
Ancrum, Frances Ker, Countess of Beal, Peter v, vi, 289, 290
38–9 Beaumont, Francis and Fletcher, John
Anne, Queen (also as Princess) 64, 106, 5; Philaster 10
141, 145, 208 Behn, Aphra 81, 98, 170–1, 183–4,
answer poems 13 262, 302; Love-Letters between a
anti-Catholicism 44–5, 47, 48, 62–4, Nobleman and his Sister 258, 297–8,
240, 246–7, 275, 278–9 299
Archilochus 9 Beinecke Library 100
Argyle, Archibald Campbell, eighth Belassis (Bellasyse), Susan, Lady 210
Earl of 39 Belassis (Bellasyse), Thomas,
Aristophanes 21, 207 Earl Fauconberg 152
Arlington, Henry Bennett, first Earl of Bellany, Alastair 9, 15, 16, 259
1, 32, 34, 116, 228 Bellegarde, Jean-Baptiste Morvan de
Armstrong, Sir Thomas 152 192, 207
Arp, see Orby Berkeley, John Berkeley, Lord 169
Arran, James Douglas, Lord 161 Betterton, Thomas 81, 93–4, 116
Arrowsmith, Joseph 85–6, 271 Blair, David 149
Ashton, Edmund 90 Blood, Thomas 5, 284
Atherton, John, Bishop of Waterford Blount, Charles 34, 49
256 Boileau, Nicolas 84, 166, 244
Aubrey, John 197, 268 Born, Hendrik 275
authorship 151–90; amateur and Boyle, A. J. 224
professional 79–86; authors as wits Boynton, Katherine 44
183–90 Boys, Jeffrey 69
Ayloffe, John 105; ‘Oceana and Braithwaite, Richard 12
Britannia’ 127–8 Brandon, Anne, Lady 87
Brennan, Michael 291
Baber, John 167, 170, 175 Brewster, Anne 105
Bacon, Francis, Lord Verulam 15, 198 Brome, Alexander 22, 281
Baker, Thomas 93 Brounker, Henry 109
ballad tunes 14, 229, 249–57; ‘Cheviot Brown, John Seely 97
Chace’ 78, 94, 250–1, 252–3; Brown, Tom 292–3
422 Index
Brownlow, Dorothy (‘Doll’), Lady 87 Charles II 1, 4, 23, 29, 30, 31–2,

Brudenell, Frances 295 39–40, 63, 75, 101, 225; as lampoon
Buchanan, George 126 subject 53–4, 83, 108, 115, 134–6,
Buckingham, George Villiers, first 221, 234, 237
Duke of 2, 16, 18, 126, 273 Chaucer, Geoffrey 12
Buckingham, George Villiers, second Chesterfield, Philip Dormer Stanhope,
Duke of 1–6, 19, 20, 32 n. 24, 33, fourth Earl of 197
34–5, 39–40, 55, 102, 105, 116, 118, Chesterfield, Philip Stanhope, second
119–20, 139, 152, 255, 282, 284–6; Earl of 42–3
as faction leader 34–5, 53, 82–3; as China 32
lampoon subject 1–6, 118, 126, 196, Cholmondeley, Hugh, Viscount
251; as patron 80; The Rehearsal Cholmondeley 169
83, 91–2, 100, 142–3, 180–1, 239 Church of England 58, 106, 255–7;
Buckingham, Mary Villiers, Duchess of ecclesiastical courts 18
(also as Mary Fairfax) 5, 215 Cibber, Colley 72, 95
Burke, Edmund 117, 194 Clarendon, Edward Hyde, first Earl of
burlesque 12–13 1, 4, 19, 32, 35, 39, 102, 106, 109,
Burlington, Richard Boyle, second 238, 239, 285; as lampoon subject
Earl of 162, 280 107, 112, 115–16, 228–9, 269, 279,
Burnaby, William 174 285
Burnet, Gilbert 23, 39–40, 90, 144, Clark, Peter 189
191 Clayton, Sir Thomas 14
Burrows, John v, 57, 105, 136 n. 65 Cleveland, Barbara Palmer, Duchess of
Busenello, Francesco 108 (also as Countess of Castlemaine) 34,
Butler, Charlotte 79 37, 38; as lampoon subject 43–4,
Butler, Dorothy, Countess of Arran 112–14, 196, 210, 222, 228–30, 235,
210–11 241, 272, 284
Butler, John, Lord 281 Cleveland, John 20, 107
Butler, Samuel 1, 19, 21, 33, 41, 78, Clifford, Martin 80, 118, 272, 282
107, 243 Clifford, Thomas Clifford, Lord 116,
228
Cabal ministry 116; ‘Cabal, The’ 288; coffee houses 85–6; Will’s 84; Peters’s
‘Dream of the Cabal, A’ 117–18, 237 264
Cambridge 59, 176, 187, 235, 269–73 Coke, Sir Edward 18, 240
Cameron, W. J. 148, 164, 263, 287, Coleman, Edward 122
294 College, Stephen 125, 235, 251–3
Capel, Nan (‘Orange Nan’) 70, 77–8, Collingwood, Daniel 152
302 Collins, Thomas 261–2
Carberry, John Vaughan, third Earl of Colt, Henry 160
154, 188–9 Colyear, Sir David (later Earl of
Cary, Simona 44 Portmore) 204
Caryl, John 130; Nabaoth’s Vineyard complaint 11
128 Compton, Henry, Bishop of London
Castelhaven, Mervin Touchet, second 48–9, 58, 144
Earl of 15–16 Congreve, William 72–3, 93, 200, 234
Catherine of Braganza, Queen 43, Cook, Sarah 165
51 n. 73, 55–6, 57, 207, 246–7 Corbett, Richard 17
Catullus 9, 220 Corelli, Archangelo 108
Cavalier school of dramatists 81–2 Cotton, Charles 18, 20, 22
censorship 16, 123, 145 Cotton, Sir Robert 274
Chace, John 260 country, the: emigration from to Town
Chamberlen, Dr Peter 165 68–9, 74
Charles I 12, 13, 19, 40 Couperin, François 65
Index 423
court, royal 30–42, 52, 67, 77–8; ‘Come on ye critics’ 243, 284;
antagonisms and factions 34, 38–40, ‘Duel, The’ 176; ‘Faithful Catalogue
43–5, 53, 55, 83; minor courts within of Our Most Eminent Ninnies, A’ 57,
35–7, 43–5; royal mistresses 32, 67, 139, 194, 215, 220, 221–6, 239,
36–8, 51–4; see also lampoons, ‘court’ 242, 244–5, 259; ‘My Opinion’ 134
Coventry, Francis 298 Dover, Henry Jermyn, Lord 46, 172,
Coventry, Sir John 132 223, 241
Coventry, Sir William 1, 109, 152 Dowling, William C. 91
Cowley, Abraham 20, 80, 108 Downing, Sir George 263
Cowper, Sarah 282–6; ‘The Medley’ drolleries 19, 21
282–3 Dryden, John 2, 35, 85, 108, 146, 151,
Cowper, Sir William 282, 283 153, 158, 166, 167–9 passim, 172,
Crashaw, Thomas 247 177–8, 186, 234; Absalom and
Crofts, Catherine 173, 272 Achitophel 2, 24, 100, 101, 109,
Cromwell, Oliver 3–4, 108 115, 117, 118, 128, 133, 138, 177,
Crowne, John 73 n. 19, 81 243, 244; All for Love 82; Annus
Cruikshank, George 147 Mirabilis 163; attitude to noble
Cutts, John, Lord 171–2 authors of 82–3; attributions to
56–7, 179–81, 279; ‘Essay on Satyr’
Danby, Briget Osborne, Countess of see Mulgrave; MacFlecknoe 24, 47,
119–20 83, 114, 153, 170, 178, 230–2, 233,
Danby, Thomas Osborne, Earl of (later 238, 243, 245; Marriage A-la-mode
first Duke of Leeds) 35, 53, 102, 116, 66, 75–6; ‘Of Dramatick Poesie’ 83,
119, 140, 152; as lampoon subject 187; scribally circulated writings of
119–22, 265, 293 178–81; verse attacks on 81, 177–8
D’Avenant, Sir William 19, 22, 79, 82 Dublin 151, 177, 235
Davenport, William 16 Dubrow, Heather 226 n. 11, 237, 300
Davies, Sir John 11 Duguid, Paul 97
Davis, Miles 219 Duke, Richard 202–3
de Viau, Théophile 18 Dumbarton, George Douglas, Earl of
Declaration of Indulgence 59 168
Defoe, Daniel 140 Dunbar, Robin 194
Denham, Sir John 22, 242 Dunbar, William 9
Denham, Margaret, Lady Denham Duncombe, Sir John 116
228–9, 242 Dundee, John Graham of Claverhouse,
Derby, William Stanley, ninth Earl of Viscount 178
215, 290 D’Urfey, Thomas 100, 264, 296, 299;
Devonshire, Christiana Cavendish, The Richmond Heiress 95–6, 295
Countess of 36 Dutch Wars 23, 35, 106–11, 116, 288
Diana, Princess 195–6
Digby, Sir Kenelm 271, 276 ‘E., R.’ 173–4
Digby, Dame Magdalene 276 Eccles, John 254
Dolben, John, Archbishop of York 3 Eisenstein, Elizabeth 198
Donne, John 11, 14, 20, 62 Eland, Henry, Lord 167–9 passim
Donno, Elizabeth Story 104, 105 Elgar, Sir Edward 219
Dorset, Charles Sackville, sixth Earl of Eliot, T. S. 103–4
(also as Lord Buckhurst and Earl of Essex, Elizabeth Devereux, Countess of
Middlesex) 19, 34, 40, 42, 49, 57, 276
64, 82, 83, 103, 142, 154, 167–9 Etherege, Sir George 77 n. 25, 80, 164,
passim, 172, 179, 180, 253, 293; and 165, 166, 177, 186–7, 243–4; as clan-
Robert Julian 288–9; and Rose Alley destine satirist 154, 167–9 passim;
beating 153 n. 14; as patron 80, The Man of Mode 37, 69–70, 72,
186–7, 262–3; ‘Colin’ 44, 52–4, 234; 182, 199
424 Index
Exclusion Bill controversy 102 news 198–203; retrospective 212–17;

Exeter, John Cecil, fifth Earl of 169 women gossipers 203–7, 283
Gould, Robert 79
Fairfax, Brian 4–5, 215 Gowing, Laura 10, 18, 193
Fairfax, Thomas, Lord Fairfax 4, Grafton, George 185, 262, 281, 294
284–5 Grafton, Henry Fitzroy, first Duke of
Falmouth, Charles Berkeley, Earl of 45, 153
109–10 Grafton, Isabelle Fitzroy, Duchess of
Falmouth, Mary Berkeley, Countess 87, 222
of 48 Grahame, Kenneth 121
Fanshaw, William 167, 168 Gramont, Philibert, Comte de 33
Farquhar, George 72, 214 Gregge, Ralph 278
Faulkland (also Falkland), Anthony Grey, Ford, Lord Grey of Werke 168
Carey, fifth Viscount 164, 169–70 Grey, Mary, Lady Grey of Werke 96–7,
passim, 179 299
Felton, John 2 Griffin, Edward, Lord 169
Felton, Lady Elizabeth 56, 173 Griffin, Madam 162
Fielding, Henry 239 Gwyn, Ellen 30–1, 41, 49, 54, 56, 58,
Fingall, Margaret Plunket, Countess 59–60, 83, 126, 131–2
of 38
Firth, Sir Charles 148–50 Hadleigh 270
Flatman, Thomas 269 Haines, Joseph 259, 262
Flecknoe, Richard 80, 231–2 Hales, Sir Edward 224
Foucault, Michel 299 Halifax, George Saville, first Earl of 29,
Fox, Adam 9, 249, 251 32, 168, 213–14, 215
Fox, Jean 173 Hall, Jacob 112
Fox, Kate 194, 197 Hall, Joseph 11, 20
Frazier, Cary, see Peterborough, Cary Hamilton, Anthony, Count 33, 42–3,
Mordaunt 45–6, 50, 249
Frazier, Charles 167–9 passim Hammond, Paul 143, 180, 267,
Freke, John 105; ‘History of Insipids, A’ 291
257, 279, 285 Harris, Benjamin 130
Freschville, Anne, Lady 61, 169, 173 Harris, Brice 248
Harris, Joseph 80, 259
Gaton, Robert 271 Harvey, Elizabeth, Lady 37, 153, 172,
George II 146 260
Gerard, Elizabeth, Lady 223 Haward, Sir William 265, 267–9, 272,
Gerard, Henry 281 279, 283–6, 290
Gerard, Mary 153 Hawkins, Coleman 219
Germaine, John 88 Hawse, Mr 155
Ghent, English nunnery at 276 hedonism 71, 74–5
‘Ghost’ satires 234 Heinsius, Daniel 275
Gibbon, Mr 184 Henderson, Felicity vi, 281 n. 95
Gilbert and Sullivan 254 Henrietta Maria, Queen 19, 35, 43
Gill, Alexander 16 Herrick, Robert 12, 19
Gillray, James 147 Heveningham, Henry 161–2, 163, 167,
Glanville, Joseph 48 169, 170, 188, 263, 264
Gluckman, Max 193–4 Hewitt, Sir George 94
Godfrey, Sir Edmund Berry 57 n. 86, Hinton, Moll 87, 94
246 Hobart, Mary 45–6, 249, 295
Goldgar, Anne 275 Hobbes, Thomas 6, 27–9, 30, 50,
Goodman, Carlell 87, 241 74–5, 91, 133, 195, 215, 242
gossip 182, 191–217, 222, 283; and Hogarth, William 147
Index 425
Homer 47, 56 Kneller, Sir Godfrey 234

homosexuality 3, 5, 60–1, 64, 142–3, Knight, Mary (Mall) 112–14, 126
175, 280 Kynaston, Edward 3, 5
Hooke, Robert 298
Horace 8, 9, 11, 115, 236, 243 Lacy, John 80, 259
Howard Edward 81–2, 243 Lake, Peter 247
Howard, Mary (Mall) 26–7, 87, 94, lampoon ‘stars’ and stock characters
209–10 23–5, 99, 131
Howard, Sir Robert 82, 155, 157, 208 lampooners as class 89, 181–190, 299
Howe, John Grubham 26, 134, 141, lampoons:
154, 160, 164–5, 166–70 passim, authorship of 151–90
174–5, 191, 206–7, 263, 292 classical influences on 84–5
Howell, James 276–7 collaborative composition of 163–6,
Hoyle, John 253 176
Hughes, Margaret 210 ‘court’ 21–65, 67, 107, 142
Hume, Robert D. 8, 301 effect on victims 151–3, 295–300
Huntington, Theophilus Hastings, folk 8–11
seventh Earl of 158, 168, 169, 210, forms and styles of 12, 13, 87,
211 146–7, 154, 219–21
Hyde Park 70, 73 morality of 88–91, 189–90, 240,
296 n. 132, 299
Inns of Court 14, 51 origin of term 13
invasion of privacy 197 poetics of 218–47
professional writers and 170–2,
Jacobites 64, 65, 140, 145, 287 189
James I 2, 12, 14–5, 18 reception of 51, 248–302
James II (also as James, Duke of York) scribal publication of
35, 42, 47, 48, 50, 62–4, 74, 139–40, secondary meanings in 242–7
145, 224; as lampoon subject 119, social aims and functions of 71,
221; as military leader 82, 108–11; 86–98, 151
religious views of 106, 119, 225 space and time relationships in
Jeffreys, Sir George 130, 131 226–38
Jenkins, John 270 stanzaic 12, 87
Jenkins, William 153 ‘state’ 99–150
Johns, Adrian 198 sung 12, 13, 249–57
Johnstone, Barbara 302 ‘Town’ 66–98, 99, 154, 159, 191
Jones, Sir William 127 transmission of 45, 51, 154–8,
Jonson, Ben 11, 27–8, 79–80, 114, 248–302; as separates 259–66; in
126, 146, 243, 245, 273 miscellanies and anthologies
Joyce, James 223 286–94; see also scriptoria
Julian, Robert 152, 154, 157–8, 160, women writers of 147, 172–4
251, 261, 287–91, 292 lampoons not cited by author or subject:
Juvenal 9, 11, 57, 91, 146, 215, 236, ‘Advice to Apollo’ 81, 159
243 ‘Barbara Piramidum Sileat Miracula
Memphis’ 84
Kaplan, M. Lindsay 16, 193 n. 5 ‘Caesar’s Ghost’ 233, 237
Katz, Jack 192–3 ‘Cary’s face is not the best’ 43–4,
Kelliher, Hilton v, 179, 180 51–2, 268, 277
Killigrew, Elizabeth 44 ‘Catholic Priest’s Farewell to the
Killigrew, Henry 153 House of Commons, The’ 240
Killigrew, Thomas 22 ‘Cover le feu ye Huguenots’ 240,
Killigrew, Sir William 44 264, 278
King, Gregory 6 ‘Good people draw near’ 225,
426 Index
lampoons . . . subject (cont.): Lord, George deForest 7 n. 12, 43

227–30, 235, 237–8, 239, 242, Louis XIV 1, 5, 31, 32, 36, 101, 119,
245 268, 273, 280, 284
‘Heroic Poem, An’ 55–7, 67, 77, 84 Lovelace, Richard 20, 107
‘Ignis Ignibus Extinguitur’ 89–90 Lucas, Charles, Lord 22, 234, 270,
‘king, duke and state, The’ 167 279, 280, 284, 285–6
‘King’s Vows, The’ 45 Lucilius 9, 236
‘Last Night’s Ramble, The’ 233, 237 Luck, Nancy 87, 205
‘Lovers’ Session, The’ 87–8, 221, Lumley, Henry 163, 168, 191; as
257 ‘Tyzard’ 264
‘Nostradamus Prophecy’ 279, 285 Lumley, Richard, see Scarborough
‘Of Three Late Marriages’ 79
‘On the Duke’s Servants’ 45 Macaulay, Thomas Babbington, Lord
‘On the Ladies of Honour’ 239 149–50
‘Quarrel between Frank and Nan, Macclesfield, Anne Brandon, Countess
The’ 77–8 of 87
‘Quem Natura negat’ 79, 89, 91 Macdonald Hugh 289
‘Rochester’s Farewell’ 55, 67, 76, 84, McKitterick, David 198
221–2, 259, 280, 285 McRae, Andrew 8, 17
‘Sage Leafe’, ballad to 2–3, 180–1 McVeagh, John 100
‘Satire on Benting’ 79 Magalotti, Lorenzo 265
‘Seigneur Dildoe’ 38, 46–7, 49, 246, Magdalen, St. Mary 113
250, 265, 268 maids of honour 37, 277
‘Session of Ladies, A’ 87–8, 233 Maine, Henry 160
‘Some Passages Illustrating the Mainwaring, Arthur 144, 162;
Giants’ War’ 136–8 ‘Tarquin and Tullia’ 144
‘Song on Danby, A’ 120–2, 265, 293 Malouf, David 146–7
‘Town Life, The’ 63, 73–4, 75, 139 Mandeville, Bernard 75
‘Utile Dulce’ 264 Manley, Lawrence 66
‘Visitt, The’ 70, 89, 157–8, 199–200 Manton, Thomas 48
‘Young gallants of the town’ 45 Margoliouth, H. M. 104
Lansdowne, George Granville, Lord Marlborough, James Ley, third Earl of
93, 162 109
Laslett, Peter 216–17 Marlborough, John Churchill, first
Latimer, Edward Osborne, Viscount Duke of 241
Latimer 122 Marlborough, Sarah Churchill, Duchess
Latimer, Elizabeth Osborne, Lady 122 of 61
Laud, William, Archbishop of Marlowe, Christopher 246
Canterbury 274 Marotti, Arthur v, 7, 15
Lauderdale, John Maitland, Duke of Marprelate controversy 16
116, 285 Marshall, Alan 28, 33
Le Neve, Oliver 174 Marston, John 11, 20
Lee, Nathaniel 234, 296 Martial 9, 11, 214, 215, 224–6, 243,
Lely, Sir Peter 113 245
L’Estrange, Sir Roger 105, 189, 262, Martin, Sir Roger 159, 169, 175
277 Marvell, Andrew 25, 101–15, 218,
libels and libellers 14–18; see also 234, 268, 284; ‘King’s Speech, The’
lampoons 281, 285; ‘Last Instructions to a
litany, as satiric form 3–4, 12, 227, Painter’ 104, 112–14, 237, 269, 272;
234–5, 281 Rehearsal Transpros’d, The 112,
Livingston, Elizabeth 44 114; ‘Second Advice’ 105, 107–12;
Locke, John 6 ‘Third Advice’ 105, 114, 233; ‘Tom
London 66–72, 75 May’s Death’ 114
Index 427
‘Marvellian’ Satire 101–7, 268, 279, Newport, Francis, Lord 77–8

284–5 news and newspapers 114, 198;
Mary II 64–5, 106, 140, 143–4 see also gossip
Mary of Modena, Queen (also as Niobe complex 214
Duchess of York) 35, 36, 37, 47, 50, Nokes, James 115
208 n. 34, 246, 251 Nonconformism 20, 22–3, 106, 210,
May, Baptist 228 270, 278–9, 282
May, Steven 8 Non-jurors 140, 145
Mazarin, Hortense Mancini, Duchesse Norfolk, Henry Howard, seventh Duke
de 36, 55 of 245
Melton, Frank E. 5 n. 9 Norfolk, Mary Howard, Duchess of
Mennes, Sir John 12–13, 18–19, 22 88, 222, 245
Middlesex, Lionel Cranfield, first North, Dudley, Lord North 270
Earl of 15 North, Sir Henry 270–1, 272
Middleton, Charles Middleton, second North, Marcy 297, 300
Earl of 177 North, Peregrina 272
Middleton, Jane 24, 37, 53, 222, 241 Nottingham, Heneage Finch, first Earl
Milton, John 16, 21, 105, 136, 137, of 122
274
Misson, Francis 258 Oates, Titus 57, 123, 128, 246
Monmouth, Earl of, see Peterborough, O’Donnell, Mary Ann 171 n. 53
Charles Oldham, John 19, 20, 91–2, 100, 126,
Monmouth, James Scott, Duke of 55, 244, 282; ‘Sardanapalus’ 166, 243
97, 131, 231, 257, 266; as lampoon Ong, Walter J. 183, 198
subject 131–9 Orby, Charles (as ‘Arp’) 161
Montagu, Charles, Earl of Halifax 187, Order of the Toast, the 161–2, 187–8
293 Orkney, Elizabeth Villiers, Countess of
Montagu, Ralph Montagu, first 64, 143
Duke of 53 Orleans, Henrietta, Duchesse de
Montrose, James Graham, first Marquis (‘Minette’) 1, 5
of 39 Orleans, Philippe, Duc d’ (‘Monsieur’)
Mordaunt, see Peterborough 1
More, Henry 277 Ormonde, James Butler, first Duke of
Morland, Anne, Lady 53–4 100, 117–18, 152
Morland, Sir Samuel 53–4 Ormonde, James Butler, second Duke
Moyle, Walter 162 of 206, 214
Mulgrave, John Sheffield, third Earl of Ormonde, Mary Butler, Duchess of
(later first Duke of Buckinghamshire) 206–7
34, 35, 61–2, 84, 142, 152, 154, 165, Orrery, Charles Boyle, fourth Earl of
168, 178; as lampoon subject 35, 48, Orrery 162
55, 81, 91, 222, 245; ‘Essay upon Osborn, James M. 148
Satyr, An’ 35, 83, 94, 151, 158, 170, Osborne, see Danby
178–9, 181, 194, 221, 243, 289; Osbourne, Penelope, Lady 173, 204–6
‘Nine, The’ 65, 142, 163–4 Ossory, Thomas Butler, Lord 152
Otway, Thomas 81, 82
Napier, Robert 281 Overbury, Sir Thomas 15–16
Nash, Richard ‘Beau’ 207 Ovid 9
Nashe-Harvey controversy 16 Oxford 5–6, 14, 59, 235; Reception of
New Exchange, the 70, 200 Buckingham at 4, 251; terrae filius at
Newcastle, Margaret Cavendish, 281
Duchess of 28, 302
Newcastle, William Cavendish, first Paine, Robert 193–4
Duke of 39, 79–80, 231 ‘Painter’ poems 107–16
428 Index
Paisible, Jacques 36 Portsmouth, Louise de Keroualle,

Paman, Henry 272 Duchess of 32, 36, 38, 47–8, 51,
Panther, The 269 53–4, 55, 58, 59–60, 83, 153, 179
parliament 1, 5, 17, 34, 54, 58, 68, postal services 260
101–2, 105, 106, 112, 118–19, 121, Potter, Lois 58
122, 124, 128, 184, 186, 230, 240, Price, Henrietta Maria 45–6, 249
261–2, 268, 279; elections 5, 68, Prior, Matthew 293
140; House of Commons 109, Pritchard, Allan 104
116–17, 279; House of Lords 53, Private Eye 25, 49, 183
106, 279; Rump 21 prologues and epilogues 85–6, 172,
parody and burlesque 12, 47, 112–14, 177
244 Prynne, William 17, 284
Parsons, Sir John 169, 170 Pulteney, Sir John 153, 161–2, 168,
Patrick, Father 48 170, 188–9
Patrick, Simon 271 Pulton, Ferdinando 16
Patterson, Annabel 105 Purcell, Henry 69, 108, 253
Payne, Henry Neville: The Morning Pye, Sir John 184–5, 260, 262, 273–82,
Ramble 201–2 283–6, 300; as traveller 274–6
Peachey, Robert 270 Pye, Sir Robert 273
Penn, Admiral 110
Pepys, Samuel 6, 24, 28, 31, 35, 44, Radcliffe, Alexander 22, 236
124, 197, 253, 254, 258, 260, 268, Radclyffe, Edward, Viscount 162,
291 163
Perry, Stephen 270 Radnor, Charles Robartes, Earl of 206,
Persius 9, 82–3 210
personal cleanliness 24, 40–2, 53 Raleigh, Sir Walter 15, 126, 234, 279
Peter, John 11 ‘Ramble’ poems 233, 236
Peterborough, Cary Mordaunt, Ravenscroft, Edward 67, 258, 289
Countess of (also as Cary Frazier) Rawlins, Giles 153
36, 163–4, 169, 173 Raylor, Timothy v, 8, 12–13, 18–20
Peterborough, Charles Mordaunt, Raynton, Rebecca 276
third Earl of (also as Viscount Ré, Île de 2, 19
Mordaunt and Earl of Monmouth) religious conflict 102, 106, 118;
141, 142, 163–4, 166, 167–70 see also anti-Catholicism;
passim, 179, 244–5, 292; ‘Female Nonconformism
Nine, The’ 65, 142, 163–4; ‘Ladies’ Richmond, Frances Stuart, Duchess of
March, The’ 24, 26–7, 38–9, 44, 48, 26, 44, 134
52, 163–4, 220 Richmond, Stuart (Howard), Mary,
Peterborough, Penelope Mordaunt, Duchess of 3–4, 32 n. 24
Countess of 36 Rivers, Dame Constantia 276
Petty, Sir William 6, 157 ‘Robin’, drawer 170
Poems on Affairs of State (1702–1707) Robinson, Capt. Charles 292
7, 148–9 Rochester, John Wilmot, second Earl of
Poems on Affairs of State (Yale) v, 7, 19, 21, 23, 26, 27–8, 35, 40, 42–3,
29, 51, 148 45–6, 68, 80, 82, 84, 90, 103, 112,
political developments 1660–1702 151, 154, 166, 174–5, 185, 191, 218,
101–3 224, 234, 248, 266, 282
Pope, Alexander 2, 6, 87, 146, 147, ‘Against Reason and Mankind’ 74,
179, 232, 239 285–6
‘Popish Plot’ 122, 123, 126–8, 216 ‘Allusion to Horace, An’ 82, 83, 159,
Porter, Olive 170, 173 284
Portland, William Bentinck, first Earl of ‘Artemiza to Chloe’ 72, 92–3, 200–1
79, 42–3 as patriot 248
Index 429
‘By all Love’s soft yet mighty powers’ Scroggs, Sir William 123–31
40–1, 244 Scroope, Sir Carr 81, 152, 156–7, 168;
‘In the Isle of Britain’ 30–1, 46, 50, ‘In Defence of Satyr’ 84, 90, 157,
60, 268 158
‘Quoth the Duchess of Cleveland to Sedley, Sir Charles 19, 34, 40, 42, 80,
Counsellor Knight’ 112–13 83, 180, 185, 187, 224, 253, 262,
‘Ramble in Saint James’s Park, A’ 292
32–3, 236 Sedley, Katharine, Countess of
‘Say Heav’n-born Muse’ 47–50, 57 Dorchester 173, 203–4, 207, 209,
‘Timon’ (also attrib. Sedley) 184, 210, 223, 263, 302; ‘The Knight
258 Errant’ 172–3, 262
‘To the Post Boy’ 59, 159 ‘sessions’ satire 13, 80, 87–8
‘Too long the wise Commons’ 248 Settle, Elkanah 81
‘Tunbridge Wells’ 208, 209, 236, sexual conduct in Restoration England
279, 284 216–17
‘Upon drinking a bowl’ 133–4 Shadwell, Thomas 23–4, 80, 81, 82,
‘Upon Nothing’ 279, 284 83, 122, 128, 136 n. 65, 153, 178,
Rochester, Laurence Hyde, Earl of 24, 230–2, 298
179 Shaftesbury, Anthony Ashley Cooper,
Rogers, Francis 265 first Earl of 102, 116, 118–19, 139,
Roscommon, Wentworth Dillon, fourth 280
Earl of Roscommon 36, 136 Shakespeare, William 9, 47, 56, 116,
Rupert, Prince 3, 35 243
Rye House Plot 257, 290 Sharpe, Kevin 301
Sheldon, Frances 37
Sackville, Edward, Colonel 169 Sheldon, John 210
St Albans, Henry Jermyn, Earl of 43, Sheppard, Sir Fleetwood 81, 167, 169,
114, 269, 272 263, 293
Saint Évremond, Charles de Marguetel Sheppard, William 240
de Saint Denis de 36 Sherman, ‘Mon’ 170
St John, Mrs 206–7, 214 Shirley, James 79
Salisbury Cathedral 27 Shrewsbury, Anna Maria Brudenell,
Salisbury, James Cecil, fourth Earl of Countess of 1, 5, 152, 153
180 Shrewsbury, Charles Talbot, twelfth
Salisbury, Robert Cecil, first Earl of Earl of 144, 210
15–16, 274 Shrewsbury, Francis Talbot, eleventh
Salmasius 274 Earl of 1, 5, 152, 153
Samizdat 300 Sidney, Algernon 17
Sanderson, Bridget, Lady (‘Mother of Sidney, Sir Philip 251
the Maids’) 32, 37, 49 Sidney, Sir Robert 132
Sarsfield, Patrick 170 Simpson, Christopher 220 n. 1, 221
Saslow, Edward 153 n. 14 Simpson, Claude M. 249 n. 4, 251,
satire, clandestine 7–8, 15; see also 252 n. 15
lampoons Sisson, C. J. 9
Savile, Henry 119, 208 n. 34 Skelton, John 12
Scarborough, Richard Lumley, first skimmington 8
Earl of 163, 169 Skipwith, Sir Thomas 156, 168, 169
Scarsdale, Robert Leke, third Earl of Smith, Aaron 255–7; ‘Ballad Sung by
169 Aaron Smith, A’ (‘The Magpyes’)
Schless, Howard 185 255–7, 268
scriptoria: ‘Cameron’ 64, 141, 179, Smith, James 12–13, 18–19, 22
248, 286, 292–4; ‘Gyldenstolpe’ Soames (also Soame), Sir William
287, 291–2; ‘Hansen’ 248, 290 166–7, 181
430 Index
Sodom and Gomorah 59, 62 Temple, Sir Richard 117

sodomy 59–61, 245 Thacker, Godfrey 263
Somerset, Charles Seymour, sixth theatres: Blackfriars 66; Dorset Garden
Duke of 206 67, 72; Drury Lane 67, 70, 71–2,
Somerset, Frances Carr, Countess of 200; satire against 79
15–16 Thwaites, Mr 264, 278
Somerset, Robert Carr, first Earl of Titus, Silas 276
15–16 Toulouse 276
Somerton, John 154, 206, 261, 262, Town, the 66–79; formation of 66–8,
292 74–5; civility in 146–7, 215–16;
Sophronia 96, 299 see also lampoon, Town
Southerne, Thomas 72; The Wives travesty 13, 20
Excuse 70–1, 92, 197, 200, 204, 214 Tresilian, Sir Robert 126–7, 128
Southesk, Anne Carnegie, Countess of Tunbridge Wells 30, 207–8; lampoons
223 about 93, 155–7, 160, 165–6,
Spence, Joseph 33 207–12, 236, 295
Spenser, Edmund 47, 56 Turner, James Grantham 28, 106 n. 14
Spragge, Sir Edward 288 Twisse, Robert 278
Sprat, Thomas, Bishop of Rochester 80 Tyrconnel, Richard Talbot, Earl of 46
Spring, Sir William 271
Stamford, Elizabeth Gray, Countess Underdown, David 9
of 26
Stanhope, Catherine 173 Vanbrugh, Sir John 72, 233
Star Chamber, Court of 17, 18 Verney family 140, 204–6
Starkey, John 261–2 Vieth, David M. v, 47, 162 n. 35, 287,
state poems 15, 99–150 290
Stationers’ Company 145 Villiers family 213, 229
Stepney, George 187 Villiers, Francis 161, 169, 249–50
Sterne, Laurence 239 Virgil 47, 56, 243
Stillingfleet, Edward, Bishop of visiting 69–70
Worcester 277, 278
Stone, Lawrence 72 n. 16 Wakeman, Sir George 124
Strange, Sir Thomas 145 Walker, Keith v
Strode, Sir George 263 Wallace, John M. 105
Stubbe, Henry 47 Waller, Edmund 22, 41, 80, 107–12,
Suckling, Sir John 13, 19, 41, 236; 115, 242, 269
‘Ballad upon a Wedding’ 13; Waller, Thomas ‘Fats’ 219
Prologue to Aglaura 66; ‘Sessions of Wallis, Ralph 277
Poets, A’ 13, 52, 80 Walsh, William 162
Sullivan, J. P. 224 Warcup, Lenthal 154, 262;
Sunderland, Robert Spencer, second ‘To Captain Warcup’ 156
Earl of 35 Ward, Ned 236
Sutton, Sir Edward 32 Warmestry, Ellen 44
Swan, Richard 165 Watson, John 269–73, 279
Swift, Jonathan 146 Watson, Thomas 271
Wells, Winifred 44
Talbot, John 153 Wentworth, Thomas, Earl of
Talbot, Sir John 152 Strafford 15
Tate, Nahum 100, 181 Wharton, Goodwin 167
Tatham, John 21 Wharton, Henry 168
Taylor, Jeremy 188 Wharton, Thomas 165, 166, 168
Temple, Anne 46, 49 n. 64, 249, 295 Wharton, Thomas, Lord 140, 222;
Temple, Philippa 48–9, 55–6, 59, 60 ‘Lilli Burlero’ 140
Index 431
Wharton, William 153, 169–70 Windsor Castle 30, 246

passim, 176 Wolseley, Robert 153, 166, 169, 176,
White House scandals 51 223, 248, 292
Whitehall, Palace of 30, 38–9, 64, 66, Wolsey, Cardinal 85
68, 69, 79, 84, 141, 233, 246 Wolverton, Roger 270, 271
Whitgift, John, Archbishop of Wood, Anthony 5–6, 14, 181, 197,
Canterbury 15 253, 261, 266, 268
Whyman, Susan E. 69 n. 10, 140 Wycherley, William 81, 95, 171;
Wild, Robert 107, 234, 285–6 The Country-Wife 31, 71–2, 76,
Wilde, Oscar 78 101
William III 64–5, 138, 140–5, 231
Williamson, Sir Joseph 229, 245 York, Anne Hyde, Duchess of 35–6,
Wilson, John Harold 26, 29, 51, 88, 251 37, 228

English Clandestine Satire

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English Clandestine Satire

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English Clandestine Satire

My interest in scribally transmitted clandestine satire began in the

prepare detailed indexes of all the major sources then known to me

A Note on Texts and Citations ix

1 Origins and Models 1

2 The Court Lampoon 21

3 The Town Lampoon 66

5 Lampoon Authorship 151

6 The Lampoon as Gossip 191

7 A Poetics of the Lampoon 218

8 Transmission and Reception 248

Appendix: First-Line Index to Selected Anthologies

Select Bibliography 415

CSP (Dom) Calendars of State Papers (Domestic Series)

Some anomalies in the citation of sources require explanation. Wherever

George Villiers, second Duke of Buckingham (1628–87) has not had

‘Begger’d by Fools’, as Dryden put it, and died a miserable death, as

The poem was circulating in manuscript by 1680, together with a

And so on to a total of sixty lines, not counting ‘Libera nos’. What is

Could it be that he was much more formidable than we imagine: a

shut up with a Fox hunter, a Chymist, a Poll, or Poet, it was sayd to

modes and origins

Clandestine satire is satire written for circulation through means

their parents’ generation. Robert D. Hume has argued that scholar-

At various stages in the ancient world versions of this improvised

villages. When, in Beaumont and Fletcher’s Philaster (ﬁrst acted

pieces of the same kind to be written for scribal circulation. A good

couplets rather than in Goliardic tetrameters or stanzas sung to a

Burlesque and travesty were separate genres from the lampoon, in

Wood’s assuredness over the last-raised matter may, of course, have

preference for ruling through favourites. The great seventeenth-

Thomas Cogswell has described this early body of state satire as

and scribally communicated texts, including lampoons, in broad-

Cavaliers, Clubs, and Literary Culture. The two leaders of this

Jacobean experiments of Hall and Marston had been forgotten but

Like Restoration comedy, the Restoration lampoon took several

Deprived of its validating political context, the drollery tradition

But even these grumblings were decently muted: Alexander Brome’s

The theme of Brome’s poem was to resurface among ‘country’ criti-

took place on 24 August 1662 was initially conveyed through sur-

that his plays had been as successful as Dryden’s, was as irritated as

A character in satire was as much a conscious artistic construction as

‘Lory’ was Laurence Hyde, Earl of Rochester: that he was Middle-

present day when a new celebrity becomes a subject of newspaper

up over-prolonging it. Yet, it should not be thought that the writing

Wilson’s description does not do justice to the kinaesthetic force of

This is the original ending; however, one unsatisﬁed reader, was

The rhyme repetitions seem meant to mimic the motions of orgasm,

Rochester has at least paused to consider the cognitive basis of

Within this world nothing, naturally, was to be taken at its face

All was subjugated to ‘a perpetuall and restlesse desire of Power after

The Restoration lampoon, as a kind distinct from its precursors, ﬁrst

overheard dialogue. External to the bedchamber was the privy

Sparkish is present to be seen as much as the monarch is. His hope is

make use of intermediaries with freer access. The holder of a bed-

Since when he’d ne’er be brought to eat,

of their rivals. A lampoon, as stated, could be an effective weapon in

Rochester returned the compliment in lines 120–5 of ‘An Allusion to

Rochester’s case by at least two banishments and in Buckingham’s by

Being prepared to lose money at cards seems to have been a kind of

court lampoon.40 Seeing that the mistresses, despite their insecurity

Her predecessor Cleveland had occupied apartments above the

Charles, however, greatly preferred Buckingham’s personal style to

If thou wou’dst have me true, be wise,