https://orcid.org/0000-0002-4433-3646
ABSTRACT
Later Stuart Britain is well known as an age of political satire. Scholars have generally approached this as an English-language phenomenon, but there was also a significant strand of satiric verse written in Latin, Britain’s second literary language. This article examines the nature and significance of political satire in Latin in this period. Latin satire appeared in many forms and genres, including epigrammatic, lapidary, hexameter and rhyming verse. Like English-language satire, most Latin satire circulated in manuscript rather than print. Although it had elite authors and readers, some Latin satires reached a substantial audience, assisted by the prevalence of short poems and their circulation alongside English translations. As Latin was Europe’s main international language, satires also flowed across borders, especially with France and the Dutch republic. Latin satires took diverse political perspectives, including royalist and oppositional, Tory and Whig, Jacobite and Williamite, and appeared throughout the later Stuart period.
Introduction
Later Stuart Britain is well known as an age of political satire, when thousands of poems were written and circulated that lampooned, mocked and condemned every available target from the monarch downwards.Footnote1 One feature of this rage of satire that has often been overlooked is that it was not wholly an English-language phenomenon, but also included a significant strand of verse written in Latin. As Britain’s second literary language and Europe’s main international language, Latin was a natural and regular medium for political expression. This was not a marginal trend: some Latin satires reached a substantial audience, assisted by the prevalence of short poems and their circulation alongside English translations. Part of the reason for the scholarly neglect of Latin satire is that it largely circulated in manuscript, and the shape and scale of Latin manuscript culture in early modern Britain is only now becoming apparent as part of an important new project to survey “neo-Latin” verse (i.e. post-Renaissance Latin verse, rather than ancient or medieval Latin) written into English manuscripts between c. 1550 and c. 1720 (“Neo-Latin Poetry in English Manuscript Verse Miscellanies”, or NLPEM). Drawing on this ground-breaking work and elsewhere, this article examines the main features and chronology of Latin political satire in later Stuart Britain.
There is a contemporary scholarly consensus that satire is most helpfully approached as a “mode” rather than a “genre” – as a literary tendency that can be found across many genres rather than as a single set of literary conventions.Footnote2 Two essential features of this satiric mode may be identified: a subject for criticism or attack, and a stylistic component, often (but not necessarily) wit or humour.Footnote3 For the purposes of this holistic survey, the very fact that all of the pieces considered were written in verse is taken as sufficient for meeting the second condition; it would be premature to exclude any poem on the basis of style. Therefore, the only prerequisite for including a poem here is that it aimed at a target that was broadly “political” in national terms – monarchs, ministers, courtiers, churchmen, wars, parliaments, parties, religious groups and so on.Footnote4
The Latin satire of later Stuart Britain must be situated in the context of two major bodies of early modern verse. The first is the considerable tradition of English-language political satire, circulating especially in manuscript, which first became a mass medium in the early seventeenth century – the well-known “early Stuart libels” phenomenon – and became particularly prominent in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, when it was conceptualised most enduringly as “poems on affairs of state”.Footnote5 The second is the wider early modern culture of original Latin (or “neo-Latin”) verse. Throughout early modern Europe, vast quantities of new literature were written in Latin rather than vernacular languages; early modern Britain should be considered a bilingual literary culture, in which Latin was widely used as a language for literary composition alongside English.Footnote6 Much of this Latin verse was written and circulated in manuscript; NLPEM has found over 28,000 neo-Latin poems in over 1,200 manuscripts held in English libraries and archives.Footnote7 The British neo-Latin tradition included a substantial body of topical and political verse, most of which can be classified broadly as either panegyric or satiric in nature – praising or criticising their subject respectively – or a mixture of these two modes. Latin political satire can be found in the sixteenth century, when poems were written sporadically against figures such as Stephen Gardiner, Catholic bishop of Winchester under Mary I, and William Parry, who was executed for plotting to assassinate Elizabeth I in 1585.Footnote8 Like its English-language equivalent, however, Latin political satire proliferated especially in the early seventeenth century, targeting an array of figures familiar in the English satire of the period, including Sir Walter Raleigh; Robert Cecil, earl of Salisbury; George Villiers, duke of Buckingham; and James I himself.Footnote9 A significant cluster of Latin satire was written during the civil wars, mostly from a royalist perspective, for instance by Christopher Wase, a headmaster and scholar, and Peter du Moulin, an Anglican clergyman.Footnote10 This phenomenon would continue in strength under the later Stuarts.
Latin satire in later Stuart Britain – and, indeed, early modern Britain more generally – has received little attention from scholars. The major studies of satiric verse do not discuss Latin except in passing, and Latin is not included in the main edition of later Stuart satire, the seven Yale volumes of Poems on Affairs of State. However, there have been studies and editions of relevant individual poets, especially Andrew Marvell and Archibald Pitcairne, although not within the full context of British neo-Latin satire.Footnote11 In addition, three scholars have made particularly important contributions to establishing the wider field.Footnote12 Leicester Bradner, the first (and to date only) scholar to attempt a full history of what he called “Anglo-Latin” verse between the sixteenth and twentieth centuries, argued that Latin satire in Britain was largely an eighteenth-century phenomenon, when formal Roman-style satire in hexameters flourished, but acknowledged that satire could earlier be found in the epigram, a ubiquitous genre of short verse.Footnote13 This is a useful characterisation, although Bradner placed too much emphasis on formal hexameter satire as the “proper” form of satire, and therefore centred the story of Latin satire too late in chronological terms.Footnote14 Harold Love’s magisterial account of later Stuart manuscript satire acknowledged the place of Latin, and his appendix of first lines in major manuscript sources included over 350 Latin entries, although he did not include any significant discussion of these poems. He subsequently began to examine some of the Latin poems in an article for The Seventeenth Century, but only scratched the surface of the subject before his death.Footnote15 Finally, Victoria Moul has examined British neo-Latin satire between the late sixteenth and early eighteenth centuries, drawing especially on NLPEM, and has established that it was strongly heterogeneous, with formal hexameter satire in fact a relatively minor part of the overall satiric landscape.Footnote16
This article begins by analysing the characteristic genres and forms of Latin satire in this period, and patterns of authorship and readership. Then, the main discussion surveys the Latin political satire written between 1658 and 1714 in five chronological sections, establishing its political contexts and taking representative case studies. First, however, the most fundamental question: why write satire in Latin at all? There were many possible reasons, as will be exemplified in what follows. Latin might be adopted for its literary features, including its brevity, its genres and its vocabulary. It was sometimes used to express controversial or obscene points that were concealed in English versions of poems. Latin might carry political coding: it had been associated with defeated royalists in the late 1640s and 1650s, and had a similar role among Jacobites after 1689 (although this should not be over-stated, as writers of all political persuasions used Latin). As the main international language of the period, Latin might be written in Britain for an international audience, or on the continent to circulate in Britain. Underlying all of this, however, the extent to which writing in Latin was simply a natural and conventional practice of the era should not be underestimated. Grammar schools and universities had a heavy emphasis on Latin, including verse composition, so a Latin verse habit was not confined to an esoteric elite.
Genre and form
By far the most common generic vehicle for Latin satire in later Stuart Britain was the epigram. Epigrams were short and (usually) witty poems, and were widely written in both English and Latin in early modern Britain.Footnote17 In their Latin form, they typically comprised between two and ten lines of elegiac couplets, although some were longer, and some were composed in other metres, including (non-classically) hexameters.Footnote18 They had a complex pedigree, drawing variously on classical tradition (especially the first-century epigrammatist Martial), medieval proverbs and jests, and Renaissance humanist practice in both Latin and vernacular languages. They were written with a wide variety of styles and subjects, among which satire, although not dominant, was certainly prominent.Footnote19 Indeed, their essential properties – identified as brevitas (“brevity”) and argutia (“sharpness”, usually in the form of a witty turn at the end of the poem) in an influential definition by Julius Caesar Scaliger – made them an ideal vehicle for satire, as they had a form that could be used to make an efficient, humorous point about a particular subject.Footnote20 Indeed, John Owen, the most successful epigrammatist of seventeenth-century Britain, observed (in an epigram), “Satires are nothing other than long epigrams,/An epigram is nothing other than a short satire” (“Nil aliud Satyrae quam sunt Epigrammata longa,/Est praeter Satyram nil Epigramma brevem”).Footnote21 One simple political example from the later Stuart period, composed as a single elegiac couplet, was written after the Restoration by Isaac Barrow, a Cambridge scholar. It expresses a royalist’s frustration that Charles II’s return had not brought appropriate rewards for those who had remained loyal during the interregnum:
In the antithesis of the two lines and the unexpectedly bitter reversal in the second, Barrow administers a pithy satiric jab against the king.
Another prominent form of Latin satire in this period was lapidary verse. This was verse composed of a series of lines of no fixed length or metre, often physically centred on the page, and modelled on a form of epitaph carved on funerary monuments.Footnote23 Such pieces might not be regarded as verse at all, but for the fact that they were treated as such by contemporaries, being included in verse anthologies and labelled as carmina lapidaria (“lapidary poems”). They were a distinctively early modern form of Latin, which first emerged on stone in late fifteenth-century Italy, and subsequently developed as an independent literary form that could appear solely on paper from the late sixteenth century (hence Stefan Tilg’s description of these poems as “literary inscriptions”).Footnote24 In the seventeenth century they were widely written across Europe to commemorate occasions such as marriages, deaths and battles. Stylistically, they bore resemblances to the brevitas and argutia of epigrams, as lines were formed as self-contained units containing tight and witty descriptions of their subject.Footnote25 Perhaps it was inevitable, then, that a tradition of lapidary satire developed during the seventeenth century, adapting the form in order to lampoon political and other targets.Footnote26 In British satire, the lapidary form first came to prominence during the 1680s. One example that satirised Richard Baxter, the prominent nonconformist writer and minister, may be used to illustrate its essential features. This begins:
[Here lies RICHARD BAXTER: armed theologian, Reformed Jesuit, Arian arch-heretic, commander of schismatics; whose itch for disputation, malevolence of writing and immoderate zeal of preaching bore, nourished and brought to maturity the MANGE OF THE CHURCH …]
Despite beginning with the conventional epitaphic “hic jacet” (“here lies”), this “Characteristical Epitaph” – as it was described by its author, Thomas Long – was published in 1682, when Baxter was still alive. It was designed as a paper weapon for efficiently dispatching Baxter’s character through a series of accusations in the compartmentalised lapidary style, rather than a reflection on him after his death.
As already suggested, there was also longer hexameter verse. As hexameters were the metre used by the Roman satirists, it is striking that they were relatively less prominent as a satiric vehicle than other forms in this period. Hexameter satires have mostly been associated with the period after 1700, when various poems appeared in print, for instance Satira in Poetastros O–C–––enses (1702, “Satire Against the Oxford-Cambridge Poetasters”), which satirised bad university poets praising Queen Anne’s accession, and Muscipula (1709, “The Mouse-Trap”), a mock-epic that included anti-Welsh satire.Footnote28 However, the chronological survey will indicate that hexameters were in fact used for writing satire throughout the period, for instance in poems about Cromwell, the Great Fire of London, and the first Whigs, and in many cases they were written in manuscript.
Other satiric forms were more minor. Some Latin poems used rhyming verse, an un-classical practice that is primarily associated with medieval Latin, but which also continued throughout the early modern period.Footnote29 One example is a short, obscene satire on Charles II, which, besides being rhyming, is also macaronic (i.e. written in a mixture of Latin and English). It is presented here with a contemporary translation:
This satire’s use of the Latin cunnus, given in the English translation as “C–”, adds blunt force to its attack on the political consequences of Charles II’s lustfulness (this kind of censorship was a common pattern in bilingual Latin-English verse). There were also some longer satires in elegiac couplets that were more substantial than typical epigrams. Other than in epigrams, elegiacs were not a traditional metre for satire, but their use in this period is unsurprising given the wider predominance of elegiacs by the late seventeenth century.Footnote31 There were also some satires in iambic metres, on the model of Horace’s Epodes, which had been an important vehicle for Latin satire in the early seventeenth century, but were uncommon after the Restoration.Footnote32
All of the forms discussed so far were essentially or primarily satiric. In addition, satire can also be found within political poems of a predominantly panegyric type. In an age of partisanship, panegyric and satiric forms can commonly be found together, as poets sought respectively to praise and rebuke “good” and “bad” political forces in order to draw partisan dividing lines. Satire might be found in various kinds of panegyric verse: in panegyric epigrams; in longer hexameter poems of the sort labelled “panegyric epics”, a model ultimately derived from the fourth-century poet Claudian that praised its subject in the form of a political or military narrative, and tended to include negative discussion of the subject’s opponents; and in more conventional panegyrics in hexameters or Horatian lyric metres, which might extol their subjects’ virtues in contrast with others’ vices.Footnote33
Authors and readers
Like its English-language counterpart, Latin satire in later Stuart Britain was mostly a manuscript phenomenon.Footnote34 Poems were often handwritten in the form of “separates” (individual papers), which were variously passed from hand to hand, made available in public houses such as coffeehouses, or enclosed in letters. They were also copied out by individuals into personal miscellanies or compiled with other poems in professionally-produced manuscript anthologies. Some, however, did find their way into print, especially towards the end of the period. Several were printed as individual pamphlets and papers. Some appeared within serial publications: examples can be found in the Flying Post, a newspaper, in 1695; in the Observator, a comment serial, in 1702; and in the Poetical Entertainer, a serial miscellany, in 1713.Footnote35 Others were included in printed miscellanies and anthologies, such as the Musarum Anglicanarum Analecta (1692), a collection of Latin verse by English poets that contains several Tory satires of the 1680s, and the Poems on Affairs of State series (1697–1707), which contains 22 Latin poems (satiric and non-satiric).Footnote36 However, print was more typically a medium for public, panegyric verse. Manuscript, with its greater potential for anonymous and clandestine transmission, was a natural medium for Latin satire, as in English.
There was undoubtedly a core group engaged in high-level Latin writing and reading that centred on university-educated men who operated in court, city and county as well as university life. Some satires were written by or attributed to poets familiar from their English verse, such as Marvell, Rochester and Tom Brown. Other satirists include figures well-known in other contexts, such as William Petty, a proto-economist, and Francis Atterbury, bishop of Rochester and Jacobite conspirator. Beyond the named authors, however, there is a large volume of anonymous satire. In terms of readership, elite consumers of Latin satire attested by surviving manuscripts include: Robert Harley, earl of Oxford; William Sancroft, archbishop of Canterbury; William Trumbull, secretary of state; William Haward, MP and gentleman of the privy chamber; the Danvers family of Northamptonshire, who were baronets; and the Killingworth family, who were London lawyers.Footnote37 Some satires were passed around small groups of correspondents, for instance in social circles around Petty, Anthony Alsop and Archibald Pitcairne.Footnote38
London was, naturally, an important centre for reading Latin satire, glimpsed most obviously through the various items printed in the capital. Many satires were associated with Oxford; a significant proportion of named authors are or were Oxford-educated, such as Francis Atterbury, Edmund Chishull, William Coward, Richard Dighton, Thomas Long and Thomas Smith, and some had Oxford-related themes, such as a cluster of poems targeting William Jane, a scholar who switched allegiance from James II to William III at the Revolution. Some poems circulated surreptitiously, but others were more public; humorous and satiric verse was often performed at the Encaenia ceremony in the Sheldonian Theatre, some of which was later anthologised in the Analecta (which overwhelmingly contains Oxford verse).Footnote39 Oxford readers with surviving manuscript traces include White Kennett and the anonymous compilers of Society of Antiquaries MS 330 and Bodleian MS Lat. misc. e. 19.Footnote40 Cambridge was also a centre for Latin satire: poems were written by Isaac Barrow and (possibly) Stephen Hales and read by John Watson, all university men.Footnote41 An important Jacobite poet, Archibald Pitcairne, was based in Edinburgh; more exotically, another Scot who read Latin satire was Patrick Gordon, who in 1685 was sent four Latin epigrams about the Monmouth rebellion while he was serving Peter the Great in Russia.Footnote42
Latin satire was also, more than its English-language counterpart, part of a wider European culture of politics and verse exchange. As the main international language, Latin verse flowed easily across borders, and much was written on both sides of the Channel about events with obvious cross-border interest, such as the Second and Third Anglo-Dutch Wars, the Glorious Revolution, the Nine Years’ War and the War of the Spanish Succession. Latin satires written in France, the Dutch republic and Rome, in particular, circulated in Britain. For example, a 1673 epigram from the Netherlands that mocked England after recent naval defeats was printed in a Dutch newspaper, sent in a letter to Michael Roberts in London, and then copied into a letter to John Wallis in Oxford.Footnote43 An epigram written in Paris in 1688 lampooned William of Orange for the failure of his first attempt to sail to England; subsequent Williamite readers of this epigram in Britain presumably delighted in how quickly this was superseded by events.Footnote44 An epigram of 1689, posted in public in France in both Latin and French versions, was subsequently read in England, with an English translation, in a pamphlet that related with horror how the poets had been punished, and two of them executed, by the tyrannical French regime.Footnote45 Satiric verse about popes was also popular, feeding into British anti-Catholic sensibilities; much of this originated as “pasquils” or “pasquinades” – verses posted at the statue of Pasquin in Rome, a longstanding tradition of public satire.Footnote46 After Mary II’s death in 1694, Latin epigrams, both panegyric and satiric, were written in France, the Dutch republic and Brandenburg-Prussia that circulated in Britain.Footnote47 Satire flowed from Britain into Europe too: the Monmouth rebellion epigrams were reprinted in German publications, and a Whig poem about the burning of Whitehall was mentioned in a French letter from Amsterdam in 1698.Footnote48
Within Britain, the social reach of Latin satire was broader than might be assumed. Familiarity with Latin was not restricted to those with elite educations, as Latin was both the subject and language of instruction in grammar schools across the country, including widespread practice in Latin verse composition. As with English, the ability to read at least some Latin must have been wider than that of writing it. Latin satire also circulated in the “public sphere”. One epigram attacking William III circulated in a coffeehouse in 1695, and another in the streets of London in 1702; satiric verses were posted in public in Edinburgh in 1678.Footnote49 Many of the poems that appeared in cheap print, including in printed broadsides, pamphlets, newspapers, comment serials and serial miscellanies, or in manuscript separates, would have been accessible to a broader readership, in public houses such as coffeehouses or via individual purchase. In addition, much Latin satire was short and/or circulated accompanied by English translations, which both maximised its accessibility to those who had a little Latin and enabled those with no Latin at all to encounter and engage with the poems. For an earlier period, Adam Fox has argued that a literate culture was experienced well beyond those who could themselves read; in the same way, there was a broad exposure to Latin culture that reached beyond those who had good Latin themselves.Footnote50
Indeed, it is a characteristic of Latin satire in this period that it was part of a broader bilingual network of verse, in which poems were accompanied, answered and translated by other poems across the two languages. Latin poems sometimes circulated alongside English poems about similar themes: to take just one example, a number of proto-Whig poems of 1680 that criticised the repeated prorogation of the Second Exclusion Parliament, written in both Latin and English, appeared together in a manuscript anthology of political verse.Footnote51 Verse that answered other verse was common, such as two Latin answers to Marvell’s famous Latin epigram on Colonel Blood, and Gerard Cater’s English answers to several Jacobite Latin poems in the 1690s.Footnote52 Translations were widespread, especially of epigrams: this was the great age of the “bilingual epigram”.Footnote53 Often, the Latin and English versions of a poem would circulate together, and if the English version circulated alone, it might carry a note that it had been “English’d from the Latin”, keeping the ghost of a Latin original before readers. Importantly, translation was not just in one direction, as translation of English verse into Latin was common in this period; parts of Hudibras were rendered in Latin, for instance, and Absalom and Achitophel inspired two Latin translations.Footnote54 Sometimes, translations, in both directions, might simultaneously act as answers, by switching from panegyric to satire as well as switching languages: Edmund Waller’s English-language funeral elegy for Cromwell was translated into a royalist Latin satire, and John Briscoe’s Latin panegyric to William III after his victory at the Boyne in 1690 attracted a satiric anti-Williamite English translation.Footnote55
1658–1670
A chronological survey of later Stuart satire, in Latin as in English, must begin with royalist verse composed in the years around the Restoration itself. After Oliver Cromwell’s death in 1658, royalists responded to a wave of adulatory elegies by composing poems that condemned the Lord Protector and celebrated his demise. One Latin example has just been mentioned: a poem of 31 hexameters, attributed to Edward Dering, that was written as a satiric royalist translation into Latin of Edmund Waller’s English-language funeral elegy for Cromwell, “Upon the Late Storme”.Footnote56 Dering inverted Waller’s images to turn the poem into anti-Cromwell invective. Where Waller’s poem interpreted the storms that accompanied Cromwell’s death as a sign of the Protector’s greatness, with the winds representing his “dying groanes”, the falling trees forming his funeral pyre, and Nature “sighing [having] swel’d the Sea”, Dering reinterpreted the extreme weather as a sign that the natural world, personified as “Terra” (Earth) and “Auster” (the South Wind), was shaking and blustering in order to coax this “monster of shameful wickedness” (“monstrum … pudendi … sceleris”) towards Hell:
[Give back your soul, which now the Furies demand, now Hell. Earth will not carry you further: shuddering at a monster of shameful wickedness, she has shaken herself entirely from the depths of her heart, and has stirred mountains, cities, sea and stars. And this was no vain effort, but has at last shaken Cromwell from his British carriage and driven him down to black Hell, and bids him cleanse his stinking soul in Stygian waves. Then, a new fury: Auster, more violent than usual, shakes the eternal mass of the world. The stars were making for the waves, and the temples with precarious roofs were collapsing. The mountains have barely stayed in place, and Earth herself gapes open, to open a path descending into black Hell for the wretch.]
In addition, Waller’s poem had compared Cromwell to Romulus, another founder of a new state who had died during a storm:
Dering inverted this image to depict Romulus’ death as a just punishment for his involvement in the deaths of Remus, his brother, and Tatius, king of the Sabines:
[They say that once, in this way, cruel Romulus collapsed lifeless on the Aventine hill, among lightning bolts and clouds and fierce storms, and finally paid the penalty for the lost old age of King Tatius, killed under a false alliance, and for his brother’s blood.]
Completing the parallel, both poems concluded with an image of the sea spreading news of Cromwell’s death around the world: in Waller’s case as a lament, in Dering’s as a celebration.Footnote58
After the Restoration, the ensuing wave of royalist panegyric included satiric reflections on the defeated parliamentarian forces. For example, a Somerset clergyman called John Oliver wrote a series of Latin poems celebrating the return of Charles II that included condemnation of the king’s enemies. One blasted the “Fanatic Faction” (“Fanatica … Factio”) of parliamentarians that had destroyed the kingdom:
[We once wept for British land when thunderstruck by foreign enemies; now a terrible Fanatic Faction disturbs it – terrible, certainly, but it has lacked success. The tyrants raged exceedingly in savage councils, and brought destruction to the kingdom and the king’s head.]
In another poem, Contra rebellantium in Regem conspirationem (“Against the conspiracy of rebels against the king”), Oliver described the internal enemy as “a madness lurking like a snake in the grass” (“rabies latitans velut anguis in herbâ”) and warned that “it appeared as a lamb, [but] behold a wolf” (“agnum prætulit, ecce lupum”).Footnote60
One of the next moments to inspire a wave of political verse, in both Latin and English, was the Great Fire of London in 1666. In Latin, Great Fire poems mostly adopted the form of panegyric or lament, although one hexameter satire, Actio in Londini Incendiarios (“Action against the Burners of London”), was written by Simon Ford, and more generally these poems satirised the Jesuits and Frenchmen who were blamed for the catastrophe.Footnote61 By the mid-1660s, however, the most important trend in political satire was the growth of “oppositional” verse. This was not related to a formal political opposition, but reflected a developing tendency to criticise the political centre in response to court decadence and perceived mismanagements of the Second Anglo-Dutch War by the ministry of Edward Hyde, earl of Clarendon. In English, this was centred on the famous cluster of “advice to a painter” satires in 1666–1667, some of which were written by Andrew Marvell, that adopted the literary conceit of instructing a painter how to depict the times.Footnote62 Two important Latin satiric epigrams also appeared in this context. The manuscript record suggests that these circulated very widely – indeed, they appear to have been among the most popular Latin satiric poems of the entire later Stuart period. The first was an attack on Charles II for preferring amours to wars, sometimes erroneously attributed to Rochester:
[You flee battles, you pursue beautiful women, and you resist war and the warrior: beds are your battlefields. Being weak yourself, you love the weak. You seem to be bold Mars at Venus’ work, and Venus at Mars’ arms.]
This epigram, which plays on various forms of bellum (“war”) and bella (“beautiful woman”), gained further bite from its having supposedly been left at the door of the king’s bedchamber – both a satiric reference to the site of his own (sexual) conquests and a warning that opposition could be found at the heart of the court.Footnote64 It appears to be a domesticated variant of an epigram originally written about Louis XIV in 1666.Footnote65 Its earliest datable version in Britain was apparently in a printed pamphlet of 1667, alongside four English-language “advices to a painter”, and thereafter it circulated widely in Britain.Footnote66
The other major Latin satiric epigram of this period attacked Clarendon after his fall from power in 1667:
In a compact structure of four hexameters, the charges against Clarendon are listed and his downfall explained. The first line lists three policy disasters of his tenure as Lord Chancellor: the “one agreement” is his sale of Dunkirk to the French in 1662, the “two marriages” are those between James, duke of York, and Anne Hyde (Clarendon’s daughter) in 1660, and Charles II and Catherine of Braganza (which had produced no heirs) in 1662, and the “threefold war” was the Second Anglo-Dutch War, fought against the French, Dutch and Danish; these three conditions, listed as ablatives of means, are presented as resulting in the first claim of the final line, that Clarendon destroyed the kingdom. In the same way, the second line lists three ways that Clarendon allegedly secured funds by corruption – through his legal work as Lord Chancellor, through his dealings with the French and through exploiting customs duties – which, as the second part of the final line explains, led him to build a “palace”, the sumptuous Clarendon House (built 1664–1667). The third line asserts the breadth of opposition to Clarendon, by king, people and Parliament, which resulted in him “cast[ing] off the purple” (i.e. his legal robes); he was dismissed by the king in August 1667, was subject to impeachment proceedings by the Commons in October–November, and fled into exile in France in late November.Footnote68
1670–1681
Latin satires of the 1670s also tended to adopt an oppositional political perspective, whether explicitly or implicitly. Two of these were written by Marvell. The first was his 1671 poem about Colonel Thomas Blood, who had attempted to steal the Crown Jewels from the Tower of London.Footnote69 This ten-line epigram, which offers a daringly sympathetic account of Blood from an anti-episcopalian perspective – Blood disguised himself in clerical robes when carrying out his crime, and “no mask is more accustomed to deceive kings” (“Larva solet Reges fallere nulla magis”) – circulated in both Latin and English; although the English version is better known today, the Latin version was probably written first. Marvell’s second satire was Scaevola Scoto-Britannus (1676, “The Scoto-British Scaevola”), a longer poem in elegiac couplets and another anti-episcopalian piece.Footnote70 This describes the torture of James Mitchell, a Scottish nonconformist, for attempting to assassinate James Sharp, archbishop of St Andrews. Mitchell is presented as akin to the Roman hero Scaevola, who had also nobly refused to give in to torture, while “Sharpius … perfidus” and his fellow bishops are condemned.
Looking to European affairs, the Third Anglo-Dutch War was accompanied by several epigrams that adopted a pro-Dutch or anti-French perspective, which ran counter to the pro-French, anti-Dutch direction of Charles II’s foreign policy.Footnote71 Anti-French verse was also written in the context of a French competition launched in 1671 for composing a Latin distich to be inscribed on a pediment on the new colonnade at the Louvre. Not only did this inspire many compositions by British poets – including Marvell, who composed a series of panegyric epigrams for the occasion – but it also provoked an inevitable wave of satiric responses that exploited the opportunity to lampoon Louis XIV.Footnote72 One mocked Louis for his reliance on British poets for his competition:
[How much do you owe to your British neighbours, Louis? Look, you are wholly a work of our war and art! A British Mars made you great, Louis, and a British Muse sings that you have become great.]
Another important theme in 1670s verse was Catholicism, which was the subject of growing anxiety as “popery” appeared to be gaining ground at court and elsewhere. One example is Canticum Catholicum (1675), a translation into rhyming Latin of The Catholick Ballad (1674), an anti-Catholic satire. Declaring “O Catholica causa!”, the poem adopts the parody voice of a Catholic who seeks the return of popery in Britain. It praises Catholicism in exaggerated terms designed to be laughable to readers, to mock the pretensions of papal authority (the quotation is given here beneath the English original):
This was presumably translated into rhyming Latin to enhance the satiric effect by parodying the language of papal Rome, but the use of Latin also brought linguistic benefits: St Peter’s “old” chair is translated by the more negative “tetram”, meaning “foul” or “disgraceful”, and the word used for “Tradition”, “traditores”, literally “those who hand over”, can mean “traitors” as well as “teachers”.
Anti-Catholic verse continued to be composed after the “popish plot” revelations in 1678. William Petty wrote several Latin poems against the Jesuits; Petty was an important writer of Latin verse, and had previously written satiric poems about Charles II’s closure of coffeehouses in 1675 and parliamentary turbulence of the same year.Footnote74 In 1680, a printed Conjuratio Jesuitica in Carolum II (“The Jesuit Conspiracy against Charles II”) satirised the popish plot in hexameters.Footnote75 There were also poems that were linked with the oppositional/Whig side of politics more generally, including a satiric epitaph of 1680 about the “still born Parliament” – the Second Exclusion Parliament, prorogued for a year without meeting in order to silence its heavy concentration of Whigs – and, later, a 1684 lapidary poem condemning the arrest at Leiden of Thomas Armstrong, a Whig who had allegedly been involved in the Rye House Plot.Footnote76
1681–1688
As the tide turned against the Whigs from 1681, and the loyalist “Tory Reaction” took hold, the balance of Latin satire tracked the wider shift from Whig to Tory. One of the most substantial examples of Tory Latin satire in this period is Richard Dighton’s Epulae Pseudo-Protestantium Interdictae (1682, “The Pseudo-Protestants’ Feasts Prohibited”), a hexameter satire on the Whigs that was written for the Oxford Encaenia.Footnote77 The “epulae” in question referred to the “Whig Feast” that had been organised by London Whigs to be held on 21 April 1682 as a thanksgiving for the country’s delivery from popery.Footnote78 On 19 April, however, the king had prohibited the celebration, as he considered it a front for Whig politicking and wanted to start taking steps towards regaining control of Whig London. Although some Whigs defied the prohibition, overall the king’s move was successful, and left the Whigs humiliated.
The poem employs the device of a first-person speaker wandering through London, conversing with a friend, a scenario which strongly recalls Horace’s first-person encounter with an interlocutor in a Roman street in one of his satires.Footnote79 The speaker notices some unfamiliar people with strange appearance and dress, and his friend explains to him that they are “Poloni” (“Poles”). He asks whether they are in London to look for a king, and the friend responds that they have, in fact, already selected one. Footnotes in one manuscript version of the poem explicate its meaning: the Poloni are “Fanatics who, as happens in Poland, maintain that a king should be chosen by the votes of the people” (“Fanaticos … qui (ut fit in Polonia) suffragiis populi Regem esse creandum contendunt”), and the “king” they have chosen is the earl of Shaftesbury.Footnote80 This aligns the poem with contemporary Tory polemic, which alleged that Whigs wanted to introduce a Polish-style elective monarchy, and that Shaftesbury, a leading Whig, was seeking power for himself.Footnote81 The poem then describes the feasts planned by the Poloni/Whigs. The friend explains that, despite appearances, the feasts of these “Publicolae” (or, in another version, “Poplicolae”) – “Public-worshippers” – are designed to criticise and mock the king and his brother, and are therefore politically dangerous:
[All of these Public-worshippers, whom the king’s grace favours in vain, harass Charles and hate James. And now the feasts (which they have arranged with great care), the pact of friendship and the pact of common love would prove to be – let's remove the mask from this business – nothing other than terrible hostility against those they mock, the king and his brother.]
The speaker observes that “we know that meal is party to this” conspiracy (“farinam/Novimus esse ream”); this mention of “meal” (in the sense of “flour”) is a reference to the “Meal Tub Plot”, which had been “revealed” in 1680 and was claimed by Tories to be a treasonous Whig scheme. This controversy is used to draw a parallel between Whig plotting and Greek craftiness against Troy:
[Don’t by any means allow something horrendous and infernal to hide in bakers’ bellies, as a conspiracy was once hidden, as is reported, in the belly of a Trojan horse.]
As a result, the king prohibits the feasts, and the speaker raises a smile at the Whigs’ ensuing hunger:
[But who could hold back hidden smiles – although much pity is felt for a rumbling stomach – when a feast-goer, wretched and empty, returned to his wife?]
He also passes satiric comment about the Whig newspapers of the day:
[Meanwhile, those Mercuries who sell news to the whole kingdom, and transmit everything with Polish faith – what will they do after the king has forbidden the feasts? The wretched must either sleep or endure their hunger for a whole week, unless perhaps meals that are luxuriously described on paper, which the presses are ready to toil over, can drive away the noisy complaints of the stomach.]
Whig newspapers such as True Protestant Mercury (1680–1682) and Impartial Protestant Mercury (1681–1682) were an important element of Whig public politics in the Exclusion Crisis, and especially during 1682 – well after the Whig parliamentary cause had collapsed in March 1681 – but their impotence is wryly suggested here due to the inability of even the most luxuriously-described foods to satisfy Whig hunger. The king’s prohibition of the feasts becomes a metaphor for the starvation of the Whig cause as a whole.Footnote82
There were many other Tory satires during this period of “Tory Reaction”, including: the 1682 lapidary satire on Richard Baxter mentioned above; two translations into Latin of Absalom and Achitophel (both Absalon et Achitophel, both 1682), written in hexameters, by Francis Atterbury and William Coward; a lapidary satire triumphing in the defeat of the republican “good old cause” entitled Causae Veteris Epitaphium (“Epitaph of the Old Cause”), printed in 1682 and reprinted in an expanded edition in 1685; a hexameter satire against nonconformists entitled Conventicula Dissipata (“The Conventicles Dispersed”), written for the 1683 Encaenia but then printed as a broadside in London in 1685 with an English translation; and a series of epigrams attacking the duke of Monmouth and earl of Argyle after their Whig rebellions in 1685.Footnote83
1688–1702
The largest concentration of Latin satire in the period was composed between 1688 and 1702, and was connected to the Glorious Revolution and its aftermath.Footnote84 This had a particularly European flavour, as poets in England, Scotland, France, the Dutch republic and elsewhere responded to the complex international conflict between Williamite and Franco-Jacobite forces. As this was in part a family drama, many poems focused on the four key figures of William, Mary, James and Louis. On the Williamite side, a lapidary poem called Votum (rendered in a contemporary English translation as “The Wish”), which circulated in both print and manuscript, presented James and Louis as twin “fighters for popery” (“Papismi propugnatores”), but with Louis as the “terror of his subjects” (“Subditorum Terror”) and James as a “laughing-stock” (“Ludibrium”). Another example is a satiric lament in hexameters by a certain “Wotton” that ventriloquises Louis, in which the French king expresses his nefarious plans for Britain and bewails their lack of success in the face of William’s strength.Footnote85
On the Jacobite side, satires included a widely-circulating epigram of 1695, written in France but circulating in Britain, that attacked Mary, recently deceased, as “a cruel sister, barren wife and disloyal daughter” (“Dura soror, sterilis coniux, Nata Impia”); a lapidary satire condemning Mary; another widely-circulating epigram that drew a contrast between the English role in liberating the Dutch from their Habsburg overlords in the sixteenth century and the Dutch role in imposing slavery on England now by sending over William; and various satiric assaults on William by Archibald Pitcairne, who depicted the king variously as a “Teutonic wolf” (“Teutonico … Lupo”), a Hydra, and Satan’s prime agent on Earth.Footnote86 Another Jacobite epigram attacked William on more personal grounds:
[Why, wicked Bentinck, do you weep for the loss of Mary? Now Orange only possesses genitals for you.]
This addresses Hans Willem Bentinck, earl of Portland, who was alleged to be the king’s lover, but its real target is William (referred to by his pre-regnal title of “Auriacus”, “Orange”, to deny his legitimacy as king). It suggests that Portland’s tears for the death of Mary II were false, as he would now be able to enjoy William’s exclusive sexual attention. Another important poem of this period, although not Jacobite per se, is an epigram of 1698 about the burning of Whitehall, which claimed that the palace deserved to burn because of the immorality of the court; this uses Whig language, and presumably reflects growing disillusionment with William at this time.Footnote88
These poems culminated in clashing epigrams in the aftermath of William’s death in 1702. These centred on the king’s horse, Sorrel, from which he had been thrown in a riding accident near Hampton Court a few weeks before his death, and which was therefore (falsely) believed responsible for his demise. A Jacobite epigram, variously attributed to Thomas Smith and Stephen Hales, quickly circulated that praised the “famous horse” (“illustris sonipes”) as “liberator of the human race” (“humani generis vindex”) for having brought about the death of the “tyrant” (“moriente Tyranno”); interestingly, the main English version of the poem does not attempt to translate the controversial word “tyrant”. This was followed by a Williamite response by Edmund Chishull, an Oxford scholar, that condemned Sorrel as “the worst of four-footed beasts” (“pessime quadrupedum”) and a “traitor” (“traditor”).Footnote89
Other satires of 1688–1702 lampooned individuals who had shifted their loyalties from James to William. These poems were generally written as Tory/Jacobite condemnations of those who had defected to William, but they might also serve as Whig/Williamite mockeries of formerly uncompromising 1680s Tories who hypocritically turned against James. Gilbert Burnet, bishop of Salisbury and one of William’s principal advisors, was a particular target, being the subject of two lapidary satires – one of which was one of the most widely-circulating Latin satires of the later Stuart period – and a number of satiric epigrams, including by Pitcairne and Tom Brown.Footnote90 Among other charges, these satires attacked Burnet for the ease with which he had abandoned his oaths to the Stuart kings and switched to William, and for writing A Pastoral Letter (1689), a tract that argued for de facto obedience of the new sovereigns and was burned in 1693 by Commons’ order. Thomas Smith composed a Jacobite epigram that condemned the formation of a pro-William “Association” in Oxford in 1688, asking, “Where does this changed loyalty, this inconstancy of morals, come from?” (“Unde haec fluxa fides? haec inconstantia morum?”).Footnote91 Another group of epigrams satirised William Jane, Regius Professor of Divinity at Oxford, who had been responsible for the notorious 1683 Oxford decree that asserted the necessity of passive obedience to the crown but defected to William in 1688. One of these read:
[If a face is not to be trusted, as the verses say, surely trust is not owed to you, Janus, being two-faced?]
This epigram’s satire relies on a tag from the Roman satirist Juvenal (“fronti nulla fides”; “appearances cannot be trusted”, literally “no trust for a face”),Footnote93 and the two-faced Roman god Janus, whose vocative (i.e. the form used for direct address), conveniently, is “Jane”. There was also a widely-circulating epigram, probably written by Tom Brown, about William Sherlock, a clergyman who took oaths to William and Mary in 1690 after initially asserting the importance of maintaining his oaths to James, and of whom it was therefore said, “He will swear one allegiance to two kings; he swears his loyalty to each, he betrays his loyalty to each” (“Binis obsequium jurabit Regibus unum,/Jurat utrique fidem, prodit utrique fidem”).Footnote94 Later, a Jacobite epigram attacked George Porter, a Jacobite plotter who defected to William in 1696 after being captured, by drawing a comparison with Judas.Footnote95
1702–1714
The height of the “rage of party” during Anne’s reign was a less productive era for Latin political satire – one signal that Latin was to become a less prominent feature of British culture in the eighteenth century. The satires that did circulate were mostly connected with party politics. On the Tory side, for example, a 1705 lapidary satire about the Church of England gained considerable traction, circulating in manuscript as well as appearing in the printed Poems on Affairs of State:
[Stop, traveller, and read this wonder of wickedness. Under this marble are buried the remains of a wholly venerable mother – let her lie hidden lest she be wholly prostituted – who was dead while alive and alive while dead. O impious and extraordinary crime! Abandoned by her defender, tormented by her fathers, killed by her sons. A votive sacrifice by the votes of the masses and the rage of fanatics. You ask: where on the earth is this? On an island where the monarch acts against the monarchy, the churchmen against the church, and the lawmakers against the law. She fell ill on 5 November 1688 and died in 1705.]
The context for this poem is the battles over the Church in the early years of Anne’s reign: the failure of high-church legislation to ban occasional conformity for the third parliamentary session in a row (“Legislatores contra Legem”), with the bishops having been notable opponents of the change (“Ecclesiastici contra Ecclesiam”). Most strikingly, the monarchy was itself at fault (“Monarcha … contra Monarchiam”): the Church fell ill on the day William landed in England, and was abandoned by its “Defensor”. As a result, the Church, personified as a mother, had now died after suffering desertion, defilement and destruction at the hand of those men who were meant to protect her. As was a staple of Tory polemic, the sacrifice of the Church was blamed on dangerous opinions of the multitude (“suffragiis των παντων”) and the “rage of fanatics” (“Fanaticorum furore”).Footnote97
On the Whig side, one example is an epigram that satirised the Tory ministry of Robert Harley, earl of Oxford, in the form of a parody of the letters patent issued when twelve new Tory peers were created in January 1712 to win votes in the House of Lords on the peace negotiations with France:
[Thus let the earl of Oxford stand more firm in the House, and let Newcastle’s wealth be given to him. Thus let us more quickly enjoy the Prince of Wales and peace. Thus let Sophia never wield the sceptres of the Britons. Thus let titles be less illustrious, the names of nobles become worthless, and honour be diminished. Thus let the duke of Marlborough fall in quick and certain ruin, and let France watch this, rejoicing. Therefore, let Masham and the rest become peers – nowhere else does Anne create a peer with a pure motive.]
The poem, entitled Proaemium Generale Literarum Patentium Singulorum nuperorum Baronum, mutatis mutandis (“The General Preamble of the Letters Patent for Certain new Peers, changing what needs to be changed”), reflects Whig claims that time was so short to write the twelve letters patent needed for the new peers that the same preamble was used for all. It purports to give the real reasons for creating the Tory peers: to enhance Oxford’s own status, to advance the Jacobite cause, and to bring down the duke of Marlborough, which would benefit France.
Other Latin satires of Anne’s reign include a Tory epigram attacking Marlborough that repurposed an epigram that had attacked the duke of Buckingham in the 1620s, suggesting that Marlborough had also become over-mighty; a verse letter by Anthony Alsop that ventriloquised Marshal Tallard, who had commanded French forces at the battle of Blenheim in 1704 and was captured and imprisoned in Nottingham; a Whig epigram of 1710 that condemned the Sacheverell mobs of 1710; Jacobite epigrams on Marlborough, Godolphin and the Hanoverian succession by Pitcairne in 1712–1713; and a Whig satire on a “Tory woman” of 1713.Footnote99 By 1714, however, the current of Latin satire on affairs of state was ebbing, and would never regain the prominence it had experienced during the Stuart century.Footnote100
Conclusion
Political satire flourished in Latin, as in English, within the intense partisan culture of later Stuart Britain, as a mode of criticism and attack that was deployed in the paper wars between loyalist and oppositional, Tory and Whig, Jacobite and Williamite forces. Latin satire was mostly a manuscript culture, and was primarily characterised by epigrams, followed by lapidary verse and longer poems in hexameters; the latter, the traditional mode of Roman satire, formed a relatively minor part of the satiric landscape. Some poems circulated more widely than others, especially the “Bella fugis” epigram satirising Charles II (1667), the epigram against Clarendon (1667), Marvell’s epigram on Blood (1671), the lapidary satire against Burnet (c.1689), the epigram on the Whitehall fire (1698), the Jacobite epigram on William III’s horse (1702), and the Tory lapidary satire on the Church of England (1705). What united these more popular satires is that they were short and often circulated alongside English translations, which made them more accessible than might initially appear. Even those without much or indeed any Latin would have encountered these poems, and could have gained an indirect or partial understanding of their meaning. Latin was an omnipresent feature of early modern British society, and was experienced in public as well as among the elite.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).
Additional information
Funding
Notes
1. This article builds on the project “Neo-Latin Poetry in English Manuscript Verse Miscellanies” (2017–2021), funded by the Leverhulme Trust and directed by Dr Victoria Moul. I would like to thank Dr Moul for her invaluable advice and assistance for this research, including discussions about my Latin translations, and for advance sight of her Literary History. I would also like to thank the other members of the NLPEM team, Dr Bianca Facchini, Sharon van Dijk and Raffaella Colombo, for their many and varied contributions to the research behind this article, and Dr Leo Shipp for discussions about several of the poems.
2. Fowler, Kinds of Literature, 106–129. Applications of this approach to early modern Britain include McRae, Literature, Satire and the Early Stuart State (for English); Marshall, Practice of Satire (for English); Moul, Literary History, ch. 8 (for Latin).
3. Important recent attempts to define satire in the context of early modern Britain can be found at Marshall, Practice of Satire, 2–8 (which adopts a “descriptive characterisation” rather than a “definition”); and Knights and Morton, Power of Laughter, 10–12.
4. I am excluding satire about literary figures, non-topical moralising satire, satire on local themes, and prose satire.
5. “Early Stuart libels” (to 1640) have attracted significant historiographical attention. See esp. McRae, Literature, Satire and the Early Stuart State; Bellany and McRae, “Early Stuart Libels”; Bellany, “Railing Rhymes Revisited”. For satire during the civil wars, see e.g. Smith, Literature and Revolution, 295–319. For post-Restoration satire, including the “poems on affairs of state” phenomenon, see esp. Lord et al., Poems on Affairs of State; DeLuna, “Poems on Affairs of State”; Love, English Clandestine Satire; Marshall, Practice of Satire.
6. The key reference works for neo-Latin across Europe are Knight and Tilg, Oxford Handbook of Neo-Latin, and Moul, Guide to Neo-Latin Literature. For British neo-Latin, see esp. Bradner, Musae Anglicanae; Binns, Intellectual Culture; Binns, Latin Poetry; Money, The English Horace, Houghton and Manuwald, Neo-Latin Poetry; Haan, “The British Isles”; Houghton et al., Anthology of British Neo-Latin Literature; Moul, Literary History. For Europe-wide surveys of neo-Latin satire, see De Smet, “Satire”; Kivistö, “Verse Satire”.
7. It should be emphasised that this figure excludes any classical or medieval Latin verse found in these manuscripts.
8. Examples can be found respectively at Corpus Christi College, Oxford, MS 324, f. 41 r–v, and BL Harley MS 3354, f. 45 r.
9. Early Stuart Latin satire awaits proper scholarly attention. To give a single example of a Latin satiric poem about each of these figures, see, respectively, BL Sloane MS 1768, f. 76 r; Nottingham University Library, Pw V 37, p. 37; BL Add. MS 10309, f. 39 v; Bodleian MS Rawl. poet. 62, f. 57 v.
10. Collections of Wase’s and du Moulin’s Latin verse can be found, respectively, at Bodleian MS Add. B. 5 and BL Add. MS 10418. Again, Latin satire in the civil wars awaits proper scholarly attention.
11. E.g. Haan, Andrew Marvell’s Latin Poetry; Pitcairne, The Latin Poems, 1–47.
12. Another pioneering scholar is James Doelman, whose work on epigrams in late sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century Britain is bilingual, and includes much consideration of epigrams as a form of political satire. He has focused on the period before 1640, but provides useful observations and approaches for a study of post-Restoration satire. See esp. Doelman, Epigram in England.
13. In both classical and neo-Latin verse, metre was strongly associated with genre. (Dactylic) hexameters were the metre used by the main Roman satirists, Lucilius, Horace, Persius and Juvenal. For discussion of metre in the context of British neo-Latin, see Moul, “Neo-Latin Metrical Practice”.
14. Bradner, Musae Anglicanae.
15. Love, English Clandestine Satire; Love, “Sir William Petty”.
16. Moul, Literary History, ch. 8.
17. For English epigrams, see esp. Doelman, Epigram in England. For neo-Latin epigrams, see Money, “Epigram and Occasional Poetry”; Cummings, “Epigram”; Moul, Literary History, ch. 7.
18. Elegiac couplets – pairs of hexameter and pentameter lines – were the single most common metre for neo-Latin verse in English manuscripts examined for NLPEM. See Moul, “Neo-Latin Metrical Practice”, 263.
19. Recent scholarship has emphasised the substantial traditions of non-satiric epigrams, but this should not detract from the fact that they were an ideal vehicle for satire. See esp. Doelman, Epigram in England, 15–44; Moul, Literary History, ch. 7.
20. Scaliger, Poetices Libri Septem, vol. 3, 170.
21. Houghton et al., Anthology of British Neo-Latin Literature, 140–141.
22. BL Harley MS 6054, f. 25 v. Other examples of epigrams, and of the other forms of satiric verse described in this section, are given in the chronological sections of this article.
23. Sparrow, Visible Words, 101–132; Sarasti-Wilenius, “Latin Lapidary Style”; Kelliher, “Dryden: A New Work”; Kajanto, “On Lapidary Style”; Tilg, “Die ‘Argute’ Inschrift”; Moul, Literary History, ch. 5. These are sometimes also described as “free verse” poems.
24. Tilg, “Die ‘Argute’ Inschrift”, 133.
25. Kajanto, “On Lapidary Style,” 154–155.
26. In addition, the writing of mock/satiric epitaphs was already common. See Doelman, Epigram in England, 318–344.
27. Long, Unreasonableness of Separation, [168]. Other copies can be found at Bodleian MS Lat. misc. e. 19, f. 145 r; Durham PG Library MS MSP 29, f. 33 v; BL Lansdowne MS 702, f. 4 v; BL Lansdowne MS 937, f. 20 r.
28. Bradner, Musae Anglicanae, esp. 212–225, 253–274; Moul, Literary History, ch. 8.
29. Moul, “Neo-Latin Metrical Practice,” 269–271. A sub-category of rhyming verse is the “leonine”, which in the middle ages referred to hexameter verse with internal rhyme, but was sometimes used in the seventeenth century to mean “rhymed accentual verse that uses a heightened prose rhythm”. See Love, “Sir William Petty,” 385.
30. BL Add. MS 34362, f. 51 r.
31. Moul, “Neo-Latin Metrical Practice,” 263.
32. Moul, Literary History, ch. 8. One probable example of a later Stuart iambic satire is Pseudo-Protestantium Flagellum (“The Whip of the Pseudo-Protestants”), by Thomas Southouse, an Oxford undergraduate. This is recorded as an “iambic poem” (“Carmine Iambico”, in the ablative) in the programme for the 1682 Oxford Encaenia (Theatri Oxoniensis Encaenia ... 1682). Its text has not been found, but it was probably a Tory satire on the Whigs.
33. For panegyric epic, see Haan, “Milton’s In Quintum Novembris”; Hale, “Milton and the Gunpowder Plot”; Moul, “England’s Stilicho”; Moul, Literary History, ch. 9. For panegyric odes, see Moul, Literary History, ch. 4.
34. For the circulation of English-language satire in this period, see esp. Love, English Clandestine Satire, 248–302. For the Latin satire, most of the examples discussed in this article have emerged from the manuscripts studied for NLPEM. Some poems appear ten or more times in the NLPEM corpus alone; many more no doubt remain to be discovered elsewhere. Where examples of authorship, circulation and readership are not cited in this section, evidence is given elsewhere in the article.
35. Flying Post, 50 (10 September 1695); Tutchin, Observator, 1.4 (22 April 1702); Ward, Poetical Entertainer, 5, 3–4. I discuss the phenomenon of “comment serials”, a distinct form of regular printed publication in this period that was designed primarily to convey comment and opinion rather than news (in contrast with the period’s newspapers), in Taylor, “John Tutchin’s Observator”.
36. Specifically, there are 22 Latin poems in the first editions of the main series of volumes. The bibliographical history of these volumes is complicated: pamphlets entitled “Poems on Affairs of State” first appeared in 1689; volume 1 of what became the main series first appeared in two parts in 1697, and these were first issued as a single volume in 1699; volumes 2, 3 and 4 of this series first appeared in 1703, 1704 and 1707 respectively; there were subsequent editions of these main volumes up to 1716; and there were also various piracies and imitations. See Lord et al., Poems on Affairs of State, vol. 1, xxvi; DeLuna, “Poems on Affairs of State”; Love, English Clandestine Satire, 147–149.
37. Oxford was the owner of much of the material in the important collection of Latin (and English) verse at Nottingham University Library, Pw V; for Sancroft, e.g. Bodleian MS Sancroft 53; for Trumbull, e.g. BL Add. MS 72478; for Haward, Bodleian MS Don. b. 8; for the Danvers family, BL Add. MS 34362; for the Killingworth family, BL Harley MS 6054 (and see Kelliher, “Dryden Attributions”).
38. Love, “Sir William Petty”; Money, The English Horace; Pitcairne, The Latin Poems, 42–46.
39. An epigram of c.1689 appears to have circulated surreptitiously in Oxford: Complete History of England, vol. 3, 419. For the Encaenia, see Bradner, Musae Angliancae, esp. 213–215. Bradner suggests that the Encaenia pieces may actually have been composed by tutors for their students to recite. There were other traditions of Latin verse at Oxford, including commemorative anthologies for occasions such as royal births, accessions, marriages and deaths (see e.g. Money, The English Horace, 229–232), and the “terrae filius” tradition of academic satire (see Henderson, “Putting the Dons”).
40. BL Lansdowne MS 937 (Kennett).
41. Watson’s miscellany, BL Add. MS 18220, was recognised by Harold Love as an important source for neo-Latin verse: Love, English Clandestine Satire, 269–273.
42. Gordon, Diary, 98–99.
43. Beeley and Scriba, Correspondence, 289.
44. This was printed in Rotterdam as an “epigram sent from Paris” (“epigramma Parisiis missum”) as early as 1688: In Felicem ... Expeditionem, 5. In Britain, it appears at BL Harley MS 7332, ff. 60 v–61 r; Bodleian MS Rawl. poet. 171, f. 36 r; Boyer, History of King William, vol. 1, 346.
45. Bloody News From Paris; Nottingham University Library, Pw V 1170; Bodleian MS Sancroft 53, p. 308.
46. E.g. BL Add. MS 18220, ff. 14 r, 38 r. For a discussion of the influence of Italian neo-Latin verse in England, including the appropriation of anti-papal verse by English Protestants, see Facchini, “Reception of Italian Neo-Latin Poetry” (also a product of NLPEM).
47. See Kemble, State Papers, 178. English manuscripts containing these epigrams include PRO SP 105/85, ff. 47 v–48 r; BL Add. MS 28253, f. 56 r; Bodleian MS Eng. poet. f. 13, f. 74 r–v.
48. For Monmouth, e.g. Happel, Grösseste Denkwürdigkeiten, 351; for Whitehall, see B., “Vingt lettres,” 160.
49. BL Stowe MS 305, f. 217 v; Tutchin, Observator, 1.4 (22 April 1702); Hickes, Ravillac Redivivus, 54–56. See also Leeds University Library, Brotherton Collection, MS Lt. 96, f. 157 r, which quotes a Latin panegyric epigram of 1700 with an English satiric translation that was “burlesqu’d in a Coffee-House”.
50. Fox, Oral and Literate Culture.
51. BL Add. MS 34362, f. 107 r.
52. For responses to Marvell, see Bodleian MS Douce 35, f. 81 r–v; for Cater, see Bodleian MS Add. A. 301; Bodleian MS Eng. d. 4005.
53. For “bilingual epigrams”, see Moul, Literary History, ch. 7.
54. For Hudibras, see e.g. Bodleian MS Don. e. 6, f. 37 r–v; for Absalom, see below.
55. Briscoe’s poem is at Academiae Oxoniensis Gratulatio, sigs 4F1v–4F2r; the satiric translation is at BL Sloane MS 1709, f. 166 r. For Dering’s poem, see below.
56. Waller’s poem was printed as a broadside in 1658 (Waller, Upon the Late Storme), and reprinted alongside two other elegies in 1659. Dering’s poem apparently survives in a single manuscript (BL Add. MS 4457, ff. 202 r–203 v), where it is undated, but there is no reason to assume that it was not written in the immediate months or years following Cromwell’s death. It is attributed to Dering in this manuscript; no corroborating evidence for this has been found. Dering was certainly a reader of classical Latin satire: Leeds University Library, Brotherton Collection, MS Lt. q. 29 records his transcriptions and translations of parts of Juvenal and Persius in 1665. Waller’s poem also inspired royalist responses in English, including William Godolphin’s “’Tis well he’s gone (O had he never been!)”, which is widely found in the manuscript tradition.
57. “Senectus” here is a puzzle: the sentence requires this to be a genitive, but nowhere is “senectus” attested as a genitive form.
58. Other Latin royalist satiric verse responses to Cromwell’s death can be found at Bodleian MS Rawl. poet. 65, f. 7 r–v; Bodleian MS Eng. poet. f. 24, f. 7 r; BL Add. MS 18220, f. 22 r–v.
59. Somerset Heritage Centre, DD/PH/205, p. 167.
60. Somerset Heritage Centre, DD/PH/205, p. 165.
61. Ford, Three Poems, sigs E3r–G2v (pp. 1–16). For Latin verse about the Great Fire more generally, see Manuwald, “Pope as Arsonist”.
62. E.g. Love, English Clandestine Satire, 101–116.
63. Quoted here from Society of Antiquaries MS 330, f. 80 r. In English manuscripts, other copies can be found at BL Add. MS 34362, f. 51 r; Bodleian MS Don. b. 8, p. 183; Bodleian MS Add. B. 105, f. 32 v; Bodleian MS Ashmole 1380, ff. 89 v–90 r; East Sussex Record Office FRE 601, f. 66 v; Cheshire Record Office MS D 8178, f. 1 r; Nottingham University Library, Pw V 1380. An additional copy at BL Lansdowne MS 852, f. 84 r, refers to Louis XIV rather than Charles II (see below). Love, English Clandestine Satire, 319, indicates the existence of four further manuscript copies in the US. This epigram receives attention in Love, “Sir William Petty,” 382–383, although this quotes a slightly different version, with “Bellatores” in place of “Bellatori” in line 2; “Bellatori” is found in more manuscript copies, and this is more likely to be the “correct” version because it sets up the “Bella Thori” pun in the same line. The epigram is sometimes attributed to Rochester, although this cannot be correct if it was not originally written about Charles II. Rochester does, however, have a connection with neo-Latin satire, as he wrote a satiric English translation of a Latin epigram about Louis XIV: see Love, “Sir William Petty,” 382.
64. This claim was found in the title that commonly appeared with the epigram, “What follows, written by I don’t know what rascal, was found at the threshold of the king’s bedchamber” (“Quæ sequuntur, in limine Thalami Regii, a nescio quo nebulone scripta, reperibantur [sic]”; quoted here from Directions to a Painter, 40). It cannot be verified, but it is not the only example of Latin satire that was supposed to have been left at the heart of the court: e.g. Gerbier, Nonesuch Charles, 17 (on James I’s cupboard); Bodleian MS Rawl. poet. 69, ff. 117 r–118 r (in Louis XIV’s antechamber and on James II’s table). The circulation of satiric verse was certainly a practice at court in the 1660s (see Love, English Clandestine Satire, 21–65).
65. See Sporschil, Geschichte des Entstehens, 266 This version was slightly different from the Charles II version, usually having “pugnaeque” instead of “belloque” in line 1, and “totusque” instead of “audaxque” in line 3. In Britain, the Louis XIV version can be found at BL Lansdowne MS 852, f. 84 r; Observations Upon the Government, 69.
66. Directions to a Painter, 40. Dzelzainis, “Andrew Marvell,” details the complex relationship between early printings of the painter poems; this epigram is only found in the pamphlet he labels “1667c”, before being removed in “1667d” for being too controversially direct against the king himself. This is the earliest example of the Charles II version of the epigram that I have found; the earliest English manuscript example so far located is Bodleian MS Ashmole 1380, ff. 89 v–90 r, where Robert Napier, a physician, transcribed it into a notebook in early 1668.
67. Quoted here from Society of Antiquaries MS 330, f. 48 v. In English manuscripts, other copies can be found at BL Add. MS 18220, ff. 7 v–8 r; BL Add. MS 23722, f. 15 r; BL Add. MS 34362, f. 118 v; Bodleian MS Ashmole 826, f. 47 r; Bodleian MS Don. e. 176, p. 40; Bodleian MS Rawl. poet. 147, p. 189 (two versions); Leeds University Library, Brotherton Collection, MS Lt. 38, f. 30 r; Durham PG Library MS MSP 29, f. 55 v. Love, English Clandestine Satire, 369, indicates the existence of at least one further copy in the US. This epigram receives attention in Love, “Sir William Petty,” 383, but the version quoted is a mistranscription by John Watson, which inverts lines 3 and 4, thereby muddling its tight construction. Different manuscripts present it in different ways (e.g. without numbers, or in a different physical shape), and with slight variants. I discuss this epigram further in Taylor, “Parliament in Scribal Verse”.
68. The precise dating of the epigram is a puzzle. Its culminating “exuit ostrum” (“he cast off the purple”) would most naturally refer to Clarendon’s loss of his “purple” robe as Lord Chancellor in August, but the “vox senatus” that is meant to have contributed to this would most naturally refer to the impeachment proceedings that came afterwards, in October–November. In addition, “exuit” suggests Clarendon’s active decision rather than his being dismissed. It is possible that the reference to Parliament is meant to indicate oppositional activity in the previous session of 1666–1667, but it is perhaps most likely that “exuit ostrum” refers to Clarendon’s flight into exile in late November, using poetic licence to conflate the different stages in his downfall over the previous few months. This is certainly the interpretation suggested by the copy of the poem at BL Add. MS 18220, ff. 7 v–8 r (transcribed in February/March 1668), whose title includes the date “Nov: 28: 1667”, which must refer to Clarendon’s flight – although, as we have seen, this is the copy that mistakenly inverts lines 3 and 4, so its interpretation cannot be taken as universal.
69. Marvell’s epigram on Blood has received substantial scholarly attention, including the listing of manuscripts containing both Latin and English versions. See Money, The English Horace, 36; Haan, Andrew Marvell’s Latin Poetry, 193–198; Smith, Andrew Marvell, 240–241; Marvell, Poems of Andrew Marvell, 413–414; Moul, Literary History, ch. 7; CELM.
70. This is a rare example of a longer satiric poem in elegiac couplets; it runs variously to 32 or 36 lines. For manuscripts and discussion of this poem, see Haan, Andrew Marvell’s Latin Poetry, 221–245; Smith, Andrew Marvell, 296–300; Marvell, Poems of Andrew Marvell, 420–422; CELM. Other Latin poems about Mitchell, apparently circulated in Edinburgh after his execution in 1678, can be found at Hickes, Ravillac Redvivus, 54–56.
71. E.g. Leeds University Library, Brotherton Collection, MS Lt. 13, f. 49 r; Bodleian MS Don. b. 8, p. 429 (originally from the Netherlands); Nottingham University Library, Pw V 1373 (another copy of the latter).
72. Kelliher, “Dryden Attributions,” 14–15; Haan, Andrew Marvell’s Latin Poetry, 184–190; Love, “Sir William Petty,” 382; Marvell, Poems of Andrew Marvell, 185–186.
73. Bodleian MS Add. B. 106, f. 7 v.
74. BL Add. MS 72899, ff. 46 r; 91 r–v; 93 r–v. See Love, “Sir William Petty,” 386–392; Taylor, “Parliament in Scribal Verse”.
75. Other anti-Catholic Latin verse in this period includes Carmen in ... Elizabethae Natalitia; and probably Caedes Edmundi-burij Gothofredi (“The Slaughter of Edmundbury Godfrey”), listed in the programme for the 1679 Oxford Encaenia (Theatri Oxoniensis Encaenia ... 1679).
76. The epitaph can be found at BL Add. MS 34362, f. 107 r; see also Taylor, “Parliament in Scribal Verse”. The Armstrong poem was written in the Dutch republic, but by a Scot (Robert Ferguson, a fellow Whig), about English-related events, and was later printed in POAS, vol. 4, 456–457.
77. Bodleian MS Lat. misc. e. 19, ff. 17 r–20 r; East Sussex Record Office FRE 690, B11–B13; Bodleian MS Rawl. poet. 171, ff. 24 r–25 r; Addison, Musarum Anglicanarum Analecta, 82–85 (from where the quotations here are taken). In the 1682 Encaenia programme (Theatri Oxoniensis Encaenia ... 1682), it is given the alternative title Epulae Foederatorum Interdictae. Some of the manuscripts attribute the poem to Francis Harding (of St John’s, Oxford, like Dighton), but the Encaenia programme and the Analecta name Dighton (sometimes spelled Dyton), which seems more likely.
78. For the Whig Feast, see Lord et al., Poems on Affairs of State, vol. 3, 174–182.
79. Horace, Satires, 1.9.
80. The footnotes are found in the manuscript copy at East Sussex Record Office FRE 690.
81. For the Whigs as Poles, see, e.g. Lord et al., Poems on Affairs of State, 396–402. The most famous depiction of Shaftesbury seeking power for himself is as allegorised as Achitophel in Dryden’s Absalom and Achitophel.
82. For the Whig newspapers in this period, see esp. Randall, “Newspapers”.
83. For the “good old cause” lapidary satire, see also the printed copy at Bodleian MS Ballard 50, ff.137 r–138 v For Conventicula Dissipata, the printed Latin version is entitled Conventicula Fanaticorum Dissipata, and its English translation Upon the Suppression of Conventicles; this is also found at East Sussex Record Office FRE 690, B14–B16; Addison, Musarum Anglicanarum Analecta, 86–90; it is sometimes attributed to Atterbury, but the Encaenia programme (Theatri Oxoniensis Encaenia ... 1683) names James Newton of Trinity. For the Monmouth and Argyle epigrams, see BL Harley MS 7332, f. 32 r, in addition to Patrick Gordon’s diary mentioned above. Other possible Tory satires at the Encaenia are Associatio Rebellis (“The Rebellious Association”, Thomas Wyndham) and, as mentioned above, Pseudo-Protestantium Flagellum (“The Whip of the Pseudo-Protestants”, Thomas Southouse), both listed in the 1682 programme (Theatri Oxoniensis Encaenia ... 1682).
84. I plan to discuss this sub-period in more detail in a separate article.
85. Manuscripts containing Votum can be found at BL Add. MS 21094, f. 119 r; Bodleian MS Add. A. 301, pp. 257–258; Bodleian MS Eng. poet. c. 18, f. 128 v; Nottingham University Library, Pw V 46; Pw V 47; Pw V 48; MoI 227; there was also a printed broadside entitled Votum pro Jacobo II. The satiric Louis XIV lament is found at Bodleian MS Firth e. 1, ff. 49 r–50 r.
86. For the Mary II epigram, see BL Add. MS 28253, f. 56 r; PRO SP 105/85, ff. 47 v–48 r; Bodleian MS Eng. poet. f. 13, f. 74 r–v. For the Mary II lapidary satire, see Nottingham University Library, Pw V 1496. For the epigram about liberating the Dutch, see Nottingham University Library, Pw V 1090; Bodleian MS Sancroft 53, p. 67; BL Add. MS 28955, f. 162 r. For Pitcairne, see Pitcairne, The Latin Poems; these references are respectively from poems 11, 81, 82. Other Pitcairne poems containing anti-William satire include poems 1, 12. The other major satiric theme of Pitcairne’s Jacobite verse was anti-Presbyterianism, following the Presbyterian overthrow of the Episcopalian Church of Scotland during the Revolution: see poems 1, 2, 18, 76.
87. BL Stowe MS 305, f. 217 v. Jacobite satiric references to William’s supposed homosexuality are also found in Pitcairne, The Latin Poems, poem 1, and an epigram preserved at Yale University Library, MS Osborn b. 111, p. 411.
88. The epigram can be found at: BL Harley MS 6054, f. 35 v; Nottingham University Library, Pw V 821, f. 1 r; BL Harley MS 6914, f. 91 v; POAS, vol. 3, 377.
89. Among manuscripts in England, the Jacobite epigram can be found at BL Add. MS 6229, f. 29 v; BL Add. MS 30162, f. 35 r; BL Add. MS 72478, f. 37 r; Bodleian MS Eng. poet. f. 13, f. 146 v (where it is attributed to Hales, a Cambridge scholar); Essex Record Office, Chelmsford, D/DW 4, [unnumbered item A]; the Williamite response can be found at BL Add. MS 6229, f. 30 r. Smith’s authorship is suggested in Lord et al., Poems on Affairs of State, vol. 6, 364, based on a reference in a letter to Samuel Pepys and a copy of the poem among his papers. The attribution is plausible – as discussed below, Smith certainly wrote a Latin Jacobite epigram in 1688 – but there is no direct evidence for it.
90. The major Burnet lapidary satire appears at least 12 times in NLPEM: Bodleian MS Eng. poet. c. 18, ff. 121 r–122 r; Bodleian MS Firth e. 6, ff. 64 v–65 v; Bodleian MS Rawl. D. 383, f. 136 r; BL Egerton MS 3880, ff. 277 v–278 r; BL Harley MS 7315, ff. 203 r–204 r; BL Lansdowne MS 852, f. 38 r–v; BL Stowe MS 305, f. 188 r; Durham PG Library MS MSP 29, f. 33 r; Leeds University Library, Brotherton Collection, MS Lt. q. 38, pp. 97–99; Nottingham University Library, Pw V 47; Pw V 47; Pw V 48. It can also be found in Princeton University Library, RTC01 No. 38, pp. 41–42, and Yale University Library, MS Osborn b. 111, pp. 157–158; Brown, Remains, 36–37. Its inclusion in Tom Brown’s Remains (as opposed to his Works) does not necessarily mean it was written by Brown, as this volume was compiled from his papers after his death, and includes items that he owned but did not write, including Marvell’s epigram on Blood. However, the attribution is plausible. See Moul, “Satire on the Bishop”; Moul, Literary History, ch. 8. The other lapidary satire is Plutoni, Reginae Pecuniae, also found at Yale University Library, MS Osborn b. 111, pp. 153–156. The epigram against Burnet on the subject of his Pastoral Letter can be found at Nottingham University Library, Pw V 877; Pw V 1415; BL Harley MS 6054, f. 23 v; Yale University Library, MS Osborn b. 111, p. 161; Brown, Works, vol. 1, 34. As this was included in Brown’s Works rather than his Remains, the attribution to Brown here is more certain. A second epigram against Burnet can also be found at BL Harley 6054, f. 23 v; a third is Pitcairne, The Latin Poems, poem 75.
91. Howell, Complete Collection, 83–84. From an account by Thomas Smith, “Now first printed from a MS”., included in this early nineteenth-century collection of state trials after the proceedings against Magdalen College, Oxford, in 1687–1688.
92. BL Harley MS 6054, f. 28 v. Other copies and other satiric epigrams about Jane can be found at Bodleian MS Rawl. poet. 81, f. 33 v; Bodleian MS Sancroft 53, p. 67; Nottingham University Library, Pw V 1415; West, True Character, 22; Complete History of England, vol. 3, 419.
93. Juvenal, Satires, 2.8. Modern editions of Juvenal have this as “frontis nulla fides”; both “fronti” (dative) and “frontis” (genitive) can be found in early modern editions. The difference in meaning is negligible.
94. Quoted from Chetham’s Library, Manchester, Mun. A.4.28, p. 240. Other manuscripts containing this epigram (with considerable variations) can be found at Bodleian MS Rawl. poet. 81, f. 33 v; Bodleian MS Rawl. poet. 171, f. 37 r–v; BL Harley MS 6054, f. 23 v; Leeds University Library, Brotherton Collection, MS Lt. 79; Nottingham University Library, Pw V 1374; Pw V 1379. It is also found in Brown, Works, vol. 4, 112. There was a wider public debate relating to Sherlock’s oath-taking: see Lord et al., Poems on Affairs of State, vol. 5, 238–256.
95. Nottingham University Library, Pw V 1154; Pw2 V 7, f. 58 r; BL Harley MS 6054, f. 25 r.
96. Quoted from POAS, vol. 4, 8–9. It is also found at BL Harley MS 6914, f. 118 r; Essex Record Office, Chelmsford, D/DW Z3, [unnumbered item C]; Bodleian MS Rawl. poet. 81, f. 43 v; BL Add. MS 78521, f. 128 r–v (where it is reappropriated for the political context of 1719). It is sometimes accompanied by a concluding epitaph, which in fact predates it; the concluding epitaph appears alone in Bodleian MS Add. A. 301, f. 4 r (apparently compiled c.1700), and Yale University Library, MS Osborn b. 111, p. 120 (where it is dated 1690).
97. “Suffragiis” could also be dative: “a votive sacrifice FOR the votes of the masses”.
98. BL Add. MS 28010, f. 82 r; also found at BL Add. MS 70095, f. 40 r. Marlborough was dismissed on 29 December 1711; the new peers were created on 31 December 1711 and 1 January 1712. The reference to Newcastle’s wealth presumably relates to plans to connect the Harley family with the duke of Newcastle’s family by marriage; Oxford’s son, Edward, was to marry Newcastle’s daughter, Henrietta, on 31 August 1713. “Masham” is Samuel Masham, a particularly controversial figure because he was married to Abigail Masham, the queen’s favourite and a Tory ally of Oxford.
99. Bodleian MS Ballard 47, f. 43 v (Marlborough); Leeds University Library, Brotherton Collection, MS Lt. 11, p. 247 (also Marlborough); Money, The English Horace, 328–330; Nottingham University Library, Pw V 1340; Pw V 1452; Pitcairne, The Latin Poems, poems 91, 92, 99; Ward, Poetical Entertainer, 5, 3–4.
100. But see Bradner, Musae Anglicanae, 253–265; Money, The English Horace, 168–228.
Bibliography1. Printed primary texts and editions
- Academiae Oxoniensis Gratulatio Pro Exoptato Serenissimi Regis Guilielmi Ex Hibernia Reditu. Oxford, 1690.
- Addison, J., ed. Musarum Anglicanarum Analecta: Sive, Poemata Quaedam Melioris Notae, Seu Hactenus Inedita, Seu Sparsim Edita, in Unum Volumen Congesta. Oxford, 1692.
- Atterbury, F. Absalon et Achitophel. Poema Latino Carmine Donatum. Oxford, 1682.
- B., P., ed. “Vingt lettres inédites de l’abbé J.-B. Du Bos.” Revue d’Histoire Littéraire de la France 14, no. 1: 141–162.
- Beeley, P. and Christoph J. Scriba, eds. The Correspondence of John Wallis. Volume IV: 1672–April 1675. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014.
- Bellany, A., and A. McRae, eds. “Early Stuart Libels: An Edition of Poetry from Manuscript Sources.” Early Modern Literary Studies Text Series I (2005). https://www.earlystuartlibels.net.
- Bloody News from Paris; Or, A Relation of the Tragical End of Some Persons of Quality at Paris, Who on the 8th. of This Instant August, 1689. Suffer’d for Their Witty Zeal the Severe Revenge of Lewis the Most Christian King. London, 1689.
- Boyer, A. The History of King William the Third. 3 vols. London, 1702–1703.
- Brown, T. The Works of Mr. Thomas Brown, Serious and Comical, in Prose and Verse. 4 vols. London, 1720.
- Brown, T. The Remains of Mr. Tho. Brown, Serious and Comical, in Prose and Verse. London, 1720.
- Canticum Catholicum, Sive Invitatio Ad Religionem Romanam. Fundata Rationibus Ponderosis. Latine Reddita & Anglico-Metris Pariter & Rythmis Juste Respondens 88. London, 1675.
- Catalogue of English Literary Manuscripts 1450–1700. [https://celm-ms.org.uk. Cited as “CELM”].
- Causae Veteris Epitaphii Editio Altera. Accedit Causa Vetus Conclamata. Quod Tibi Fieri Non Vis Alteri Facito, Hic Causae Veteris Modus, Haec Moderatio. London, 1685.
- Causae Veteris Epitaphium, in Antecessum, Ab Anonymo Autore Scriptum. London, 1682.
- A Complete History of England: With the Lives of All the Kings and Queens Thereof; from the Earliest Account of Time, to the Death of His Late Majesty King William III. 3 vols. London, 1719.
- Conjuratio Jesuitica In Carolum II. London, 1680.
- Coward, W. Absalon et Achitophel. Carmine Latino Heroico. Oxford, 1682.
- The Flying Post. London, 1695–1733. [This newspaper’s title varied a little during its run.]
- Ford, Simon. Three Poems Relating to the Late Dreadful Destruction of the City of London by Fire: Septemb. 1666. Entituled, I. Conflagratio Londinensis. II. Londini Quod Reliquum. III. Actio in Londini Incendiarios. London, 1667.
- Gerbier, B. The None-Such Charles His Character: Extracted, Out of Divers Originall Transactions, Dispatches and the Notes of Severall Publick Ministers, and Councellours of State as Wel at Home as Abroad. London, 1651.
- Gordon, P. Diary of General Patrick Gordon of Auchleuchries, 1635–1699. Volume IV: 1684–1689. Edited by Dmitry Fedosov. Aberdeen: Aberdeen University Press, 2013.
- Happel, E-G, E. G. Happelii Grösseste Denkwürdigkeiten Der Welt Oder So Genandte Relationes Curiosae. 3 vols. Hamburg, 1687.
- Hickes, G. Ravillac Redivivus, Being a Narrative of the Late Tryal of Mr. James Mitchel a Conventicle-Preacher, Who Was Executed the 18th of January Last, for an Attempt Which He Made on the Sacred Person of the Archbishop of St. Andrews. London, 1678.
- Holdsworth, E. Muscipula, Sive Kambromyomaxia. London, 1709.
- Houghton, L., G. Manuwald, and L. Nicholas, eds. An Anthology of British Neo-Latin Literature. London: Bloomsbury, 2020.
- Howell, T. B., ed. A Complete Collection of State Trials and Proceedings for High Treason and Other Crimes and Misdemeanors. Volume XII. London, 1816.
- In Felicem Serenissimi Arausionensium Principis Expeditionem Composita Carmina. Rotterdam, 1688.
- Kemble, John M., ed. State Papers and Correspondence Illustrative of the Social and Political State of Europe from the Revolution to the Accession of the House of Hanover. London, 1857.
- Long, T. The Unreasonableness of Separation: The Second Part. Or, A Further Impartial Account of the History, Nature, and Pleas of the Present Separation from the Communion of the Church of England. London, 1682.
- Lord, G., et al., eds. Poems on Affairs of State. 7 vols. New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1963–1975.
- Marvell, A. Directions to a Painter, for Describing Our Naval Business in Imitation of Mr. Waller. London, 1667.
- Marvell, A. Poems of Andrew Marvell. Edited by Nigel Smith. London and New York: Routledge, 2007.
- Newton, J. Conventicula Fanaticorum Dissipata. London, 1685.
- Observations upon the Government of the Kingdom of France, during the Reigns of Henry the Fourth, Sirnamed the Great, Lewis the Thirteenth, Sirnamed the Just, but More at Large of Lewis the Fourteenth, Sirnamed, Given of God, the Great, and the Invincible. London, 1689.
- Pitcairne, A. The Latin Poems. Translated and edited by John and Winifred MacQueen. Assen, Netherlands: Koninklijke Van Gorcum, 2009.
- Plutoni, Reginae Pecuniae, Et Diis Manibus Sacrum. London, 1690
- Poems on Affairs of State. London, 1689–1716. [Various editions: see footnote above. To distinguish this from the Yale Poems on Affairs of State, this is cited as “POAS”, referring to the first editions of the main, four-volume series, 1697–1707.]
- Pope, W. The Catholick Ballad: Or an Inuitation to Popery, upon Considerable Grounds and Reasons. To the Tune of 88. London, 1674.
- Salgado, J. Carmen In Serenissimae Reginae Elizabethae Natalitia, Classem Hispanicam Ab Ipsa Devictam, & Conspirationem Papisticam Antiquam & Modernam. London, 1680.
- Satira in Poetastros O–C–––enses. London, 1702.
- Scaliger, J. C. Poetices Libri Septem. Lyon, 1561.
- Theatri Oxoniensis Encaenia Jul. 11. An. 1679. Celebrata. Oxford, 1679.
- Theatri Oxoniensis Encaenia Jul. 7. An. 1682. Celebrata. Oxford, 1682.
- Theatri Oxoniensis Encaenia Jul. 6. An. 1683. Celebrata. Oxford, 1683.
- Three Poems upon the Death of His Late Highnesse Oliver Lord Protector of England, Scotland, and Ireland. Written by Mr Edm. Waller. Mr Jo. Dryden. Mr Sprat, of Oxford. London, 1659.
- Tutchin, J. The Observator. London, 1702–1712.
- Upon the Suppression of Conventicles. A Translation from the Latine Copy. London, 1685.
- Votum Pro Jacobo II. Sine Regno, Rege, Pro Ludovico XIV. Sine Christianitate, Christianissimo, Solutum. London, 1700.
- Waller, E. Upon the Late Storme, and of the Death of His Highnesse Ensuing the Same, by Mr. Waller. London, 1658.
- Ward, E. The Poetical Entertainer. London, 1712–1713.
- West, R. The True Character of a Church-Man, Shewing the False Pretences to that Name. London, 1702.
2. Secondary studies
- Bellany, A. “Railing Rhymes Revisited: Libels, Scandals, and Early Stuart Politics.” History Compass 5, no. 4 (2007): 1136–1179. doi:https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1478-0542.2007.00439.x.
- Binns, J. W. Intellectual Culture in Elizabethan and Jacobean England: The Latin Writings of the Age. Leeds: Francis Cairns, 1990.
- Binns, J. W., ed. The Latin Poetry of English Poets. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1974.
- Bradner, L. Musae Anglicanae: A History of Anglo-Latin Poetry, 1500–1925. London: Oxford University Press, 1940. New York: Modern Language Association of America.
- Cummings, R. “Epigram.” In A Guide to Neo-Latin Literature, edited by V. Moul, 83–97. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017.
- De Smet, I. “Satire.” In The Oxford Handbook of Neo-Latin, edited by S. Knight and S. Tilg, 199–214. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015.
- DeLuna, D. N., ed. “The Yale Poems on Affairs of State Thirty-Five Years Later.” 1650–1850: Ideas, Aesthetics, and Inquiries in the Early Modern Era 4, (1998): 307–382.
- Doelman, J. The Epigram in England, 1590–1640. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2016.
- Dzelzainis, M. “Andrew Marvell and the Restoration Literary Underground: Printing the Painter Poems.” The Seventeenth Century 22, no. 2 (2007): 395–410. doi:https://doi.org/10.1080/0268117X.2007.10555601.
- Facchini, B. “The Reception of Italian Neo-Latin Poetry in English Manuscript Sources, c.1550–1720: Literature, Morality, and Anti-Popery.” The Seventeenth Century 36, no. 4 (2021): 527–560.
- Fowler, A. Kinds of Literature: An Introduction to the Theory of Genres and Modes. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1982.
- Fox, A. Oral and Literate Culture in England, 1500–1700. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000.
- Haan, E. “Milton’s In Quintum Novembris and the Anglo-Latin Gunpowder Epic.” Humanistica Lovaniensia 41 (1992): 221–295; second part, Humanistica Lovaniensia 42 (1993): 368–393.
- Haan, E. Andrew Marvell’s Latin Poetry: From Text to Context. Brussels: Latomus, 2003.
- Haan, E. “The British Isles.” In The Oxford Handbook of Neo-Latin, edited by S. Knight and S. Tilg, 427–444. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015.
- Hale, J. K. “Milton and the Gunpowder Plot: In Quintum Novembris Reconsidered.” Humanistica Lovaniensia 50 (2001): 351–366.
- Henderson, F. “Putting the Dons in Their Place: A Restoration Oxford Terrae Filius Speech.” History of Universities 16, no. 2 (2001): 31–64.
- Houghton, L. B. T., and G. Manuwald, eds. Neo-Latin Poetry in the British Isles. London: Bristol Classical Press, 2012.
- Kajanto, I. “On Lapidary Style in Epigraphy and Literature in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries.” Humanistica Lovaniensia 43 (1994): 137–172.
- Kelliher, H. “John Dryden: A New Work from His Cambridge Days.” Transactions of the Cambridge Bibliographical Society 10, no. 3 (1993): 341–358.
- Kelliher, H. “Dryden Attributions and Texts from Harley MS. 6054.” The British Library Journal 25, no. 1 (1999): 1–22.
- Kivistö, S. “Verse Satire.” In A Guide to Neo-Latin Literature, edited by V. Moul, 148–162. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017.
- Knight, S., and S. Tilg, eds. The Oxford Handbook of Neo-Latin. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015.
- Knights, M., and A. Morton, eds. The Power of Laughter and Satire in Early Modern Britain: Political and Religious Culture, 1500–1820. Woodbridge: The Boydell Press, 2017.
- Love, H. English Clandestine Satire, 1660–1702. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004.
- Love, H. “Sir William Petty, the London Coffee Houses, and the Restoration ‘Leonine’.” The Seventeenth Century 22, no. 2 (2007): 381–394. doi:https://doi.org/10.1080/0268117X.2007.10555600.
- Manuwald, G. “The Pope as Arsonist and Christian Salvation: Peter Causton’s London Conflagratio: Carmen.” In Life, Love and Death in Latin Poetry, edited by F. Montanari and A. Rengakos, 275–295. Berlin and Boston: De Gruyter, 2018.
- Marshall, A. The Practice of Satire in England, 1658–1770. Baltimore: The John Hopkins University Press, 2013.
- McRae, A. Literature, Satire, and the Early Stuart State. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004.
- Money, D. K. The English Horace: Anthony Alsop and the Tradition of British Latin Verse. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998.
- Money, D. K. “Epigram and Occasional Poetry.” In The Oxford Handbook of Neo-Latin, edited by S. Knight and S. Tilg, 73–86. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015.
- Moul, V. “Neo-Latin Metrical Practice in English Manuscript Sources, c. 1550–1720.” In Neulateinische Metrik: Formen und Kontexte Zwischen Rezeption und Innovation, edited by S. Tilg and B. Harter, 257–276. Tübingen: Narr, 2019.
- Moul, V. “England’s Stilicho: Claudian’s Political Poetry in Early Modern England.” International Journal of the Classical Tradition 28 (2021): 23–50.
- Moul, V. “A Satire on the Bishop of Salisbury: Anonymous (Thomas Brown?), In Episcopum Quendam (c.1689).” In An Anthology of British Neo-Latin Literature, edited by G. Manuwald, L. Nicholas, and L. Houghton, 251–261. London: Bloomsbury, 2020.
- Moul, V. A Literary History of Latin & English Poetry: Bilingual Verse Culture in Early Modern England. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press (forthcoming 2022).
- Randall, S. “Newspapers and Their Publishers during the Popish Plot and Exclusion Crisis.” In Book Trade Connections from the Seventeenth to the Twentieth Centuries, edited by J. Hinks and C. Armstrong, 45–70. London: British Library, 2008.
- Sarasti-Wilenius, R. “Latin Lapidary Style in Finland.” Arctos: Acta Philologica Fennica 25 (1991): 121–132.
- Smith, N. Literature and Revolution in England, 1640–1660. New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1994.
- Smith, N. Andrew Marvell: The Chameleon. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2012.
- Sparrow, J. Visible Words: A Study of Inscriptions in and as Books and Works of Art. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1969.
- Sporschil, J. Geschichte des Entstehens, des Wachsthums und der Grösse der österreichischen Monarchie. Vol. 5. Leipzig: Friedrich Volckmar, 1844.
- Taylor, E. “John Tutchin’s Observator, Comment Serials, and the ‘Rage of Party’ in Britain, 1678–c. 1730.” Historical Journal 63, no. 4 (2020): 862–884. doi:https://doi.org/10.1017/S0018246X19000451.
- Taylor, E. “‘Our Masters the Commons Begin Now to Roar’: Parliament in Scribal Verse, 1621–81.” Parliamentary History (forthcoming).
- Tilg, S. “Die ‘Argute’ Inschrift Als Barocke Form Des Freien Verses.” In Neulateinische Metrik: Formen und Kontexte Zwischen Rezeption und Innovation, edited by S. Tilg and B. Harter, 133–148. Tübingen: Narr, 2019.