‘A Late Court-Poet’ Revisited: Milton, Cleveland, and The Readie and Easie Way

ABSTRACT

This essay makes a case for identifying the ‘late court-Poet’ to whom Milton alludes in both editions of The Readie and Easie Way to Establish a Free Common-wealth as the royalist poet John Cleveland, who died in 1658. Beginning with the difficulties critics and editors have previously encountered in identifying possible referents for Milton’s allusion, it proposes a new interpretative framework for the reference which is consistent with Milton’s polemical strategies, and which supports the suggestion that Cleveland might well have been his target. Drawing on new archival and textual evidence, as well as on recent scholarship, it sets out reasons for considering Cleveland a rival and enemy of interest for Milton from the 1630s onwards, and especially in the fraught moments of early 1660 when a restoration of the Stuart monarchy seemed – to Milton’s evident horror and despair – increasingly likely. In doing so, it revises familiar perceptions of Cleveland’s writings, readership, reputation and networks, offering a fresh view which illuminates a key aspect of Milton’s polemical focus in early 1660.

KEYWORDS:

• Milton, John
• Cleveland, John
• poetry
• polemic
• cipher
• Restoration
• monarchy

Disclosure Statement

The author reports there are no competing interests to declare

Notes

¹ The Readie and Easie Way to Establish a Free Commonwealth, in Keeble and McDowell, eds, 486, 488.

² Readie and Easie Way, 489.

³ Readie and Easie Way, 483.

⁴ Readie and Easie Way, 484, 485.

⁵ Readie and Easie Way, 483, 485.

⁶ Camden, Remaines, ‘Certaine Poemes … ’, 59.

⁷ Brome, A Jovial Crew, 1.1.448-9.

⁸ Duncan-Jones, ‘Milton’s “Late Court-Poet”’, 473.

⁹ Davenant, Gondibert, ed. David Gladish, Book 2, Canto 2, 14.

¹⁰ Ayers, ed. The Complete Prose Works of John Milton: vol 7, 1659-1660, 361.

¹¹ Chapman, Bussy d’Ambois, 1.1.34-6.

¹² Shakespeare, The Winter’s Tale, 1.2.6-9.

¹³ Eccles, ‘Brief Lives: Tudor and Stuart Authors’, 95-6.

¹⁴ Munday, Drayton, Hathwaye and Wilson, I Sir John Oldcastle, 4.2.15-20.

¹⁵ Eccles, ‘Brief Lives’, 96.

¹⁶ Eikonoklastes, in Neil Keeble and Nicholas McDowell, eds, The Complete Works of John Milton, vol. 6, 293.

¹⁷ Bourne and Scott-Warren, ‘“thy unvalued book”: John Milton’s copy of the Shakespeare First Folio’, 12-21, 61.

¹⁸ Duncan-Jones, ‘Milton’s “Late Court-Poet’”, 473.

¹⁹ ‘His Majesties Speech to both Houses at the Banqueting House in White-hall’, in Reliquiae Sacrae Carolinae, ‘Several Speeches Delivered by His Majesty’, 5.

²⁰ Parker, Observations, 22.

²¹ Bramhall, Serpent Salve, 103.

²² Heylyn, Short View, 91.

²³ Symmons, A Vindication of King Charles, 181.

²⁴ OED, ‘expression’, II.4.c.

²⁵ Milton, Of Prelatical Episcopacy, in Wolfe, ed., Complete Prose Works … vol. 1: 1624-42, 632.

²⁶ Eikonoklastes, 372.

²⁷ Egan, ‘Rhetoric and Poetic in Milton’s Polemics of 1659–60’, 79.

²⁸ Egan, ‘Rhetoric and Poetic in Milton’s Polemics of 1659-60’, 94-5; Egan, ‘“As His Own Rhetorick Shall Persuade Him:” Refutation and Aesthetic Self-Construction in Milton’s Antiprelatical Tracts’, 58-9; Egan, ‘Oratory and Animadversion: Rhetorical Signatures in Milton’s Pamphlets of 1649’, 204.

²⁹ Potter, Secret Rites and Secret Writing, 38-42.

³⁰ Cousins, ‘Cleveland, John’.

³¹ ‘The Answer to the Newark-Summons’, in Cleveland, Clievelandi Vindiciae, 169-72; A Letter to the Honorable William Lenthall Esq, 5-8; Gapp, ‘Notes on John Cleveland’, 1079-80.

³² Royal Commission on Historical Manuscripts, The Manuscripts of the Marquis of Ormonde, vol. 2, 391-3.

³³ Cleveland, ‘The King’s Disguise’, in Morris and Withington, ed., Poems, ll. 105-14.

³⁴ Eikonoklastes, 390.

³⁵ Readie and Easie Way, 486, 467, 490, 491, 507, 522, 523.

³⁶ The complicated history of the print publication of Cleveland’s poems is succinctly summarised by Morris and Withington in Poems, xli-xlix.

³⁷ Cleveland, The Character of a London-Diurnall, 1647; Houghton Gen *EC65 C5993 645cg.

³⁸ ‘J.C.’, The Character of a Moderate Intelligencer, with Several Select Poems. Thomason dated his copy (BL E385(9)) ‘Aprill 29. 1647’.

³⁹ Dryden spoke disparagingly of ‘Clevelandism’ in Of Dramatic Poesy, but the coinage predates this work: Fuller writes of his imitators as ‘such who have Clevelandized’ in his History of the Worthies of England,135. See also Jacobus, John Cleveland, 31-68.

⁴⁰ J. Cleaveland Revived, 2^nd edition (1660), 7.

⁴¹ Morris and Withington, eds., Poems, l-lv.

⁴² Overton’s travails have been recounted by Andrew Shifflett in ‘“A Most Humane Foe”: Colonel Robert Overton’s War with the Muses’, 161-5. The text of the poem as recorded in Thurloe’s papers differs considerably from the version printed as Cleveland’s, though it is close to a copy in a miscellany with clear connections to the English occupying forces in Scotland in the early 1650s. See NLS Adv MS 19. 3. 4, f.49r.

⁴³ To those listed in the Catalogue of English Literary Manuscripts we can add copies of ‘A Young Man to an Old Women Courting Him’ and ‘Upon an Hermaphrodite’ in a mid-seventeenth century miscellany, Yale MS Osborn b 465, pp. 10-11, 121-3, and a copy of ‘The Rebel Scot’ together with The Character of a London Diurnal among the papers of Evan Edwards of Rhual, Flintshire (Flintshire RO, Rhual Ms D/HE/926).

⁴⁴ Nottingham Univ. Pw V 178; see Duffy and Wilson, ‘Two Manuscripts of John Cleveland’, 163.

⁴⁵ Jacobus, John Cleveland, 114-45.

⁴⁶ Cleveland, The Character of a London-Diurnall, BL E.268(6).

⁴⁷ Morris and Withington, ed., Poems, xliii-iv

⁴⁸ Cleaveland’s Petition to His Highnesse the Lord Protector.

⁴⁹ The pamphlet edition went by the same title as Shears’ broadsides but also included a letter by Cleveland addressed to the Earl of Westmorland which was first published in a 1656 edition of the Poems. The scribal manuscript obtained by Thomason is BL E746(4); the dated broadsheet is BL 669.f.20/69.

⁵⁰ It has sometimes been assumed or asserted that Cleveland played a role in the writing and production of newsbooks in London in the later 1640s, a claim argued by ‘J. B. Williams’ (alias J. G. Muddiman) in his History of English Journalism, 83-6, accepted by Gapp in his ‘Notes’ (1082-84) and echoed by some recent scholarship (see, for example, Amos Tubb, ‘Mixed Messages: Royalist Newsbook Reports of Charles I’s Execution and of the Leveller Uprising’). This assertion, however, ultimately rests on a single contemporary claim in an issue of Mercurius Anti-Mercurius of April 1648 (sig. A2r) that Cleveland was the author of Mercurius Pragmaticus. Subsequent attributions by Muddiman and Gapp were based on an erroneous understanding of the extent of his verse canon, crediting him with authorship of verses in issues of Mercurius Pragmaticus that we now know to have been written by Marchamont Nedham.

⁵¹ ‘Williamson, Sir Richard (1563-1615/16), of York and Pottergate, Gainsborough, Lincs’, in Thrush and Ferris, eds., History of Parliament … 1600-1640.

⁵² Venn, Alumni Cantabrigienses; J. Cleaveland Revived, sig. A3v-4v.

⁵³ J. Cleaveland Revived, sig. A8v.

⁵⁴ Royal Commission on Historical Monuments, Newark on Trent: the Civil War Siegeworks, 91; Clergy of the Church of England Database, Person ID 135518.

⁵⁵ Maddison, Lincolnshire Pedigrees, 25; The Diary of Abraham de la Pryme, 117.

⁵⁶ Withington, ‘Mildmay Fane’s “Fugitive Poetry”’, 71; Cain, ed., The Poetry of Mildmay Fane, 256-7.

⁵⁷ McDowell, Poet of Revolution, 95.

⁵⁸ Cousins, ‘Cleveland, John’.

⁵⁹ Loxley, Royalism and Poetry in the English Civil Wars, 51-2.

⁶⁰ Cleveland, Poems, ed. Morris and Withington, 12-13.

⁶¹ Davidson, ed., Poetry and Revolution, 547-8.

⁶² See, for example, William Hog’s Paraphrasis Latina, in Duo Poemata, published in 1694, which printed ‘Lycidas’ with Cleveland’s elegy alongside Hog’s Latin translations of both. A second vernacular elegy, which is printed unsigned immediately prior to Cleveland’s elegy in Justa, has sometimes been attributed to him (Le Comte, tr. and ed., ‘Justa Eduardo King’, 222), and is included as a poem probably by Cleveland in Morris and Withington’s edition of his Poems. However, it only appears in two late 1650s editions of Shears’s Poems, when the canon was being extended with the inclusion of attitudinally plausible attributions, and is excluded from the 1677 Clievelandi Vindiciae. The internal evidence for Cleveland’s authorship adduced by Morris and Withington is weak, and partially dependent on the poem’s connections with a copy of the epitaph on Strafford now persuasively attributed to Paman. For these reasons, it is unlikely that this elegy is in fact by Cleveland. Why it should be the sole unsigned poem printed in Justa remains a puzzle.

⁶³ Postlethwaite and Campbell, eds, ‘Edward King, Milton’s “Lycidas”: Poems and Documents’, 92-5.

⁶⁴ Cleveland, Clievelandi Vindiciae, sig. A7v.

⁶⁵ de Quehen, ‘Pearson, John’.

⁶⁶ Pearson, Minor Theological Works, 2. 97-111.

⁶⁷ de Quehen, ‘Pearson, John’; Martinich, ‘Thomas Hobbes’s Interregnum Place of Worship’, 233-6.

⁶⁸ Pearson, An Exposition of the Apostles Creed, 679.

⁶⁹ Readie and Easie Way, 484, 485.

⁷⁰ Readie and Easie Way, 514, 515.

⁷¹ Fuller, History of the Worthies of England, 135.

⁷² de Quehen, ‘Pearson, John’.

⁷³ Birch, ed., A Collection of the State Papers of John Thurloe, 4. 184

⁷⁴ Carthew, The Hundred of Launditch and Deanery of Brisley, in the County of Norfolk, 3.109.

⁷⁵ Venn, Alumni Cantabrigienses. Venn lists Edward, John and Robert as sons of John Coke of Holkham, matriculating in 1631, 1631 and 1634 respectively, but this cannot be corroborated by the surviving genealogical evidence – and indeed conflates this John with the elder John Coke’s namesake heir, who was not in fact born until 1635 (‘Coke, John I (1635-71), of Holkham, Norf.’, in Henning, ed., History of Parliament … 1660-1690). It is possible that the John who matriculated with Edward in 1631 was indeed Edward’s brother, but that he died before the younger John was born in 1635. To complicate matters further, it is important to distinguish these three John Cokes from the man of the same name who matriculated from Trinity as sizar at Easter 1631, and was eventually appointed to a fellowship in 1637. This man is the likeliest author of a Latin poem included in the Cambridge miscellany presented to the King on his recovery from illness in 1633, Anthologia in Regis Exanthemata, to which several later contributors to Justa Eduardo King, as well as Edward King himself, contributed; he is at least a candidate for authorship of the Latin poem in Justa signed ‘Coke’, which Le Comte (220), attributes instead to Francis Coke or Cooke of Christ’s.

⁷⁶ Coke, A Detection of the Court and State of England, 2. 52-9.

⁷⁷ Aubrey, Brief Lives, 1. 21-2.

⁷⁸ de Quehen, ‘Butler, Samuel’.

⁷⁹ The case for the attribution of this work to Butler was most persuasively made by Nicholas von Maltzahn, in ‘Samuel Butler’s Milton’, 482-95.

⁸⁰ Butler, The Censure of the Rota, 8. Waller’s commendatory poem prefacing Evelyn’s translation begins ‘LUCRETIUS with a Stork-like fate / Born and translated in a State / Comes to proclaim in English Verse / No Monarch Rules the Universe’; Evelyn, An Essay on the First Book of T. Lucretius Carus De Rerum Natura, 3.

⁸¹ Aristophanes, Frogs. Assemblywomen. Wealth, 426.

⁸² Butler, Censure, 10.

⁸³ Yale, Osborn MS b 93. This manuscript, which was then still in the private collection of James Osborn, is designated ‘O’ by Morris and Withington. Crucially, it identifies the ‘Mrs K. T.’ to whom Cleveland addresses a poem first published in 1647 as ‘Mrs Katharine Thorold’, a member of another Lincolnshire gentry family with Cambridge and Royalist connections. See Duffy and Wilson, ‘A Note on John Cleveland’s “To Mrs K. T.”’.

⁸⁴ Duffy and Wilson, ‘A Note’, 548.

⁸⁵ Duffy and Wilson, ‘A Note’, 548; Clergy of the Church of England Database, Person ID 145598.

⁸⁶ BL MS Sloane 3515, ff. 68-9.

⁸⁷ Third Report of the Royal Commission on Historical Manuscripts, Appendix, 86; Alnwick DNP MS 16 (450/1), ff. 78-9. There is a surviving record of a third witness in a sale catalogue of books and manuscripts from 1748; this copy was among two poems by Cleveland included in a miscellany begun by Sir Robert Bolles while he was a student at Sidney Sussex, Cambridge, in 1635, and sustained through the 1640s (Catalogue of English Literary Manuscripts, Bolles MS, ClJ 66). Robert, the second baronet, was appointed with his father as a Commissioner of Array for Lincolnshire in 1642; a Sir John Bolles, who may well have been Robert’s royalist father, was in the Newark garrison (‘Bolles, Sir Robert, 2nd Bt. (1619-63), of Scampton, Lincs. and London’, in Henning, ed., History of Parliament … 1660-1690; Newark on Trent: the Civil War Siegeworks, 92). The provenance of this manuscript suggests it would be an important textual witness; unfortunately, its fate after 1748 is unknown.

⁸⁸ Loxley, Royalism and Poetry, 138-47, 155-68.