‘Epiques chang’d to Doleful Elegies’: The Poems on the Death of Henry Stuart, Duke of Gloucester

ABSTRACT

This article examines the elegies written in 1660 in response to the death of Henry Stuart, Duke of Gloucester. It analyses the elegies to show how Henry’s death meant the joys of the Restoration shifted to emotions of grief and that doubts about the security of the new royalist regime were brought to the fore. The poems on Henry’s death reveal the ideological fissures within royalist culture in 1660 concerning how best to ensure the restored royal family’s safe future.

KEYWORDS:

• Henry Stuart
• Duke of Gloucester
• elegy
• panegyric
• Restoration
• Charles II; Henrietta Maria

In her book Regicide and Restoration, Nancy Klein Maguire made an important argument about the popularity of tragicomedy in the repertoire of the public theatres that reopened in England in 1660. Tragicomedy, Maguire argued, was the ideal genre for a society coming to terms with the violence of the execution of Charles I in 1649 and the joy (as many if not all saw it) of the Stuart monarchy’s return in May 1660 in the shape of the dead king’s son, Charles II. The split-plot structure of these plays, Maguire writes, ‘propagandized the Restoration as a tragicomic reversal of the act of regicide’; their theme of ‘joy reached through grief … became part of the Restoration rhetoric’.¹ Lois Potter’s analysis of the image of Charles I in the later seventeenth century expands on Maguire’s argument. The dating of the fast sermons for Charles I on 30^th January (the date of his execution) and those for Charles II on 29^th May (the date of his return), she argues, ‘was a deliberate separation of mourning from celebrating, winter from spring, dead king from restored king.’ Potter concludes that writers could not integrate the upheavals of the mid-century with the political rebirth of 1660. They needed ‘to undo tragic endings in a fantasy of wish-fulfilment.’²

These are valuable insights into how the terms of the Restoration political settlement structured the forms of various cultural artefacts in 1660 and beyond. They risk, however, obscuring the occasions in the early Restoration when expressions of mourning overwhelmed celebration, when fantasies of wish-fulfilment fell to pieces. This article will highlight one such occasion and its significance by analysing the verse elegies written to commemorate Prince Henry Stuart, Duke of Gloucester. Henry arrived in England on 25^th May 1660 alongside his elder brother, the new king, Charles II. His death by smallpox less than four months later, on 13^th September, put mourning unexpectedly back in the nation’s political life and literature. The first poems on Henry’s death were printed around 20^th September, the date of his funeral. Others appeared over the following months.³ More royal elegies would be called for in early 1661 after the death of Henry’s younger sister, Princess Mary, in December 1660. Henry and Mary’s deaths were in some cases linked together. Cambridge University published a single anthology to commemorate both prince and princess whilst Thomas Manley’s biography described both their lives. Manley, indeed, seems to avoid discussing the complicated timing of their deaths so soon after the Restoration and instead makes them figures of exemplary royal virtue.⁴ The literary response to Mary’s death was, however, small in comparison to Henry’s and used tropes like dismay at royal death, the lopping of the royal oak, and the sinfulness of the people that were all present in the elegies for Henry, too.⁵ I focus on the verse responses to Henry’s death here because they best reveal the variety of ways that authors struggled to resolve the conflict between the joy of the royal Restoration and the tragedy of royal death.

Some of the named authors of the elegies for Henry were young poets with little literary reputation. The elegy by the Scottish poet George Mackenzie was printed in his allegorical prose romance Aretina, which was his first published work. Samuel Pordage’s was first printed as an anonymous broadsheet called Some Teares Dropt ore the Herse Of the Incomparable Prince Henry Duke of Gloucester before appearing in Poems on Several Occasions in 1660 alongside other occasional verse and love poetry. Arthur Brett had graduated in 1659 and his poetry about the political events of 1660 seems to have been the first he published. These were poets just entering the literary and political world when they wrote their elegies and who perhaps hoped to attract patronage by doing so. Others of Henry’s elegists had supported the Stuarts in the 1640s and 1650s. Katherine Philips belonged to the circle of royalist writers surrounding the composer Henry Lawes in the late 1640s and she wrote poems about the regicide and the battle of Worcester.⁶ Her friend, Charles Cotterel, was Henry’s tutor during the 1650s, suggesting a possible connection between herself and the prince. Her elegy for Henry was first printed in 1664 but was probably circulating in manuscript from 1660 along with her other poems on the royal events of 1660-61. John Crouch was a royalist pamphleteer whose satires of the leaders of Parliament led to him being arrested in 1652. His elegy was one of several poems on royal occasions he wrote in 1660-61 which were gathered in one volume called Census Poeticus in 1663.⁷ The Oxford poet Martin Lluelyn was an established royalist author whose poems were printed in university anthologies. This included a poem celebrating Henry’s birth in 1640.⁸ These were poets, then, who built up their royalist allegiances over the previous two decades and in some cases suffered for it. What links them to the less well-known crop of writers is that they too had written poems on the Restoration of the monarchy before writing their elegies for Henry. In the autumn of 1660, verse panegyrics were still being published that celebrated the return of the king. In some cases, the elegies for Henry ended up being printed or re-printed alongside Restoration panegyrics in collections of an author’s work. A reader could encounter on successive pages a panegyric followed by an elegy.⁹ These poems may have been attempts to attract royal favour. But their significance is also that they situate elegy within, rather than divorced from, the broader context of royal Restoration.

The poems for Henry include epitaphs, tears poems, and lamentations. Most are in rhyming couplets like the Restoration panegyrics before them. Brett’s elegy is written in six-line stanzas. There are also some broadsheet ballads. Specific generic and formal conventions, such as the echoes of the language of panegyric or the tunes to which the ballads were set, become part of how these poems make sense of Henry’s death. All the poems, however, can be called funerary elegies, poems of lament written for a specific occasion.¹⁰ The generic elasticity of early modern elegy and its tendency to digress beyond its immediate occasion to address social, political, or religious matters has been noted by critics.¹¹ Henry’s elegists highlighted the wider political context in their baffled exclamations at the sudden shift from joy to mourning. Significantly, some of them framed this change as the return of tragedy. Melpomene, the muse of tragedy, urges on some of the poets. Another elegy begins: ‘Sweet heavens have been pleased of late to shew | How stars and comedies in mourning go’. Martin Lluelyn describes the smallpox and its ‘cruel tragick part’. Heroic return changing to grief is framed in generic terms by Pordage who describes ‘Epiques chang’d to Doleful Elegies’.¹² In using tragedy as a lens through which to interpret history, the Henry elegies crucially and problematically recall the poems on the regicide from 1649-50. In that period, elegy was the royalist genre, a means to condemn what supporters of the king saw as the national sin of regicide, which was itself presented in poetry, drama, and pamphlets as a tragedy.¹³ Using elegy so soon after the Restoration, though, brought the tragedy of Charles I’s death back into play when official strategies of commemoration were meant to be parcelling it off into the past. Transforming comedy to mourning and epic to elegy, the poems on Henry’s death put Maguire’s tragicomic paradigm into reverse. They reveal how royalist writers, grappling with the memory of the regicide, focused on the security of the new regime even in its infancy.

The Henry elegies use images and themes common to much seventeenth-century royal elegy. The 1660 context, however, makes their use unusually problematic and worthy of investigation. The elegies throw into doubt the legitimacy of the joy experienced and written about at the Restoration, and they show how joy and mourning had become entangled.¹⁴ One literal illustration of this can be seen in the woodcut accompanying the Restoration ballad Englands Joy in a Lawful Triumph where six Stuart siblings are depicted but Henry’s hand rests upon a skull. The ballad’s titular triumphalism is not affected. Henry’s death is not mentioned amidst all the excitable claims that trade, law, and religious and political order will return now that the king is back. But at this time when the new king had no heir, the authority of the new regime was shored up by the siblings who returned with him, the necessary spares in the line of succession should disaster strike. Henry was second-in-line after his brother James, Duke of York, and his death highlighted how fragile the succession to the crown was and, with it, the restored royal family’s future. This ballad’s juxtaposition of a celebratory text with a visualisation of the depleted royal line reveals tensions between royalist hopes and fears for the future, unsaid perhaps but visible all the same.

This article argues that the major implication of the collision of joy with grief in the elegies for Henry was that it foregrounded these fears about the fragile condition of the new regime. Given the large amount of literature and pageantry that celebrated the Restoration, it can be easy to forget that the Stuarts returned only after both protectoral and republican regimes had dramatically collapsed in 1659-60. There was no guarantee the same fate would not befall the Stuarts. We know there were republican and radical plots against them, and that arguments against the Restoration were made. The elegies for Henry evidence how uncertainties about the long-term future of the Restoration monarchy existed within royalist culture. I will develop this argument over four parts. In the first two parts I will show how the poets confront aspects of the history of the 1640s and 1650s that did not fit into a narrative of joy triumphing over sadness. Henry’s biography disclosed messy ambiguities about religious and political allegiance among the exiled Stuart court. Some of his elegists tried to smooth them over. I will argue they were only partially successful. In the third part, I will show how writers took terms and images from the verse about the return of the king and adjusted them to a context of grief and mourning. Panegyric in 1660 praised the Restoration as a providential deliverance for the nation and a new beginning after a period of chaos. The turn to elegy saw poets use Henry’s death to interrogate Restoration poetry’s claims to resolve the conflicts of the previous two decades. The elegists subvert imagery of natural or spiritual wholeness that had symbolised the power of the restored regime. The poetics of royal panegyric was re-shaped by the poetics of royal loss. Finally, I will show how the elegies examine questions about providence and justice. The elegies for Henry show us that neither questioning the basis of the new regime’s authority nor ruminating on its possible errors were exclusively the domain of its opponents. The elegists for Henry wondered, too, whether the divine will had been interpreted right in 1660. The elegies thus highlight the insecurities latent in royalist culture and the fissures that existed in that culture about whether retribution or clemency was the best means for the regime to remain safe in the eyes of God.

I

Henry Stuart was the youngest son of Charles I and Henrietta Maria. The elegists, however, frequently describe him as mature beyond his years. One wrote that the ‘Youngest of years did Blush in his Maturity’.¹⁵ Another argued ‘He was but Young when ravish’d hence, | Yet Old in WISDOM and EXPERIENCE’.¹⁶ The sudden violence of Henry’s death is made clear in the image of ravishment, though the languages of blushing and ravishment almost feminise him. Such gendering, as we will see, was politically important in the poems. Henry, though, was seen as wise due to the circumstances of his early life. Born in July 1640 about a month after the start of the Second Bishops War, his birth was celebrated with a volume of poetry where he is sometimes figured as a harbinger of victory, unity, and peace.¹⁷ But two years later, Civil War broke out. He was four when his mother fled to France, leaving him in England, and eight when his father was executed. One elegy presented the Civil Wars as an infernal vendetta against Henry specifically: ‘no sooner having made the earth | More happy by his most Illustrious Birth: | But straight all Hells enrag’d’.¹⁸ The elegies argue he gained wisdom through adversity. In so doing, they replay a theme from that summer’s panegyrics where his older brother’s trials and tribulations in exile were presented as evidence of his readiness to be king. Using the same trope in the context of mourning, however, suggests a heightened sense of loss: unlike his brother’s sufferings, Henry’s brought no earthly reward.

This is not to say the elegies do not find value in Henry’s short life. They set him up, indeed, as a political, moral, and religious exemplar through the presentation of key biographical episodes. Pivotal among these is what purported to be the final conversation between him and his father, Charles I, which took place on the eve of the latter’s execution in 1649. Details of the conversation were reported almost immediately the same year and then re-told in pamphlets printed in 1660. The following version, from Thomas Manley’s 1661 biography of Henry and Mary, borrows almost verbatim from such pamphlets:

The King taking the Duke upon his knee, said, Sweet heart, now they will cut off thy fathers head, mark child what I say, they will cut off my head, and perhaps make thee a King, but you must not be a King so long as your brothers Charles and James be living, for they will cut off your brothers heads (when they can catch them) and cut off thy head too at the last, and therefore I charge you not to be made a King by them. At which words the child smiling said, I will be torn in pieces first, which falling so unexpectedly from one so young, made the King rejoyce exceedingly.¹⁹

The violence of the anecdote may be shocking but Charles’ four references to decapitation – his own imminent one and his three sons’ imagined ones – plus Henry’s gleeful imagining of his body torn to pieces, makes the suffering royal body a sign of honourable defiance. In other pamphlet accounts of this conversation, Henry is in fact said to sigh rather than smile. Manley’s version suggestively makes Henry less realistically melancholy but more fervent in his loyalty. This is vital to the Restoration presentation of Henry. A version of this conversation also appears in Brett’s poem where Charles issues his last words to Henry: ‘Child, mind my words, they are my last, | And make not to a Di’dem too much hast’.²⁰ In Manley’s version Charles urges Henry not to be made king ‘by them’ whereas Brett’s offers a more generalised warning about the trials of power that recollects the crown rolling, rejected, out of the bottom corner of the frontispiece of Eikon Basilike. But for both Manley and Brett, the episode illustrates Henry’s loyalty and links Henry to his father as each recognises the follies of earthly power.

The above episode has specific political significance that links to Henry’s role in the tumultuous months immediately before the regicide. This significance depends on to whom Charles was referring when he specified in Manley’s account that Henry should reject a crown if offered ‘by them’. From late 1642, Henry was under the control of Parliament. After his father’s death, he was kept under close observation by the republican authorities along with his sister Elizabeth so ‘that they might not be the objects of respect, to draw the eyes and application of people towards them’.²¹ Yet in late 1648, Henry was viewed with less suspicion. His brothers, Charles and James, had effectively been debarred from the succession because of the military threat they posed to the Parliamentarian regime. But Henry was a useful bargaining chip for people opposed to Charles I but not opposed to the monarchy per se who had been seeking an ultimatum that would allow a new monarch to take over. Among their number was Oliver Cromwell who, as Morrill and Baker argue, probably sent emissaries to the king in December 1648 to deliver the options: abdicate in favour of Henry or die and seal the fate of the whole Stuart dynasty.²² The former option likely enjoyed the support of the Council of Officers and there were reports as late as mid-January 1649 of toasts being made there to Harry the ninth.²³ Even after the regicide and for as long as Henry remained in England there were discussions about the possibility of installing him on the throne. In December 1651, following Cromwell’s victory over Prince Charles at Worcester the previous September, Henry’s name once again came up in debates over whether the nation was to be a republic or retain elements of a monarchy. Again, the discussions led nowhere.²⁴ What we know, though, is that for around three years from December 1648 to December 1651 rumours circulated and schemes developed where Henry was seen as a candidate to be king because he was young enough to be controlled, and, unlike his brothers, did not pose a military threat.

All this would make sense of Manley’s 1661 account of the final meeting: the king is shown warning his son off the very ultimatum he had been offered because it means Henry can be presented as loyal. Yet the fact that Henry had once been central in efforts to find an accommodation between opponents of Charles I and the Stuart dynasty was clearly no help to his elegists after the Restoration who wanted to stress his unswerving filial fidelity. Knowledge of those efforts may of course have been limited, though James Loxley has detected possible allusions in the portraiture of the 1640s to what he calls the ‘threat’ Henry posed to Charles I.²⁵ In the elegies for Henry in 1660, though, the idea that he could have been made a puppet-king register, albeit indirectly, in the presentation of Cromwell. Royalists in the early 1660s demonised Cromwell as a scheming machiavel hell-bent on the destruction of the royal family.²⁶ This pattern is followed to an extent in the elegies. But they also show Henry tempering Cromwell’s evil. Martin Lluelyn presents Henry pursued by his enemies.

Thy sufferings Inventary rose so high,

There scarce was other left to Thee, but to die.

And this was that in all his rage and storme,

Though Cromwel wisht, he trembled to performe.

When pawzing here after Thy slaughter’d Sire,

He seem’d to fear this was to murder High’r.

And bathing his black soule ith’ sacred flood,

He durst gorge Royal, but not tender blood.

Where then shall Innocence in safety sit?

When a disease it selfe doth Cromwel it.²⁷

Cromwell rages and storms as would be expected. But he also pauses, rendering the famed man of action (whether guided by providence, the devil or sheer self-interest) ineffectual and hesitant. What causes him to pause is Henry’s divine worth, which can stop a ‘black soule’ in its tracks, and his youthfulness, a tender innocence that even Cromwell will not violate. All Cromwell’s possible violence is instead performed by the smallpox. The irony of ‘Cromwell’ being a verb describing the actions of an entity other than Cromwell may make the disease, in the words of David Shuttleton, Oliver’s ‘posthumous agent’.²⁸ But it also renders Cromwell’s supposedly singular powers redundant: he paused but smallpox finished the job.

Similar vocabulary and ideas are used by Katherine Philips in her elegy for Henry. Of Henry’s ‘barbarous and stupid foes’, she writes:

Yet then thou didst so much express a prince,

As did even them amaze, if not convince.

Nay, that loose Tyrant whom no bounds confin’d,

Whom neither lawes, nor oathes, nor shame could bind,

Although his soule was then his lookes more grim,

Yet thy brave Innocence halfe softned him,

And he that worth wherein thy soule was drest,

By his ill favour’d clemencie confest;

Less’ning the ill which he could not repent,

He call’d that travaile which was banishment.²⁹

The reference to Cromwell’s ‘grim’ soul sounds like Lluelyn’s description of his ‘black soule’ and Philips contrasts this to the worth of Henry’s. Henry’s ‘brave Innocence’ is also like Lluelyn’s reference to the innocence that cannot find safety. The affective impact of Henry’s character is also especially important for Philips. The attempts by Cromwell and the army to position Henry as a potential successor because he was too young to be a threat are not referenced directly by either Philips or Lluelyn. They are, instead, displaced into representations of Cromwell being affected – ‘halfe softened’ – by Henry’s youthful innocence which, instead of making Henry a prime candidate for king, sees his calm benevolence as a threat that disarms Cromwell of his rage and fury. Rather than being Cromwell’s puppet, Henry’s innate worth renders Cromwell powerless. Possible rumours of him taking the throne are subtly redirected as his reputation as a loyal son and brother are reinforced.

II

Philips and Lluelyn represent the affective power of royalty over Cromwell and emphasise for an early 1660s audience the supposedly mystical triumph of the Stuarts over their enemies even in moments of defeat. Their poems also link to Jason Peacey’s argument that debates over what to do with the children of the dead king in the early 1650s revealed divisions within the English republic after the regicide. Political conservatives were keen to keep Henry in the country should there come about the possibility of crowning him whilst radicals saw him as a threat to securing the republic and wanted him exiled, with Cromwell sitting between the two camps.³⁰ When Philips and Lluelyn depict Cromwell’s resolve being softened by Henry, then, they also seem retrospectively to point to indecision and weakness among the king’s enemies. This said, Henry had himself been agitating for more freedom throughout 1652. He was finally allowed to leave England to join his brothers in France in January 1653. Henry’s experience of exile was described in some of the Restoration panegyrics as a political education like that of his brothers. In Martin Lluelyn’s poem on the Restoration, for example, Henry is likened to Telemachus in a mini-exile.³¹ In his elegy for Henry from the autumn, Lluelyn revisited the same topic when describing Henry’s keen desire for education in his learning of Latin, Spanish, French, Italian and Dutch.³²

Henry’s religious allegiances were an important factor in the depictions of his time abroad. Supporters of the restored monarchy in the early 1660s often emphasised the Protestantism of the new king and, as Christopher Highley has shown, this was in response to rumours that Charles II had converted to Catholicism during his exile.³³ But this touched upon Henry’s reputation as well for the story of Henrietta Maria’s attempts to convert him to Catholicism was well-publicised and a problem for his elegists to address. The story, in short, goes like this. When Charles’ court was forced to move to Cologne in 1654, Henry remained with his mother in Paris. There she, along with her court, began to encourage him to convert by removing his Anglican instructors and replacing them with her Catholic confessors. Charles became increasingly concerned about the conversion attempt, believing that it would jeopardise the support of English and Scottish Protestants in the event of his possible return home. Charles urged his mother to desist from her attempts or have Henry removed from her care. The latter eventuality came to pass in December 1654 when members of Charles’ court brought Henry out of France and back to his brother.

The controversy preoccupied the exiled courts for several months. It revealed confessional divisions among the exiled royalists and different arguments regarding which was the correct strategy for ensuring a Stuart restoration.³⁴ Newspapers reported the episode, and a pamphlet account was printed in London in 1655. These suggest there was public knowledge in 1650s England of the episode.³⁵ But much like Henry’s uncertain political allegiances, the conversion attempt was part of his biography that his elegists in 1660 may have struggled to know what to do with. It was, after all, a theme of several panegyrics on the Restoration that the Stuarts would protect the Church of England. This depended on depicting the new regime as a bulwark of Protestantism in the face, mostly, of sectarianism but also Catholicism. Raking over historic conflicts and feuds over religion would have been unhelpful to say the least to the public image of the royal family and to the job of mourning the loss of one of their number. Sure enough, many of Henry’s elegists do not mention the controversy. Another reason for this avoidance was also a need to be tactful when referring to the Queen Mother. The prospect of the return to England of the Catholic Henrietta in 1660, and the belief that she might exercise influence over religious policy, was an argument used by republicans to oppose the Restoration and one that royalists felt was serious enough to warrant reply.³⁶ Henrietta was still in France when Henry died and when she returned to England in October most of the elegies had probably been printed. Among those that do mention her, she is typically presented as a suffering mother, an image that is of a piece with those images of her that appear in the panegyrics from earlier in 1660.³⁷ One elegist does describe her as an ‘indulgent Mother’, a turn of phrase which sounds condemnatory whether ‘indulgent’ refers to her parenting style (as in either not exercising parental restraint of a child or being self-indulgent) or her religion (as in the Catholic practice of granting indulgences or the loosening of ecclesiastical restraints). That phrasing, though, is the only, veiled, reference this elegist makes to religious controversy. They do not mention the conversion attempt and focus on Henrietta’s short-lived joy at the return of Charles being destroyed by the death of Henry. In another move that links Henry to Charles I, the only comfort this poet finds is that the former is now in heaven with the latter.³⁸

The ballad The Queen’s Lamentation is a particularly intriguing elegy in this case because it purports to be Henrietta’s own ‘mournful Complaint’. The blurring of lamentation and complaint had happened a long time before 1660 in sixteenth-century religious poetry where female complainants elicit sympathy despite some sense in the poem of their own wrongdoing.³⁹ The voice of Henrietta in The Queen’s Lamentation does not explicitly invoke her own guilt. Yet the ballad is set to the traditional tune, ‘Franklin’, which was also used for the ballad The Unfortunate Lovers in which a woman dresses as a sailor to accompany her lover to sea, where she ultimately drowns. The tune adapts that used for a song of lovers parting to the parting of mother and son but may also carry a residual message of supposed female folly. Similarly, the conversion attempt is not mentioned explicitly but may be referenced covertly. Henry is praised as a ‘seem’d deity’ with ‘princely piety’ and ‘godly zeal’. Such terminology sounds typically Protestant, especially the reference to godliness. The ballad therefore makes the Catholic Queen Mother praise her son’s Protestant virtues in a way that tacitly highlights her failure to convert him. Henrietta goes on to complain to heaven for taking Henry away prematurely. At the same time, she asks for heavenly and angelic support to get her through grief. Caught between anger and despair, Henrietta’s repeated refrain of ‘O pitty me’ invites readers to extend their sympathies to her as a grieving mother. A reader with knowledge of her faith and the conversion attempt could presumably fill in the blanks if they so wished and decide if it was Henrietta’s parental or confessional situation that most deserved their pity. The ballad concludes, though, with an unambiguous sense of comfort in, and support for, the surviving royal family: ‘My comfort is but small; | yet all my joy | Is in this Gracious king’. The solitary female voice on the margins is reintegrated into society and the ballad ends by emphasising familial resilience rather than lasting division.

In both the above examples confessional differences are approached subtly. Whilst Henrietta’s position as Catholic may be implied she is also an emblem of the suffering endured by the Stuarts. The most explicit reference to Henrietta’s Catholicism, however, is found in Arthur Brett’s Threnodia. Brett acknowledges Henrietta’s grief and argues that, until Henry’s death, she and he were only separated by their opinions. It is almost as if religion posed no threat. A few stanzas later, however, Brett introduces the conversion attempt:

The Prince had been allur’d for Rome to make,

  And bid the Latine Way to take,

  But did the Latine Way forsake;

    He bravely kept the Golden Mean,

    And has nor chang’d nor shaken been

By an enticeing Woman, Mother, Queen ⁴⁰

The transposition of a mother-son relationship into something like that of a tempted man and the female seductress is in all senses awkward. But Brett’s presentation of Henrietta as temptress counterpoints the portrayal of Henry as the figure of moderation navigating worldly temptation with moral clarity. The problem of Henry challenging a parent is addressed by Brett with a rhetorical sleight-of-hand that aligns unthinking deference to authority figures with Marian idolatry: ‘to believe what Parents say | Where Sacred Oracles say Nay, | Were to adore whom we should but obey’. This show-down between rational, moderate Henry and the alluring Henrietta is obviously gendered and it allows Brett to expand his message to include the older brother, Charles II. Henry, it turns out, is a model of Protestant masculinity a little like his namesake and uncle Prince Henry who died in 1612 (it is perhaps no surprise to find Brett mention the earlier Henry is his elegy).⁴¹ The king should follow his younger brother’s example in his dealings on the stage of international religious politics:

Reformed Cittadels may yeild [sic],

Protestant Armies loose the Feild:

But CHARLES’s race will stand it out,

Being at Twelve or there-about

   In judgment Clear, in resolution Stout.⁴²

Henrietta, meanwhile, is depicted here as someone successfully contained in the domestic sphere. Henry’s rejection of her attempts to convert him ‘struck not much unto her heart: | But this [his death] unto the quick will touch’.⁴³ Somewhat improbably, the elegy ends in a similar place to others in its emphasis on Henrietta’s emotional plight. But it does so only after figuring Henry’s resistance to her as a noble, masculine struggle.

Overall, however, Brett’s depiction of Henrietta as temptress is an outlier. Other elegists that mention the conversion attempt tend to diminish her role in it. One argues that it originated from the ‘Church of Rome’ rather than Henrietta specifically.⁴⁴ In another, rather than being ‘enticeing’, as Brett puts it, she just ‘endeavour[s] to convince’.⁴⁵ These portrayals have the dual benefit of making Henrietta both not very malign and not very strong. Her influence on the Stuart court is presented as minimal. In turn this opens space for the elegists to focus on Henry as a figure of religious steadfastness. One writes that Henry’s fame in his lifetime, and posthumously, is as a champion of religion: the ‘PRINCELY DARLING of all Christendom, | Were but (by these unworthy lines) to tell | A Truth the World already knows so well.’⁴⁶ Another claims he ‘with courage bold | … said his true religion he would hold’.⁴⁷ On all these counts, the history of Henry’s resistance to conversion is used to transform him into a heroic figure, certainly a role-model for Charles. The ballad Dying Tears is particularly interesting in this case because it warns that the power and wealth of princes can do nothing to stop death. It also claims that ‘the grave cannot contain | The righteous soul’. Henry’s virtue comes from his religion: he has ‘rare Vertues’; he is ‘our most virtuous Prince’; in him ‘all vertues shine’; mourners will ‘seek his vertues’; and the people trusted his ‘vertues’.⁴⁸ In this ballad, the spiritual lesson Charles should take from his brother’s death is to live righteously not ostentatiously. This ballad contains some of the strongest moral and religious messaging of any of the elegies and this is emphasised by the tune to which it was set, ‘Aim not too high’. This tune was used for ballads condemning pride and sinfulness and urging people to turn to God. Equally suggestive is the fact that the same tune was used for a ballad about the trial and execution of Charles I.⁴⁹ In this way Dying Tears links Henry’s death to that of the late king, as if this were a moment when the nation may again be dangerously deviating from God’s direction. It thus adds further urgency to its message that the new king should aspire to a godly virtue like that supposedly represented by Henry.

However, even as the elegists emphasise Henry’s loyalty to the men of his family and model him as a masculine religious hero, the representations of him in the elegies often seem to feminise him. We have seen hints of this several times already: in Thomas Manley’s elision of the sighing Henry into one who smiles; in the depictions of the affective impact of Henry’s youthful innocence; in the emphasis on the complexly-gendered idea of virtue that though still etymologically linked to manhood also codified expectations of female behaviour; and in the imagery of his ravished body. Deaths by smallpox were violent. Focusing on the body comes partly from a need to hold it static in time before its devastation. But this does mean that, though a young man when he died, he is cast as the most youthful-looking of the Stuart brothers, caught forever between boyhood and manhood. Neither does commemorating the royal body ravaged by smallpox entirely explain the highly-wrought imagery of lilies and roses used when the voice of his mother in The Queen’s Lamentation mourns ‘His Crimson looks so sweet | His Lilly hand’ or, more elaborately still, when another elegist writes how:

         his soft breath’s,

But whispering Mercy in the ears of Death:

View but His cheeks, where though the Roses are

Seeming t’retreat, the Lillies spring more fair

Than ere they did […]

The former lustre of his Ruby Lips,

(Which now seem Snow) feel but a short Eclipse.⁵⁰

In the late 1640s, when Henry was for some a hope for the continuation of the Stuart dynasty, he was described as ‘one precious flower and blossom’.⁵¹ The specific imagery of lilies and roses, though, is also familiar from mid seventeenth-century complaint and elegy, particularly that associated with the regicide or by royalists mourning family loss.⁵² The lily and the rose were also the heraldic colours of Charles I and Henrietta Maria. They were depicted as entwined at their marriage. The mixture of the lily and the rose was also deemed to make the ideal facial complexion that was reflective of inner health and beauty.⁵³ In this case the intimate closeness between the speaker and Henry that seems almost like a blazon becomes political as Henry figures the unity of the royal dynasty. But even as the red and the white signal life slipping away, the language of sweet looks, white hands, ‘soft breath’, rosy cheeks, and ‘Ruby Lips’ feminise Henry, belying the portrayal of his masculinity in other elegies.

Even down to the semantic proximity of Henry and Henrietta’s names, there is a sense that Henry is a figure of ambiguity: the fiercely loyal son, the manly defender of true religion, at the same time as delicate youth, affecting and virtuous. His elegists seem to have wanted him to be a perfect mixture of delicacy and strength. As the full title of A Cordial Elegie puts it, he was ‘a Prince who, if we compare his Valour with his Meekness, his Knowledge with his Innocence, and his Religion with his Youth, no Prince can equalize’. But what should we make of this? In one sense, the representation of Henry’s youth and innocence as central to his power is part and parcel of post-regicide royalist discourse where suffering, passivity, and defeat needed to be reframed as power and authority. The elegies for Henry try to read strength in his meekness and innocence, to fit him into mythic narratives of Stuart resolve. But in their various emphases on his loyalty, the elegists end up hinting that Henry might not be completely disassociated from questions about obedience. How close did he get to making his peace with the people who killed his father? How tempted was he to take his mother’s side in confessional identity and religious politics? It was not unusual for writers and politicians to be working through such questions of allegiance in 1660, not least because many had found their own ways to accommodate themselves to the regimes of the 1650s. In commemorating Henry, the elegists could not avoid delving into the political history of the previous decade. The attempts by some of them to flatten ambiguities of allegiance into a discourse of royal resolve could only be half-successful, though, because Henry’s death shook the terms of that discourse as much as it could be used to reiterate or secure them. The next section will look at how Henry’s death destabilised royalist narratives of survival and triumph by analysing how the elegists revisited and revised the language and imagery of Restoration panegyric.

III

‘Hope’ and ‘hopefulness’ are words used in descriptions of Henry in the elegies. Samuel Pordage described the three royal brothers as a ‘hopeful Trine’ and in another poem Henry is ‘that Hopefull Prince’.⁵⁴ ‘Hope’ has various, conflicting, meanings. It could mean simply that Henry embodies qualities desired from the future. But in the context of his death, the word activates a sense of resignation, that things hoped for cannot be fulfilled. It suggests a present cut off from a sense of its own future even to the extent of ironizing hopefulness. All these meanings can be seen in the use of Virgilian analogy in two elegies. Henry is likened to the young prince Marcellus who is seen in the underworld by Aeneas in Book Six of The Aeneid. Aeneas, we recall, spots Marcellus and asks the ghost of his father, Anchises, who it is, to which Anchises responds by explaining the story of Augustus’ nephew and possible heir who will die suddenly, depriving the Roman empire of one possible future. The episode is appropriated by Brett in the epigraph for Threnodia. In Virgil it is: ‘ostendent terris hunc tantum fata nec ultra | esse sinent’ (only a glimpse of him will fate give earth nor suffer him to stay long).⁵⁵ Brett has ‘HENRICOS ostendunt fata, nec ultra | Esse sinunt’ (the fates reveal Henry and do not allow him to stay long). Philips also invokes Marcellus to demonstrate Henry’s overgoing of the virtues of the classical past: ‘Not Rome’s belov’d and brave Marcellus fell | So much a darling or a miracle’.⁵⁶ Hyperbolic as it may be, comparing Henry with Marcellus nonetheless signals that Henry’s death endangers the Restoration’s sense of its own futurity. Virgilian analogy has a bearing on Charles II’s role, too, if we remember that he had been figured in panegyric as Aeneas, the wanderer returned and founder of a new era of empire and prosperity. The imperial logic of Restoration panegyric was supported by a supposedly constructive understanding of Virgilian epic where future greatness promised by the gods was realised. Restoration England became a spatial and temporal reimagining of classical Rome. Paralleling Henry and Marcellus, however, adds melancholy and irony to this analogy. It disrupts the teleology of England as new Rome by focusing attention on unfulfilled histories. Brett indeed preserves from Virgil the idea of something taken too early and the implied sense of what-might-have-been. The parallel brings into play a more pessimistic interpretation of The Aeneid which focuses on the losses incurred in arriving at a national destiny, on those excluded or who do not live to see the future’s promise. Virgil’s Aeneas must try to come to terms with those losses. So too for Charles II there was perhaps a sense that the regime he headed could not be sustained without a painful awareness of absence and ironic distancing from imperial hyperbole.

The efforts in print to introduce the Stuarts to a population who had become used to their absence were led by texts that focused on their appearance, identity, and character. Woodcuts and engravings of the royal siblings were included with ballads and pamphlets. Panegyrists addressed poems to all three royal brothers. One celebrated the return of ‘sacred Henry’ and, in words that would become grimly ironic, wished that ‘Nestor’s days | Become your age’.⁵⁷ Literary ‘portraits’ in verse and prose celebrated the physical and mental character of the Stuart siblings. Richard Flecknoe presented James and Henry as Castor and Pollux, the former full of martial prowess, the latter ‘eager and fervent’ in doing his duty.⁵⁸ It is a cosmological and mythic analogy we will see taken up in the elegies.

The return of a royal lineage as well as the return of a king was central to the celebration of the Restoration. Lineage was meant to be a guarantor of longevity, a map to the regime’s future. With three brothers, the restored Stuart family were seen by panegyrists to have strength in numbers. The youth of these Stuarts, too, seemed to bode well. Henry’s death threw all this into doubt. In the elegies there are attempts to reassert the strength of the restored line by linking it to earlier royals. One elegist thus likened Henry to Solomon in a way that was reminiscent of the iconography of his grandfather James I.⁵⁹ And, as we have already seen, Henry is frequently connected to his father, Charles I. One poet called him ‘That blessed Image of our Martyr’d King’ as if to suggest that whatever happened on earth the Stuart lineage would survive in divine iteration. But that connection between father and son brings the grief of the regicide into play in the elegies for Henry. The same poet laments: ‘Was’t not enough by Traytors Tyranny, | To loose bles’t Charles […] but again this loss!’.⁶⁰ The death of Henry is a historical repetition - ‘again this loss!’ – and it is as if the promised afterlife cannot completely provide consolation.

The elegies therefore detect fragility in the new regime. Martin Lluelyn goes through an argument about the apparent senselessness of Henry’s death. Had Henry died before the Restoration, he argues, then the living might have called for his virtues to be returned but not him given that life was ‘lesse lovely’ than death. But for the death to happen in the same year as the Restoration, which Lluelyn presents as a time of plenty, when vines spill wine, trade flows, crime is punished, churches protected from sacrilege, and when the king lives, is beyond utterance: ‘What Niobe can waile your mournful fate?’⁶¹ Henry’s death is seen as a disaster for his brothers not least because it erodes the new dynasty:

The Royal Line (England this brand must weare.)

Suffer abroad, but perish only here.

So to the sun the Phoenix doth repaire,

Through each distemper’d Region of the Aire.

Through swarms of Deaths she there victorious flies,

But in her cruel Nest she burns, and dies.⁶²

Charles II was likened to a phoenix in 1660 when it was a helpful simile for maintaining the fiction of succession despite the eleven-year gap between one king’s death and the successor’s return. One poet wrote: ‘we view after that cursed Doome | This Phenix springing from his Fathers tombe’.⁶³ This is a perfect example of joy emerging from grief. The trouble with using the Phoenix to describe the death of Henry was that, unlike the dead king, nobody was going to replace him. Lluelyn therefore leaves the simile half-finished. The phoenix retreats to its nest and returns to the flames. Resurrection and return are transformed into conflagration without rebirth as the poetics of panegyric are once more disrupted.

What is apparent in the elegies is their contrasting visions of history. On the one hand, the Restoration itself is depicted as a new beginning when war and violence are stopped through new life. On the other, history figures as a cyclical pattern of restoration and destruction. A common iteration of these visions is the elegies’ use of seasonal imagery. Here we see with particular clarity how the elegists revise imagery that was central to the panegyrics of the summer. Those panegyrists laboured on the metaphor of the king as sun and the pathetic fallacy of May heralding political rebirth. George Cartwright compares the end of winter and the return of the sun to the return of the king.⁶⁴ Samuel Pordage writes of Phoebus shining in the sky being a source of revival for Charles II’s subjects.⁶⁵ Both poets altered these images in their respective elegies for Henry. Cartwright laments how ‘Hard Fate’ has ‘rob’d us of so great a Light’. Pordage writes: ‘’Tis Autumn now: and Ceres to our hands | Has pour’d the Annual Blessings of our Lands’. In another example of ambiguous gendering, it is almost as if Henry becomes Persephone, whose return to the underworld was preceded by the harvesting of the land by Ceres. But the metaphor Pordage develops sees Henry’s death as part of said harvest: ‘the high powers cropt from the Royal Stem | What was too good for us, and fit for them.’⁶⁶ We should note the difference between Cartwright’s ‘Hard Fate’ and Pordage’s ‘high powers’ here, which reveals how different poets theorised providence’s role in Henry’s death, a theme to which I will return. Pordage’s turn to what sounds like Christian providence supports the idea that Henry was taken away because the nation was not worthy of him. This echoes the elegiac literature for Charles I which emphasised how God punished a nation’s sinfulness by taking away a king. Once more, regicide elegy structures the mourning for Henry. Rarely among the elegists, Pordage tries to maintain the symbolic meaning of seasonal change by arguing that autumnal loss might be compensated for by spring birth, that is by Charles II fathering a baby: ‘we lament, till a new Spring arise, | And Charles his First-born clear our weeping eyes.’ But with no marriage in sight for the new king, this is to defer yet another new spring into a suddenly unclear future.

A metaphor the elegies use that links defending the Stuart lineage to the natural imagery just examined is that of Henry as a branch. One poet writes that Henry came from a ‘good and Godly Vine | Of Royal Decent’. Insisting on the divine origins of the royal lineage, the same poet figures Henry as ‘the very off-spring and the root of Jess’.⁶⁷ Yet the trees in the elegies keep having their branches lopped off. ‘Lopping’ and its cognates is a common word in Civil War political literature and was, obviously, used extensively in poems on the death of Charles I. Figuratively, at least, being ‘lopped’ signified a brutal doing-away with, a violent assault. Its appearance in the elegies is another sign of how the defeat of royalism in the 1640s structures the literature of Henry’s death. Contrary to the Pordage poem examined a moment ago, one poet figures a violent incongruity in the seasonal cycles when describing Henry as a branch ‘Lop’t in the prime of his most happy spring’.⁶⁸ In another, Henry is specifically a branch of the Royal Oak, which was in 1660 a central motif in the retellings of Charles’ providentially guided escape from England.⁶⁹ Arthur Brett, though, writes: ‘Fate has giv’n a dismal stroak, | The Royal Three sh’ has basely broke, | And lopp’d a Bough of Britains stately Oake.’⁷⁰ Brett possibly recalls an engraving from 1649 where Cromwell is shown chopping down the royal oak. Although it is fate giving the stroke here, the echo again shows Henry’s death bringing those conflicts from the previous decade back into the forefront of the literature of the new regime.

In Brett’s poem, fate is again seen to be responsible for Henry’s death. The question of who or what was responsible for Henry’s death was important in the elegies. The elegists ask how God could have allowed the young prince to die and they lament humanity’s incomprehension of providence. They draw explicit contrasts with the confident assertions made earlier in the year that special providence was in evidence when the monarchy was restored.⁷¹ In the elegies, the theological foundations of the Restoration are held up for scrutiny. John Crouch begins The Muses Tears wondering where providence has gone.

Good Heav’ns! what strange Wheel keep you rowling thus

So full of Eyes, and yet so dark to us!

How bright and orient was the pearly Chain

Of Providence? and straight how dim again?⁷²

Crouch juxtaposes past joy and present sorrow. These lines also present a kind of historical revisionism. By rendering the comments on providence as questions rather than exclamations, Crouch holds previous interpretations of providence’s role in the Restoration up for scrutiny. Just how bright was providence after all? Crouch does not doubt providence’s role in recent history; he does doubt humanity’s understanding of providential history. Indeed, the enjambment that breaks the phrase ‘pearly Chain | Of Providence’ reflects this epistemological failure. The poetics strike a note of scepticism: the imagery is of light eclipsed by darkness, vision lost; the form suggests broken chains of understanding.

In his elegy Crouch revises imagery from his earlier panegyric, A Poem upon the Happy Restauration, where he wrote that Charles was ‘by Heav’n restor’d to shew its slighted power’.⁷³ Other elegists, too, wrote about how their earlier representations of providential history had to be re-examined in light of Henry’s death. Again, this is indexed by recycling of imagery. Pordage’s A Panegyrick on his Majesties Entrance into London begins by mapping the events of May 1660 onto a vision of nature filled with divine portents:

The Heaven’s great Star since He saluted Earth

With his diurnal Light, ne’r yet gave Birth

To such a joyfull Day, as that wherein

Charles to his native England came ag’in.⁷⁴

The star to which Pordage alludes is that which was alleged to have appeared in the midday sky on the day of Charles’ birth in 1630.⁷⁵ His use of it in the panegyric contrasts to the imagery of cosmic signs at the beginning of his elegy:

… ’tis strange Heav’n should not prae-declare

A loss so grievous by some Blazing Star,

Which might our senses, overjoy’d, alarm

And time give to prepare for so great a harm.⁷⁶

Complaining about the lack of a portent was commonplace in royal elegy.⁷⁷ Here in Pordage’s poem, we can see especially the particular significance of the motif in 1660 as it captures the speaker’s estrangement from the certainties of the Restoration. It is notable that both Crouch and Pordage use the word ‘strange’. Crouch’s ‘strange Wheel’ may collapse the wheel of Fortune into a discussion of special providence, muddling non-Christian and Christian elements to convey the theological confusion of Henry’s death. Pordage’s speaker is more perplexed still. A blazing star was a comet that was meant to mark a major catastrophe.⁷⁸ However, the prefix ‘some’ gives the image a lack of clarity. The heavenly intentions that had once been clearly signalled become strange, distant from human understanding.

IV

We see in both the previous examples poets struggling to reconcile Henry’s death with what they had written in the summer about the divine origins of the Restoration. In mourning untimely deaths, elegy as a genre of course seeks to explain these seemingly inexplicable or even unjustifiable moments. Henry’s elegists frequently warn against peering into the intentions of providence. Yet they remain preoccupied by trying to explain the death of Henry in the context of the Restoration. One especial concern is justice and punishment, issues that were at the forefront of the Restoration settlement. Charles sought a policy of clemency on his return to England in May 1660. In the Declaration of Breda, it was made clear that crimes committed against Charles I and the new king would mostly be forgiven and forgotten. MPs in the newly elected Convention Parliament, however, insisted that retributive justice should be pursued in relation to Charles I’s killers. The question of who was going to be excluded from any state-sponsored oblivion preoccupied Parliament in the summer of 1660 and by early August fifty-one men were listed as exempt. Twenty-nine of them were put on trial between 9 and 19 October 1660.⁷⁹ In this final section, I will argue that questions of blame and responsibility which are brought to the fore in the responses to Henry’s death were part of the discussions in later 1660 about these trails and executions and about how, if at all, they were going to preserve the safety of the regime.

The most militant outlook seen in the elegies was that Henry’s death proved that God wanted the regicides dead. The author of A Cordial Elegie imagines hearing the voice of a ‘damn’d Phantique’ from hell informing ‘his yet living Brethren’ that Henry’s death ‘on us a fatall judgment was | For trampling down forsooth their Good Old Cause’. The speaker imagines the heavens replying:

     If so it be,

That ’tis a judgment, Charles his Clemency:

Occasions it; in suffering such to breath,

Whom Gods decree had justly mark’t for death:

See Saul th’ Almightyes favour was deny’d,

Whilst Murtherous Agag good Indemnify’d:

And Ahabs life a satisfaction gives

For Israels sin because Benhadad lives.⁸⁰

Some elegists might have been wary of claiming to know providence’s exact intentions. This poet, on the contrary, insists that human justice must align with divine justice, which they believe decrees that enemies of the new regime should be killed. Two biblical references help the poet make the point in uncompromising terms. The first is to 1 Samuel 15. Here, God commands Saul to destroy the Amalekites but Saul spares their king, Agag. In response, God says ‘It repenteth me that I have set up Saul to be king’ (KJV 1 Samuel 15:11). The second reference is to 1 Kings 20. Ahab, king of Israel, defeats Benhadad, King of Syria, in battle. Ahab lets Benhadad go when the latter promises to restore the cities that his father had taken from Ahab’s father. A prophet then warns Ahab that he will now forfeit his life because he has freed a man whom God appointed to destruction. Both references are about kings whose disobedience to God means that they either lose power or die. This kind of biblical political analogy was perhaps more typical of non-conformist writing. The elegist, though, uses that rhetorical strategy against the ‘phantique’ of the poem: the worst that can be said for Charles II is that he has been too clement. Yet in attacking the ‘phantique’ for their disobedience to the restored king, the poem at the same time argues against a policy of clemency. The poet apologises for this: extreme sorrow, he explains, has made him ‘overbold’ but ‘our blest Martyr Charles, his blood has cry’d | to Heaven, and Heaven remains unsatisfy’d’.⁸¹ The repetition of ‘satisfaction’ and ‘unsatisfy’d’ contrasts the biblical death of Ahab – a satisfaction of divine justice – to the unpunished death of Charles I. The imagery of blood is also the same as that used in royalist arguments for retributive justice against the regicides.⁸² This elegy joins those arguments by attacking radicals and objecting to royal policy.

John Crouch makes similar points. Using images of blood and sacrifice, he wonders whether Henry’s death is meant to atone for that of Charles I:

Shall this Duke’s blood the flames of Justice quench

Due from the scarlet of that Murthering Bench?

Must he appease his Fathers injur’d Ghost,

Till expiated by an Holocaust?

Propitious Heaven your milder Laws dispence

Fat not your Alters still with innocence!

Lambs have been slain too long, O set them by

And let the Rugged Bulls of Basan die!⁸³

Heaven’s ‘milder laws’ seems to refer to clemency, though what Crouch means by ‘dispence’ (to get rid of or to distribute?) is vague.⁸⁴ Either way, he seems to avoid questioning the king’s preferred policy. He does, however, frame Henry’s death as an injustice. Stuart dies for Stuart, son for father; the innocent suffer, the guilty remain free: ‘that Murthering Bench’ is Crouch’s name for the judges at the king’s trial. Like the author of A Cordial Elegie, Crouch turns to the Old Testament to make his point. The Bulls of Bashan appear in Psalm 22 where the speaker laments God’s seeming absence when they are beset by troubles: ‘Many bulls have compassed me: strong bulls of Bashan have beset me round. They gaped upon me with their mouths, as a ravening and a roaring lion’ (KJV Psalm 22: 12-13). References to the bulls are found in both royalist and republican writing, often being used to describe Oliver Cromwell or his army.⁸⁵ Psalm 22 was also prominent in the liturgy of the crucifixion where the bulls were interpreted as the people who had condemned Christ. Crouch, too, uses the Bulls to figure the enemies of Charles I (who was of course seen by many royalists as a Christ figure). Crouch seems, then, to present Henry as a sacrifice for a larger cause of protecting the whole Stuart lineage. The language of sacrifice, however, is not used easily by Crouch. He recoils from the gruesome imagery of flowing blood, sacrificial altars, and slain innocence. The question at stake here is what counts as true justice. Crouch is trying to dispel the idea that Henry was a just sacrifice and focus instead on those who should be on the receiving end of the new regime’s retribution.

The possibility that Henry’s death might be interpreted as divine condemnation of the Restoration was no invention of the elegists.⁸⁶ The not infrequent references to enemies of the new king in these poems show that Henry’s death was seen as a moment of danger. As the author of Loyal Tears put it: ‘Our loss is greater than we dare to own | Let it not be among late rebels known’.⁸⁷ The same poet situates Henry’s death in the context of the king’s return. The crimes they describe, though, are the people’s responses to the events of May 1660.

We had an Earthly Trinity before,

The stamp of that which you above adore;

And you agreed to have our Saint away,

Urg’d by the rival Worship of last May.

Now they are Gemini, and the Royal Line

Grows less with Fortune, and advanc’d, Decline.

What Rebels Pride and Staring Insolence

Brav’d not to Kill, see the unwarded Fence

Of a just Triumph laid it in the Grave,

And Vertue, Honor, Goodness could not save.⁸⁸

The figuration of the three Stuart brothers as a broken Trinity further exemplifies how poetry about Henry’s death undercut panegyric.⁸⁹ As we have seen, James and Henry were praised as Castor and Pollux. In this elegy, though, such mythicising is second-best and the result of a loss. As the poet seems to chart a shift from Christianity to classical Fortune, from theology (the Trinity) to myth (Castor and Pollux), it is as if Henry’s death prompts a slippage in spiritual values. Amplifying this is the issue of idolatry, ‘the rival Worship of last May’. To figure the celebrations of the Restoration as idolatrous is unusual given how poets, preachers, and pamphleteers argued that the king’s return was the work of providence. This elegist uses idolatry, though, to shift responsibility for Henry’s death onto the people. Once more, regicide elegy is influencing the Henry elegies here. As Charles I was exonerated of guilt for the Civil Wars and blame laid squarely at the feet of the ‘rabble’, so the ‘people’ here are culpable. The Restoration is thus one chapter in a series of national trials where God demands that the people acknowledge His actions in bringing about political change.

Pordage also used the idolatry motif in his elegy as a way of explaining providence’s decision to take Henry: ‘lest we should commit Idolatry, | Heaven took him from our sight, not Memory.’⁹⁰ More forgiving in that it is about possibility rather than practice, these lines, nonetheless, make a similar point to that in Loyal Tears about the risks of idolising the restored Stuarts. These references to idolatry are worth pondering on not least because, ironically, one can almost hear in them something of Milton’s argument against Stuart monarchy from The Readie and Easie Way to Establish a Free Commonwealth: ‘a King must be ador’d like a Demigod’, he wrote mockingly, and the people are like the Israelites who returned to Egypt ‘to worship thir idol queen’.⁹¹ Even when used by opposing political sides, idolatry, both would have agreed, was a danger: for Milton because it’s just what Stuart kingship was; but for royal elegists, too, because they were policing a boundary between just celebration and ignorance of God’s will. This royalist concern was in evidence, in fact, even in the summer of 1660, well before Henry’s death, when one panegyrist had warned against idolizing Charles II: ‘let’s not Idolize him, lest he prove | A Gift bestow’d in anger not in Love’.⁹² This appears to be an allusion to 1 Samuel 8 where the Israelites demand a king and God, sending Saul, laments that they are obeying someone other than Him (the references to Saul’s disobedience in 1 Samuel already noted suggest this story of the people’s ignorance of God’s power was not far from the minds of some of Henry’s elegists). The classical analogue is Aesop’s fable of the frogs. The frogs ask Zeus to send them a king and Zeus, after sending a log, sends a heron who eats the frogs up. With their clear potential for republican interpretation, neither story exactly captured the zeitgeist in the summer of 1660. Some royalist interpretations of the fable, however, did argue it was all about the folly of being too desirous for change.⁹³ Our panegyrist quoted above may fit into a similar, if not identical, mould insofar as he argues that God is testing the people’s humility. The recurrence of the idolatry motif in two of the elegies suggests, however, that some believed that Henry’s death proved that the test had been failed. Though, like the echoes of Milton’s republican prose, it is highly unlikely to be a direct allusion, we might hear in the image of the ‘unwarded Fence | Of a just Triumph’ Milton’s Satan leaping over the boundary of Eden in one bound (Book 4. 181-2). If the return of the king was for royalists a paradise restored, then Henry’s death was a warning that such a paradise was to be guarded well and not taken for granted.

The Henry elegies bring into sharp focus a sense that the Restoration needed to be protected from harm. A just triumph it may have been, but a straightforward one it was not. Katherine Philips’s elegy for Henry works through some of these issues. Her elegy has received little critical attention in contrast to her other occasional political poems. Yet it speaks to the ways supporters of the restored Stuarts struggled to reconcile belief in the providentially directed return of the king with heaven’s anger in taking Henry. Philips begins bluntly: ‘Great Gloucester’s dead, and yet in this we must | Confesse that angry heaven is wise and just.’⁹⁴ The enjambment emphasises confession, signalling that this elegy aims to articulate the nation’s sins. Suggestions of disobedience and retribution dominate the poem’s opening section. Philips situates Henry’s death in a longer history of the Civil Wars. But conflict, violence, and suffering are seen as the consequence of ‘our offences’. The death itself is described as a ‘new stroke’, with the suggestion of an axe stroke implying historical echoes of the king’s execution.

Like Pordage and the anonymous author of Loyal Tears, Philips does not shift blame onto vague enemies of the state. Henry, rather, was a sacrifice for the ingratitude of the whole population. But Philips is interested in how to cure this.

But our ingratitude and discontent

Deserv’d to know our mercies are but lent;

And those complaints heaven in this rigid fate

Doth first chastise, and then legitimate.

By this it our divisions doth reprove,

And makes us joine in griefe, if not in love.⁹⁵

Seeking contentment through retreat was a political act in Philips’ pastoral lyrics of the 1650s where ‘discontent’ was associated with the cares of the public world. With the Stuarts restored and Philips directly addressing her poetry to public events, ‘discontent’ weighs down the possible greatness of the Restoration she supported. This speaker does not specify who was being ungrateful nor what the complaints are, and that lack of specificity, in contrast to some of the other elegies, is part of the point. There is no convenient other to blame. The use of the first-person plural throughout this elegy – ‘we’, ‘our’, ‘us’ – does not argue division. Philips’s point, rather, is that division kills. It is a rather dark turn of wit for Philips to say that unworthy complaints only get legitimated by a prince’s death. But Heaven, turned from benevolent redeemer to become harsh and ‘rigid’, will make its point through suffering not joy; the verb ‘makes’, indeed, suggests divine force directed at the whole nation.

This elegy argues that providence wants Henry’s death to be a spur to restore unity. Henry’s life, therefore, is depicted as a cause of agreement: everyone admired him, everyone laments him; he was a ‘universal favourite’. But the poem’s conclusion turns to what’s left and thinks about Charles’ position: ‘While on our King heaven doth this care expresse, | To make his comforts safe, it makes them lesse.’⁹⁶ The ‘care’ or guidance that Heaven offers to Charles emphasises discomfort as a source of security. Writing about Philips’ 1663 play Pompey, Andrew Shifflett has argued that she created a sophisticated critique of the politics of clemency.⁹⁷ We may recall here that Philips does describe Cromwell’s decision to send Henry into exile as an ‘ill-favour’d clemencie’. But if Cromwell’s was ‘ill-favour’d’ then perhaps Charles’ would be more fortuitous. The elegy, indeed, leaves no suggestion that Philips favoured a policy of royal retribution. Rather, it fits well with what Hero Chalmers has argued in relation to Philips’ Restoration writing, namely that Philips anatomises the costs of subduing personal pain in the name of national unity.⁹⁸ There is no naïve belief in the politics of forgiving and forgetting. Discomfort enables safety because it means rulers are more wary of danger not forgetful of it. Elegy could draw political divisions and several of the elegies for Henry indeed aspire to divide rather than unite. But Philips’ elegy stands out in arguing that Henry’s death required a period of collective reflection on God’s purposes. Mourning at least one of the Restoration’s possible futures was, for Philips, a sign of the need for the nation to unite rather than once more become divided.

∞

The elegies for Henry show us how poets used royal death to meditate on the challenges facing Charles’ rule. The Restoration was subject to various interpretations. Different groups and individuals saw in it their own multi-faceted hopes and fears for the future. These came both from without royalism and from within. Such interpretations were themselves subject to change over short spaces of time in response to other historical events. I have argued that the death of Henry was one such event that reveals much about the divisions in royalist culture. The elegies do sometimes try to codify a version of the past that was ideologically useful in shoring up the authority of the king. In this respect they carry on the work of panegyric. But the elegies disclose the variety of disagreement over the direction of the new regime, especially in the uncertain times around the punishment of its enemies. Angry providence punishing the sinful, whoever they may be, or making from the experience of loss some possible if imprecise unity in a new state; these are tragic themes that the elegies take up as they disrupt the structuring of the Restoration as a moment of triumph over mourning to examine how the future of the monarchy could be imagined through the interactions of joy and grief.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

¹ Maguire, Regicide and Restoration, 14.

² Potter, ‘The Royal Martyr in the Restoration’, 244-5.

³ Thomason’s dates range from 20^th September to the following February. The Universities of Oxford and Cambridge issued anthologies of poetry almost all in Latin: Epicedia Academiae Oxoniensis (dated 14^th November by Thomason) and Threni Cantabrigienses (dated 15^th February). The complex connections of university anthologies to their institutional contexts as well as to similar anthologies from the rest of the century are beyond the scope of this article which will focus on the English poetry with occasional reference to the university poems. On university volumes on successions see Power, ‘‘Eyes Without Light’’. Other literature printed about Henry’s death includes a biography (Manley, Short View) and a sermon (Phillpott, An Adieu).

⁴ Threni Cantabrigienses; Manley, Short View.

⁵ See, for example, Henry Bold, Poems, 234-5.

⁶ On Philips and Henry Lawes see Chalmers, Royalist Women Writers, 17-21; 78-82.

⁷ On Crouch see McElligott, ‘John Crouch’.

⁸ Horti Carolini Rosa Altera, b2v.

⁹ For example, P[ordage], Poems, Crouch, Census Poeticus, Mackenzie, Aretina, Cartwright, Heroick Lover.

¹⁰ For an illuminating discussion of terminology see Doelman, Daring Muse, 297-302. Throughout this article I use the term elegy as a shorthand for funerary elegy.

¹¹ Doelman, Daring Muse, 12-20; Brady, English Funerary Elegy, 2. A rich discussion of the generic development of the elegy is Kay, Melodious Tears.

¹² Select Poems, 12; Elegie Upon the Universally-Lamented Death; Queen’s Lamentation; Lluelyn, Elegie, 4; P[ordage], Poems, sig. B6v.

¹³ On the centrality of elegy to royalism see Smith, Literature and Revolution, 287-91. On the regicide elegies themselves see Lacey, Cult of King Charles, 94-114.

¹⁴ Hannibal Potter noted how joys and sorrows were mixed in Academiae Oxoniensis, sig. A3r.

¹⁵ Howard, An Elegy.

¹⁶ Eligie upon the Universally-lamented Death. Dying Tears uses the same image of being ‘ravished’ away: ‘Dear Gloster’s ravished from this mortall Stage’.

¹⁷ See for example Francis Marrow’s poem: ‘Arise bright infant, and shine forth | To calme the tempest of the North’: Horti Carolina Rosa Altera, sig. D1r.

¹⁸ Cordial Elegie, 2.

¹⁹ Manley, Short View, 22. The first published account of this conversation was A True Relation of the KINGS Speech, printed in 1649 and dated March 24 by Thomason. It also appeared in 1660 in The Last Counsel of a Martyred King to his Son.

²⁰ Brett, Threnodia, 9.

²¹ Quoted in Stuart Handley, ‘Prince Henry, Duke of Gloucester’, ODNB.

²² Morrill and Baker, ‘Sons of Zeruiah’, 31.

²³ Adamson, ‘The Frightened Junto’, 55; Kelsey, ‘Staging the Trial’, 77.

²⁴ The account of the meeting is in Whitelock, Memorials of the English Affairs, 491-2.

²⁵ Loxley, Royalism and Poetry, 162-5.

²⁶ Knoppers, Constructing Cromwell, 167-93.

²⁷ Lluelyn, Elegie on the Death, 4.

²⁸ Shuttleton, Smallpox and the Literary, 72. This interpretation fits with Jasper Mayne’s poem in Oxoniensis Academicae, sig B2r: ‘Hanc, Cromwelle, tuam suspicor esse luem’ (I suspect this is your plague, Cromwell).

²⁹ Collected Works, 78-9.

³⁰ Peacey, ‘The Duke’s Parrot’.

³¹ Lluelyn, To the Kings Most Excellent Majesty, 11-12.

³² Lluelyn, Elegie, 7.

³³ Highley, ‘Charles II and the Meanings of Exile’.

³⁴ For a full analysis of the episode see Nicole Greenspan, ‘Public Scandal, Political Controversy’.

³⁵ See An Exact Narrative of the Attempts made upon the Duke of Glocester.

³⁶ On the arguments about Henrietta Maria in the run up to the Restoration see Anna-Marie Linnell, ‘Writing the Royal Consort in Stuart England’. PhD, Exeter University, 2016. 118-20.

³⁷ Ibid., 122-4.

³⁸ Cordial Eligie, 4.

³⁹ Kerrigan, Motives of Woe, 32, 27-8.

⁴⁰ Brett, Threnodia, 14.

⁴¹ Ibid., 8: ‘The Name which to Three Nations deer | We loved in thy Uncle here’. For other references to Prince Henry Frederick see Epicedia Academiae Oxoniensis sigs. A3v and B2v and Phillpott, An Adieu, 3: ‘HENRY hath been of late an ominous and unfortunate Name unto the Princes of the Nation’.

⁴² Brett, Threnodia, 15.

⁴³ Ibid.

⁴⁴ Eligie Upon the Universally-lamented Death.

⁴⁵ Dying Tears.

⁴⁶ Eligie Upon the Universally-lamented Death.

⁴⁷ Dying Tears.

⁴⁸ Ibid.

⁴⁹ See A Looking Glass for a Christian Family and The Manner of the Kings Trial.

⁵⁰ Eligie upon the Universally-Lamented Death.

⁵¹ Quoted in Peacey, ‘The Duke’s Parrot’, 21.

⁵² For example, Andrew Marvell’s ‘The Nymph Complaining on the Death of her Fawn’ or Hester Pulter’s ‘Elegy on the Death of my Dear and Lovely Daughter, J.P.’ For an illuminating discussion of these two poems see Ross, Women, Poetry, and Politics, 147-52.

⁵³ Griffey, ‘Rose and Lily Queen’, 818-9.

⁵⁴ [P]ordage, Poems, sig. B6r; Cordial Elegie, 2. In his diary entry for 23^rd September, John Evelyn described Henry as ‘a prince of extraordinary hopes’.

⁵⁵ I have followed the translation in the Loeb edition by H.R. Fairclough.

⁵⁶ Collected Works, 78.

⁵⁷ Three Royal Poems, 5-6.

⁵⁸ Flecknoe, Heroick Portraits, sigs. B6r; C1v.

⁵⁹ Howard, Elegy.

⁶⁰ A Cordial Elegy, 2.

⁶¹ Lluelyn, Elegie, 5-6. For the Niobe image see also J.P., Select Poems, 15.

⁶² Lluelyn, Elegie, 5.

⁶³ Three Royal Poems, 2.

⁶⁴ Cartwright, Heroick-Lover, 75.

⁶⁵ P[ordage], Poems, sig. B4v.

⁶⁶ Cartwright, Heroick-Lover, 78; P[ordage], Poems, sig. B6v.

⁶⁷ Howard, Elegy.

⁶⁸ A Cordial Elegie, 2.

⁶⁹ For discussion see Weber, Paper Bullets, 25-49.

⁷⁰ Brett, Threnodia, 3.

⁷¹ On providence in writing about the Restoration from 1660 see Munns, ‘Accounting for Providence’.

⁷² Crouch, Census Poeticus 27. The first edition of Crouch’s poem, The Muses Tears for the Loss of the Illustrious Prince Henry Duke of Gloucester, was printed as a quarto pamphlet in London in 1660. An amended version appeared in Census Poeticus. In the 1660 version the third line reads ‘Now bright, and orient was the pearly Chain’. I have quoted from the 1663 version. The Muses Tears is followed in Census Poeticus by The Muses Joy, a poem on the return of Henrietta Maria where she is presented as heaven-sent to heal the country after the death of Henry.

⁷³ Ibid., 21.

⁷⁴ P[ordage], Poems, sig. B4v.

⁷⁵ See Royal Chronicle, 4 where the story of the diurnal star appears alongside a 6-line verse interpretation of it attributed to John Selden.

⁷⁶ P[ordage], Poems, sig. C2r.

⁷⁷ See Aphra Behn, A Pindarick on the Death of our Late Sovereign: ‘That such a Monarch! such a God should dye! | And no Dire Warning to the World be given’ (Poems, 190).

⁷⁸ See, for example, Doelman, Daring Muse, 93-100 on the comet of 1618.

⁷⁹ For discussion of the trials of the regicides see Zook, ‘‘Blood will have blood’’, 73-92.

⁸⁰ Cordial Elegie, 3.

⁸¹ Ibid.

⁸² See Zook, ‘’Blood will have Blood’’, 75-6.

⁸³ Crouch, Census Poeticus, 28-9.

⁸⁴ A lot depends on whether Henry’s death is read as harsh, thus inviting a request for ‘milder laws’, or if it is read as an unintended consequence of mildness, which should therefore be dispensed with. Theologically, the latter seems untenable for it would be to suggest that God did not foresee an outcome of His own actions, and hence to question His providence. Still, the vagueness of the term is helpful for Crouch in walking a line between critiquing and endorsing royal policy.

⁸⁵ See the Leveller Richard Overton’s The Baiting of the Great Bull and the Royalist cleric Thomas Washbourne’s Repairer of the Breach, 23. A mock funeral sermon by Samuel Butler for the Fifth Monarchist Thomas Harrison, who was executed in October, uses the image satirically: Feak, A Funeral Sermon, 15.

⁸⁶ One contemporary described hearing about a sermon preached in Wapping where prayers were offered requesting that another member of the royal family be killed ‘for the rejoicing of God’s people’. Calendar of State Papers, Domestic Series, Charles II. 1660-61, 270.

⁸⁷ Loyal Tears.

⁸⁸ Ibid.

⁸⁹ Compare Richard Braitwait describing the brothers as ‘a three-fold-cord’ and the ‘Trine | Of You, and Your two Brothers’ (To His Majesty, 6) to Pordage mourning the loss of the ‘hopeful Trine’ (Poems, sig. B6r).

⁹⁰ P[ordage], Poems, sig. B6v.

⁹¹ The Complete Works of John Milton Vol. VI: Vernacular Regicide and Republican Writings ed. Nicholas McDowell and N.H. Keeble (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), 488, 521.

⁹² A Glimpse of Joy. There is no date on this broadsheet but Thomason’s copy is dated 30^th June.

⁹³ Patterson, Fables of Power, 94-5.

⁹⁴ Collected Works, 78.

⁹⁵ Ibid.

⁹⁶ Ibid., 79.

⁹⁷ Shifflett, ‘Politics of Clemency’.

⁹⁸ Chalmers, Royalist Women Writers, 91.