History and Propaganda
As Cowley implies in his description of The Civil War in his 1656 preface, 'three Books of the Civil War it self,' military action is central in the poem, although the scope of the poem is much wider than military history, and his treatment of events is that of a poet and propagandist, rather than that of a chronicler or historian. Cowley is concerned with the religious and political issues and the personalities of the war as well as with military action, but no one could complain of him as Ben Jonson complained of Samuel Daniel: 'Daniel wrott Civill Warres, and yett hath not one batle in all his Book.'1 Cowley describes the important campaigns and battles of the first year of the war, to the time of Newbury, especially those which were, or could be claimed as, Royalist victories; and the structure of his poem is determined to a large degree by the military events of this period, although it is influenced also by literary, especially epic, tradition.
In organizing his account of events Cowley was confronted by the problem that the action of the war did not follow any simple or orderly pattern. In the period he deals with, there took place the two major battles of Edgehill and Newbury in central England, but important campaigns were fought also in the west and the north, and fighting occurred simultaneously and sporadically over much of the country. The solution that Cowley devised to this problem is the one that has generally been adopated by later historians of the Civil War: he makes a compromise between the chronological and regional treatment of events. His scheme is basically chronological, but he departs at times from strict chronology in order to give a coherent account of events in a particular region or theatre of war.
The opening part of Book I, which serves as a general introduction to the poem, includes a contrast between the divided England of the present and the united England of the past, and a review of the antecedents of the Civil War (11.1-168). Cowley then describes the gathering together of the King's army, which followed the raising of the royal standard at Nottingham on 22 August 1642; and he goes on to give an account of events in central England during the first three months of the war, including the first skirmish at Powick Bridge near Worcester, on 23 September, the first major battle, Edgehill, on 23 October, the subsequent royal advance to Brentford in the environs of London, and the King's return to Oxford on 29 November, when the design to attack London was abandoned (11.169-364). Cowley next gives a brief description of events in central England during the later winter and the spring of 1643, including the deaths of the Parliamentary leaders, Lord Brooke and John Hampden (11.365-92); but, since little fighting took place in the area during this period, he soon moves on to celebrate the successful Royalist western campaign led by Sir Ralph Hopton, Prince Maurice, and the Marquis of Hertford, which culminated in the crushing defeat of the Parliamentary army of Sir William Waller at Roundway Down on 13 July (11.393-490). In the later part of the book he describes the victories won in the north by the Earl of Newcastle against the Parliamentary armies of Sir Thomas and Lord Fairfax, the most notable of which was Adwalton Moor on 30 June (11.509-46).
Books II and III, which cover a shorter period of time than Book I, are not so fully taken up as it is by the narrative of events, but military action remains the dominant subject of the first half of Book II and the middle part of Book III. Book II opens with an account of the war in the central and northern Midlands during March and April, including the Battle of Hopton Heath and Prince Rupert's capture of Brimingham and Lichfield (11.1-136). Cowley next turns his attention to events in Lincolnshire, particularly the death on 28 July of the Royalist hero, Charles Cavendish (11.137-56), and to those in the southern Midlands, including the sickness which devastated Essex's army at Thame in Oxfordshire during the month of June (11.157-96). He then resumes his history of the western campaign from the point at which he had left it in Book I, describing the Royalist capture of Bristol on 26 July (11.197-276) and of Exeter on 4 September (11.277-352), and the commencement of the Royalist siege of Gloucester on 10 August (11.357-64). In the remaining section of Book II history is partly displaced by epic fiction as Cowley describes a council in Hell, in which Satan declares his support and aid for the rebels (11.365-617). The opening of Book III is given largely to a satirical description of the zeal of the Puritans of London in raising a force for the relief of Gloucester, and to satire of the sects which compose this force (11.1-198). The story of military events is resumed with an account of the King's abandonment of the siege of Gloucester on 5 September, and the skirmish between Royalist and Parliamentary armies at Aldbourne Chase on 18 September (11.199-250). There follows a description of the Battle of Newbury, on 20 September (11.251-380), a satirical catalogue of the rebels who fell in the engagement (11.381-454), and finally a series of elegies for the Royalist fallen, concluding with that for Falkland (11.455-648).
Since Cowley wrote The Civil War before any ordered or comprehensive history of the period he was dealing with had been published, he had to piece together the history of events for himself. No doubt he relied partly upon his own observation, partly upon such informal sources of information as his acquaintance in the Royalist circles in Oxford provided, and partly upon the newspapers and pamphlets that were being printed in large numbers. His opportunity for observation of important events was probably quite limited. The attendance in the King's expeditions to which Sprat refers may have taken place at a later date than the poem, since Cowley's descriptions of battle provide no definite evidence of first-hand knowledge,2 but he must have witnessed the setting out and return of royal armies and other events of the kind that Anthony Wood describes in his account of life in Oxford during the war.3 It is impossible to estimate how much information came to him in informal ways, but his friendship with Falkland and the acquaintance Sprat states he held with 'the chief men of the Court and the Gown' should have provided him with opportunities of acquiring knowledge of events. The evidence suggests, however, that Cowley remained consistent to his bookish habits of study and work, and that he acquired most of his information from the newspapers and pamphlets, relying heavily upon the official and semi-official Royalist accounts of events printed in Oxford. The Civil War contains very little information that Cowley could not have found in the Royalist newspapers, newsbooks, and pamphlets printed in 1642 and 1643, and the poem frequently seems to be specifically indebted to these publications.
Cowley's most important single source for the history of events in 1643 was probably Mercurius Aulicus, the newspaper skilfully edited by John Berkenhead, which was published weekly in Oxford beginning in January of that year, and which was in effect the official Royalist journal of news and propaganda.4 The poet frequently appears to follow the version of events it provides, to reflect its emphases, and to establish the same links between events as it does. For example, the details of his description of the Battle of Adwalton Moor and the Earl of Newcastle's heroism (I 529-40) are almost certainly drawn from the account in Mercurius Aulicus.5 His statement that Henry Hastings had twice vanquished Sir John Gell and Sir William Brereton in encounters earlier than the Battle of Hopton Heath (II 22-5) probably rests upon a careful reading of Mercurius Aulicus, for the journal had reported two such occasions, in January and February. His linking of the deaths of Hampden and Brooke as exemplifying the workings of providence in the Royalist cause (I 372-80) may also have been suggested by Mercurius Aulicus. In many instances Mercurius Aulicus should be regarded as representing the view of events that was general in Royalist circles, rather than as a direct source for The Civil War, but there can be little doubt that Cowley read the newspaper with close attention, and it seems likely that he sometimes had issues of it in front of him when he wrote.
In addition to Mercurius Aulicus, Cowley made extensive use of various Royalist accounts of particular military actions which were published in separate pamphlets, usually in Oxford. These reports were often written by officers who had played a part in the engagement they described, and Mercurius Aulicus sometimes referred its readers to them for a fuller description of actions than it had space to provide. There can be little doubt, for example, that Cowley drew the details of his account of the Battle of Stratton (I 433-56) from such a pamphlet, The Round-Heads Remembrancer (Oxford 1643). For his account of the Battle of Roundway Down (I 471-82), he probably made some use of Mercurius Aulicus but went for other details to Sir John Byrons Relation (York 1643). His description of the Battle of Hopton Heath and the heroic death of the Earl of Northampton (II 22-81) seems to derive from The Battaile on Hopton-Heath ([Oxford] 1643), and his account of the battles of Aldbourne Chase and Newbury (III 199-380) derives, in part at least, from A True and Impartiall Relation (Oxford 1643), attributed to Lord Digby.
Cowley no doubt made similar use of the proclamations, declarations, and speeches that were issued in the King's name (although often penned by Falkland, Clarendon, and others), and of Royalist sermons and pamphlets on the political and religious issues of the conflict. In addition to numerous pamphlets on special subjects, some comprehensive surveys and indictments of the crimes of the rebels had appeared in time to be of service to him, including two intelligent and effectively written works published in Oxford in 1643; A Letter from Mercurius Civicus to Mercurius Rusticus, attributed to John Berkenhead, and The True Informer, Who in the following Discourse, or Colloquy, Discovereth unto the World the chiefe Causes of the sad Distempers in Great Brittany, and Ireland, the authorship of which is unknown.6 The poet must have read also Parliamentary newspapers and pamphlets, which, as Clarendon states, 'were everyday printed at London, and as constantly sent to Oxford,'7 but he read these to refute rather than to borrow.
The Civil War belongs in many respects to the stream of Royalist propaganda that issued forth from Oxford in 1642-3. Cowley's treatment of events is to be understood in the context of the propaganda warfare of this period waged between Mercurius Aulicus and its chief Parliamentary opponent, Mercurius Britanicus, and their cohorts of followers. For example, his statement that de la Vieuville was cold-heartedly slain by the rebels after his capture at Aldbourne Chase (III 235-44), and his insistence that the Parliamentary forces had the advantage of the ground at Newbury (III 253, 307, 321, 363, 481-4) reflect the emphasis of the Royalist journals and pamphlets. Both points were vigorously denied by the Parliamentary writers. The very words and phrases he employs are often loaded with special meanings they had acquired in the verbal warfare of the period. Much in The Civil War that now appears flat or pointless had heated significance in the propaganda battle at the time Cowley wrote.
The Civil War is polemical to the degree that Cowley implies when he describes in the 1656 preface his decision to destroy it and similar writings: he declares that the members of the defeated party should dismantle 'all the Works and Fortifications of Wit and Reason'8 by which they had defended their cause. He writes in the poem with the constant purpose of rallying opinion on the Royalist side, of raising the morale of his party, and of crushing the Parliamentarians. He appears to have learned rapidly those arts of political propaganda that were developed during his period in Oxford under the leadership of Berkenhead and others. His desire to defend the Royalist cause did not make him entirely unscrupulous in his handling of facts. His poem contains many elements of fiction, but the fiction is not often presented in a way that would lead the reader to confuse it with fact. He made the most of his poetic license in introducing a fictious speech of King Charles before the Battle of Newbury (III 277-328), and a fictious or largely fictious catalogue of the rebel dead following that battle (III 385-456), but in the first of these two instances he may have considered his practice to be sanctioned not only by epic precedent but also by the historiographical tradition stemming from Thucydides.9 In some other cases where fact and fiction are confused Cowley was probably misled by his sources, as in the absurd allegation that Papists served in the Parliamentary army (III 183-6), and in the inflation of a trivial incident on the river near Brentford into an important engagement (I 325-32). However, if he rarely presents fiction as fact, he invariably interprets the facts in the way most favourable to the Royalist cause, and where facts are disputed he always prefers a Royalist version.
Cowley's natural bias in the treatment of events appears in the fact that he claims both of the two principal battles fought during the period covered by his poem, Edgehill and Newbury, as Royalist victories, although they were indecisive enough to be claimed as victories also by the Parliamentarians.10 His bias appears too in the emphasis he gives to certain events or aspects of events, and in his omission or near-omission of others. Thus, while he celebrates the victories of Edgehill and Brentford, he passes silently over the fact that the campaign of which these battles were part ended in failure, when the King, faced by strong Parliamentary forces, decided not to risk another battle and abandoned his attempt to advance on London. He makes only the briefest allusion, by way of a pun, to the Parliamentary capture of Reading (II 157-8), which was really a major blow to the Royalists.11 He describes very elaborately the disease that ravaged Essex's army in June 1643, interpreting it as divine punishment upon the rebels (II 159-92), while he makes no direct reference to the fact that Royalist Oxford was severely afflicted by a similar disease during the same period. He makes no allusion whatever to the fiasco of Edmund Waller's plot in London, in May 1643, an episode that brought only discredit upon the Royalist cause, as well as disgrace upon a fellow poet.
The extent to which Cowley's treatment of history is polemical can be assessed by comparing his version of events with Clarendon's in The History of the Rebellion. By the time he wrote The Civil War Cowley had probably become acquainted with Sir Edward Hyde, the future Lord Clarendon, who admired his poetry and shared his friendship with Falkland.12 Cowley's biases are generally the same as Clarendon's and his treatment of events is often strikingly similar. The Civil War can be elucidated more frequently by reference to Clarendon's History than to any other single work, with the possible exception of Mercurius Aulicus. But Clarendon is distinctly more moderate, detached, and objective than Cowley, and the nature of The Civil War as propaganda frequently emerges from the comparison with the History.
While Clarendon is by no means totally uncritical of the King, is strongly critical of some of the royal advisers and military leaders, and comments candidly on various failures in the management of the royal cause, Cowley, in contrast, is completely uncritical of the King and his advisers, and he does his best to conceal all Royalist political and military blunders. In The Civil War he develops a eulogy of the happy years preceding the war (I 79ff) which has affinities with a famous passage in Clarendon's History, but he avoids the criticism of Charles' attempt at personal government that is stated or implied in Clarendon's account. Cowley half-conceals beneath a witty conceit the humiliation of the terms of the Treaty of Ripon made by the King with the Scots in 1640 (I 104); Clarendon emphasizes the ill management and disastrous consequences of the negotiation. Cowley makes no mention of the facts that the Royalists violated a truce in their attack on Brentford in November 1642, and failed to observe properly the articles of agreement through which they obtained the surrender of Bristol in July 1643. Clarendon recognizes the need to offer explanation and justification in both instances, and in the second he expresses some real regret for a Royalist fault. Cowley does not admit the skill and heroism of Essex's relief of Gloucester, or the blunder of the Royalist commanders in subsequently allowing Essex to take his forces from Gloucester to Newbury before intercepting them; Clarendon has high praise for the first and strong criticism for the second. Similar differences appear between Cowley's and Clarendon's accounts of the Battle of Newbury, and even in their accounts of the death of Falkland. Cowley, although he shows some sign of being moved by Falkland's own spirit of charity, blames his death primarily on the rebels; Clarendon, strong though his Royalist bias is, blames it primarily upon the war.13
The difference between Cowley's and Clarendon's treatment of events arises partly no doubt from intrinsic differences between the characters of the two men, and from differences in experience and principle. Cowley lacked any of Clarendon's practical experience of politics when he wrote The Civil War, and he had developed little of Clarendon's breadth of view. It is significant that during the period prior to the conflict, while Hyde was actively opposing some of the King's policies in Parliament, Cowley was writing panegyrics of the monarch which stand out as extreme even in an age of extravagant panegyrics. Nor can it be entirely accidental that, even though Cowley made the friendship of the eminently moderate Falkland at Oxford, he found his later place in the service of Jermyn and Henrietta Maria, leaders of a circle which Clarendon regarded as dangerously extreme and which he worked against. But the difference between Clarendon's treatment of history and Cowley's is to be accounted for partly also by the differences in purpose and in the circumstances of composition of the two works. In The History of the Rebellion Clarendon wrote of the events of 1642-3 several years after they occurred, and he had the advantage of perspective and detachment impossible for Cowley.14 Furthermore, Clarendon could allow himself considerable freedom and candour, because he did not write for immediate publication: the History was not published until 1702-4, long after his death, and it appeared then in an expurgated version. Cowley, on the other hand, wrote very close in time to the events he described, and, until unforeseen reverses occurred, he no doubt intended his work to be quickly published as a contribution to the Royalist propaganda campaign.
If Cowley had any reservations concerning the character and policies of Charles and his advisers, it would have been quite contrary to his purposes to have admitted even a hint of doubt or criticism in The Civil War, for to do so would have been to give aid to the King's enemies. Thus Charles stands in the poem not merely as a paragon of virtue, which in private life he may have been, but also as the ideal monarch and as a great general. Happily for Cowley, the Royalist generals included men like Prince Rupert, Sir Bevil Grenville, and Sir Ralph Hopton, whose military exploits better qualified them for heroic treatment, but even Rupert possessed faults and made mistakes that Cowley had to conceal.15 In such battles as Stratton, a great Royalist victory won in the face of overwhelming odds, Cowley had a fit subject for celebration, and his hyperbole needed scarcely to move beyond the truth,16 but in other instances he had to exercise all his ingenuity to conceal defeat or to represent a doubtful action in the light most favourable to his cause.
As Cowley can admit no fault in the Royalists, so he can scarcely admit any merit in the rebels. He credits some of the Parliamentary leaders with Machiavellian skill but none with virtue. Thus Hampden is represented (just as Cromwell was later to be represented by Royalists) as a man of great intelligence and subtlety who uses his abilities to evil ends (I 377-92). In the poet's eyes all rebels are absolutely evil, and he makes no distinction between such relatively moderate figures as Hampden and Pym and such extremists as Harry Marten. He is reluctant even to allow courage to the Parliamentary soldiers, although he makes an exception in the case of their defence of Lichfield (II 135-6), prompted perhaps by the fact that Rupert had paid public tribute to the bravery of his opponents in this action. During the end of the period covered by the poem the rebels in truth provided a better subject for heroic treatment than the Royalists. There was a genuinely epic quality in the energy and spirit of the Londoners in raising troops for Essex, in Essex's remarkable achievement in relieving Gloucester,17 and in the courage of the London trained bands at Newbury; but Cowley could respond only with satire, and with the poetic fiction of the council in Hell, which evades unpalatable historical reality.
Cowley's treatment of the political issues that lie behind the conflict rests upon the conservative assumptions common to the Royalist writers of the period. His purpose is, in the words he gives to King Charles in the poem, 'things well establisht to defend' (III 291). The poet possessed an exceptionally strong personal commitment to order, as his writings show from the beginning to the end of his career,18 and like many members of his party he viewed the outbreak of rebellion as the coming of chaos. He expresses again and again in The Civil War his belief in a traditional conception of order and degree. His view of the proper political and social order is frequently conveyed by images of divinely established cosmic order such as appear in the official sixteenth-century homily on obedience, in Hooker, or in the speech of Shakespeare's Ulysses in Troilus and Cressida:19 the obedience of the stars to law in their movements through the heavens, or the allegiance rivers show in rendering tribute to the sea. Rebellion is described in images that suggest the violation or disruption of the natural order: earthquake, tempest, deluge, disease, and madness. Imagery of order and light is consistently associated with the Royalists, and imagery of disorder and darkness with the rebels.
The Civil War is a political poem rather than a political treatise. Cowley does not set forth his position regarding the political and constitutional issues of the war in any systematic way, and he implies his views as often as he states them. It is clear, however, that he adheres to the principles and arguments expounded in such official Royalist statements as His Majesties Answer to … The Declaration, or Remonstrance of the Lords and Commons, of the 19th of May, 1642 (1642), and in such popular and influential discourses as the younger Dudley Digges' The Unlawfulnesse of Subjects Taking Up Armes Against their Soveraigne, in what case soever ([Oxford] 1643). Like the authors of these works, and like Royalist writers generally in the period following Parliament's issuing of the Militia Ordinance in March 1642,20 he regards himself as a supporter of the traditional constitution. He holds that the constitution has been violated, not by the King, but by the pretended or self-styled Parliament, the two houses sitting at Westminster, which have taken to themselves the right to make law without the royal assent and in violation of the royal prerogative. Professing to champion the subject's liberty and property, Parliament has in actuality illegally imprisoned the King's subjects and illegally taxed and confiscated their property. In Cowley's view the Royalist party is the true defender of liberty as well as of order.
Many of the political statements and implications of the poem are to be understood in the light of the great debate taking place during the period when Cowley wrote, on the questions of the duty of obedience and the right of resistance. In the arguments and examples he uses the poet follows the pattern established by such Royalist writers as Dudley Digges, Henry Feme, and Thomas Morton in their controversy with Parliamentary writers like Henry Parker and William Prynne, who attempted to justify the resort of their party to armed revolt.21 Thus Cowley places the barons who forced King John to sign Magna Carta, and Simon de Montfort, leader of the baronial opposition to Henry III, in the company of the most evil and notorious rebels of English history (II 457-68), with the purpose of refuting Parliamentary writers such as Prynne, who made heroes of these men and appealed to their example as precedent for their own rebellion in the name of liberty.22 Cowley's unfavourable allusion to the rebels against Henry III has special point in view of the fact that Sir Robert Cotton's life of that king was republished in 1642 as Parliamentary propaganda, with a title suggesting a parallel between Henry and Charles.23
Cowley's allusions to biblical history have the same kind of polemical significance as his allusions to medieval British history. Like Clarendon,24 he protests against the application of 'Texts of wicked Princes' to King Charles by Parliamentary preachers and pamphleteers (II 597). The comparison of Charles to a wicked or erring monarch of the Old Testament was implied in Stephen Marshall's famous sermon, Meroz Cursed (1641), and it became increasingly open in Parliamentary literature after the outbreak of the war.25 In opposition, Royalist writers tried to show that no good biblical precedent could be found for resistance to Charles or rebellion against him. Parliamentary writers argued, for example, that divinely sanctioned precedent for resistance to royal authority existed in Jeroboam's rebellion against King Rehoboam: Rehoboam took the advice of evil counsellors and acted tyrannically, and God forbade him to fight against the rebellion led by Jeroboam (1 Kings 12). Mercurius Aulicus and the Royalist pamphleteers rejected this argument and protested against the comparison of Charles to Rehoboam.26 Cowley's allusion to Rehoboam and Jeroboam gains its point from this debate: he describes the followers of the latter, those who 'cut old Jacobs Stemme,' as suffering the torments of Hell, and maintains that even though Rehoboam was a tyrant, and even though God and fate decreed the success of the rebels, divine punishment was the inevitable consequence of the heinous sin of rebellion (II 443-8). The apparent implication is that rebellion is in no circumstances justifiable.
The political views Cowley expresses in The Civil War differ markedly from those he expresses in some later works. In parts of the Davideis that were evidently written during the 1650s he appears much more critical of monarchical government than in The Civil War.27 In the ode 'Brutus' (1656) he approves by implication violent resistance to an established ruler in the defence of liberty. In A Discourse by Way of Vision, Concerning the Government of Oliver Cromwell (1661) he expresses a more favourable view of Magna Carta than the earlier work seems to imply.28 The contrast between his views in The Civil War and in these later works provides some measure of the extreme position into which he was driven in that poem by the pressures of debate. Yet his political views in The Civil War are no more extreme than those of most other Royalist writers during the period to which the poem belongs. In upholding the doctrine of non-resistance Cowley was doing no more than reasserting an ancient commonplace, which was set forth in the sixteenth-century homilies on rebellion and which was revived and given renewed emphasis by such Royalists as Digges and Morton. Like these writers, Cowley is concerned to show that armed resistance to the King would be unjustified even if Charles were—as he is not—a tyrannical and ungodly monarch. There is no need to assume that Cowley or other Royalists like Digges and Morton were attempting to justify absolutism, but they had a lively fear of anarchy, and at a time of active revolt against the King they could admit no sanction for rebellion.29
Cowley values degree no less than order, and his treatment of social issues rests upon the same conservative assumptions as his treatment of politics. Although he was, according to John Aubrey,30 the son of a grocer, his aristocratic class bias is as intense as that of most Royalist writers. He shares the view, common among Royalists, that the rebellion is to a large extent an uprising of 'base mechanicks' and tradesmen discontented with their traditionally established place in the social order, and he condemns the rebels at every opportunity as socially inferior to their opponents. Thus he draws a contrast similar to that made by Clarendon and other Royalists between the high social rank of the King's officers slain at Newbury and the low rank of the rebels who fell. In one respect, indeed, his class prejudice appears more intense than Clarendon's. Clarendon concedes that the London trained bands, consisting of middle-class and humbler men, fought splendidly at Newbury and forced the abandonment of the old contempt in which the Royalists had held them. Cowley, however, remains blinded to the reality of their achievement, and he continues to satirize the citizen militia just as he had done in his earlier writings, following the tradition established by Jonson and Beaumont, as if nothing had changed.31
Like other seventeenth-century Anglicans, Cowley views the church as an integral part of the established social and political order. Writing in the context of the raging controversy of the early 1640s concerning church government, he defends the traditional ecclesiastical system against all attacks and deplores the damage it had recently suffered at the hands of the Puritans. He laments the fragmentation of the church caused by the development of numerous Puritan sects and by the sudden emergence of anarchy and excesses of all kinds in religion; and he represents the new sects as old heresies in revived form. His emphasis upon the great number and the heretical nature of the Puritan sects may be read as an attempt to refute claims such as that made by John Milton in The Reason of Church-Government (1642) when he argued that an episcopal system was not necessary to prevent schism. Milton asked what heresies would appear if the episcopacy were abolished: 'What sects? What are their opinions? Give us the Inventory.'32 Cowley provides a very long inventory or catalogue of the sects (III 59-186). He does not display much concern for strict accuracy but engages in the kind of attempt to 'confute by scandalous misnaming' that Milton charges against the defenders of the episcopacy.33 He endeavours to associate with the contemporary Puritans not only the notorious excesses of the Anabaptists of Münster in the previous century but also a whole series of ancient heresies, many of which could scarcely be demonstrated to have any modern counterpart, for example, the 'Angelicalls' or Angelici, which Epiphanius had mentioned in the fourth century as an extinct sect whose doctrines he had been unable to discover.34 In an apparent allusion to The Doctrine and Discipline of Divorce, Cowley seems to include Milton himself among the new heretics (III 95-6). But accuracy in detail is secondary to Cowley's purpose. By drawing up a lengthy catalogue of heresies he makes his point concerning the fragmentation of the church and the revival of heresy. In this he follows a pattern established in numerous Anglican pamphlets of the period, for example, John Taylor's A Swarme of Sectaries (1641), Richard Carter's The Schismatick Stigmatized (1641), and the anonymous The Division of the Church of England (1642);35 and he anticipates by a few years two more exhaustive and better-known treatises of the same kind, Ephraim Pagitt's Heresiography (1645) and the Presbyterian Thomas Edwards' Gangrœna (1646).
Although Cowley follows some of the common patterns of Anglican polemical writing, he displays tendencies that link him with the Laudian rather than the moderate party in the Church of England. As his earlier writings show, he was strongly hostile toward the Puritans from the beginning of his career, attacking them as socially low, as irrational, as hypocritical, and as the enemies of learning and the arts.36 At Cambridge he may, like his friend Crashaw, have come under the influence of the Laudian party, and there may be significance in the fact that at Oxford he is said to have resided at St John's, Laud's college.37 There is no evidence that he was subsequently inclined to follow Crashaw in joining the Church of Rome, even though he was attached for many years to the Catholic circle of Henrietta Maria and Jermyn. Sprat's praise of his loyal devotion to the Church of England appears to be quite justified.38 He developed, however, a greater sympathy for Roman Catholicism than many of his Anglican contemporaries, as his elegy for Crawshaw suggests.39 In The Puritan and the Papist he defends the Church of England as the via media between the false extremes of Puritanism and Roman Catholicism, but in his reaction against Puritanism in The Civil War he aligns himself with those right-wing Anglicans who were much closer to the Roman Catholic than to the Puritan extreme. He introduces unfavourable allusions to Papists and makes it clear that his real allegiance is to the Church of England, but he goes so far as to state that he prefers Roman Catholicism to the excesses of Puritanism:
If such foule Waters the fam'd Lake containe
Let's rather drinke old Tybers Flood againe.
Let our great Thames pay Homage as before,
Rather then new and worser streames adore.
If wee're resolv'd and fixt our Way to loose,
Let's some false Road before false By-wayes choose.
(III 73-8)
He includes in his catalogue of notorious heretics 'Wicleffians, Hussites, and the Zwinglian crew' (III 179), although Wyclif, Hus, and Zwingli were generally admired by English Protestants as pioneers of the Reformation.40 His reasons for placing them (or their followers) with the heretics is no doubt the fact that they were heroes especially of the Puritan party,41 but he runs the risk of providing ammunition for the Puritan propagandists. Cowley protests against the Puritan habit of attaching the label 'Papist' to Royalists and Anglicans, but he is sometimes injudicious enough to make statements that could have been used by Puritans in support of their thesis that Royalist circles were thick with Roman Catholics and Roman Catholic sympathisers.
The Civil War frequently suffers from the narrowness and limitations of party propaganda, and it sometimes displays a bitterness, vindictiveness, and bloodthirstiness quite out of keeping with the conventional image of the poet as a gentle and moderate spirit, which is derived principally from his essays and other late writings. Cowley's decision to suppress the work testifies, in part at least, to his own recognition of these faults. It was clearly not in the character of the relatively young and fiercely committed poet who wrote The Civil War to achieve the exceptional detachment that appears in Marvell's 'Horatian Ode' or the striking moderation that sometimes appeared among the active military leaders, as in the famous and moving instance of the letter Sir William Waller addressed to Hopton in the spring of 1643.42 But, in any case, such liberty was scarcely possible for the polemical writer in the heat of the propaganda warfare. In its treatment of history and politics The Civil War is not justly to be compared with Marvell's 'Horatian Ode' or even with Clarendon's History. The juster comparison is with Mercurius Aulicus, with the political verse of Cleve-land, and with the other explicitly polemical writings of the period of the Civil War. There may be some instances where Cowley appears unusually biased and extreme even when judged by the criteria generally accepted by the participants in the propaganda battle, but on the whole he emerges from the comparison with contemporary polemical writers not as one who is exceptionally immoderate, although certainly as one who possesses many of the common limitations.
While The Civil War is strongly partisan, designed as a contribution to a hoped-for Royalist victory, Cowley sometimes views the war in a wider perspective, as a tragedy for England in which there can be no victory. This sense of tragedy sounds strongly in the final words of the poem, in the conclusion of the elegy for Falkland. Cowley is bitter against the rebels for having killed this paragon of men, and he hopes that his dead friend's spirit will inspire the Royalists to victory. But finally, as if in meditating on Falkland's character he has absorbed something of that man's charitable spirit and hatred of bloodshed, and as if his death has shocked him into an increasing sense of the horror of the war, he asks not for victory but for peace, and he seems to admit the possibility of forgiveness and reconciliation.
Notes
1Ben Jonson 's Conversations with William Drummond of Hawthornden ed. R.F. Patterson (London 1923), p.20. Jonson's criticism may, of course, be taken to refer to the style rather than the actual amount of military description.
2 Cowley's description of the sights and sounds of combat at Newbury (The Civil War III 339-50) may suggest that he witnessed this battle, but a later passage (III 529-46) seems to indicate that he received news of the battle elsewhere, presumably in Oxford, which he mentions in 1.530.
3 See Anthony Wood's Life and Times ed. A. Clark (Oxford 1891-5), I 69-105.
4 The first editor of Mercurius Aulicus was Peter Heylin, but Berkenhead appears to have become the effective editor long before he officially succeeded Heylin in September 1643. See P.W. Thomas, Sir John Berkenhead 1617-79, A Royalist Career in Politics and Polemics (Oxford 1969), pp.30-5.
5 When details concerning Cowley's use of printed sources are not given here they will be found in the notes on the relevant passages of The Civil War.
6 The Letter is concerned particularly with London, but it has a wide scope. On the attribution to Berkenhead, see Thomas, Berkenhead, pp. 107-14. The True Informer appeared in several editions and issues in 1643, with both genuine and forged Oxford imprints (the forgeries being London printings); one has the title The Historical Passages of England. Thomason received a copy on 12 April. (See Madan's Oxford Books, nos. 1304, 1305, 1306, 1422.) The Royalist writings of the period are so homogeneous that it is perilous to argue direct influence, but this work provides some close verbal parallels with The Civil War, and one may suspect that Cowley was familiar with it.
7 Clarendon, Life: The Life of Edward Earl of Clarendon (Oxford 1827), I 161
8Poems (1656), sig. (a)4
9 In the dedicatory epistle of his The Civile Wares (1609) Samuel Daniel states that he departs from historical truth only in 'framing speaches to the persons of men according to their occasions; as C. Salustius, and T. Liuius (though Writers in Prose, yet in that kinde Poets) haue, with diuers other antient and modern Writers, done before me' (sig. A2V).
10 This is not to say that Cowley entirely hides the truth about the outcome of the two battles. He makes the most of the limited Royalist success at Edgehill in I 207-320, but he later refers to 'Edghills almost-Victory' (II 42). In III 377-8, he admits openly that the result of Newbury was disappointing, and in subsequent passages he deplores the terrible cost of that battle.
11 See C.V. Wedgwood, The King's War (London 1958), p.194. Royalist leaders regarded the surrender of Reading as so discreditable that they made the commander responsible, Richard Feilding, face a court martial.
12 Clarendon praises Cowley's poetry in his Life (I 34). He appears to have been offended by Cowley's attempt to make peace with Cromwell's government in 1656, as has been noted above. It must have seemed to him then that the poet had moved from one false extreme to another.
13 See Edward Hyde, Earl of Clarendon, The History of the Rebellion and Civil Wars in England ed. W. D. Macray (Oxford 1888), I 159; II 107-30; VI 136; VII 130, 204-14, 217.
14 Clarendon wrote the original version of the earlier part of his History, which embraces the period covered by Cowley's poem, in 1645-8. He later incorporated in his first and second books extensive passages written in 1668-9. See C.H. Firth, 'Clarendon's "History of the Rebellion",' English Historical Review, XIX (1904) 26-54, 246-62, 464-83.
15 Rupert has often been held responsible for the failure of the Royalists to achieve a complete victory at Edgehill, because he allowed his cavalry to pursue the enemy too far from the field, an action which Cowley treats circumspectly (I 271-2). The poet makes no direct allusion to the fact that Rupert quickly became notorious for ruthlessness and plunder, being nicknamed by his opponents 'Prince Robber', but he does not see reason, as other Royalist writers did, to excuse the Prince's burning of Birmingham as an accident. See II 69-94 and note.
16 Little discrepancy appears between Cowley's view of this action (I 433-56) and that of such a scrupulous modern historian as Mary Coate in her Cornwall in the Great Civil War and Interregnum 1642-60 (Oxford 1933): 'Stratton fight is nothing less than the triumph of forces spiritual and psychological over brute superiority of numbers and the tactical advantages of position …' (p.70).
17 J.A.R. Marriott describes Essex's relief of Gloucester as 'the finest military achievement in the Civil War' (The Life and Times of Lucius Cary, Viscount Falkland [London 1907], p. 312).
18 See Robert Hinman's comprehensive treatment of this subject in his Abraham Cowley's World of Order (Cambridge, Mass. 1960).
19 See 'An Exhortation Concerning good Order, and obedience to Rulers, and Majestrates' (first published in 1547), Certaine Sermons or Homilies Appoynted to be Read in Churches (1635), I 69; the first book of Hooker's Of the Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity; and Troilus and Cressida, I iii 74-137.
20 On the political debate of this period see J.W. Allen, English Political Thought 1603-1660 (London 1938), I 415-521; and Ernest Sirluck, Introduction, Complete Prose Works of John Milton, II (New Haven 1959), 1-52.
21 The most heated phase of the debate began with Parker's Observations upon some of his Majesties Late Answers and Expresses [July 1642], which drew a series of Royalist replies, including Feme's The Resolving of Conscience (Cambridge 1642), and Morton's The Necessity of Christian Subjection ([Oxford] 1643).
22 See Prynne's The Soveraigne Power of Parliaments (1643), Part I, p.38, etc. On the importance attached to Magna Carta by lawyers and parliamentarians in the Tudor and early Stuart periods see Faith Thompson, Magna Carta, Its Role in the Making of the English Constitution 1300-1629 (Minneapolis 1948), pp. 167-374. Cowley had precedent, however, for his unfavourable view of the rebels against John in the anonymous Elizabethan play, The Troublesome Raigne of King John (1591), and in 'An Homily Against Disobedience, and wilfull Rebellion,' Certaine Sermons (1635), II 315-16. This homily, first published c 1571, was reissued in 1642 as Royalist propaganda, by an editor who used the initials 'G.I.', with the title: The Doctrine of the Church of England, Established by Parliament against Disobedience and wilfull Rebellion.
23The Troublesome Life and Raigne of King Henry the Third. Wherein five Distempers and Maladies are set forth … Sutable to these unhappie times of ours; and continued with them till the King tied his Actions to the rules of his great and good Councell, and not to passionate and single advice
24 Clarendon condemns this type of Puritan 'wresting and perverting of Scripture' (History, VI 40).
25 See, for example, John Goodwin, Anti-Cavalierisme, Or, Truth Pleading as well the Necessity, as the Lawfulness of this present War [1642]; and Hezekiah Woodward, The Kings Chronicle: In two Sections; Wherein We have the Acts of the wicked and good Kings of Iudah fully declared, with the Ordering of their Militia, and grave Observations thereupon (1643).
26 See Mercurius Aulicus, 24 May 1643, p.276.
27 See the speech of Samuel in Book IV of the Davideis (Poems, p.371). As Arthur H. Nethercot has pointed out (Abraham Cowley: The Muse's Hannibal, Oxford 1931, pp. 153-5), this section of the Davideis and the 'Brutus' ode may be read as part of Cowley's attempt to conciliate Cromwell's government.
28 In the Discourse Cowley refers to 'the most sacred of our English Laws, the Petition of Right, and Magna Charta' (Essays, p.371).
29 J.W. Allen has emphasized that Royalist writers generally in 1643 were not arguing for royal absolution (English Political Thought, I 512, etc).
30Brief Lives ed. A. Clark (Oxford 1898), I 189. Aubrey's statement has been questioned because the poet's father described himself in his will as a stationer, but he may have been both a grocer and a stationer. See Nethercot, pp. 1-3.
31 See III, 303 and note. Cf. Jonson's Underwood, XLIV, and Everyman in his Humour, III V 149-52; Beaumont's The Knight of the Burning Pestle, v i and ii; and Cowley's The Guardian, I V.
32Complete Prose Works of John Milton, I (New Haven 1953), 787
33 Ibid., p.788
34Adversus Octoginta Hæreses (Migne, Patrologice Cursus Completus, Series Græca, XLI, cols. 1038-9)
35 See Don M. Wolfe's discussion of pamphlets of this type, Introduction, Complete Prose Works of John Milton, I 135-7.
36 See, for example, 'A Vote,' and The Guardian, Prologue, and IV vii.
37 The President of St John's during the period of Cowley's presumed residence was Richard Baylie, Laud's disciple and kinsman by marriage. See W.C. Costin, The History of St. John's College, Oxford, 1598-1860 (Oxford 1958), pp.30, 34.
38 'Life', sig. e1v. There is a story that Cowley died a Catholic, but it appears to be quite false. See Nethercot, pp.131, 135.
39 'On the Death of Mr. Crashaw'
40 See, for example, John Foxe's enormously influential Book of Martyrs, Actes and Monumentes (1570), pp.523-52, 701-48, 995-1005. Peter Heylin appears to have stirred controversy by maintaining in an Oxford disputation in 1627 that Wyclif and Hus were heretics from the Anglican as well as the Roman viewpoint, but his argument won Laud's approval. See George Vernon, The Life of the Learned and Reverend Dr Peter Heylin (1682), pp.26-30.
41 See, for example, John Milton's Of Reformation and The Reason of Church-Government, Complete Prose Works, I 525-6, 788. In the latter Milton writes that Christ's 'best Disciples in the reformation … were call'd Lollards and Hussites' by their enemies of the bishops' tribe, just as they are now termed Brownists or Puritans.
42 The best text of the letter is the one given by Mary Coate in her Cornwall in the Great Civil War (p.77).
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The Theoretical Bases of Cowley's Later Poetry
Cowley's 'Brutus' Ode: Historical Precepts and the Politics of Defeat