SOURCE: Nicholes, Joseph. “Politics by Indirection: Charles Lamb's Seventeenth-Century Renegade, John Woodvil.” The Wordsworth Circle 19, no. 1 (winter 1988): 49-55.

[In the following essay, Nicholes describes Lamb's historical drama, John Woodvil, as an analogical commentary on the political situation contemporary to Lamb.]

The idea that Charles Lamb was one of the least politically minded of Romantic writers has been, since Lamb's own day, a prominent feature of his literary reputation. Burton Pollin and Winifred Courtney have shown, however, that Lamb was more concerned with politics than either he or his friends and biographers have been prepared to admit. “That Lamb was not apolitical can no longer be in doubt,” writes Mrs. Courtney in her recent critical biography Young Charles Lamb: 1775-1802 (1982), “nor did he just stop being political after a certain age” (p. 186).¹ Lamb began his historical drama, John Woodvil: A Tragedy, within a month of being lampooned as a Jacobin in a cartoon by James Gillray and poem by George Canning in the July, 1798, Anti-Jacobin Review and Magazine.² The historical setting of John Woodvil, just after the Restoration of 1660, when examined in light of a late eighteenth- and nineteenth-century practice of drawing analogies between contemporary politics and the constitutional crises of the seventeenth century, invites a reading of the play as a veiled response to the Anti-Jacobin's attack and its aftermath in the author's private and public affairs. In the tale of a political renegade of seventeenth-century England, Lamb found an ideal vehicle for indirect comment on the volatile politics of his own day.

In 1800, John Kemble rejected John Woodvil for production at Drury Lane, and Coleridge and Southey advised Lamb against publication—though Coleridge told William Godwin in December, 1800, that his “love and admiration” for the work increased every time he reviewed it (McKenna, 63). In January, 1801, Lamb was annoyed by Wordsworth's delayed and lukewarm expression of “Liking” for the play (Works, 5: 354). In spite of these mixed responses, Lamb had John Woodvil published in 1802, at a personal loss of twenty-five pounds, and reprinted in his Works of 1818. Though critics have dismissed the play as a failed imitation of Shakespeare (McKenna, 55-63), the work was important to Lamb and he cared that it reach an audience.

Lamb gives the setting of John Woodvil as “soon after the Restoration” (131).³ In the first scene, a drunken servant sings the traditional anthem of Charles II's return, “When the King Enjoys His Own Again,” and with his companions toasts their improved access to spirits since that day (131, 134). The drink provokes loose talk of betraying the whereabouts of their former master, Sir Walter Woodvil, a Parliamentarian who has been hiding since the King's return (135-36). The loyal steward Sandford overhears the men and rebukes them for disloyalty. Then Margaret, John Woodvil's sweetheart since childhood, enters “as in a fright, pursued by a Gentleman” (137)—one of the Cavalier courtiers John Woodvil has befriended in his father's absence. Sandford laments the “debauch and mis-timed riotings” (137) the courtiers have introduced to the Woodvil household.

Unable to endure the “atheist riot, … profane excess, / … And free discourses, of the dissolute men” (138) retained by Woodvil, Margaret resolves to leave the estate where she has been reared as Sir Walter's ward. The elder Woodvil has been too honor-bound to the Good Old Cause to ask the King's pardon (135, 147), and now has a price on his head of two hundred pounds (135). Consequently, the son's association with Cavalier courtiers represents a blatant rejection of family politics and, combined with his neglect of Margaret, the betrayal of a character “That was by nature noble” (139). “'Tis these court-plagues, that swarm about our house,” says Sanford, “Have done the mischief, making his fancy giddy / With images of state, preferment, place, / Tainting his generous spirits with ambition” (139). Woodvil confirms this assessment with an introspective soliloquy in the following scene:

Now Universal England getteth drunk
For joy that Charles, her monarch, is restored: …
                                                                                                                                  Fools do sing,
Where good men yield God thanks; but politic spirits,
Who live by observation, note these changes
Of the popular mind, and thereby serve their ends.
Then why not I? What's Charles to me, or Oliver,
But as my own advancement hangs on one of them? …
I would be great, for greatness hath great power,
And that's the fruit I reach at.—

(145-46)

This key passage gives a strong impression that Woodvil has assumed the role of Cavalier courtier purely to gain personal advancement, and that if the Parliamentarians were still in power he would be one. Lamb gives no indication of how long Woodvil has been associated with the King's party, and it is only through this association that Lamb establishes Woodvil's identity as a Cavalier—an identity that seems “affected” at best. Sandford, Sir Walter Woodvil, and John Woodvil himself each assert that he “affects” the “favours,” “manners,” and “fashions” of the Cavalier court (139, 146). A moment before Woodvil's pragmatic soliloquy on his “own advancement,” he offers to show his Cavalier friend Lovel a recently purchased Van Dyke depicting a favorite scene of Royalist iconography, “The late King taking leave of his children” (145).⁴ Among his Cavalier drinking mates, he proclaims the King's birthday and suggests another round of drinks “for the better manifesting our loyalty this day” (156-57); he contributes to jokes about persecuting Puritans (157); but feeling immediate guilt after getting drunk and telling Lovel the secret of his father's hiding place, he mocks his friend by keenly satirizing Cavalier pretensions (164). Woodvil never displays genuine loyalty to the Cavalier cause.

The kind of political opportunism exemplified by Woodvil's behavior was particularly distasteful to Lamb because it betrayed a fundamental moral insincerity, self-interested pragmatism, and even cowardice. The best illustration of this sentiment appears in an epigram, “To Sir James Mackintosh,” from the radical newspaper The Albion, and Evening Advertiser, for which Lamb wrote extensively in the summer of 1801—a few months before the final revisions and publication of John Woodvil:

Though thou'rt like Judas, an apostate black,
In the resemblance one thing thou dost lack:
When he had gotten his ill-purchased pelf,
He went away, and wisely hanged himself.
This thou may'st do at last; yet much I doubt,
If thou hast any bowels to gush out!

(Works, 5: 102)

Mackintosh (1765-1832), the author of an important rebuttal to Edmund Burke's Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790), had repudiated his former radical opinions. At the time of Lamb's epigram Mackintosh was seeking government employment, which he attained in 1803—hence the imputation that he had sold his ideals for personal advancement. The Albion folded shortly after the epigram appeared, Lamb blaming its demise on the withdrawal of support by a wealthy patron offended by the severity of his ridicule of Mackintosh.⁵

Lamb already had in mind this kind of abrupt reversal in politics while at work on his play in 1798 and 1799. His close friend Charles Lloyd, with whom he had published Blank Verse in early 1798, and with whom he was satirized as a frog croaking over that volume in Gillray's cartoon, had embarked on a public campaign to absolve himself of the charge of Jacobinism—and he constantly drew Lamb's name into the controversy. The details of this episode suggest that Lamb may have initially acquiesced in this process, only to regret it soon thereafter (Pollin, 640-43; Courtney, Young Charles Lamb, pp. 197-200). In one of several pamphlets Lloyd issued to prove his political respectability, he cites, “undoubtedly with [Lamb's] full permission,” writes Pollin (643), an extract from Lamb's poem “Living Without God in the World,” introduced by Lloyd as “a satire on the Godwinian jargon.”⁶ After meeting Godwin in February of 1800, however, Lamb confirmed his political consistency by developing a warm friendship with this elder statesman of English radicalism and by his writings for the Albion the following year—it was Godwin who introduced Lamb to John Fenwick, editor of the paper.

Lamb's characterization of John Woodvil probably owes much to his concern over Lloyd's public abdication of his liberalism and to Lamb's consequent entanglement in the controversy over “renegadism,” a divisive concern of two generations of Romantic writers in an era of extreme conservative entrenchment. Lamb's epigraph on Mackintosh is reminiscent of Wordsworth's unpublished criticism of Richard Watson, Bishop of Llandaff, who revised his liberal views after the execution of Louis XVI (Prose, ed. Owen and Smyser, 1: 19-25). Lamb needed a subtle method for exploring such a sensitive issue, and he chose a setting for his play that offered ideal subject matter for indirect political discourse.

In 1788, England observed the centenary of the Glorious Revolution, the constitutional resolution of the Civil War epoch. A number of prominent liberals and religious dissenters had been meeting annually as members of the London Revolution Society on November 4, the anniversary of William III's birthday, to commemorate the events of 1688. The years 1788 and 1799 gave them reasons for special celebration. Burke originally subtitled his Reflections on the Revolution in France, “And on the Proceedings in Certain Societies in London Relative to that Event,” and he begins the work on the pretext of refuting the egalitarian interpretation of the Glorious Revolution professed by Reverend Richard Price at the London Revolution Society meeting of November 4, 1779 (2 nos. (1793) 2: 13). “Their ‘Church and King’ enemies in the provinces vilified the Dissenters,” writes Albert Goodwin of Price and his fellows, “not so much as devotees of French democracy, but rather as the worshippers of their seventeenth-century forebears—the Levellers and Republicans of the Commonwealth period” (92). A Church and King attack on Tom Paine, fellow republican reformers, and dissenters entitled The Anti-Levelling Songster appeared as a pamphlet in 1793; it includes a satirical reference to the French Revolution as “All merry and free begotten, / In the happy days of Yore / Upon Oliver's whore, / Who has been long dead and rotten.”⁷

From the outset of troubles in France, the English found analogies between seventeenth-century English history and contemporary political events meaningful, and controversial. When the French executed Louis XVI in 1793, the distinctive parallel to the fate of Charles I rendered such analogies all the more logical.⁸ In 1795, Coleridge announced his intention to give six lectures on “A Comparative View of the English Rebellion Under Charles the First, and the French Revolution,” including a discussion of the “Characters of Charles Ist. and Louis the XVIth.”⁹ As the French Revolution produced its series of tyrants, the English began making comparisons and contrasts with Cromwell. In The Fall of Robespierre, the play by Coleridge and Southey, an opponent of Robespierre refers to him as “This worse than Cromwell” (the phrase appears in Act III, written by Southey); and the prospectus to Coleridge's 1795 political lectures on the Civil War promises a comparison of “Oliver Cromwell, and Robespierre” (Lectures 1795, 256).

Observers in England soon replaced Robespierre with Napoleon in their comparisons with Cromwell. Lamb suggested such a comparison in a letter to Coleridge dated October 23, 1802, the same year John Woodvil was published: “Have you anticipated it, or could not you give a Parallel of Bonaparte with Cromwell, particularly as the contrast in their deeds affecting foreign states: Cromwell's interference for the Albigenses, B's against the Swiss. Then Religion would come in; &. Milton & you could rant about our Countrymen of that Period” (Letters, 2: 82).

In September of the same year, Lamb advised Godwin on the latter's forthcoming play Faulkener, a tragedy set in the seventeenth century (Letters, 2: 17-20, 23-25). This advice included how to handle a detail upon which the drama hinges: that the hero's mother has been corrupted as a former mistress of Charles II during his exile in France ([1807], 64-71). As in John Woodvil, corrupt Cavalier morals mirror liberal disapproval of Stuart politics. Godwin had begun writing a history of the Commonwealth period in 1798, having in common with other figures of his circle, including, eventually, Leigh Hunt and Shelley, “a feeling of kinship with the Puritan revolutionaries.”¹⁰

That Lamb felt the same kinship is clear from a comment in “What Is Jacobinism?”—an essay from the Albion that Courtney has identified as Lamb's. After defending Godwin and other liberals from vague and inconsistent incrimination as Jacobins, Lamb concludes: “Not content with living names, they persecute and spoil the dead, with whom man should not war; and pass sentence of Jacobinism backwards upon such men as Milton, Sidney, Harrington, and Locke. It is sufficient, that these benefactors to mankind sought the happiness of their species in ways which they cannot understand. We have heard of general lovers, though we dislike the character: but these men are a sort of general haters, and discredit and cry down, at random, all that is new, and good, and useful.”¹¹ Lamb here refers to Algernon Sidney (1622-83), venerated martyr to the cause of constitutional liberties whose Discourses Concerning Government (1698) became a chapbook of revolutionary politics at the end of the eighteenth century; James Harrington (1611-77) was the influential republican political philosopher who wrote the utopian treatise Oceana (1656); and the great philosopher John Locke (1632-1704) was a prominent seventeenth-century advocate of political views similar to those held by Sidney and Harrington. Lamb's complaint that bellicose journalists have unjustly labeled these seventeenth-century libertarians as Anti-Jacobins, with prominent liberals as their latter-day counterparts, indicates the current tendency for political writers to make such associations.

Coleridge's proposed comparison between the Civil War and the French Revolution also lists Milton, Sidney, and Harrington as exemplary seventeenth-century political writers (Lectures 1795, 255). These names coincide closely with those in Wordsworth's 1802 sonnet “Great men have been among us; hands that penned”: “The later Sidney, Marvel, Harrington, / Young Vane, and others who called Milton friend.”¹² Wordsworth then makes a comparison between revolutionary France and England during Puritan Revolution: “France, 'tis strange, / Hath brought forth no such souls as we had then.” This conclusion reflects Wordsworth's disillusionment with the way events had developed in France by 1802, an attitude similar to that betrayed by Lamb when he contrasted Napoleon with Cromwell in his letter to Coleridge: Cromwell had interfered “for” the oppressed Swiss, Bonaparte “against.”

“Great men have been among us” coincides with Wordsworth's visit to France during the Peace of Amiens, an experience that must have vividly recalled to the poet his youthful republican enthusiasm. Though Wordsworth moved toward conservatism after his disappointment with the French Revolution, he held to ideals personified by the English republicans of the seventeenth century (see Fink, 124-26). As expressed in “London, 1802,” the “manners, virtue, freedom, power” of Milton were attributes Wordsworth found wanting in his present countrymen; and in “It is not to be thought of that the Flood,” also written in 1802, he suggests a possible diminishment “Of British freedom,” and looks to Milton and his era for exemplary tradition. “Written in London, September, 1802” records Wordsworth's regret that the “homely beauty of the good old cause / is gone” from the England of his day.

Wordsworth had added reason at this time to contemplate political struggles for individual and national liberty. In a note to “Written in London, September, 1802,” he states, after mentioning his recent return from France, “It would not be easy to conceive with what a depth of feeling I entered into the struggle carried on by the Spaniards for their deliverance from the unsurped power of the French.” As Marilyn Butler pointed out in Romantics, Rebels and Reactionaries (1981), that on the issue of the Spanish fight for freedom, “Wordsworth and Coleridge both wrote indignant pamphlets, Coleridge rejoicing that he could do so in the terminology of his youthful Good Old Cause, the English revolution of 1688” (117). She cites a passage from Coleridge's Essays on his Times containing another honor role of seventeenth-century heroes: “… it was the noble efforts of Spanish Patriotism, that first restored us, without distinction of party, to our characteristic enthusiasm for liberty; and presenting it in its genuine form, incapable of being confounded with its French counterfeit, enabled us once more to utter the names of our Hampdens, Sidneys and Russels, without hazard of alarming the quiet subject, or of offending the zealous loyalist” (ed. David Erdman, 3 vols. [1978], 2: 38). Coleridge's “us” and “our” certainly include Wordsworth and his sonnets of 1802. In nineteenth-century usage the word “loyalist” serves in such contexts as a synonym for “royalist”; so Coleridge, himself a conservative by the time he writes this in 1809, demonstrates here an ironic sensitivity to traditional Tory allegiances. The passage indicates how politically conscious the British public was of its seventeenth-century heritage if “the quiet subject,” as well as “zealous loyalist,” could be alarmed by references to constitutional martyrs.

Though Coleridge would have preferred the veneration of his heroes to be “without distinction of party,” interpretations of seventeenth-century English history and their application to contemporary politics remained consistently polarized in Britain throughout the Romantic and Victorian eras. Liberals of the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries saw the Parliamentary reformers of the seventeenth century as their political forebears, patriotic libertarians trying to win reforms in Parliament. Conservatives, on the other hand, usually identified with the preservation of monarchy and the status quo secured by the Restoration. Roman Catholics and high churchmen revered the memory of the Royal Martyr, while those affiliated with religious dissent looked to the Puritans for their heroes. Most Romantic writers, with their typically republican sympathies—and in the case of Lamb and of Coleridge, coming from backgrounds of religious dissent—naturally fell on the Parliamentarian side of this national division in historical consciousness.

Within this context, John Woodvil's opportunistic fraternization with the Cavaliers had clear potential for analogy to contemporary politics. The first three acts of Lamb's play take place on May 29, the birthday of Charles II and anniversary of his triumphant return to London in 1660. The day became a national holiday observed well into the nineteenth century, commonly referred to as “Royal Oak” or “Oak-Apple Day” and commemorated by the wearing of oak leaves as token of the storied hiding of Charles in the Boscobel oak tree after the Battle of Worcester in 1651. Lamb establishes the May 29 date with the well-known song in the opening scene, two references to celebration of the King's birthday (144 and 156), and the setting “soon after the Restoration” (131). Since Sir Walter Woodvil has been in hiding since the King's return (134-36), the implied date of the play's opening is May 29, 1661, the “first” Royal Oak Day. This chronology is reinforced by a servant's comment that the elder Woodvil “has been excepted by name in the late Act of Oblivion” (136), which was passed in August, 1660. In opening his play on the primarily Tory holiday Royal Oak Day and featuring drunken servants and dissolute Cavaliers, Lamb subtly but unmistakably expressed his political bias. His negative depiction of England after the Restoration of Charles II and his Cavalier court provides, through analogy, a satiric comment on the conservative ascendancy in England at the turn of the nineteenth century.

After Woodvil betrays his father under the corrupting influence of Cavalier courtiers and their free-flowing holiday wine, he eventually comes to his senses, and following painful repentance enjoys reconciliation with Margaret. In a manuscript of the play, Lovel and Gray, the two false friends who reveal Sir Walter's hiding place, are identified as “two Court spies” (Works, 5: 356; see also 362). The parallel to the notorious government spy system of Lamb's day is telling, as further illustrated by Lamb's vitriolic epigram of 1820 in which he compares three contemporary government spies to Bedloe and Oates, two disreputable seventeenth-century characters of the same profession who were employed by Charles II:

Close by the ever-burning brimstone beds
Where Bedloe, Oates and Judas, hide their heads,
I saw great Satan like a Sexton stand
With his intolerable spade in hand,
Digging three graves. …
“These graves,” quoth he, “when life's brief oil is spent,
When the dark night comes, and they're sinking bedwards,
—I mean for Castles, Oliver, and Edwards.”

(Works, 5: 105)

Walter Scott popularized the Civil War setting in nineteenth-century literature with the publication in 1826 of his novel Woodstock, or The Cavalier, a Tale of the Year 1651.¹³ It is consequently very interesting to see Lamb doing similar things with the theme twenty years earlier. Probably because of the accumulated lore of “Pope's holes” and Cavaliers disguised as servants fleeing Roundheads, including a future king hiding in an oak tree, taking refuge in forests became a common element of the genre. Woodstock features a fictional sequestering of Charles Stuart on the secluded, well-forested royal Woodstock estate. Frederick Marryat's Children of the New Forest (1847), as the title suggests, recounts the adventures of orphaned children of a Cavalier officer who have sought refuge in a forest. Lamb's noble Parliamentarian hiding in Sherwood Forest anticipates this pattern with its own characteristic inversion.

Lamb also pioneered a more significant motif, that of two lovers from opposite sides of the political conflict who are reconciled at the end of the story as an image of national reconciliation. At the end of both Woodstock and Children of the New Forest, lovers with familial loyalties in political opposition are shown blissfully united in overt association with the King's return on May 29, 1660. Scott's May 29 tableau at the end of Woodstock features the same song that begins John Woodvil: “O, the twenty-ninth of May, / It was a glorious day, / When the King did enjoy his own again.” Both Scott and Marryat use the marriage of Puritan and Cavalier lovers on May 29 to represent the Tory myth of national peace and reconciliation brought about by the Restoration. A pictorial version of this motif, complete with overtones of Royal Oak lore, was rendered in 1853 by the Pre-Raphaelite painter John Everett Millais in The Proscribed Royalist, 1651 (private collection), which depicts a Cavalier hiding in the trunk of a hollow oak tree and kissing the hand of a Puritan woman who has brought him food (see Strong, And When Did You Last See Your Father?, pp. 144-45).

In John Woodvil, Lamb makes it clear that Margaret has remained loyal to her Puritan sensibilities. She is a “true protestant” (174), thus making possible the tensions produced by Woodvil's role as a Cavalier. But in Lamb's play the celebration of May 29 contributes directly to the alienation of the two lovers, and they can only set things right when Woodvil repudiates his dishonorable behavior as a Cavalier courtier. And in significant contrast to the endings of Woodstock and Children of the New Forest, the prospect of domestic joy for the lovers in John Woodvil seems but an isolated compensation for life in a time characterized by misguided political prejudice and persecution—a political climate much like that of Britain at the beginning of the nineteenth century. Lamb's play turns upon Whig/Liberal versions of motifs supposedly invented by Scott twenty years later. Whether, or how much, Scott was influenced by John Woodvil must probably remain a matter of conjecture,¹⁴ but Lamb's work should be given its place in the development of an important theme in nineteenth-century political and historical iconography.

Carl Woodring has made an important observation in Politics in English Romantic Poetry [1970] about a tendency Lamb had “to exaggerate his distaste for politics”: he “practiced in all his essays, and even in his letters, the devices of understatement, covert allusion[,] self-refuting, exaggeration, and the inversion of fact that he called ‘matter-of-lie.’ Aided by these devices, he gradually reduced first the appearance and then the reality of his political anxieties” (p. 74). The political meaning of John Woodvil was disguised by a strategy of indirection perfectly suited to relieve “political anxieties” without risk of offending friend or foe with an overt expression of partisan views. Recalling work at the Albion in his essay “Newspapers Thirty-Five Years Ago,” Lamb wrote facetiously that his editor Fenwick was “resolutely determined upon pulling down the Government in the first instance, and making both our fortunes by way of corollary” (Works, 2: 225). “Our occupation … was to write treason,” Lamb continues in this vein: “Blocks, axes, Whitehall tribunals, were covered with flowers of so cunning a periphrasis, … never naming the thing directly—that the keen eye of an Attorney General was insufficient to detect the lurking snake among them.” Perhaps a related strategy inspired Lamb to couch his political sentiments in the tale of a confused young man in a former time of violent and perplexing political change.

Notes

1. Burton Pollin reviews Lamb's reputation for being apolitical at the beginning of his article, “Charles Lamb and Charles Lloyd as Jacobins and Anti-Jacobins,” SiR [Studies in Romanticism], 12 (1973), 633-47.

2. For an account of the composition, publication, and reception of the play, see the notes of E. V. Lucas, The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb, 7 vols. (1903-05), 5: 350-68 (hereafter cited as Works). Lamb first called his play “Pride's Cure,” completing a first draft between Aug., 1798, and May, 1799; the present title dates from revisions completed around Nov., 1801, in preparation for the play's publication. See Works, 5: 350, 353-56; Lamb to John Rickman, Nov. 24, 1801, The Letters of Charles and Mary Anne Lamb, ed. Edwin W. Marrs, Jr., 3 vols. (1975-78), 2: 37-38 (hereafter cited as Letters). Wayne McKenna summarizes contemporary reviews of the play, which were mostly negative, in Charles Lamb and the Theatre (1978), pp. 58-59, 63. The Gillray cartoon is reproduced by both Pollin and Winifred Courtney. Pollin discusses the attack on Lamb in detail, as does Mrs. Courtney in a chapter entitled “Political Lamb”; see also her article “Lamb, Gillray and the Ghost of Edmund Burke,” Charles Lamb Bulletin, 12 (1975), 77-82. An excerpt from Canning's poem “New Morality” appeared as caption to Gillray's cartoon, specifying “C——-DGE and S—TH-Y, L—-D and L—B and Co.”—a grouping that occurs again in a poem entitled “The Anarchists” in the Sept. issue (Thelwall and Godwin are also mentioned in both instances). “New Morality” originally appeared in the July 9, 1798, Anti-Jacobin, or Weekly Examiner (the predecessor of the monthly Anti-Jacobin Review and Magazine, of which the July, 1798, issue was the first), and was reprinted in Poetry of the Anti-Jacobin (1799) and Beauties of the Anti-Jacobin, or Weekly Examiner (1799). The latter includes a note on the poem that slanders Coleridge as unpatriotic, irreligious, and an abandoner of wife and children, and refers to Lamb and Southey as “his associates”: “Some of these youths were early corrupted in the metropolis … when scholars at that excellent seminary, christ's hospital” (306). Poetry of the Anti-Jacobin went through six editions by 1828, and a two volume reprint of the Anti-Jacobin, or Weekly Examiner (1799) was also reissued frequently. Lucas and Courtney cite satirical verses of 1820 aimed by Lamb at Canning as evidence of a prolonged grudge (Works, 5: 106-07, 334; Young Charles Lamb, pp. 199-200).

3. This specification appears with the cast of characters before act one. All references to John Woodvil will be given as page numbers of the text in Lamb's Works, 5: 131-76 (no line numbering is included by Lucas). Lucas has reprinted the text of Lamb's 1818 Works and notes a few minor differences from the 1802 edition (5: 350, 366-67).

4. I have found no evidence that Van Dyke painted such a picture. Lamb may have confused Van Dyke's Charles I and Family (c. 1631-32; Buckingham Palace) with a depiction of the scene by another artist. See Roy Strong, Van Dyke: Charles I on Horseback (1972), pp. 22-25, 34-35, 40.

5. For further background on Mackintosh and Lamb's epigram see Lucas's notes (Works, 5: 333), Pollin, 644, and Winifred Courtney's “New Lamb Texts from The Albion? I: ‘What Is Jacobinism?’” Charles Lamb Bulletin, 17 (1977), 2 (this article includes throughout important information on Lamb's politics; it continues in two more installments: 18 [1977], 28-40; 20 [1977], 73-92).

6. Lamb's poem, c. 1798, was first published in its complete form in Sept., 1799 (see Works, 5: 17-18, 290). Lloyd's pamphlet is entitled, Lines Suggested by the Fast Appointed on Wednesday, February 27, 1799 (1799).

7. See Burke's Reflections, ed. Conor Cruise O'Brien (1968), pp. 83-87, 93-94, 99-107, 116-18. For information on the centenary observances of 1788, activities of the London Revolution Society, and Burke's response, see Albert Goodwin, The Friends of Liberty: The English Democratic Movement in the Age of Revolution (1979), 19, 85-98, 130-35.

8. For discussion of analogies between seventeenth-century English history and the French Revolution see Roy Strong, And When Did You Last See Your Father?: The Victorian Painter and British History (1978), pp. 40, 139-40; and Martin Meisel, Realizations: Narrative, Pictorial and Theatrical Arts in Nineteenth-Century England (1983), p. 232. Meisel's entire chapter “Royal Situations” is relevant to a general understanding of nineteenth-century Civil War iconography—as are Strong's chapters “Cavaliers and Roundheads” and “Oliver Cromwell,” and “The Mournful King” in Van Dyke: Charles I on Horseback. See also “For King or Parliament?”: Attitudes of 19th Century Painters to the Civil War, the catalogue to an exhibition mounted in 1978-79 by the Wolverhampton Art Gallery, Wolverhampton, and the Mappin Art Gallery, Sheffield; and J. W. Burrow, A Liberal Descent: Victorian Historians and the English Post (1981), pp. 12-17.

9. Lectures 1795: On Politics and Religion, Lewis Patton and Peter Mann, eds., vol. 1, The Collected Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1971), p. 255; see also xl, 254. For Coleridge's preoccupation with seventeenth-century political history, see Coleridge on the Seventeenth Century, ed. Roberta Florence Brinkley (1968), pp. 3-36.

10. Kenneth Neill Cameron and Eleanor L. Nicholes, eds., Shelley and His Circle: 1773-1822, 1: 464. Godwin eventually published a four-volume study, History of the Commonwealth of England (1824-28). Shelley started a Civil War play, Charles the First, left uncompleted at his death.

11. “New Lamb Texts” 9. Lamb's essay appeared June 30, 1801, and is reprinted in its entirety in both “New Lamb Texts” and Young Charles Lamb. Courtney identifies Lamb's allusion to “general lovers” as from a passage in John Woodvil which he had published separately from the play in Nov., 1800 (“New Lamb Texts” 11; see John Woodvil, 152-53). She cites other references in Lamb's writings to Sidney, Harrington, and Locke in “New Lamb Texts” 10.

12. For quotations from Wordsworth, I have used The Poetical Works, ed. Ernest de Selincourt, 2nd ed., rev. Helen Darbishire, (1952-59). For a discussion of the influence on the young Wordsworth of the republican writings of Milton, Sidney, and Harrington see Z. S. Fink's “Wordsworth and the English Republican Tradition,” JEGP [Journal of English and Germanic Philology], 67 (1948), 107-26.

13. See Strong, And When Did You Last See Your Father?, pp. 30-31, 138-39; Meisel, 234-36; and “For King or Parliament?”, pp. 3, 6. In addition to the influence of Scott, Strong emphasizes an interest in the English Civil War among the French that “strengthened and influenced” the English (139). Influential examples he cites include Victor Hugo's Cromwell (1826), paintings by Paul Delaroche from the 1830s, and François Guizot's Histoire de la Révolution d'Angleterre (1826-27), trans. in 1845 by William Hazlitt (139-40); see also Van Dyke: Charles I on Horseback, pp. 36-39.

14. Lamb and Scott met briefly in 1821. In 1822, Lamb wrote to Scott petitioning financial aid for Godwin, and Scott sent ten pounds but asked to remain anonymous. With his reply, Scott evidently asked Lamb to his home in Scotland, and an invitation “as early as 1818” has also been reported (E. V. Lucas, The Life of Charles Lamb [1968] 610). It is likely that Scott had read John Woodvil by the time he wrote Woodstock.