SOURCE: Pritchard, Allan. “Abuses Stript and Whipt and Wither's Imprisonment.” The Review of English Studies n.s. 14, no. 56 (November 1963): 337-45.

[In the following essay, Pritchard explores the reasons for Wither's 1614 incarceration in the Marshalsea prison for his essay Abuses Stript and Whipt.]

George Wither's imprisonment in 1614 for his authorship of Abuses Stript and Whipt stirred considerable attention among his contemporaries, winning him the sympathy of such fellow poets as William Browne of Tavistock, Christopher Brooke, and Richard Brathwait,¹ and it has an enduring claim to interest as the occasion of The Shepheards Hunting, perhaps his finest work, which he composed within the walls of the Marshalsea. Yet the reason for his punishment has never been satisfactorily explained. Abuses was passed by the official licenser, Taverner, before it was entered, on 16 January 1613, in the Stationers' Register,² and Wither was not arrested until more than a year later, when it had already gone through four editions,³ although he appears to have been threatened with some penalty during the interval. Surviving warrants show that the Privy Council ordered his imprisonment on or about 20 March 1614, and his release four months afterwards on 26 July,⁴ but the records do not reveal who brought complaint against his work or what in it gave offence.

Wither protested in The Shepheards Hunting (1615) that he was brought to a trial ‘Where Innocence preuails not, nor denyall’ (sig. D6^v),⁵ and he proclaimed his freedom from any guilt in a bold appeal to King James for his release, A Satyre: Dedicated to his most Excellent Maiestie (1614):

I haue not sought to scandalize the State,
Nor sowne sedition, nor made publike hate.
I haue not aym'd at any good mans fame,
Nor taxt (directly) any one by name.
I am not he that am growne discontent
With the Religion, or the Gouernment.
I meant no Ceremonies to protect,
Nor doe I fauour any new-sprung Sect;
But to my Satyres gaue this onely warrant,
To apprehend and punish Vice apparant.

(sigs. C2-C2^v)

This avowal is, of course, the conventional self-defence of a satirist, but it has usually been accepted at face value, for Abuses is predominantly an abstract and general didactic poem. Although it contains an intermittent strain of social satire in the tradition of Hall and Marston, which becomes strongest in the final section, ‘The Scourge’, as a whole the work is not so much a satire as a series of moral essays in verse on the passions and universal human weaknesses.

Those passages which can properly be termed satire include some charges of corruption in church and state, but they have seemed to most readers to be safely general and conventional. Thus, Charles Lamb made the well-known comment on Wither's imprisonment: ‘That a man should be convicted of a libel when he named no names but Hate, and Envy, and Lust, and Avarice, is like one of the indictments in the Pilgrim's Progress, where Faithful is arraigned for having “railed on our noble Prince Beelzebub, and spoken contemptibly of his honourable friends, the Lord Old Man, the Lord Carnal Delight, and the Lord Luxurious”.’⁶ Later critics and scholars have often echoed Lamb's opinion. R. M. Alden felt the work to be so innocuous that he was reduced to speculating that earlier editions than any he had seen contained passages removed before the later printings.⁷ Others have interpreted Wither's imprisonment simply as evidence that as late as fifteen years after the prohibition and burning of satires in 1599 authority was still highly sensitive about satirical writing,⁸ but they have not undertaken to explain why the poet's fate was not shared by a number of his contemporaries.

Only one specific solution to the apparent mystery of the imprisonment has ever been offered, and it does not withstand examination, although no one seems to have refuted it. In 1834 Rev. R. A. Willmott concluded that Abuses contained an attack on Lord Chancellor Ellesmere, reproving Wither for slander of ‘an upright and honourable man’,⁹ and in 1902 Frank Sidgwick subscribed to the same view, charging the poet with a ‘gratuitous attack on the Lord Chancellor’.¹⁰ Their theory rests upon a misreading of a passage in which Wither gives his ‘satyr’ the following instruction:

… preethee tell the B. Chancellor,
That thou art sent to be his counsellor:
And wil him if he meane not to be stript,
And like a schoole boy once againe be whipt
His worship would not so bad minded be,
To peruert iudgement for a scuruy fee.

(p. 271)

The poet himself may have felt that these lines were susceptible of misinterpretation, for, among numerous revisions in the later editions of Abuses, he changed ‘B. Chancellor’ to the plural ‘B. Chancellors’;¹¹ yet even the earlier version makes it sufficiently clear that his allusion, couched in relatively general terms, is not to the Lord Chancellor but to a class of ecclesiastical officials, the bishops' chancellors: the preceding lines deal with churchwardens, and those following with bishops.

There is no reason to suppose that Ellesmere should have taken offence at Abuses, but Wither indicates both in The Shepheards Hunting and in A Satyre that it was in fact some powerful person or party at court who caused his imprisonment, not the king himself but others second only to the monarch in power,¹² and his contemporaries seem to have held the same belief. John Taylor declared of the poet in his Aqua-Musae [1645]:

'Tis knowne that once within these thirty yeares,
Thou wast in Jayle for scandalling some Peeres.

(p. 7)

Wither implies the greatness of his enemies' rank in his address to James in A Satyre:

… 'tis my comfort, they are not so high,
But they must stoope to Thee and Equitie.

(sig. B8)

One man, who made himself the poet's particular enemy, construed

That which I haue enstil'd a Man-like Monster,
To meane some priuate person in the state.

(sig. B5)

The passage to which Wither here alludes is easily identifiable as the first of a series of ‘epigrams’ suffixed to Abuses. In it he warns the king against a ‘beast in Humane shape’ who conceals his true nature:

He wil not, for he dares not before thee
Shew what (indeed) he vses for to be,
But in thy presence he is meeke, demure,
Deuout, chast, honnest, innocent, and pure:
Seeming an Angel, free from thought of ill. …

(sig. T5^v)

The poet gives no clear indication of the identity of this enemy either in The Shepheards Hunting or in A Satyre, but some years later he provided what is probably the clue, although it has curiously been neglected.

In 1621 Wither was questioned by the Privy Council concerning an allusion in his recently published Motto to a person whom he had regarded as his enemy. He explained that he meant the late Earl of Northampton (Henry Howard).¹³ His reason for viewing Northampton as his enemy is not recorded, but there can be little doubt that it was the imprisonment of 1614, for the earl was at the height of his power when it took place, and he died in June of the same year. Becoming increasingly prominent among James's ministers after the death of Salisbury in May 1612, Northampton consolidated his position in 1613 through the marriage of his great-niece, the notorious Lady Essex, to the royal favourite, Robert Carr, Earl of Somerset. By the beginning of 1614, in alliance with a group of relatives, including the earls of Suffolk and Nottingham, he dominated the royal council.¹⁴ As Lord Privy Seal, he was one of the signers of the warrant which sent Wither to the Marshalsea,¹⁵ and it may be significant that the poet did not secure his release until after Northampton's death.

It is not hard to find reason why Northampton and his party should have taken offence at Abuses. Roman Catholic in his sympathies and secretly a pensioner of Spain, he worked with other members of the Howard family and with the remarkably influential ambassador Sarmiento (shortly to be known as Count Gondomar) in the interest of a Spanish alliance.¹⁶ Wither, who was born in the year of the Armada, was strongly hostile to Rome and Spain, and he more than once attacked the very policies to which Northampton was dedicated. In Prince Henries Obsequies (1612), his first published work, which slightly precedes Abuses, he had warned that Rome and Spain sought to take advantage of the death of the staunchly Protestant Prince of Wales to ‘plot againe to sue for tolleration’, and that they were busy ‘new contriuing of old Eighty-eight’ (sig. D4^v). In Abuses itself he declares the current truce with Spain to be deceptive, and urges the nation to arm in preparation for conflict:

Looke well vnto your selues and not suppose,
Cause theres a league with Spaine you haue no foes
For if Warres euer make this land complaine,
It wil bee through some truce it had with Spain.

(pp. 245-6)

Widely shared although this hostility toward Spain was among Wither's contemporaries, its expression was not so safe during the high tide of the influence of Northampton and Sarmiento as it had earlier been; and in his Motto the poet seems to imply that he has suffered prosecution in this very matter. Attempting (unsuccessfully, as it proved) to guard himself against further charges in that work, he tells his readers:

          You are deceiu'd, if the Bohemian state
You thinke I touch; or the Palatinate:
Or that, this ought of Eighty-eight containes;
The Powder-plot, or any thing of Spaines:
That their Ambassador need question me,
Or bring me iustly for it on my knee.
The state of those Occurrences I know
Too well; my Raptures that way to bestow.

(sig. A6^v)

It seems likely that he writes here from his own experience, and that his allusion is to his punishment for Abuses Stript and Whipt.

The allegory of The Shepheards Hunting, although obscure, is not inconsistent with the supposition that Wither's warning against the Catholic power of Spain was a cause of his imprisonment. The poet writes in that work of his aim in Abuses:

… the delight that most possessed me
Was hunting Foxes, Wolues, and Beastes of Pray:
That spoile our Foulds, & beare our Lambs away.

(sig. C3^v)

His acknowledged master, Spenser, had used the image of wolves and foxes preying on sheep in the September eclogue of The Shepheardes Calender to signify Catholic threats to English Protestantism. From a Protestant viewpoint, furthermore, there could hardly be a better candidate than Northampton for identification with the ‘beast, More subtile and more noysome then the rest’¹⁷ which Wither seems in The Shepheards Hunting to hold partly responsible for his imprisonment. The reputation which Henry Howard had long held among English Protestants for the devious and unscrupulous pursuit of Catholic and Spanish policies is illustrated by Lady Bacon's description of him in a letter of 1595 to her son Anthony: ‘He is a dangerous intelligencing man; no doubt a subtle papist inwardly, and lieth in wait. … A very instrument of the Spanish Papists. For he pretending courtesy, worketh mischief perilously.’¹⁸

If Northampton and his agents read Abuses it could not have escaped their notice that as Wither opposes any policy of friendship with Spain, so also he singles out for praise the leaders of the anti-Spanish party in England. These were almost invariably personal as well as political enemies of the earl, who nourished many hatreds. Wither extols the strongly Protestant Archbishop Abbott, who on occasion quarrelled with Northampton at the council table, and he commends the earls of Pembroke and Southampton and Lord Lisle, who likewise opposed the Privy Seal's policies: so strong was Northampton's enmity toward Pembroke and Lisle that he asked on his death-bed that neither should receive any of his offices.¹⁹ Furthermore, the poet makes what must have been read by contemporaries as an appeal for the release of that old foe of Spain, the imprisoned Sir Walter Raleigh, whose prosecution Northampton had assisted with considerable vindictiveness:

Let Martiallists that long haue bene disgrac't
Be lou'd againe and in our fauours place't:
Count not them rogues.

(p. 244)²⁰

Wither protests also the slander spread against Salisbury after his death,²¹ and asks, ‘What shall they looke for that are ten times worse?’ The question could not have been pleasing to Northampton, who had bitterly disliked Salisbury,²² and had himself succeeded more fully than any other man to the dead minister's power.

In other passages of Abuses Wither ventures on still more dangerous ground. He suggests that the current lack of military preparedness, which in his view leaves the nation open to Spanish attack, is caused by some ‘undermining hand’ (p. 243), a power at home plotting to deliver the nation to its enemy; he declares that papists, or their protectors, are to be found close to the throne; and he alleges that even royal councillors are delinquent in duty:

… sometime comes out a Proclamation,
Which threatens on the paine of confiscation.
That no Recusant do presume to stay
Within ten miles o th' Court till such a day.
Yet sure 'tis notwithstanding ment that some
Should daily to the Presence Chamber come,
And shroud within a furlong on't or two;
Some great one's may; and so I hope they do.
And by their owne authority no doubt
May keepe the rest from danger thereabout
.....But oh you Noble English Senators
Our Kingdomes Guard, and Princes Councellors,
How can you see your labours so mis-vs'd?
Or brooke, to haue your Soueraigne so abus'd?
Do you suppose that it deserues no blame,
To make a scar-crow of the Regall Name?
And to erect it on some common stall,
For to be gaz'd on, to no end at all?
Respect it more: and vse it not for course
Or fashions sake; but shew it hath some force.
Pluck out those Vipers that for feare of harme
Their chilled spirits in your bosomes warme.

(pp. 135-6)

Northampton was notoriously suspicious, and there is good reason to suppose that he was capable of reading these lines, in conjunction with the description of the ‘Man-like Monster’, as an attack on himself. Between 1612 and 1614 he several times severely punished persons for spreading various reports that councillors attended mass, and that after Prince Henry's death he himself had led a delegation to the king asking for toleration of Catholics.²³ John Chamberlain more than once remarks on his extraordinary sensitivity and vengefulness in these matters, writing of a prosecution in a letter of 17 December 1612: ‘the Lord hath got no great advantage, but only this, that men must learne not to speake of great one ni en bien ni en mal.’²⁴

It may be, indeed, that Northampton or his associates made an attempt to prosecute Wither upon the first publication of Abuses. Referring in A Satyre to the charges against him, the poet tells us, ‘once I stood accus'd for this before’. He was saved from possible punishment on that occasion through the influence of Princess Elizabeth, who

… vouchsaf't her word to cleare
Me from all dangers (if there any were).

(sig. F)

Addressing Elizabeth years later in the dedicatory epistle of his Psalmes of David (1632), he expresses his gratitude: ‘I do hereby most humbly, & thanckfully acknowledge; that, when my overforward Muse first flutterd out of her neast, Shee obtained the preservation of her endangered Libertie, by your gratious favour: and perhaps, escaped also, thereby, that Pinioninge, which would haue marred her flieng forth, for ever after’ (sig. A2^v).²⁵ Like her brother Henry, the princess was determinedly Protestant, and her marriage in February 1613 to the Lutheran Elector Frederick of the Rhine, which Wither celebrated in his Epithalamia, was opposed by Northampton.²⁶ Elizabeth would not have been the less inclined to protect Wither because that peer was his enemy. It was unfortunate for the poet that the princess's marriage took her to the Continent and decreased her influence in English affairs before the period of Northampton's greatest power.

In 1614 the popularity of Abuses was sufficient to assure that the charges against it should not be forgotten. Writing years later as Wither's political opponent during the Civil War, John Taylor describes the large following which the work had gained the poet by the time of his imprisonment:

There, in the Marshalseas, whole flights of Gulls,
Of Schismatiques, of Cuckolds, Knaves and Trulls,
In Droves and Heardes, in Pilgrimage they came.(27)

Taylor alleges, indeed, that Wither deliberately sought imprisonment in order to give his volume publicity, but the fact that four editions of Abuses are dated 1613 indicates that its popularity preceded its author's confinement. Yet Taylor is probably right in suggesting that it did not owe its sudden and considerable success entirely to the sound and conventional morality which it contained. There can be little doubt that it was seized upon as propaganda, not only by ‘Schismatiques’, but by Protestants generally who were hostile to Northampton's party. Wither may have suffered as much from the enthusiasm of admirers who persisted in reading personal satire on Northampton into Abuses and thus gave the work a dangerous reputation, as from the suspiciousness of the earl's own nature. In a passage clearly inspired by his imprisonment which he inserted into the 1615 edition of Abuses, the poet condemns those who wilfully find attacks on individuals where none was intended, concluding:

So shall my well-meant lines become to be
A wrong to others, and a plague to me.
Heauen shield me from such monsters: for their breath
Is worse than blasting, and their praise is death.

(p. 45)

When Abuses is read with a knowledge of the political situation in 1613-14, the cause of Wither's imprisonment does not appear so mysterious as Lamb and others have supposed. And, despite his protestations of innocence, there is evidence in Abuses itself that Wither was quite aware that the work was likely to bring punishment upon him. In one passage he addresses the nobles of the court thus:

          I'le tell the illes you do,
And put my name for witnesse therunto.
Then 'tis but fetching mee ad Magistratum
And laying to me scandalum Magnatum,
Which though you proue not, rather yet then faile
You were best hang, or clap me into iaile,
To stay my tongue.

(pp. 129-30)

Similarly he recognizes in an epigram addressed to the lords of the Privy Council that some may ‘tax me as too saucy with the State’, concluding with the scarcely conciliatory lines:

But if there's any take this writing badly:
Had it told al, it would [haue] vext them madly.

(sig. T8^v)

If Wither did not intend any attack on Northampton or other individuals, he introduced into Abuses some imprudent comment on public affairs and certain dangerous ambiguities. His career as a controversialist, in fact, began much earlier than has usually been recognized. Although he remained an Anglican for many years after he wrote it, in some respects Abuses Stript and Whipt anticipates his verse pamphlets in support of the Puritan cause during the Civil War, just as the imprisonment, although he did not hold the king responsible for it, marks the beginning of that disillusionment with the Stuart monarchy which, with other causes, was eventually to make him an apologist for the regicides.

Notes

1. Wither indicates in The Shepheards Hunting that Brooke (‘Cuddy’), who had experienced imprisonment himself for his part in Donne's wedding more than a decade earlier, and Browne (‘Willy’) were among his visitors in the Marshalsea. Cf. Browne's The Shepheards Pipe (1614), where Wither appears as ‘Roget’. See also Brathwait's A Strappado for the Divill (1615), pp. 23-24, his Times Curtaine Drawne (1621), sig. A6^v, John Taylor's The Nipping or Snipping of Abuses (1614), sig. B2, and, for later, much less friendly comment, his Aqua-Musae [1645], pp. 7-8. Drayton may have been among those who sympathized with Wither's aims in Abuses, as K. Tillotson has suggested in her introduction and notes to ‘The Shepheards Sirena’ in The Works of Michael Drayton, ed. J. W. Hebel and others, v (Oxford, 1941), 206-9.

2. See Arber's Transcript, iii. 512.

3. As the Short Title Catalogue shows, at least four editions are dated 1613, and single editions appeared in 1614, 1615, and 1617. The work was included also in Wither's Fuvenilia, 1622 and 1633. The old supposition that an edition which has not survived had appeared before 1613 seems to be satisfactorily refuted in the Grolier Club's Catalogue of Original and Early Editions … Wither to Prior (New York, 1905), iii. 245. Certainly the editions published in 1613 contain allusions to relatively recent events, such as the betrothal of Princess Elizabeth and the death of Salisbury, both of which occurred in May 1612.

4. Acts of the Privy Council, 1613-14, pp. 391, 521. An earlier warrant for Wither's release was issued on 10 July, but countermanded on 14 July (pp. 491, 498).

5. Unless otherwise indicated, reference is to Wither's works in their first editions, to Abuses in S.T.C. 25891, and to Motto in S.T.C. 25925. He frequently revised his writings, and for many of them no satisfactory modern edition exists.

6. ‘On the Poetical Works of George Wither’, The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb, ed. E. V. Lucas, i (London, 1903), 181.

7. The Rise of Formal Satire in England (Philadelphia, 1899), p. 187. Alden had seen only the edition of 1614, but its text does not differ substantially from that of the 1613 editions.

8. See, for example, Phoebe Sheavyn, The Literary Profession in the Elizabethan Age (Manchester, 1909), p. 49.

9. ‘George Wither’, Lives of Sacred Poets (London, 1834), p. 77.

10. The Poetry of George Wither (London, 1902), 1. xxv.

11. Wither made his most substantial revisions between 1614 and 1615, but this one did not appear until 1622 (Juvenilia, p. 319).

12. Wither seems to have believed that the king knew and sympathized with his work. See A Satyre, sig. B^v, and The Shepheards Hunting, sig. D4.

13. Cal. State Papers, Domestic, 1619-23, p. 268. Professor Kathleen Tillotson suggested in her notes to Drayton's ‘The Shepheards Sirena’ that this statement might relate to Wither's imprisonment for Abuses, but did not elaborate (Drayton, v. 207, n. 3). In 1621 Wither had little to fear in making his revelation, since Northampton had been discredited after his death by the suspicion of his complicity in the murder of Sir Thomas Overbury, and the whole party of the Howards had fallen from power.

14. See S. R. Gardiner, History of England, 1603-42 (London, 1883), ii. 145, 247, 259; E. R. Turner, The Privy Council of England (Baltimore, 1927-28), i. 85-86; D. H. Wilson, King James VI and I (London, 1956), pp. 178, 269, 285, 334-8.

15. Acts of the Privy Council, 1613-14, p. 391. Six of the ten Privy Councillors who ordered Wither's imprisonment belonged to the Howard faction (in addition to Northampton, the earls of Nottingham, Suffolk, and Worcester, Lord Knollys and Lord Wotton). Only one, the Earl of Pembroke, is clearly identified with the opposing party.

16. See Gardiner, i. 214; ii. 137, 160, 247; and Turner, i. 86.

17. This is the phrase of the 1622 text (Juvenilia, sig. Kk6^v). The 1615 text reads, ‘Some viler, and more subtile then the rest’ (sig. D5^v).

18. Quoted in Thomas Birch's Memoirs of the Reign of Queen Elizabeth (1754), i. 227.

19. P. 81, sigs. T8^v-V^v. Cf. The Letters of John Chamberlain, ed. N. E. McClure (Philadelphia, 1939), i. 394, 542. Pembroke authorized Wither's arrest but also his release, and in his Emblemes (1635) the poet seems to credit him with securing his liberation from a confinement (sig. (*), following p. 196). This allusion, however, is probably to his difficulty over his Motto in 1621-2.

20. See Gardiner, i. 94, and Willson, p. 178.

21. Although he does not refer to him by name, Wither undoubtedly means Salisbury by ‘that great mighty Peere that died so lately’ (p. 128). Chamberlain comments three days after Salisbury's death in a letter of 27 May 1612: ‘I never knew so great a man so soone and so generally censured …’ (Letters, i. 351; cf. 362, 364-5).

22. See Willson, p. 178.

23. See Cal. State Papers, Dom., 1611-18, pp. 160, 162; Chamberlain, Letters, i. 394, 396, 453, 508-9.

24. Letters, i. 396; cf. 453.

25. It is possible, however, that Wither's allusion in the Psalmes is to trouble arising from publication of Prince Henries Obsequies. In Abuses itself he refers to some ‘thrall’ which he has escaped (sig. B4^v).

26. See Willson, pp. 285-6.

27. Aqua-Musae [1645], pp. 7-8. Abuses was popular enough to be pirated at some undetermined time before 1 March 1615. See Records of the Court of the Stationers' Company, 1602 to 1640, ed. W. A. Jackson (London, 1957), p. 73.