SOURCE: Maguire, Nancy Klein. “Regicide and Reparation: The Autobiographical Drama of Roger Boyle, Earl of Orrery.” English Literary Renaissance 21, no. 2 (spring 1991): 257-82.

[In the following essay, Maguire reviews Orrery's corpus as it repeatedly develops the theme of forgiveness and mercy, proposing that through his heroic dramas Orrery sought to expiate his—and by extension society's—guilt for the execution of Charles I and the civil war.]

“For nought is virtue w(ch) successe does want.”

(Orrery, The Generall)

“Guilt next to Love, above all ties does bind.”

(Orrery, Mustapha)¹

Roger Boyle, Lord Broghill and Earl of Orrery, straddled both sides of 1649, and his autobiographical plays, while admittedly not great literature, record at least one participant's astute but guilty response to the execution of Charles I. Painfully obsessed with the act of regicide, Orrery overtly debates the nature of monarchy in his self-indicting autobiographies. Orrery's close connections to the governing party of England for three regimes particularly qualified him to dramatize this issue; his rhymed heroic plays repetitively explore the question most of the playwrights and many in their audience were asking, “Was it right to serve a usurper?”

Literary scholars oddly neglect² or malign³ the most popular playwright of the Restoration decade. Most recently, for example, Nicholas Jose, criticizing Orrery's “weary, wooden plays,” dismisses him as “opportunistic, pragmatic, [and] lacking deep ideological allegiance throughout the 1650s and 1660s.”⁴ Painting a radically different portrait, historians consider Orrery an exceptionally capable politician. H. R. Trevor-Roper, for example, recognizes him as Cromwell's “ablest political adviser … the man who would nearly save the English Revolution by making the Protector king.” Most recently, Ronald Hutton credits Orrery with being “The person with the real genius for figures, who thoroughly understood the details of the land legislation and the public revenue alike,” concluding that his “talents should have made him one of its [Restoration Ireland's] greatest ornaments.”⁵ Even historians, however, miss the complexities of this politician/playwright. Orrery's heroic plays show a “political adviser” able to use his playwriting skills to advantage, but they also uncover a politician who paid a price for thriving during the Cromwellian regime.

Orrery certainly used playwriting to rehabilitate himself politically, but in modern terms, his self-indicting autobiographies were also his psychotherapy. Orrery, probably unconsciously, used playwriting to work through his own political history, particularly his obsession with the act of regicide. Indeed, Orrery's neurotic and compulsive reiteration suggests the nightmarish quality of the regicidal experience: repeatedly, for example, a usurper (Cromwell) overcomes the rightful king (Charles I); then, a general (George Monk) defeats the usurper and restores the true king or heir (Charles II). Samuel Pepys, in fact, who saw at least one performance of each of Orrery's plays, constantly complains of “the very same design and words and sense and plot.”⁶ Whether spoken by heroes or villains, the “words and sense,” as much as the design and plot, betray Orrery's obsession. At times, in consciously political parallels, Orrery deliberately uses the emotional power of the shared myth of regicide and restoration,⁷ working on the blood-guilt of his audience. At other times the repetitive and discontinuous emotional associations appear unconscious and out of context, and these perhaps tell us most about the playwright and his culture.

Using the emotional associations of past events in what seems an unconscious transference, a dream-like association of past and present power-figures, Orrery mirrors the political and emotional process operating in him and in many of his contemporaries. Orrery's five rhymed heroic plays (produced 1661-1668)⁸ progress from thinly-veiled allegory toward concern with political consciousness; they move, in fact, toward overt discussion of the mentality that made the act of regicide possible and ultimately forgivable. The theatrically unembellished The Generall (1661), for example, reenacts the recent events of regicide and restoration with little analysis; Henry the Fifth (1664) and Mustapha (1665) transfer the impact of the execution of Charles I to the political events of the 1660s and show Orrery beginning to use plays as political tools; the theatrically and politically sophisticated Black Prince (1667) and Tryphon (1668) finally confront the complex and worrisome mid-century questions he and his audience have been skirting. Centering on the execution, Tryphon, in particular, finally accommodates the act of regicide.

Biographical and allegorical readings are often crucial in interpretations of early Restoration drama. Indeed, the playwrights themselves invite an allegorical approach. John Wilson comments, for example, that the story of the usurping tyrant Andronicus (Cromwell) is “such perhaps, as might not be thought altogether unparalel to what our selves have seen, were not the one, but too fresh on our memories, and the other, too far remov'd from our knowledge.” Thomas Forde darkly concludes, after telling the story of Semiramis (a King's concubine) who killed the King because he gave her kingly power for only three days, “I leave the parallel to the readers thoughts.” Lodowick Carlell even explicates his political use of metaphor. After paralleling the “true” story of Charles II in Heraclius, Emperour of the East (1664), Carlell explains “my design in translating it to his Princely consideration”: “For the subject of it is the restoration of a gallant Prince to his just inheritance, many years after the unjust and horrid murder of a Saint-like Father, and this by the courage and prudence of one, who saem'd [sic] in the vulgar eye to go another way. … All this, if I mistake not, is a just parallel.”⁹ Carlell's explication of Heraclius also illuminates Orrery's autobiographical plays.

Orrery himself provided the necessary archive for this study; he wrote prolifically on matters other than literature, and his writings survive. Orrery's frequent letters to the Duke of Ormonde (James Butler) between 1660 and 1668, for example, almost constitute a diary and usefully parallel his plays of that time. Orrery's prolific correspondence and his non-dramatic publications document his preoccupations and allow us to root his creative works in explicit political concerns. In addition, The Life of the Earl of Orrery by his chaplain Thomas Morrice and Eustace Budgell's Memoirs of the Life and Character of the Late Earl of Orrery, and of the Family of the Boyles¹⁰ provide family and personal information of a kind not readily available for other playwrights; even if some of this information needs to be tested against less partisan sources, it remains a trove of primary material. We have, therefore, an unusually rich body of data from which to reconstruct Orrery's political and psychological profile and to reconsider the usefulness of terms like “opportunistic.” For if we read Orrery's regressive, guilt-ridden, and king-worshipping tragicomedies as the product of his multiple political affiliations, we see that he may, at the very least, have preempted later reproaches, and conceivably have exposed his critics as more facile than himself.

II. THE POLITICIAN

Before we can understand Orrery's heroic plays, we need to understand his guilt-producing political career. In an unpublished poem entitled “On the Martyrdome of his Sacred Maiesty KING CHARLES the First of Blessed Memory” (probably written shortly before Orrery's death), Orrery indicts himself for the act of regicide by confessing that “All are too Guilty: they are, who did Sit, / To shed his Blood, and Those Permitted it.”¹¹ Orrery's early political, familial, and social relationships with the court of Charles I laid a firm foundation for his regicidal guilt. In the spring of 1639, for example, the eighteen-year-old Orrery (then Lord Broghill) and his two older brothers fought for Charles I in the Scottish war. The following year, their father, “the upstart” Earl of Cork,¹² possibly educating Orrery in “opportunism,” sent his son to York with 1000 pounds in gold as a gift to Charles I.¹³ Orrery's sister Lettice married the eldest son of Lord Goring, Vice-Chamberlain to Henrietta Maria, and in 1636 Goring opportunely presented Orrery and his brother Lewis to the King and Queen. In 1639, Charles I and Henrietta Maria sponsored the marriage of Orrery's brother Francis and Lady Elizabeth Killigrew, one of the Queen's maids of honor. The couple was married in the King's Chapel in Whitehall, and the King led the bride to the bedchamber while the Queen helped to undress her.¹⁴ Later in the year, Orrery's brother Lewis married a lady of the Queen's Privy Chamber and received similar attentions.

The family's intimacy with the court of Charles I deepened during the last years of his reign. Indeed, Charles I was the godfather of the eldest son of Orrery's brother Richard (one of the masquers in Coelum Britannicum—1634) and appointed Richard governor of Youghal in late 1641. Budgell comments that Richard was “remarkably eminent for his Loyalty to King Charles I. whom he assisted and supplied with Money in his Troubles” (sig. E4v). A year earlier, Orrery himself fell in love with one of the Queen's maids of honor, Frances Harrison, and fought a duel over her. During the spectacular 1640 performance of Salmacida Spolia, Orrery's future wife Lady Margaret Howard performed with the Queen's ladies; his close friend Sir John Suckling commemorated their 1641 wedding in “Upon my Lord Brohall's Wedding.”

Within a year after this royalist idyll, however, Orrery was fighting rebels in Ireland while his wife lost their first child during the siege of Lismore.¹⁵ A 1642 letter from his father suggests the climate that the young lord suddenly found himself in: “for the tymes are so full of danger that no honest man knowes whom to trust.”¹⁶ Although Orrery's emotional loyalty to the monarchy as an institution never faltered,¹⁷ extreme hardship soon tested his loyalty to the Stuarts. The atrocities that Orrery experienced during the Irish wars,¹⁸ in fact, exceeded the tragedies that he had seen enacted on stage or would later portray. Orrery purchased his title of “facile turncoat” (and the material for his heroic drama) by the loss of his homes and funds and by seeing his immediate family oppressed.¹⁹ The man supposedly “lacking deep ideological allegiance” grieved over relatives and friends killed in the cause he defended.²⁰

Although by nurture and inclination a royalist, the pragmatic Orrery reluctantly switched sides in order to get money to fight the Irish rebels. Yet according to his revisionist biographer Morrice, “when the horrid murther was committed upon the king's sacred person, he also deserted them, and giving up all Ireland for lost, retired into England” (SL, I, 15). In Morrice's and Budgell's version of Orrery's biography, Orrery was on his way to fight for the son of the holy martyr when Oliver Cromwell accosted him and gave him a clear-cut choice of going to the Tower or of fighting the Irish. Orrery fought the Irish. In 1655, Cromwell rewarded Orrery by appointing him President of the Council in Scotland and in 1657, Orrery acted as one of Cromwell's advisers in the House of Commons. Relentlessly monarchical, a grateful Orrery attempted to make Cromwell king by helping frame the “Humble Petition and Advice.” While championing the Cromwell family until Richard's abdication in 1659, Orrery also managed to help the Stuart cause at the same time. According to Morrice, before Orrery went to Scotland in 1655, he proposed a marriage between Cromwell's daughter and Charles II (SL, I, 40-43); in 1659, by the account of Morrice and others, Orrery prevented the House of Commons from passing a test act which alleged “that the putting to death the late King, Charles Stuart, was lawful and just” (SL, I, 55).²¹

Although certainly a master of the art of compromise, Orrery paid an emotional price for his hard-headed decisions. Plainly in his mind his guilt encompassed not only regicide but also desertion of the Stuart cause. A 1662 letter to Charles II clearly reveals Orrery's guilty and politically astute conscience: Orrery complains that the honors which the King bestowed on him made “me the more lament the sin and misery of having ever spent one moment of my life, but in the duty of that service”; he assures Charles that he is convinced “of the greatness of my crimes, only in the greatness of your mercies; and thereby in one performance heal the wound by renewing it” (SL, I, 128). In the following year, after having been ill of “burning fever,” Orrery avows to Secretary Bennet that nothing bothered him as much as the thought that “I should end my life ere I had by some signal services wiped away my past offences.”²²

We may be somewhat skeptical about this talented and conciliatory politician's self-accusations; one of Orrery's characters, however, points out that, “Guilt next to Love, above all ties does bind” (I, 244), and guilt, as well as his instinct for political survival, bound Orrery to the “Martyred Monarch's” son. Indeed, Orrery's guilty affection for Charles II appears genuine.²³ Orrery kept track of the hours he spent in private audience with the King and claimed that he would preserve his first letter from Charles II “for myself, and convey to my posterity, as the highest honour they ever had, or indeed could receive” (SL, I, 129-30).

Like other converted and ambitious Cromwellians, Orrery made heroic efforts to “wipe away” his offenses by “signal services.” Claiming to be the first Irishman to offer his help to Charles II, Orrery composed the declaration for a free parliament in February of 1660 and engineered the act of settlement in Ireland.²⁴ Orrery's “well received”²⁵ panegyric on the Restoration of Charles II has been lost, but Morrice claims that he celebrated the Restoration “not only with his presence, but with his pen, in a poem, wherein he expressed his own joyful sentiments, as well as those of the three kingdoms, upon that occasion” (SL, I, 65). Predictably, the gregarious and trimming Orrery became a recognized favorite of the restored King; in August, 1660, Charles II ordered a bill making Orrery, then Lord Broghill, the Lord President of Munster and the next month (September 5) created him Earl of Orrery. Charles signed his first letter to Orrery “Your very affectionate friend” (SL, I, 127).

III. THE AMATEUR PLAYWRIGHT

In his letters to Ormonde, Orrery intimates that Charles II frequently asked him for advice, and perhaps Orrery saw his plays as a continuation of these conversations. His autobiographical plays compliment, instruct, and admonish the new King in a curious combination of deference and self-assertion, of instruction and expiation. In The Generall, for example, Lucidor attempts to win pardon for his apparent disloyalty by insisting “Yet, I confesse, I cannott butt designe / To show my failings are fates sins, nott mine” (I, 114). Orrery excuses many of his political decisions through the voices of his characters. The exaggerated idealization of Altemera who “choose[s] to dye, rather than wrong a freind” (I, 161), for instance, reverses Orrery's purported choice of denying the Stuart cause rather than going to the Tower. As he frequently does in the State Letters, in his plays Orrery rationalizes his external disloyalties by emphasizing interior action. And of course his protagonists' complex ethical dilemmas clearly represent his own; as the 1743 editor of The State Letters put it, Orrery “was so entangled by the fetters of honour, artfully, and with some degree of kindness put upon him by Cromwell, that he found himself too closely manacled even to attempt at liberty” (SL, I, vi-vii). One of the commanders in The Generall articulates Orrery's rationale, explaining that “The End is Noble though the way bee nott” (I, 111).

THE GENERALL

In 1676, Orrery wrote A Treatise of the Art of War, dedicated to “the Kings Most Excellent Majesty,” with a frontispiece showing Charles II as a warrior-king. Asserting that “the contempt of Authority is of fatal consequence in all Humane Affairs, and most of all in Military,” Orrery stresses that “it is my firm belief, that still very much will be, nay must be left to the Judgment and Presence of Mind of a General, and the chief Officers under him.”²⁶

Not surprisingly, Orrery's first play concerns a general who restores his King to the throne. Orrery wrote The Generall (early in 1661)²⁷ at the request of Charles II; as Morrice put it, His Majesty “commanded his lordship to employ some of his leisure that way” (SL, I, 81). After receiving the play, Charles II wrote to Orrery, “I have read your first play, which I like very well” (SL, I, 127). At The Generall's 1664 London première, according to Sir Heneage Finch (the Solicitor General), Charles II presented “his” play to “the Greatest and noblest presence w^ch ye Court can make before the fullest Theatre & with the highest applause imaginable.”²⁸

Orrery's first play draws on pre-Commonwealth drama,²⁹ surely, but Orrery also replicates his own experience in choosing pre-Commonwealth fictions.³⁰ The nameless usurper-king and the true King Melizer represent Cromwell and Charles II.³¹ Clearly representing George Monk, General Clorimun also depicts an idealized Orrery. Clorimun, for example, voices Orrery's rationale for serving Cromwell,

Justice herselfe wou'd blush, shou'd shee receive
A right which treachery does to her give,
And virtuous Melizer wou'd never owne
From falsehood the possession of the Throne.
Disgrace I feare lesse than to be unjust.
'Tis such to take and then betray a trust.

(I, 135)

The parallel to Orrery is close. Morrice comments that “When lord Orrery had given his word to be faithful to Cromwell, it would have been dishonourable in him not to keep it” (SL, I, 98).

Repairing his Cromwellian affiliation, Orrery creates, as he does in all his plays, an idealized image of Charles II. Underscoring Charles' virtues of mercy and courage, and clearly recalling the Declaration of Breda, the true king Melizer/Charles II promises the usurping nation that “Past faults I'le never to Remembrance bring” (I, 163). Describing the natural nobility of the “true” king,³² Clorimun/Monk/Orrery reinforces Charles's dual claim of natural and divine right by deciding to stay in retirement “till Melizer does Reigne, / Whose virtues are soe great, his right soe good, / Hee should bee King by choice as well as bloud” (I, 135). Yet at the same time that Orrery lavishes compliments on the King, he admonishes and instructs him. In the 1664 version of the play, at least, Orrery appears carefully critical of the King's sexual escapades, warning him “Nor to your pleasure sacrifice your fame” (I, 141). Sounding familiar and topical themes, Orrery encourages Charles II to “take that Army into pay,” advising him that “Nothing to Souldiers can more wish'd for come, / Than to have Warrs abroad and peace at home” (I, 164).

In this first theatrical effort, Orrery highlights the military and political crisis of 1659, frequently alluding to the power of the army: “if their strength they once but understand, / 'Twill teach them from obeying to Command” (I, 112). Orrery's commanders Monasin and Filadin replay Monk's movement toward restoration, warning the usurper-king that the army “now are ready to pursue / Their mutiny, with yo^r dire Murther too,” and that “Rebellion in short time / Will prove as much their interest as crime” (I, 111). Making clear that “If the Usurpers rage shou'd rise soe high, / We have not yet forgott to Mutiny,” Monasin later decides to “change our Tyrant for our King” (I, 140, 143). Orrery's “Tyrant,” however, has redeeming qualities.³³ The nameless usurper (and his very namelessness may be a courtesy to Orrery's old friend and chief) responds with remorse to the supposed death of the conciliating heroine Altemera, “Woul'd to Heav'n I cou'd your life redeeme / By laying at your feet my Diadem!” (I, 151). When realizing that the army has betrayed him, the usurper vows, “My death shall show I merited a Crowne” (I, 152). Providing a model for the repentant usurper later represented in John Dryden's plays (Marriage A-la-Mode, for example), the usurper-king confesses to the true king:

This Hightned [sic] gallantry which thou dost show
Wounds mee much deeper than thy sword can doe,
And makes mee more to greive that I withstood
Thy virtuous title than thy right of bloud.

(I, 152-53)

In much the same way as the regicides were hanged, drawn, and quartered in 1660, the usurper's confidante, Gesippus, bears the brunt of the restored king's royal revenge, “Let that Gesippus to the tower be ledd. / 'Tis to the Law I leave his guilty head” (I, 153).

The Generall anticipates Orrery's next four plays. The usurper, who thinks that “all crimes which help him to a Crown / Are then absolve'd when he does put it on” (I, 261), reappears again and again, as do the heroic-lover and the idealized female. Orrery observes in his State Letters that “revenge often is stronger than reason and interest” (SL, II, 191),³⁴ and The Generall reflects this sentiment; Clorimun saves his rival only “To make thee my Revenges sacrifice,” and Monasin claims: “The Campe th' Usurpers crimes soe much resent, / That as one man they on revenge are bent” (I, 156, 143). Orrery's themes of revenge, usurpation, civil war, jealousy, and succession remain constant, and his underlying obsession with the execution of Charles I never alters; the later plays, however, use that obsession to comment on the political affairs of the sixties.

IV. THE PLAYWRIGHT AS POLITICIAN

Orrery's tragicomic life had particularly happy political and theatrical reversals in mid-decade. His next two plays reflect both his more assuredly repaired position in Charles II's government and his growing friendship with the King. Orrery appears a more consciously political playwright, and he underscores his dedication to the restored monarchy. Indeed, he wrote to Secretary Bennett in 1664, “'tis a clear and indispensable duty to rest in the will of God and of the King, which is a doctrine I inculcate into all, and shall still practice.”³⁵ Sworn a member of the King's Privy Council in May of 1665, Orrery had considerable political influence: the French Ambassador described him (in 1669) as “conseiller de Cromwell, grand ami du Chancellier, et créature de la Duchesse de Yorke et son parent, qui avoit plus de credit avec le Roy que touts les autres Ministers ensemble.”³⁶ Moreover, Orrery's contemporaries considered him the foremost dramatist of the decade,³⁷ and one the King clearly supported. John Downes's description of Henry the Fifth is telling; the play “was Splendidly Cloath'd: The King, in the Duke of York's Coronation Suit; Owen Tudor, in King Charle's: Duke of Burgundy, in the Lord of Oxford's, and the rest all New. It was Excellently Perform'd, and Acted 10 Days Successively.”³⁸

HENRY THE FIFTH

In Henry the Fifth (1664), Orrery developed political fictions particularly suited to the restored monarchy. In his version of the story of Henry V,³⁹ Orrery depicts the young King as a romanticized portrait of Charles II—handsome and adventuresome. The marriage negotiations over Catherine of Braganza particularly interested Orrery,⁴⁰ and he probably intended Henry V's courtship of the French Katherine to suggest Charles's courtship of the Portuguese Catherine. Indeed, Orrery used Henry the Fifth to flatter the King and the Queen in a number of ways, complimenting Catherine by an elaborate description of the Portuguese saving the English from the French navy (I, 211).

Orrery continues to bolster divine-right monarchy. The Frenchman Blamount points out that “A Subjects Sword could not resist a Kings: / Angels are Guardians of that Sacred name,” and Princess Katherine (not unlike Dryden's later Lyndaraxa) scorns any but a king, since “He who a Throne does want, wants all things too” (I, 175, 177). Recapitulating Charles I's dictum that “A subject and a sovereign are clean different things,”⁴¹ Henry V explains to Tudor that “because thou art / A Subject, thou mistak'st a Monarchs heart,” and Tudor later insists that “A Subject must not with his King contend” (I, 183, 190). At the end of the play, in the peers' compliment at the wedding of Henry V and Katherine, Orrery articulates his own flattering perception of the relationship between kings and subjects.

I from the Nobles come, who still are born
To save their Monarchs, and their Courts adorn;
And still are certain of th' incessant care
Of Pallaces and dangers of the War.
They in their Sphear should still continue bright
Since they from Kings derive their borrow'd light.

(I, 223)

Although Orrery and the other nobles had failed to “save their Monarch,” Orrery's play celebrating the divine right of kings must have pleased the son of Charles I.

MUSTAPHA

While Orrery was in London from June of 1664 to June of 1665, The Generall and Henry the Fifth played on the rival stages. Perhaps inspired by his smashing theatrical successes, during the winter Orrery wrote his most popular play, The Tragedy of Mustapha, The Son of Solyman the Magnificent (1665).⁴² Produced by the Duke's Company, Mustapha demonstrates Orrery's skill in adapting to new circumstances. Clearly learning new techniques to please a more theatrically sophisticated audience, he has sharpened his skills as a dramatist and appears a more professional playwright. According to Downes, Davenant's company derived “vast Profit” from its initial run.⁴³ Charles II, at any rate, again liked the play and ordered John Webb, the court architect and former assistant to Inigo Jones, to prepare the scenes for a performance at Whitehall.⁴⁴

In this blockbuster production Orrery uses more sophisticated and subtle political allegories. If we look closely at Mustapha's text, we see a growing integration of the past and gradual confrontation of troublesome questions. Perhaps gaining more conscious control over regicidal guilt, Orrery personates Charles I in the popular Mustapha. Even Orrery's hagiographic rhetoric, in fact, mimics royalist “Holy Martyr” propaganda: Mustapha's brother Zanger, for example, asks his Sultan father, “How could you his unblemisht Virtue doubt?” and claims that “you have the world bereft / Of much more Virtue than is in it left” (I, 293, 292). Defending Mustapha/Charles I, Zanger insists that false counselors “wrought / You into wrong suggestions of his fault” (I, 293). Orrery's recollection of Charles I's imprisonment and execution probably inspired Zanger's comment that “A Princes Prison is a Princes Grave,” and the Cardinal's comment that “Religion too makes it a greater thing, / To dye a Martyr than to live a King” (I, 278, 233) echoes the “Martyred Monarch.”⁴⁵ Tellingly, Orrery later repeats the line nearly verbatim in his poem on Charles's execution: “For Heav'n had taught him, Twas a Greater Thing; / To be a Martyr, then to be a King.”⁴⁶ Mustapha's courageous death has a sense of martyrdom, and Orrery may have been deliberately working on the theatergoers' guilt by reminding them that while 30,000 horse fought to save Mustapha no one lifted a hand to save Charles I. Mustapha perceptively comments: “For where in evil many bear a share, / They hardly count, when they divide the guilt, / A drop for each, though streams of blood were split” (I, 236).

Orrery also appears to acknowledge the guilt clustered around the civil wars and Interregnum. In describing the guilt-ridden war in Hungary, for example, Orrery also describes England's civil wars:

Some, who had kill'd their Sons, more tears did shed
For their own guilt, than that their Sons were dead;
Guilt wrought by Fate, which had their valour mov'd
Against that Prince whom they for valour lov'd.

(I, 298)

Orrery, certainly, and most of the audience could have said with the Sultan's wife Roxolana “O fatal strife where Victors nothing gain” (I, 296). Some members of Orrery's audience were guilty royalists who had been adrift during the Interregnum, and perhaps they applied the hopeless dilemma of the young widow, the Queen of Hungary, to their own experience. The Queen's final complaint evokes the lack of clarity and direction many felt during the Interregnum, “But why should we be punish'd if we stray, / When all our Guides dispute which is the way?” She grieves, “Without a Clue I'm in a lab'rynth left: / And where even Hope is of her Eyes bereft” (I, 268, 267).

Against this resonating and emotionally powerful backdrop, Orrery uses the characters in the play to advise the King on the impending crisis over Clarendon. Although not impeached until 1667, Clarendon was rumored to be in the pay of the Dutch as early as 1664 and “remained the most detested of royal ministers.”⁴⁷ Orrery himself apparently remained ambivalent toward the Chancellor; as we shall see, he held different positions at different times, or perhaps, like others, he adjusted his views to suit different audiences. Clearly the marriage of Orrery's niece to Clarendon's second son in 1665 and Orrery's friendship with the Duke and Duchess of York (Clarendon's daughter) suggests particular interest in Clarendon. A month after he demanded the seals of office from Clarendon, Charles II wrote to Orrery concerning the “late changes I have made.” Charles reassured Orrery that “you may be most confident that you may stand upon your own legs, & that you need nobody's friendship with me”⁴⁸—perhaps intimating that Orrery believed his political position depended on Clarendon's power. If Morrice is correct that “The King then solemnly protested, he [Orrery] should be chancellor” (SL, I, 78), Orrery's ambivalent fixation on Clarendon would not be surprising.

Orrery would claim in 1667 that Clarendon had persuaded the King to marry Catherine of Braganza, “who he knew would be barren & could not be otherwise.”⁴⁹ In Mustapha, Orrery dramatizes this accusation by creating a manipulative adviser who interferes with natural succession. Nervousness about the Chancellor's power, and perhaps of Parliament's, comes through quite strongly. Roxolana, for example, advises the Queen of Hungary that she “should from Subjects counsel still be free,” cautioning her that “Slaves may govern whom they can perswade” (I, 272). While always instructing Charles II on how to rule, Orrery's political observations in Mustapha seem more specific. Indeed, the Queen could be portraying the autocratic and domineering behavior of Clarendon when she remarks of the Cardinal, her adviser:

Our greatest Counc'lours think we are unjust
When our least thoughts are hidden from their trust;
And till (By knowing th' utmost that we know)
Those restless Counc'lours may our Rulers grow,
They do not love us, and they sullen seem;
But after, care not, though we love not them.

(I, 274)

Perhaps Orrery inadvertently describes his own expedient but guilt-producing political career when the scheming Cardinal advises the Queen: “Councils should alter as their causes do. … The Pilot, of most firm and constant mind, / Must shift his course and turn with ev'ry wind” (I, 273).

By 1665, Orrery had learned to “turn with ev'ry wind” theatrically as well as politically. No longer using plays as thinly-veiled political allegory, he and his fellow playwrights had begun to integrate past and present political issues and to comment on the political events of the sixties in increasingly sophisticated ways. In his last two plays, Orrery uses drama, both consciously and unconsciously, for increasingly complex theatrical, political, and reparative purposes.

V. EXPIATION AND EXORCISM

By the time the theaters reopened after the plague of 1665-1666, Orrery had integrated his theatrical and political expertise. The masque-makers of the thirties had combined the two arts in much the same way, and Orrery may have been consciously imitating their political extravaganzas. Successful plays certainly required the spectacle of a masque by the mid-1660s, but Orrery had learned more than this. Both Orrery's heroic plays and the court masque invested evenhandedly in mythology and political reality, and in both forms the viewpoints of the idealized characters onstage contrasted sharply with those of the more pragmatic audience. In a masque performance the revels attempted to cancel these dual perspectives by merging the ideal and the real. Orrery also attempted to merge the two in his regressive Caroline mythology, but as we shall see in The Black Prince and Tryphon, Orrery repressed rather than cancelled the awareness of opposing perceptions.

THE BLACK PRINCE

The extraordinarily masque-like Black Prince (1667), “which I writ by the King's command,”⁵⁰ premièred at the first Drury Lane Theatre on October 19, 1667, with an epilogue addressed to the King. Charles II and persons of the court gathered to honor the most distinguished playwright of the nobility. Orrery's comment that “if ever I writ anything fit for the theatre this play is it”⁵¹ reveals his sense of having mastered the playwright's craft.

So far, we have seen Orrery using plays primarily to work through earlier political events and to repair his political position by pleasing the King. In The Black Prince he flatters a wider audience and has a broader political goal. Indeed, he patriotically uses his “masque” to boost morale for the war with France. Although Louis XIV only declared war on England in January of 1666, in The Black Prince Orrery gives a precipitous victory to England, inflating the prowess of the English army. As in the battles that Orrery fought in Ireland, the odds are against the English, “eighty Thousand” to “eight Thousand strong.” In the voice of King Edward, Orrery declares, “No humane force could ever yet subdue / An English Prince, and English Army too” (I, 311). Orrery probably completed The Black Prince around May of 1666,⁵² and his 1666 letters⁵³ parallel King Edward's sentiments. In May of 1666, for example, Orrery assures Ormonde that “they will find an English sword is at least as sharp as a French one” (SL, I, 278).

Although obviously geared to the theatrical and political machinery of the late 1660s, The Black Prince still focuses on the execution of Charles I, treating the act of regicide yet more obsessively. Orrery even embellishes Cromwell's sentiments, perhaps unconsciously, to condemn indirectly the act of regicide. According to Morrice, when Orrery suggested that Cromwell's daughter marry Charles II, Cromwell responded “The king cannot and will not forgive the death of his father” (SL, I, 43); in The Black Prince, the heroine asks, “Can you believe I'll share that Monarcks [sic] Bed / By whose Command my Father lost his Head?” (I, 335). Concluding that “There's no Atonement for a Fathers Blood,” she carries on a sophistical discussion about responsibility for regicide, arguing “Into a high Injustice I had run, / Had I ascrib'd the Kings guilt to his Son” (I, 335). The argument allows her to marry her “Father's Murth'rers Son” (I, 335), and it perhaps also sanctions Charles II's espousal with the English people.

Orrery's regressive themes of civil war and guilt certainly remain,⁵⁴ but his discussion of kingship and his curtailment of responsibility for the act of regicide suggest that he is searching for a new definition of kingship. Although he conscientiously supports Charles II, Orrery's own diffuse feelings about monarchy inevitably surface. He creates the characters of King John, Delaware, King Edward, and the Black Prince, for example, but does not focus on any single character sufficiently to create an effective model of either sacred or absolute monarchy. All these characters, in fact, fall below the standards of an ideal kingship. King John betrays Valeria, Delaware betrays the Prince by concealing an important letter, and the Black Prince himself scarcely qualifies for kingship: Kent deceives him, and Delaware extricates him from his dilemmas. Departing “From all his sacred Vows” (I, 316), the reigning King Edward ignominiously threatens, “I'le make them feel that 'tis a dangerous thing / To dare to court the Mistress of a King” (I, 346), perhaps obliquely commenting on Charles II's increasingly unpopular and expanding—to use Hutton's term—“unofficial royal family.”⁵⁵

The absence of a definitive hero, the splintering of monarchy seen here, suggests that Orrery could not contain kingship within its pre-regicide definition. This diffusion puts emphasis on the difficulty of realizing an idealized concept of kingship, and in the consciousness of Orrery the “King” may still be the “Martyred Monarch.” Indeed, Orrery's most effective kingly images belong to Charles I, and Orrery proclaims his continuing divine right (as well as Charles II's kingship in exile) in the voice of the Prince: “Subjects who from their King the Pow'r have got / Are still his Subjects though he Rules them not” (I, 341). Staging masque-like revivals of Caroline kingship, Orrery attempts to recover the mystique of Charles I. Perhaps he hoped that the heroic play would work mimetic magic, and that lost ideals would be reborn.

TRYPHON

The most complex example of Orrery's political theory and dramatic practice must surely be Tryphon (1668), written at a point where Orrery was confident of the King's support, yet in danger himself from his Irish enemies. In high political favor with the King, and using his shorthand for himself [Mr. Rogers] and the King [Mr. Church], Orrery boasted in 1669 that “Mr. Church yesterday stuck like a burr to Mr. Rogers in a business which made many admire and some sad,” underscoring that “Mr. Church and Mr. Rogers are now every day one or two hours alone together.”⁵⁶ Indeed, Charles II actively supported Orrery throughout the 1669 charges of treason trumped up by Ormonde's friends.⁵⁷ Shrewdly referring to “the execrable trial and murder of his late majesty of ever blessed memory” (SL, I, 116), Orrery cagily answered the charges during the impeachment proceedings, speedily defeating his enemies.

Tryphon explores various aspects of Orrery's checkered political career, becoming almost an apologia pro vita sua—a densely packed political and emotional psychoanalysis of himself. The play operates on several levels, with fiction and history discontinuously fusing together. Predictably, Orrery's fiction depicts the reign of a usurping regicide (Tryphon/Cromwell) which ends, predictably, with a deposed general (Nicanor/Monk) restoring the true heir (Aretus/Charles II). Orrery underscores his obsessive theme by debating the advisability of killing kings. On another allegorical and autobiographical level, the character of Tryphon/Cromwell fuses in a nightmarish way into the character of Clarendon, thus becoming Tryphon/Cromwell/Clarendon and conflating the crimes of regicide and purported usurpation of power.⁵⁸

Orrery probably wrote Tryphon (1668) when he came to London, where he again resided from June 16, 1668, to late July of 1670. The Duke's Company apparently produced Tryphon very simply.⁵⁹ Although Charles II probably again attended the première of the play,⁶⁰ which was produced at court later in the month, existing stage records suggest that the non-spectacular play was not popular. By 1668, however, Orrery had achieved sufficient theatrical expertise and emotional distance to confront directly the question plaguing him and his audience: “Was it right to serve a usurper?”⁶¹

Personating Charles I in the murdered king Antiochus, Tryphon debates the act of regicide and the nature of divine right directly and aggressively. In spite of Charles II's aversion to plays about murdering kings,⁶² Orrery focuses on king-killing, or rather usurper-killing. Objectifying and sorting out his own uncertain feelings about the act of regicide, Orrery sets up his characters as spokesmen, and we hear the conflicting and conflicted voices of royalists agonizing over regicide (and/or tyrannicide) throughout the play. Like Orrery, Demetrius and Nicanor faithfully serve the usurper until they can safely restore the true king.⁶³ The two politicians frequently speak for Orrery. Demetrius, for example, asserts, “Those who for wrongs their Monarchs, murther act, / Worse sins than they can punish they contract,” and Nicanor (as an ideal Orrery) insists that “subjects, Sir, should die to save their Kings” (I, 380, 381)—a sentiment Orrery frequently expresses in his letters.⁶⁴ In a debate concerning the advisability of tyrannicide, Orrery appears uncertain whether de facto kingship demands the same reverence as hereditary kingship. Insisting that “Yet he's to blame who does to death pursue / That Man to whom the Name of King is due,” Nicanor appears to claim divine right for de facto kings. Aretus, however, retorts,

But him with greater Justice we should blame
Who as his due usurps that Sacred Name;
Since he our lawfull Monarch's Blood has spilt,
Who e'r revenges not, contracts the Guilt.

An advocate of divine right and enemy of de facto kings, Aretus argues for tyrannicide by claiming: “When e'r a Subject does Usurpe the State, / Any Brave Hand has Right to Act his Fate / The Gods make every Man a Judge of him” (I, 401).

Demetrius pragmatically calculates the end results of tyrannicide/regicide. Remembering the events of 1649-1660, and perhaps recalling Restoration accounts of Charles I's trial, “a thing unexampled since the world began, That a King should be so arraign'd before his own Subjects as a Criminal,”⁶⁵ Demetrius/Orrery concludes “'Tis less to kill, than to arraign a King” (I, 378). Demetrius reminds his fellow conspirators that “We may change Tyrants, not the Tyranny. / Where Force is Title, Force must make it good” (I, 379). Recalling the succession problems following Cromwell's death and the confusion of the army's reign, Demetrius warns the potential regicides that, “All would, were Tryphon kill'd, fight for the Throne, / 'Tis worse to have Many Tyrants than but One” (I, 414). In tragicomic fashion, however, the force of love settles the debate in favor of regicide, and Aretus concludes with a providential logic similar to that of Parliament (or Cromwell?) in 1649: “Since we to kill the Tyrant are agreed, / I see the Gods his Ruine have decreed” (I, 425). The new King by divine right (Aretus) says to Nicanor/Monk/Orrery: “The Way in which me to the Throne you bring, / Is Greater than to be your self a King” (I, 435).

In his debates about monarchy, it appears that Orrery has shifted away from the Caroline notion of the divine right of kingship. Putting little emphasis on the means by which kings obtain their title, Orrery stresses the consequences of the title; the name of king has become increasingly important. Demetrius, for example, reiterating Blamount's “Angels are Guardians of that Sacred name,” explains, “That name, Aretus, is a sacred thing” (I, 175, 380). Even Tryphon/Cromwell respects the kingly title, claiming that “The name of King by no base act I'l Blot, / Nor Dying loose the Fame my Life has got” (I, 430). One could even speculate that Orrery applauds Cromwell for refusing the crown. He certainly presents a case for Cromwell's rehabilitation, asserting that “Usurpers, who inforc'd their Crimes forsake, / For all past Crimes full satisfaction make” (I, 384). Orrery again vindicates his Cromwellian affiliation. Demetrius asserts in the play's opening speech, “But how men gain their Pow'r the Gods do not / So much regard, as how 'tis us'd when got” (I, 378).

Analyzing power again and again, Orrery compulsively uses the nightmarish maneuvers of 1642-1660 to give emotional resonance to his political analysis of the sixties. Manipulating fears and memories of the past, Orrery runs together characteristics of Tryphon/Cromwell with the negative characteristics of Clarendon. Many of Orrery's contemporaries and friends believed that Clarendon's autocratic behavior usurped Charles II's power, and the first act opens with Demetrius' counsel, “he too much deserves to lose his Throne / Who makes a Subject's power exceed his own” (I, 378). Underlining Tryphon/Clarendon's arrogance and greed for power, Demetrius observes, “his Pride his Virtue has betray'd” and reflects “When once Ambition does the mind devour, / Men Sacrifice their Vertue to their Pow'r” (I, 379, 378). Nicanor reminds Tryphon, also his King's powerful favorite, that

Subjects, too oft, whose services are great,
Consider that as merit, which is debt;
And have the ruine of their Kings design'd,
Judging them cruel when not over-kind.

(I, 381)

Defending his usurpation of power, Tryphon not only argues “Since to my Services he was severe, / From him what might not his best Subjects fear,” but defensively asks, “If he did erre, placing me where I stood, / Why must his fault be washt off with my Blood?” (I, 381). Orrery's statement in 1667 that “Clarendon must dy” surely underscores the Tryphon/Clarendon identification.⁶⁶ Clarendon's opponents frequently accused him of arranging his daughter's marriage with the Duke of York to gain power, and Tryphon attempts marriage with Nicanor's daughter to consolidate his political position, for “reasons of state.” The various readings of the play merge as Demetrius imitates Orrery's attempt to arrange a marriage between Charles II and Cromwell's daughter by arranging Tryphon's marriage to Nicanor's daughter. To save her father, Cleopatra (like Anne Hyde?) agrees to marry the usurping tyrant.

Tryphon also concerns the nature of treason. Sir Robert Howard had accused Clarendon of treason during the impeachment crisis, as well as vilifying him in The Duke of Lerma (1668), and we could expand our set of parallels to include this unrelenting adversary of Clarendon. Exclaiming “For what could show this Tyrant more unjust / Than to abuse such gratitude and trust” (I, 378), for example, Aretus/Howard decides “All have more Right, since he those Crimes has done, / To Tryphon's Life than he had to the Crown” (I, 402). While Aretus pushes for tyrannicide, Howard advocates impeachment. Regarding the fall of Clarendon, Orrery observed that “The wisest and justest ministers of state cannot avoid being struck at. All that they can do, is, not to deserve it” (SL, II, 299). Perhaps defending Clarendon from the charge of treason, and again rationalizing his own unmonarchical choices, Orrery uses a similar sentiment in Tryphon. Like many playwrights of the 1660s, Orrery identifies commitment to monarchy with commitment to women, and he puts his favorite line in the voice of his spokesman Demetrius: “To lose her, yet Deserve her, is more fit, / Than to Possess her and not Merit it” (I, 407).

In this play questioning the nature of loyalty to kings, Orrery mirrors the hierarchical confusion and ethical complexity following the act of regicide. The execution of Charles I, among other forces, set traditional codes of loyalty in conflict, and the captain of Tryphon's guard embodies the shiftiness of the codes after the King's death; he sells out his friends for the tyrant, for example, but within hours reverses his loyalties and helps to destroy him. The love reversals in the play also accentuate the lack of fixed commitment—Tryphon's love, for example, instantaneously switches from Cleopatra to her sister, and Aretus' love for Cleopatra “'twas till last night unknown to me” (I, 386). Imitating the ethical dilemmas Orrery and his audience faced during the Interregnum, the convoluted dilemmas about honor absurdly complicate personal relationships; Cleopatra, for example, denies her lover and herself, “Because my word was first to Tryphon past” (I, 397). The characters seem to work against their own good—no matter how well things turn out, honor imposes one last obstacle. The almost insane rhetoric of honor camouflages emotional needs and desperate rationalizations. Orrery conspicuously allows for the possibility of forgiveness. Cleopatra says, “His past Offences he does much deplore” (I, 384), suggesting perhaps the offenses of Orrery as well as those of Tryphon/Cromwell/Clarendon. In his rhymed heroic plays, Orrery appears to beg for forgiveness.

VI

At the end of Mustapha, Solyman forces his wife Roxolana to write a confession of her crimes; Orrery apparently was forced to write his confession in his plays. Orrery's plays show a politician using his playwriting skills to rehabilitate himself and his monarch, but they also reveal a politician with a tender conscience. Addressing the nagging questions of the 1660s like a history lesson which keeps going over the same question in the hope of finding a different answer, Orrery's rhymed heroic plays neurotically repeat the themes of usurpation and restoration until they are sufficiently worn down to be forgotten. His plays reflect a society trying to adjust to the new world ushered in by the execution of Charles I. Orrery understood the mentality of the midlife generation caught between two kinds of monarchy, actively participating in a new political world while remaining emotionally in the old. For Orrery and for his audience, the Orrerian heroic play seems a necessary progression in coming to terms with the civil wars, the act of regicide, and the Interregnum. Orrery progresses from The Generall, where the “true” King says to the usurper, “Dye both forgiven and forgotten too” (I, 153), to Tryphon, which overtly justifies regicide/tyrannicide: Demetrius asserts, “'Twas Just this Execution he should doe, / That as he wrong'd us, he may right us too”; Aretus, however, argues “Death should have been his Punishment, not Choice” (I, 431, 432). Orrery gradually worked out the act of regicide, as in an exorcism, in ritualistic reparation.

Notes

1. The Dramatic Works of Roger Boyle, Earl of Orrery, 2 vols., ed. William Smith Clark, II (Cambridge, Mass., 1937), I, 113, 244; all references to Orrery's plays are from this edition.

2. Since Kathleen Lynch's biography in 1965, literary scholars have more or less ignored Orrery, dismissing him as a second-rate playwright, grudgingly admitted to have initiated the English rhymed heroic play. Susan Staves devotes eight pages to his plays, considering them, along with other heroic tragedy, as constituting “one stage of the culture's gradual assimilation of the civil war experience,” and Matthew H. Wikander's five pages concentrate on Orrery's rhetoric, considering his plays as “extravagant historical pageants.” Laura Brown and J. Douglas Canfield briefly discuss Orrery's plays. Kathleen M. Lynch, Roger Boyle: First Earl of Orrery (Knoxville, 1965); Susan Staves, Players' Scepters: Fictions of Authority in the Restoration (Lincoln, 1979), p. 51; Matthew H. Wikander, The Play of Truth & State: Historical Drama from Shakespeare to Brecht (Baltimore, 1986), p. 90; Laura Brown, English Dramatic Form, 1660-1760 (New Haven, 1981), pp. 6-9; J. Douglas Canfield, “The Significance of the Restoration Rhymed Heroic Play,” Eighteenth-Century Studies 13 (Fall, 1979), 51-52. After the present essay was completed, Mita Choudhury's “Orrery and the London Stage: A Loyalist's Contribution to Restoration Allegorical Drama” appeared in Studia Neophilologica 62 (1990), 43-59.

3. Clark, for example, in his 1937 edition of the works of Orrery, presents him as a self-seeking, superficial man, the “Charlatan of Munster,” and refers to “His continual scheming and self-interest” (I, 58, 54).

4. Nicholas Jose, Ideas of the Restoration in English Literature, 1660-71 (Cambridge, Mass., 1984), p. 135.

5. H. R. Trevor-Roper, Religion, The Reformation and Social Change (London, 1967), p. 433; Ronald Hutton, Charles the Second: King of England, Scotland, and Ireland (Oxford, 1989), pp. 260, 372. In Robert Boyle and the English Revolution: A Study in Social and Intellectual Change (New York, 1977), J. R. Jacob calls Orrery “a member of that group in the highest councils of the Protectorate” (p. 129), and in Cromwellian Scotland 1651-1660 (Edinburgh, 1979), F. D. Dow concludes that in Scotland in 1655-1657, “it was Broghill himself who suggested the major guidelines of English policy, and who, by his personal intervention at many crucial points in the negotiations with Resolutioners and Protesters, gave the execution of that policy its distinctive twist” (p. 195).

6. Samuel Pepys, The Diary of Samuel Pepys, ed. Robert Latham and William Matthews, 11 vols. (Berkeley, 1970-1983), IX, 389.

7. Initially an emotional reaction to the execution of Charles I and fanned by the widespread and immediate dissemination of Eikon Basilike, the emotionally charged myth of the “Murdered Monarch” had become a politically valuable force by the Restoration. See my “The Theatrical Mask/Masque of Politics: The Case of Charles I,” Journal of British Studies 28 (January, 1989), 1-22.

8. Orrery expressly wrote his last rhymed heroic play, Herod the Great (1672), for Thomas Killigrew's Bridges Street Theatre which burned just as Herod was ready for production; the play was never produced.

9. John Wilson, Andronicus Comnenius: A Tragedy (1664), sigs. A3-A3v; Tho[mas]. Forde, Virtus Rediviva: Or, A Panegyrick on the late K. Charls the 1. Second Monarch of Great Britain (1660), sig. B8; Lodowick Carlell (“Englished by”), Heraclius, Emperour of the East. A Tragedy, (1664), sig. A3v.

10. Thomas Morrice, The Life of the Earl of Orrery, in A Collection of the State Letters of the Right Honourable Roger Boyle, the first Earl of Orrery, Lord President of Munster in Ireland, 2 vols. (Dublin, 1743); Morrice's life and an appendix are separately paginated: SL references in the text are to this work; Eustace Budgell, Memoirs of the Life and Character of the late Earl of Orrery, And of the Family of the Boyles (1732).

11. Roger, Earl of Orrery, “On the Martyrdome of his Sacred Maiesty,” Poems on most of the Festivals of the Church (1681), sig. T2v.

12. For the “upstart Earl,” see Nicholas Canny, The Upstart Earl: A Study of the Social and Mental World of Richard Boyle first Earl of Cork 1566-1643 (Cambridge, Eng., 1982).

13. Lismore MS. 27, fol. 314v, Devonshire Collections, Chatsworth.

14. Lismore MS. 27, fol. 278v, Devonshire Collection, Chatsworth.

15. In 1641 the Earl of Cork described Orrery as “full of hot blood and courage” (SL, I, 4).

16. BL Egerton MS. 80, fol. 14.

17. When attempting to convince Cromwell to become King, for example, Orrery argued, “what is good in it's own Nature [monarchy], is always good, and if by intervening Accidents it be a while clouded, yet at length it shines and overcometh, and all Men do desire to revert unto it,” in [John] Lord Somers, A Second Collection of Scarce and Valuable Tracts, 4 vols. (1750), III, 151.

18. A woman, for example, was buried alive at his father's home in Youngal during the Irish Rebellion (BL Egerton MS. 80, fol. 31); in 1643 Orrery's brother Francis and a companion, after capturing an Irish castle, put the entire garrison to the sword.

19. Orrery's wife and children, for example, arrived in Cork as refugees in 1645, and Lynch claims, with inadequate documentation, that Murrough O'Brien, the first Earl of Inchiquin, imprisoned his three young children in 1648 (Granville Penn, Memorials of the Professional Life and Times of Sir William Penn, 2 vols. ([1833, I, 118]; Lynch, Roger Boyle p. 63).

20. Orrery's brother and brother-in-law were killed in the battle of Liscarrol in 1642; another brother-in-law was killed in the battle of Edgehill. Orrery's close friend Lucius Cary (favorite of Charles I and the father of the Restoration playwright Henry Cary) was killed—more likely, he sought his death—in the first battle of Newbury in 1643.

21. For Morrice's account, see SL, 55-57; see also M. Guizot, History of Richard Cromwell and the Restoration of Charles II, trans. Andrew R. Scoble, 2 vols. (1856), I, 113-14.

22. CSP Ireland, 1663-1665, p. 290.

23. In letters written in 1665, Orrery extravagantly says, either pathologically or sycophantically, “I can truly say I never loved a mistress so well as I loved the King my master, and when I see his affairs prosper I am more pleased than ever I was when my amours succeeded,” and “I love the King a thousand times more than myself” (CSP Ireland, 1663-1665, pp. 670, 643). CSP frequently simply says “Further loyal expressions follow” or “various fulsome expressions follow.” Although Charles II generally failed to reward Orrery's reparative services (in 1667, Orrery complained to Ormonde, “yet I never got what the charge of the king's letters did amount unto, by all his royal gifts”—SL, II, 283), Orrery's devotion to the King continued to the end of his life. The King visited him in 1674 and, according to Orrery, “he was very gracious to me” (BL Stowe MS. 205, fol. 344v). Morrice even claims that before Orrery died in 1679, “He often heartily pray'd God to preserve the king, believing that our happiness would expire with his life” (SL, I, 95).

24. In a March, 1660, letter to R. Onslow, Orrery describes the “settlement which all sober men longe for, & [indecipherable word] poore nations [indecipherable word] much want.” He comments that “we have purged all our Phanastick Factious officers Troopers & Privat foot solders … with Persons fitted for the Worke” (BL Add MS. 45850, fols. 20-21).

25. See Budgell, Memoirs, sig. N2.

26. Roger Earl of Orrery, A Treatise of the Art of War: Dedicated to the Kings Most Excellent Majesty (1677), sigs. K2, 3G1v.

27. Orrery's The Generall was first produced in Dublin under the title of Altemera in 1662. Although Gerald Eades Bentley, in The Jacobean and Caroline Stage ([Oxford 1956], III, 33-35), suggests that Orrery revised his own or someone else's Caroline play (a play called The Generall was produced in Ireland between 1634-1640 with a prologue by James Shirley), Clark denies that the Caroline play was the same as Orrery's and calls his Generall “the first full-fledged heroic play” (I, 30).

28. BL Stowe MS. 744, fol. 81.

29. Clark in Works observes that “The Generall contains much material of wide distribution in the Elizabethan, Jacobean, and Caroline drama” (I, 101). The influence of Philaster dominates, evidenced, for example, by the transfer of character names noted by Clark (I, 101), the Sicilian civil-war setting, and a Philaster reversal—a man disguised as a woman to be near his lover. Predictably, Orrery also imitates Suckling. The courtship of Orrery's Altemera by both a usurper-king and his son imitates the pursuit of Suckling's Aglaura by a “lustfull and cruell” king and his son, and Brennoralt's 2.2 provides the pattern of the same scene and act in The Generall. Orrery's discussion of mistresses could be Suckling's—“Shee's a Platonick or at least a foole. / I prais'd her body, and shee prais'd her soule” (I, 123).

30. The usurper's plan, for instance, to marry “his only sonne, young Alimast” (Richard Cromwell?) to “our faire princess Rosocleere, / Who is to our true king th' undoubted heire” (I, 110) gains piquancy from Orrery's (and others') schemes of restoration by marrying Cromwell's daughter to Charles II.

31. Lynch notes the parallels of usurping King/Oliver Cromwell, Clorimun/Orrery, and Melizer/Charles II (Roger Boyle, p. 152).

32. See e.g., Melizer's comment: “A tyrant never a true King cou'd fight, / Nor is he fitt a Kingdome to Command, / Who feares a sword in any single hand” (I, 152).

33. Orrery compliments Cromwell's military expertise in a letter to Ormonde: “in Cromwell's war with the Dutch (which was not ill managed)”—SL, II, 211.

34. Ronald Hutton claims that the men who made the settlement of 1661-1662 “were concerned with the short-term ends of reducing the country to order, after what had been to them a period of chaos, and of punishing old enemies so far as they were able” (The Restoration: A Political and Religious History of England and Wales 1658-1667 [Oxford, 1985], p. 183).

35. CSP Ireland, 1663-1665, p. 348.

36. HMC, The Duke of Buccleuch and Queensberry (London, 1889), I, 437.

37. See [Edward Phillips], Compendiosa Enumeratio Poetarum, &c., in Johannes Buchler, Sacrarum Profanarumque Phrasium Poeticarum Thesaurus (1669), sig. R8v. R. G. Howarth provides the Latin transcript in “Edward Phillips's ‘Compendiosa Enumeratio Poetarum,’” Modern Language Review, 54 (July, 1959), 321-28.

38. John Downes, Roscius Anglicanus, or an Historical Review of the Stage (1708; rpt. Los Angeles, 1969), pp. 27-28.

39. Orrery vaguely borrows Henry the Fifth from the story of the English king of that name. For a short discussion of historical and literary sources see Clarke I, 165-66.

40. In May of 1661, e.g., Orrery wrote to Secretary Nicholas of “the news of the King's intended marriage with the ‘daughter of Portugal,’” and the following May, Orrery commented to Ormonde, “We now are confident, that the queen is landed” (CSP Ireland, 1660-1662, p. 338; SL, I, 111). Catherine's father had offered his daughter and a large dowry to Charles as early as August of 1660. Catherine arrived in England in May of 1662, and Orrery commemorated the event with “Verses to the Queen” (Orrery Papers, N.L.I. Add. MS. 31187, Petworth House Archives, folder 11).

41. Cobbett's Complete Collection of State Trials, ed. Thomas Bayley Howell, 33 vols. (1809-26), IV, 1139.

42. Reversing his earlier opinion of the play, Pepys claimed in 1667 that “the more I see, the more I like” (VIII, 421), and as late as 1693, Nahum Tate considered the play “a just Model of Tragedy, as long as the Stage shall last” (Clark, I, 440). Evelyn described Mustapha as “exceedingly well writ” (The Diary of John Evelyn, ed. E. S. de Beer, 6 vols. [Oxford, 1955], III, 466).

43. Downes, Roscius Anglicanus, p. 26.

44. The plague delayed the court performance of Mustapha until 1666.

45. In a letter of 1642, e.g., Charles claims that he “will be either a glorious king or a patient martyr” (Gilbert Burnet, The Memoirs of the Lives and Actions of James and William [Oxford, 1852], p. 260). Other comments reinforce this theme: Charles I observed to the Prince of Wales, e.g., that he would “turn the reproach of my sufferings, as to the world's censure, into the honour of a kind of martyrdom,” and on the scaffold Charles claimed, “I am the Martyr of the People” (Sir Charles Petrie, ed., The Letters, Speeches, and Proclamations of King Charles I [London, 1935], pp. 265-66; State Trials, IV, 1139). See also “A Copie of Verses, said to be Composed by His Majestie” [1648], Wing C2172, in which Charles purportedly says, “Ile die a Martyr, or Ile live a King.”

46. Orrery, “On the Martyrdome,” Poems, sig. T2v.

47. Hutton, The Restoration, p. 213.

48. Bodl. Carte MS. 69, fol. 129v.

49. Bodl. Carte MS. 69, fol. 129.

50. CSP Ireland, 1666-1669, p. 158.

51. CSP Ireland, 1666-1669, p. 158.

52. See Clark, Works, I, 305.

53. As early as May of 1665, Orrery finds “we are not over well pleased with the French, nor they with us” (SL, I, 193). In May of 1666 he comments to Ormonde that “your grace has a belief, that the French have some design on these parts, and to attempt it speedily” (SL, I, 277). Three different letters in January note French activity. On January 15, 1666, Orrery detailed a plan of defense if the French landed (SL, II, 121).

54. Orrery, e.g., continues to harp on the familiar fear of civil war, excusing Delaware's actions because “the Kingdom may be plung'd in War / When such a Son and Father Rivals are” (I, 357); similarly, Cleorin excuses her brother because he “had cause to fear / A Secret so important to declare, / As might perhaps have caus'd a Civill War” (I, 363).

55. Hutton, Charles II, p. 337. In 1683, Charles forgot himself so far as to go into a rage when rumors circulated of an affair between his mistress, the Duchess of Portsmouth, and the Chevalier de Vendôme, Grand Prior of France (Hutton, Charles II, p. 417).

56. CSP Ireland, 1666-1669, p. 763.

57. For details, see Clayton Roberts, The Growth of Responsible Government in Stuart England (Cambridge, Eng., 1966), p. 181.

58. The State Letters testify to Orrery's intense concern with the Clarendon affair; on September 12, 1667, e.g., after explicitly stating his preoccupation with Clarendon's fall from power, Orrery remarks, “I did fear, at the next meeting of the parliament, my lord chancellor of England would be assaulted; but the storm is fallen earlier than I thought it would” (SL, II, 299). Orrery judges that “whatever rage and desperation may produce must be expected from the D. of York” (Bodl. Carte MS. 69, fol. 129).

59. The text does not indicate scenes and machines—there is not even a song. Davenant, however, could have used costumes or scenery not indicated in Orrery's text.

60. The King attended a great many first nights. See William Van Lennep, “Plays on the English Stage 1669-1672,” Theatre Notebook, 16 (Autumn 1961), 13, for an account of the Lord Chamberlain's warrant for payment to the Duke of York's Company.

61. Lynch notes: “The central issue of Tryphon is the vexatious question, provoked by Orrery's own troubled experience: Is it right to serve an usurper?” (Roger Boyle, p. 156).

62. Charles II may have found Tryphon acceptable because the king killed is a usurper. He later failed to approve Nahum Tate's 1680 adaptation of Richard II.

63. Lynch notes that “Nicanor and Demetrius illustrate the various facets of Orrery's services to Cromwell” (Roger Boyle, p. 156).

64. Orrery says, e.g., in May of 1663, “we were the vilest and the ungratefullest of men, if we did not serve him, and obey his authority to the death”; in June of 1666, he reports that “the king our master has a knot of men in this province, which will sacrifice their lives and fortunes chearfully in his service”; for himself, “God is my witness, that I would, to serve him, employ all the little interest I have in the world to the utmost, and lay down my life and estate as joyfully for his service” (SL, I, 137; II, 5; I, 56).

65. James Parry, Two Horrid murthers: One Committed Upon the Person of Henry the Fourth of France. The other Upon His Son in Law, Charles the First of England (1661) sig. A4.

66. Bodl. Carte MS. 69, fol. 129.

A Newberry Library/American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies fellowship supported this project. For advice and suggestions, I am particularly grateful to Derek Hirst, Derek Hughes, Ronald Hutton, Annabel Patterson, A. H. Scouten, and James A. Winn. I presented “Regicide and Reparation” in shortened form at the Carolinas Symposium on British Studies on October 16, 1988.