[In the following excerpt, Turner examines Coopers Hill, as part of a tradition of “adapting landscape to political issues,” comparing the poem to some of its predecessors.]

It seems to me (beholding it at the
best light) a Lantskip of these Kingdoms …

(Fanshawe on Il Pastor Fido)

Denham's Coopers Hill appeared in 1642, and Marvell's Upon Appleton House was probably written by 1652. They are both true topographical poems,¹ elaborating on the description of an actual place, and bearing its name. They are very different in manner, but they both derive their structure from a transformation of ideal landscape. Both poems construct an image of country life, and draw upon “prospective” techniques to arrange multifarious material into a significant pattern. Denham confines himself to the emulation of landscape, though with unprecedented grandeur and dynamism; Marvell extends the range of techniques, and remodels topography in forms suggested by didactic emblems, theatrical scene-building, perspective distortions and architecture. Both use topographia for ideological purposes. Denham deals with national politics and Marvell with the internal politics of one family, but both poems are designed to serve a particular historical situation; “green Thought” becomes an instrument of extreme precision. I hope the reader will share my fascination with uncovering the details.

It is no longer necessary to establish that Coopers Hill is a political poem, or that it is constructed on the principles of concordia discors, antithesis and harmonious balance. Earl Wasserman demonstrated this in The Subtler Language (1959) and Brendan O Hehir has documented it fully in Expans'd Hieroglyphicks (1969), his edition of the various texts of Coopers Hill. My study is at once more particular and more general; I attempt to clarify the precise nature of Denham's politics, still in debate, but I also place the poem in a tradition of adapting landscape to social issues.

Denham began his writing career with a double first; “he came out,” as Waller said, “like the Irish rebellion, three score thousand strong.” The Sophy and Coopers Hill were published simultaneously in August 1642, only a few days before civil war was declared. The landscape poem is certainly political, but the tragedy, despite being set in a corrupt court, is unusually remote from the crisis. It does contain a reference to the troubles of England—the famous lines in Act IV on the seditious role of religion in extremist politics. But this is an interlude, spoken by the mouthpiece characters at the halfway point, written in couplets, and dealing with issues that occur nowhere else in the play; from that moment, we concentrate on the inward moral drama of the prince himself. It is a tragedy on the pure Aristotelian model, with faults, turning-points and sudden revelations; its principal purpose is to inspire pity and fear for the hero. The core of the play is Act IV, where philosophical courage struggles with ghoulish anger, rescuing Mirza just as his hands close on his unsuspecting child. “A reader in 1642” would not, I believe, “have leaped with one movement of the mind to a recollection” of Charles's disastrous attempt on the Five Members.² Denham's two works form a double essay on the theme of seeing; in both, the mind's eye looks down on the violence and contradiction of human life, and discovers a philosophy to maintain true vision and a harmonious existence. In the tragedy this insight is personal, inward, and reached by a series of hideous and ironic catastrophes; in the ‘prospective poem’ the message is political, explicit, and unrolled consistently from the beginning of the description.

Coopers Hill exists in several versions, some dating from the early 1640s, some from 1655-68; they are elaborately transcribed and compared in O Hehir's edition (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1969: I refer to this work only when comparing drafts, and revert elsewhere to the original published texts, indicated by date only). All these versions begin with the same lines, a relaxed, familiar address to the hill where the poet has so often found himself:

So where the Muses and their Troopes resort
Parnassus stands; if I can be to thee
A Poet, thou Parnassus art to mee

(1642)

As a way of proving how congenial this place is to the Muses, Denham then shows how his thoughts embroider on the social and political elements of what the hill allows his physical eye to see; poetry and ideology are thus subtly linked from the start. Once again, all versions do this. In the earliest draft the ‘Parnassus’ lines continue

Whose topp when I ascend, I seeme more high,
More boundlesse in my Fancy than myne Eye

(p. 79)

He explains this by an extended simile: visionary scientists, lifted into the stratosphere by magic or their imaginations, can see foul weather forming before it shows on earth; Denham likewise, gazing from his earth-bound hill at the fog which surrounds London but having his “minde uppon the Tumult and the Crowde”, can see that fog as “a more dusky Cloud of busines than of Smoke”. Eye and Fancy—the faculties which create optical and mental images respectively—are closely linked; mental vision is higher and “more boundlesse” certainly, but only because it enjoys the full cooperation of the eyesight, raised and enlarged by topography above the plain, but not so high as to be remote from human affairs. Windsor Castle is the next object to “swell into myne Eye”, and again the eye is an agent of interpretation:

          such a Rise as doth at once invite
A pleasure and a Reverence from the Sight;
Thy Masters Embleme, in whose face I saw
A frendlike sweetnes and a Kinglike Awe.

(p. 80)

Ranging the horizon in a hungry search for new stimulus, the eye alone is responsible for introducing the next topic—St. Anne's hill, stripped of its abbey by the depredations of Henry VIII (p. 83). This move is rather a dishonest one; since St. Anne's hill is visually less prominent than Windsor and lies in the opposite direction, the eye is obviously led by a political argument and not vice versa. This politicization of vision increases when, by grammatical sleight-of-hand, the eye is made the subject of the emotion aroused by Puritan church-breaking:

Partinge from thence twixt Anger, Shame and fearre
(Those for what's past, and this for what's too neere)
My Eye descending from the Hill surveyes
Where Thames amongst the wanton valleys strayes.

(p. 84)

The reader comes perilously near to rejecting this trickery, and only a certain grace and dynamism redeems it. Later in the poem, in fact, Denham points out that only a “quicke poeticke sight” (p. 87) can grasp his vision.

Later versions amplify this structure of vision without changing it. Draft II breaks the flow of the opening lines to insert a complement to Waller's poem on St. Paul's (p. 94), and resumes the parallelism of eye and mind in a clumsy antithesis:

Then London where my eye the place, the crowd
My mind surveyes …

Denham also adds more lines on the self-contradictory frenzy of City life—lines which are extended again in the first published version (“Draft III”). Here the tribute to Waller is more skilfully blended in, and the implications of this prospective vision more clearly stated:

Nor wonder if (advantag'd in my flight
By taking wing from thy auspicious height)
Through untrac't waies and airie paths I flie,
More boundlesse in my Fancie than my eie.

(p. 110)

The airy flights of his contemplations are possible only because their objects are brought into physical view. Since this elevation is both physical and mental, the ambiguity of the next line is quite fruitful:

Exalted to this height, I first looke downe
On Pauls …

Nevertheless it is replaced in the fourth draft (1655) by a still more fluent and comprehensible version:

More boundless in my Fancy than my eie:
My eye, which swift as thought contracts the space
That lies between, and first salutes the place
Crown'd with that sacred pile. …

(p. 139)

The Civil War had made Denham's prognostic function obsolete, and the meteorological simile is dropped. Tall clouds now have the connotation of diffuse grandeur, and their ominous aspect is downgraded to a creeping mist:

                    … that sacred pile, so vast, so high,
That whether ‘tis a part of Earth or sky
Uncertain seems, and may be thought a proud
Aspiring mountain, or descending cloud …
Under his proud survey the City lies
And like a mist beneath a hill doth rise
Whose state and wealth, the business and the crowd,
Seem at this distance but a darker cloud.

(pp. 139-40)

This revision shows signs of partial rethinking of the relation claimed between eye and mind. The eye is merely as swift as thought, and it contracts the space between London and Windsor, several hours' journey, in the same way that a telescope does. It “salutes” the various places described in the poem, but this only denotes their visual prominence. The word “seems” is given greater emphasis. The transition from Windsor to St. Anne's hill is made more explicit and compact:

Here should my wonder dwell, and here my praise,
But my fixt thoughts my wandring eye betrays,
Viewing a neighbouring hill.

(p. 145)

But this only brings out more clearly the paradox already noticed—it is Denham's idée fixe that betrays his visual realism, not vice versa. All other cases—Windsor, the Thames, the quick poetic sight—remain the same as in the poem's first conception.

In Coopers Hill, then, Denham is trying to establish his credentials as a seer. He is a logician, using his privileged synoptic vision to pierce the fog of error; he claims to lay bare a whole system of inherent contradictions invisible to those in their toils—

False to their hopes, afraid to be secure,
Those mischiefes onely which they make, endure,
Blinded with light, and sicke of being well,
In tumults seeke their peace, their heaven in hell.

(1642)

He compares himself to a natural philosopher, the happiest of all men according to the Georgics, and so confers a scientific colour on his analysis of London. Later, translating Mancinus's ‘Of Prudence’, he goes out of his way to refer to his own earlier poem. The original asks

What is the use of researching into the various paths of the stars? You fool, why do you seek to know matters and causes? Why do you want to embrace innumerable sciences in your studies and to place correctly every location on earth?³

This becomes

What need we gaze upon the spangled Sky?
Or into Matters hidden Causes pry?
To describe every City, Stream or Hill
I'th World, our fancy with vain Arts to fill?(4)

But in Coopers Hill logic and science do serve the cause of prudence. As an auspex, Denham offers advice to kings, and laments the inadequate knowledge which leads to unnecessary bloodshed:

Had thy great destiny but given thee skill
To know, as well as power to act, her will …
That bloud which thou and thy great Grandsire shed,
And all that since those sister Nations bled,
Had beene unspilt—had happy Edward knowne
That all the bloud he spilt had beene his owne.

(1642)

Denham seems to offer help to the victims of contradiction, and warning of what he sees in the clouds. He has the insight of the meteorologist, but the moral security of the countryman with whom Virgil pairs him. By conflating these distinct forms of philosophy, he persuades us that he deals in necessary truths.

We have seen how Coopers Hill resembles landscape; its prospective devices are as persuasive as its philosophical guise. The littleness of the City (in geometrical perspective) suggests its pettyness. The mist of aerial perspective corresponds to the malignant fog of Puritan business, and the romantic horror of the ruin-piece to political thuggery. How far can this visual analogue be taken? Landscape can depict contrasts, but not critical relationships, or the struggle of opposites. Typically, Denham profits from this limitation. In a landscape the eye is pleased more by the composition than by its members; this harmony from variety is transcendental, and can be intensified by the skilful use of ugly and disturbing patches. Equally, the threat of Puritan reformation has to appear as an aberration which, properly understood, can be nicely brushed into the landscape. The theory of harmony from discords discovered in the landscape of the Thames valley allows opposites to be seen as contrasts. More precisely, it allows the desperate opposition of Royalist to Puritan to expand into lofty and agreeable arrangements, and the opposition of Puritan to Royalist to shrink into a jagged outline or a little patch of mist, an episode in the entertainment. Trouble is seen in perspective.

Denham was aware that perspective imagery can be false or true, according to whether it is properly applied. On the one hand, the observer may shrink or expand the truth according to his affections; this is the theme of Saavedra's emblem of the telescope, warning against the “false Opticks” of the court,⁵ the flattery and moral blindness which plays such a large part in The Sophy. He must equally avoid the appearance of idiosyncrasy, of “looking thorow the prospective of min owne imagination, that onely takes measure of other men's passions by that itselfe feeles”.⁶ On the other hand, correct perspective leads to a sound interpretation of history and society; heroes and villains may be given their proper stature and perhaps their vanishing point. To apply the telescope of history you must “sett … your eyes in method”;⁷ only a good prospective can extract a single image from confusion. Fanshawe's translation of Il Pastor Fido operates in this way; the play is trivial in itself, but “through the perspective of the Chorus” the real political message is revealed—“a Lantskip of these Kingdoms … as well in the former flourishing, as the present distractions thereof”.⁸ Fanshawe illustrates his method by describing another kind of “perspective”,

a Picture (it is in the Cabinet of the great Chancellor [of France]) so admirably design'd, that, presenting to the common beholders a multitude of little faces (the famous Ancestors of that Noble man), at the same time, to him that looks through a Perspective (kept there for the purpose), there appears onely a single portrait in great of the Chancellor himself; the Painter thereby intimating that in him alone are contracted the Vertues of all his Progenitors; or perchance by a more subtile Philosophy demonstrating how the Body Politick is composed of many naturall ones. …⁹

Every perspective device has a “subtile Philosophy” of this kind, an exclusive viewpoint which claims to reveal the true form of appearances. Landscape is the subtlest form of prospective, for its trickery is unobtrusive and the resulting image overwhelmingly clear. Denham can sometimes be seen dictating to the reader's eye:

Under his proud survay the Citty lyes,
And like a mist beneath a hill doth rise;
Whose state and wealth, the busines and the crowd,
Seems at this distance but a darker cloud:
And is to him who rightly things esteems
No other in effect than what it seems.

(1655)

More often he assumes that his message is self-evident, a property of the venerable landscape itself. In The Sophy vision operates on a closed world, foreign, fantastic and subjective; Coopers Hill is founded on the open vistas of the Thames valley, on the solid masses of hills and the siting of ancient buildings:

So Windsor, humble in it selfe, seemes proud,
To be the Base of that Majesticke load,
Than which no hill a nobler burthen beares
But Atlas onely, that supports the spheres.
Nature this mount so fitly did advance,
We might conclude, that nothing is by chance;
So plac't as if she did on purpose raise
The Hill to rob the builder of his praise.
For none commends his judgement that doth chuse
That which a blind man onely could refuse.

(1642)

Denham's task is to establish a single viewpoint equally free from flattery and idiosyncrasy; his opinions will then appear as natural and irrefutable as sight itself.

Denham imitates the Stoic philosopher as Samuel Daniel described him, “that hath no side at all But of himself”.¹⁰ But is he really “moderate … less partisan than philosophical and reflective”? Is it true that “no tempers would be aroused” by Coopers Hill?¹¹ It is certainly a poem of “anger, shame, and feare”, of stinging satire and sarcasm, directed on party lines. The moderate Commons Petition of Long Afflicted England¹² calls upon “the bright Sun-shine of our Parliament” to dispel “the misty foggs of error”, but Denham envelops the whole City in a “darker cloud”; after the protection of the Five Members it was enemy territory, and not even the guild leaders could be counted on. Another moderate, Isaac Massy, tried to reconcile the parties:

Ther's some would go to ransacke Hull …
Ther's others would go ransack Lumbard-Street,
But fy upon them they shall never meet.(13)

Denham clearly belongs to the latter. Furthermore, he attacks popular institutions. He echoes James I in disparaging Magna Carta,¹⁴ and reserves his fiercest satire for Henry VIII. If Denham's Windsor grows into Windsor-Forrest, his Henry grows into Achitophel. Antithetic couplets, which give double praise to Charles, confound their victim with a double charge—he does wrong while able to do right. In the moderate and considered view, Henry was partly bad, but predominantly good.¹⁵ For the vast majority he was a hero, a bulwark of parliament, Old England, and the Garter. To attack him was to ally with the lunatic fringe—with the papal nuncio Nicholas Sanders or the ultra-royalist and provincial George Daniel.¹⁶ Denham's fury over the ruins of Chertsey abbey should be compared with Speed's description, or the ruin-pieces of Joseph Hall or Marvell, recognizing the justice of the reforming hand.¹⁷ Edward III, on the other hand, was popularly a great lecher, and considered by historians to be a mixture of virtues and vices.¹⁸ He is, nevertheless, one of the heroes of Coopers Hill, which thereby joins the series of fulsome historical poems commissioned by Charles himself in the 1630s. Thomas May's Edward III (1635), written “by his Majesties command”, anticipates most of Denham's themes—Windsor as the seat of Mars and Venus, the splendour of the Garter, St George as “Saint and Souldier”, the captured kings of France and Scotland, and above all the needlessness of the Scots campaign, revealed in a vision of Charles's glorious reign.¹⁹ Denham's opinions are those of a fully-committed Royalist; it is hard to accept him as non-partisan.

Coopers Hill, like the landscape it describes, appears to be balanced and moderate. This was typical of the royalist point of view. John Taylor the Water-Poet's Humble Desired Union Betweene Prerogative and Priviledge (1642), for example, shows how the doctrine of balanced opposites became part of the vocabulary of coarse royalism. John Spelman, recruited by the King as early as January 1642, published Certain Considerations Upon the Duties Both of Prince and People a year later; despite this insistence on checks and balances,²⁰ Spelman's real message is that no subject may oppose or criticize a king, however absolute. Throughout 1642, Charles insists that he upholds the “true old legall way”, the true Protestant religion,²¹ and the balance of powers: on January the 20th he gives equal priority to parliamentary privilege and royal income; on March the 15th he proposes that each side should be “tender” to the other's privileges; on May the 14th he concludes by quoting Pym's own words—if prerogative overcomes liberty, the result is tyranny, and if the reverse, anarchy and confusion. Parliamentarians were used to this “moderation”, and learned to read beneath it.²²

Coopers Hill is in fact closely attuned to the successive crises of 1642, and to Charles's own messages of response. The opening of the poem is dominated by the contrast of London and Windsor. It must surely be engendered in the aftermath of the Five Members affair, after Charles had been driven out of Whitehall and Hampton Court by furious London crowds. The episode rankled for the rest of Charles's life, and raged on after his death.²³ It is the nub of the propaganda battle of 1642; Parliament frequently calls him back to London, and Charles rebuffs them, arguing the danger to his family.²⁴ There is thus a particular point to the description of Windsor

                                        where Mars with Venus dwels,
Beauty with strength;

one manuscript even adds the note “the Kinge and Queene there”, confirming its topicality.²⁵ These issues remained alive after Charles moved north from Windsor, and the poem must be imagined accumulating during the following months. The praise of the Garter is appropriate for a Windsor setting, but it would be more sharply focused by the King's attempt to move the Lords to York, on the pretext of a Garter feast. Denham's sarcastic exposure of contradictions is matched in Charles's writing from May onwards, especially in the Answer to a Printed Remonstrance of May 26. There, too, Charles emphasizes his obedience to what Denham called

                              that Law, which teaches Kings to sway
Their Scepters,

reprinting the relevant part of his coronation service. In the winter months his tone is conciliatory, but increasingly from the end of April he uses a different style; he adopts a tone of profound patience, but at the very end hints that he may be provoked to overwhelming violence.²⁶Coopers Hill ends in precisely the same way.

In these latter months, Charles seems to be running hand-in-hand with his propagandists. Denham's poem echoes the King's threatening patience, and the King's Declaration, published a few days later on the 12th of August, uses the effect more strongly than ever. July saw several proposals of conciliation by independent commoners; Isaac Massy foresaw pacification and unity, and the Propositions of Accommodation begs the King to return to Whitehall and govern by law only—a reference to the inflammatory commissions of array. Some royalists adopted the same persuasive tone, in a last-minute attempt to demoralize the enemy. John Price's Few and Short Considerations on the Present Distempers calls on parliament to surrender gracefully over Hull:

squeez'd and exorted things in the commerce of life are not welcome to us: what willingly we accept of, must come willingly … When they shall see their undoubted and undaunted Soveraign in the head of an adverse Army, shooting forth Rayes of Majesty, and thundering out a Durum est contra stimulos calcitrare, what man can promise that they will not be appall'd, dazled, blinded? … His Majesty, like a Royall Dove, in a former return of his from the North parts of his Dominions brought us back an Olive-Branch, a token of peace with our Neighbours, and their reconcilement to us; an assurance that the Torrent which had swollen high was fallen and dryed up; if readily and humbly he be complyed with in his now-proposalls, his next return hither will bring better tidings, That the waters of his own displeasure are abated, a deluge more formidable then that other, to loyall and obedient hearts (such as we all professe to have) …

The tie which I have as an honest man, and the right which I have as a free man, of speaking what I think conducible to the weale publike, hath invited me in the crowd of others who blot paper … to commend to all men, specially to the wisdom of our great Councell, these few particulars … Such is the weak, but hearty and most humble assistance, which in stead of Plate, Money and Horses, is presented, if not from the head of an able man, from the heart (at least) of an honest man, one whom no apprehension of possible private losses … no by-respect of advancing his peculiar interest, nor adulation of Monarchique power hath mov'd in this way to speak himself, … but a lively and deep sense of the common danger, a soul labouring with Anxiety from the just and too certain estimate of impendent ruine.

Denham's poem matches this pamphlet closely, in its warning tone, its attack on extorted gifts, its awesome presentation of the King's military power, its flood-imagery, and its character of virtuous objectivity.

Denham, like a good patriot, has placed his equipment entirely at the disposal of the authorities. We should not assume him to be spurious. If any fault is to be found, it is with Charles's belief in the efficacy of style,

                                        in his artificial-heav'n,
Which flatring Poets, and his Painters made.(27)

A poet's first loyalty is to his art, and Denham's political loyalism gave him two excellent qualities. The first is breadth—the quality he praises in Fanshawe, and the opposite of

Cheap vulgar arts, whose narrowness affords
No flight for thoughts, but poorly sticks at words.(28)

The second is congruity—the ability to fuse description, interpretation and style into a single compatible image. These qualities offset his faults. The machinery of his “political optics” is sometimes all too visible, and his arguments are often tissues of loose analogy and innuendo. His themes are not original: Camden, Drayton and Speed combined vivid description of Windsor with antiquarian history; John Hep-with used a topographical title for political pamphlet verse, in The Calidonian Forrest of 1641; P. J.'s Scottish Journie²⁹ begins with an imposing castle and its noble prisoner, uses a ruin to lament the destructiveness of Puritans and a town to satirize their greed, describes a hunt, and ends with direct political comment. But Coopers Hill transforms them. For those already of his persuasion, Denham provides a valuable service. He offers them the landscape as a way of coping with the collapse of their political world—not a random and clumsy allegory, nor just a glimpse of idyllic country scenes, but a whole aesthetic system, succinct and adaptable, an elaborate display of the art of prospect.³⁰

Notes

1. See my ‘The Matter of Britain: Topographical Poetry in English 1600-1660’, N& Q, forthcoming 1978.

2. J. M. Wallace, in Critical Inquiry I (1974) p. 287. According to Wallace, Denham's two works are not parallel but consecutive. Coopers Hill is a defence of parliamentary royalism, written in the wake of the King's departure for Scotland in August 1641; The Sophy continues the political discussion, as Denham becomes more critical of Charles. How all this takes place “within the limits set by his increasing royalism”, and why both works are published on the eve of civil war, remains for Wallace a “serious critical problem”. Since the play deals with the perils of fear and jealousy, and since “Fears and Jealousies” were a catch-phrase of political pamphleteering in 1642, then it follows that the entire play is a political pamphlet, with Charles as its central figure. It may be objected that England did not have a senile King, a simple-minded and militaristic prince, a sensitive and strong-minded princess, and a grandson ready to take command; or that the “fears” of 1642 were overstated in order to justify aggression, while those in the play are insufficiently heeded. Wallace replies that the features of Charles are distributed between “the good prince and the tyrannical emperor”.

3. De Quattuor Virtutibus (c. 1520 ed.) f.A7: “Quid prodest varios stellarum inquirere cursus? Quid res et causas noscere, inepte, petis? Quid cupis innumeras discendo amplectier artes? Et toto veros orbe te ferre situs?” The emendation from “disendo” was suggested by Francis Cairns.

4. Denham, Poetical Works, ed. T. H. Banks (2nd ed., Hamden Conn., 1969) p. 193 (my emphasis). Another “scientific” aspect of Coopers Hill is suggested by J. W. Foster (‘The Measure of Paradise: Topography in Eighteenth-Century Poetry’, ECS IX (1975-6) pp. 240-3) who relates it to contemporary surveying.

5. William Peaps, Love in it's Extasie (1649) f.D2. For the emblems of Diego de Saavedra see Henkel and Schöne, Emblemata (Stuttgart, 1967).

6. Samuel Daniel, Complete Works ed. Grosart (1885) I.273.

7. Crashaw, Poems ed. Martin (2nd ed., 1957) p. 410.

8. (1647) f.A4v.

9. Ibid. f.A3v. Jean-François Nicéron devotes the whole of the last book of his La Perspective Curieuse (Paris, 1638) to this device, and claims it to be as important as the microscope and the telescope; like Fanshawe, he deduces a serious political message from its optical trickery (pp. 173-4, 189, and plates 48-9). See my letter in Art Bulletin LIX (1977) p. 659.

10. Complete Works ed. Grosart (1885) I. 204.

11. R. Nevo, The Dial of Virtue (Princeton, 1963) p. 18; J. M. Wallace, ELH XLI (1974) p. 497. Cp. ibid. p. 500—“not a party poet”—and J. W. Foster, ECS IX (1975-6) p. 237.

12. By C.I. (Jan. 1642); cp. esp. f.A2v. The fog of error was used in London pageantry—e.g. Middleton's Triumphs of Truth (1613).

13. Midsummers Prognostication of Pacification and Unity (June 1642) p. 1.

14. Poems ed. J. Craigie II (1958) p. 188. Ironically, the far left also attacked Magna Carta (e.g. P. Zagorin, Political Thought in the English Revolution (1954) pp. 11, 23, 27, 51).

15. E.g. Drayton, Poly-Olbion ed. J. W. Hebel (1961 ed.) p. 337; Edward Herbert's Life; Howell, Poems (1664) p. 14; Lovelace, Poems ed. C. H. Wilkinson (1930 ed.) p. 182.

16. E.g. Poems ed. Grosart (1878) I.170.

17. Theatre of the Empire of Great Britaine (1611) p. 11; Occasionall Meditations (1630) p. 192; Upon Appleton House st. 27.

18. Cp. the play Edward III, Prynne's Sovereigne Power of Parliaments (1643) II.55, and J. M. Wallace, ELH XLI (1974) pp. 501-2, (but Denham does not blame Edward, merely regrets that history prevented him from knowing about Charles I).

19. Ff.F2v, F4v, K2-v.

20. Ff.C2v-3 are particularly like Denham; he quotes Hosea 5.10, which may well be a source of the threatening element in Denham's flood-imagery, and insists on mutual boundaries and respect of law.

21. I refer to Charles's pronouncements by date only, where possible; cp. 7 May, 14 May f.A2v.

22. J. M. Wallace quotes such an example (ELH XLI (1974) p. 507) yet he continues to believe Denham a moderate “parliamentary royalist”. Wallace's case rests on giving Coopers Hill an early date; he claims that its themes and images belong uniquely to August 1641, and the aftermath of the Anglo-Scots treaty and the King's departure for Scotland. There is no internal evidence for such a date, and O Hehir recognizes that the poem belongs to the crisis year of 1642. Wallace tells us repeatedly what Denham was thinking and doing in the Autumn of 1641, but in fact those months of the poet's life are curiously undocumented. Nor do they provide a unique theme. Scotland is not a dominant topic of the poem. The idea that wise kings wage foreign wars is a commonplace, and not special to that August. He explains Denham's threatening flood-imagery by suggesting that in the summer of 1641 there was a general fear of the King's returning at the head of an army; but such alarms were greater in the following year, after he had left London. His interpretation of the landscape is equally constricted. He compares the double “visit” of the Thames with Charles's double farewell to Parliament before he left for Scotland; but such an interpretation is unnecessary—Denham refers to home and colonial produce, the one brought downstream and the other upstream on the tide. And he discovers August 1641 in the hanging woods above Runnymede, which Denham compares, conventionally enough, to great lords frowning on the humble folk below. Apparently these “were the lords of the privy council” responsible for collecting ship-money; the poet, to put his true subject beyond doubt, “makes the hill an intrinsically Scottish mountain, not a Surrey hillock” (p. 516 and note).

23. E.g. Eikon Basilike Chapter 4, answered by Milton (Columbia ed. V. 125), paraphrased by Stanley (Poems and Translations ed. G. M. Crump (1962) p. 277), and echoed in the anonymous Stipendariae Lacrymae (Hague, 1654) p. 29.

24. Cp. Charles's publications: 2 Mar, 21 Mar p. 10+, 28 Mar, 3 June p. 1, 17 June p. 5, 16 July p. 8, 12 Aug f.C3; for Parliament's denial that there was any violence, except from the King's men, see their Declaration or Remonstrance of 19 May pp. 8-9, and for their pleading, cp. esp. Horrible Newes f.A2. Henry Glapthorne's topographical poem White-Hall (“Written 1642”) centres on this episode.

25. B. O Hehir, op. cit. p. 113.

26. 14 Feb p. 4; April 18th; April 28th p. 5; Answer to a Book of 19 May p. 29; 27 May; 3 June p. 4; 14 June; 16 June pp. 6-7; 18 June; 20th June; Answer to a Paper of 21 June p. 7; Answer to 16 July p. 18.

27. George Wither, Vox Pacifica (1645) p. 203.

28. Poetical Works ed. T. H. Banks (2nd ed., Hamden Conn., 1969) p. 143.

29. Written 1641, edited by C. H. Firth in Miscellanies of the Scottish Historical Society II (1904).

30. This account of Coopers Hill should be compared with W. B. Carnochan, Confinement and Flight: an Essay on English Literature of the Eighteenth Century (1977) pp. 108-17. His version of the poem is incompatible with mine. He makes no reference to its politics. Denham grapples with the problems, not of Puritan and Royalist, but of how to defeat gravity, how to get to the top of Cooper's hill, and how to see through St. Anne's hill. He looks up at Cooper's hill, and is embarrassed by the physical act of climbing it; he therefore replaces the view from the summit with a bird's-eye or god's-eye view of the landscape. We are told that the poet's eye might not have seen St. Paul's at all, and then that it roams the vault of air in all directions and floats freely around the cathedral dome, together with the readers of the poem. But in turning to the denunciation of Henry VIII “the poet comes back to himself” (p. 117). A critic is entitled to select only those aspects of a “seminal” work which affect his subject—but in this case the features selected do not exist.