[In the essay below, Wallace attempts to establish composition dates for the various drafts of Coopers Hill, in an effort to identify more definitively the political events treated in the poem.]

If we could discover the very day on which Denham stood on Cooper's Hill, staring out across the Thames valley and reflecting upon the history of its landmarks, we should not only be able to read his famous poem with more exactitude, but we could see where it belonged in the exciting history of which it is a part. Professor Brendan O Hehir in his edition of the drafts of the poem has concluded on the evidence of the stag hunt that Coopers Hill was begun in all probability shortly after the death of Strafford; that is to say, after 12 May 1641 and before the summer was much older.¹ Yet if the stag is not a quasi-allegorical account of the Earl's execution, and I am sure it is not, then the question is open once more, and one has to start again.

The external evidence is inconclusive, although the outer limits are defined with virtual certainty by the date of the assembly of the Long Parliament in November 1640 and Thomason's record of buying the first edition on 5 August 1642. Within these boundaries, O Hehir's reasons for believing that the earliest surviving draft of the poem was completed in 1641 remain convincing, but most readers would agree with him that the internal evidence for a more precise date is cryptic to say the least. Theoretically, however, we could expect more help from a poem as topical as Coopers Hill, especially in a period shaken by such momentous events that almost every month brought new developments and concerns, and new alignments among the groups involved in the struggle; it would be surprising if the text did not reflect a particular coincidence of interests that was characteristic only of a narrow span of time, and the three drafts of the “A” text do in fact show Denham making small accommodations to changing historical events. To put the matter another way: O Hehir has cleared away much earlier nonsense about Denham's political “neutrality” and has concluded that he was a “committed royalist” when he wrote the poem. With the argument that he was “royalist” in some sense I have no quarrel at all, but the word begs as many questions as it solves, because historians have become justifiably cautious about a label that underwent such radical alteration within fifteen months, and which described at different times men of such variable allegiance and ideas. Some truth yet remains in Macaulay's statement that the parties were formed on 20 October 1641 when parliament reassembled after the recess² (in which case “committed royalist” might imply a late date for the poem), but the history of royalism until the outbreak of civil war is a complicated narrative that ought to provide clues to the period in which Denham was writing. Contrariwise, if we could date the poem we should know a little more about the history of that cause, and of the components from which the final coalition was pieced together.

The disturbing consequence of this train of thought is that Coopers Hill becomes a classic example of the Catch 22 in literary criticism. An accurate interpretation of the poem requires a date, and to find the date we must offer an interpretation. The problem is compounded by the suggestion that if Denham published the poem in August 1642 on the eve of open warfare, he must have had a clear sense of its relevance to the current predicament, and we could therefore be excused if we read the final version of the “A” text as an expression of Denham's opinions at mid-year 1642. To make that mistake is to waste a lot of time, because the last draft is not substantially different from the first, and it is well-nigh impossible that any “royalist,” or parliamentarian for that matter, would have had identical feelings or would have written the same topical poem if a year or more of increasingly ugly confrontations had intervened on the historical scene. To use only O Hehir's evidence, if the stag is Strafford then Strafford was a peculiar subject about which to be writing in the summer of 1642, and the publication of the poem was something of an anomaly. The conclusion is inevitable, on the one hand, that Denham believed Coopers Hill still contained a topical application or relevance when he published it, but, on the other, that the main body of the poem was dictated by an earlier sequence of events and responses. Nor would the poem have been read in the same fashion in 1641 and 1642. By radically revising his work during the Interregnum, Denham continued to assert that it had a “general” meaning which was impervious to time and permanently important, while he retained the major sections which had originated in a temporal, not to say temporary, context. For the purposes of practical criticism it is necessary to distinguish not only the drafts of the poem, but between their probable implications at a given time; or, as I should prefer, between the different intentions and hopes that Denham must have entertained in composing, publishing, and rewriting his magnum opus.

Readers will agree at once with Alexander Pope, who emphasized the naturalness of the poem's process of reflection, in which images and places “are still tending to some hint, or leading into some reflection upon moral life or political institution, much in the same manner as the real sight of such scenes and prospects is apt to give the mind a composed turn, and incline it to thoughts and contemplations that have a relation to the object”;³ but they must therefore also agree that Denham would have had different associations with Windsor or the Thames, and would have recalled different historical episodes, had he been writing in 1649, 1660, or 1666. This may be obvious, but then it is only slightly more contentious to argue that a similar difference could and did exist between 1641 and 1642, and that Coopers Hill in being the product of its own time should reflect the precise circumstances that prompted it. An intriguing puzzle remains, the solution of which lies in balancing all the features of the first draft of the poem, and all the implications which they legitimately suggest, against the numerous alternatives presented by the complexities of history. The result of this maneuver is to narrow the period of composition to the three months between the king's departure from London on 10 August 1641 and his return on 25 November, but with a very strong presumption that Denham was writing in September. It is only then that the topical meaning of Coopers Hill makes immediate and powerful sense, and the poem becomes an important document during a hiatus in the forward march of the revolution. However, as Denham tried so hard to raise his discourse above the fevers of political disputation, and to be topical in such an oblique way that no tempers would be aroused, we must start by considering this intention and explaining its coexistence with a specific purpose to produce effective propaganda for the king. In the poem itself they are never separable, because the more disinterested Denham could appear the more convincing was his function as a royal spokesman, but for clarity's sake it is convenient to isolate them here.

He established his impartiality by various means, and of course by necessity in his opening lines, when readers required assurance about the character of the speaker. The view from a hill afforded him the needed distance to see all the problems of the crown and the capital in perspective, just as his later recourse to history affirmed his wish to separate himself from the passions with which the men who were making history were afflicted. In the familiar language of the time, and in the phrase which the judgment in the case of ship-money sent echoing down the years of revolution, the distance enabled him to become “sole Judge both of the Danger, and when, and how the same is to be prevented.”⁴ King and parliament each claimed the eminence to decide the issue in all cases of necessity, and Denham's literal eminence was of the same kind.⁵ Looking out towards London, “that warm region where thunder and lightning was made,”⁶ and standing above the gathering storm “Secure from danger & from feare,” Denham could already discern that men's “vast desires” were the cause from which the danger sprang:

                                                                                                    men like Ants
Preying on others to supply their wants
Yet all in vaine, increasing with their Store
Their vast desires, but make their wants the more.
Oh happines of Sweete retyr'd content
To be at once Secure, and Innocent.

(21-26)

“Desire,” and especially “humble desire” was the invariable expression used by parliament to petition the king, and to at least some readers Denham's impartiality would have looked rather thin, although he was later to characterize two English kings as suffering from the same delusion. Yet if Denham was congratulating himself on his exemption in sweet retirement from the fears and dangers, the desires and self-deceptions that beset the city, he was also announcing what his poem was about. His theme was no less than the public safety, endangered now by the deficient understandings and infected wills of the people. Security pertained to places, and guilt and innocence to minds, and the safety of England depended on the morality of her inhabitants' actions. From his own vantage-point he could see that London was neither secure nor innocent, and in the second draft of Coopers Hill he was to underline his theme by suggesting that St. Paul's was “Secure, while thee the best of Poetts sings / Preserv'd from ruine by the best of Kings.” Denham could not have chosen a subject that would have been more instantly recognizable, or that appealed to a wider range of persons and interests. The king had called the Long Parliament, he said, “to consider the best way both for the Safety and Security of this Kingdom.”⁷ and almost every page of the great historical collections of the period bears witness to the universal concern with “the publike peace, safety, and happinesse of this Realme,” or the “Honour, Greatnesse, and Security of this Crowne and Nation.”⁸ No party had a monopoly of this language, although each of them claimed the prerogative of knowing where safety was to be found. Denham was merely speaking to the hopes of all, and claiming too that his far-sighted prospect gave him the ability to diagnose and the right to speak. Five years later, at the very beginning of his History of the Rebellion, Clarendon was to declare that the wise had been imposed upon and the innocent had been possessed with laziness and sleep in the most visible article of danger,⁹ and Coopers Hill was a timely warning about the consequences to the common safety if the wise and the innocent did not come to its rescue in time.

I will return later to the statement “Courts make not Kings” (line 5) that O Hehir has argued hides a “proroyal bias,” but the opening section as a whole is apprehensive rather than tendentious, and initiates the dialectical and ethical theme involving safety, knowledge, and desire that will not be completed until the poem's concluding lines. The description of Windsor hill that follows (27-28) might seem, on the contrary, to be the most “royalist” passage in Coopers Hill, and in so far as it praises a king who needed all the favorable publicity he could get, it certainly reveals the side on which Denham's sympathies lay. Yet the entire section points to fundamentals that lie beyond controversy—to the glories of the past, to the naturalness of the English monarchy, and, above all, to the loyalty that all Englishmen bore to the king himself. Whatever the sovereign's mistakes, for which his evil counselors were solely responsible, the subjects' allegiance was to his person, not his policies, so Denham's appeal was to feelings that lay much deeper than the animosities that divided the country. Charles's private virtues were not in dispute, but Denham saw in the king's “frendlike sweetnes & … Kinglike Awe,” or his “Majesty & love,” an expression of nature's law of concordia discors. Nature's wisdom in designing “First a brave place, & then as brave a mynde” (68) is meant to contrast with the vain activities and desires of the Londoners, but it serves also to make the historical polemic about the origin of the castle superfluous. “Nature this Mount soe fitly did advaunce / Wee might conclude then nothinge is by Chance … (For none commends his iudgement that doth chuse / That which a blind man only could refuse.)” To look at Windsor was to be reminded of the basic fact that England had always been a monarchy, and that neither the lusts of kings, the sufferings of the people, nor the vagaries of subsequent history could harm the rock on which the constitution was founded. History itself, from which the poem later gives us selected incidents, is superficial by comparison, and merely demonstrates that men have always deviated from one extreme to another in their attempt to return to the balanced norm from which they started. Platitudes of such magnitude command the assent of all, and need only to be stated to be believed. Although all Denham's contemporaries would have known at once that they were reading a “royalist” declaration, they would also have recognized the accents not of a “party” poet but of a firm believer in the old balanced monarchy which parliament was fighting for, and which the revolution of 1640-41 had already almost restored.¹⁰

When Denham chose to continue his account of Windsor by recalling the history of Edward III he managed simultaneously to maintain his detachment and to move closer to his principal topical concern. The virtues and vices of Edward III were fairly well known in 1641. Raleigh in his Prerogative of Parliaments (reprinted in 1640) mentioned that “the three estates did [Edward] the greatest affront that ever King received or endured,” but clearly implied that the king had been greedy for money and had not acted wisely himself.¹¹ Stow recorded Edward's concupiscence, Sir Thomas Roe noted that both Edward III and Henry VIII had debased the coinage, and William Hakewill devoted twenty pages to the history of Edward's efforts to raise money without the benefit of parliaments.¹² Sir Simonds D'Ewes, however, said more than once in the House of Commons that Edward was a “wise Prince” and “one of the most excellent princes that ever this kingdom had.¹³ O Hehir has sided with D'Ewes, and points out, quite properly, that Denham praised Edward for uniting the crowns of France, Scotland, and England, for founding the Order of the Garter, and for choosing St. George as a patron saint: “the royal citadel of Windsor is then, to him who reads aright, a hieroglyphic inscription. … it speaks of British imperial greatness, of the superiority of peace to strife, of the divine warrant of the British monarchy. It reveals the history of English kingship to have been in sum a preamble to and prediction of the potential harmony now within reach of actualization in the Stuart reign.”¹⁴ This is very happily expressed, and the justice of its conclusion can be underlined by the observation that Denham was also perfectly aware of Edward's limitations, and hence was contrasting him with Charles, who had peacefully reunited the countries that Edward had bound by force:

Had thy greate destiny but given thee skill
To know aswell as power to Act her will
That from those Kings who then thy Captives were
In after tymes should springe a Royall paire
Who should possesse all that thy mighty power
Or thy desires more mighty did devoure
To whome thire better Fate reserves what Ere
The victor hopes for, or the vanquisht feare,
That blood which thou & thy greate Grandsire shead
And all that since these Sister nations bledd
Had beene unspilt had happie Edward knowne
That all the blood he spilt had beene his owne
Thou hadst extended through the Conquered East
Thyne & the Christian name & made them blest
To serve thee, while that losse, this gaine would bring
Christ for their God, & Edward for their Kinge.

(87-102)

Edward III, like the Londoners, and like his successor Henry VIII, was deficient in knowledge and over-endowed with desire, so that the great Christian crusade he might have waged had never been undertaken. The promise of his reign was unfulfilled, just as (later in the poem) the potential good of Magna Charta is seen to have been quickly vitiated by the “Subiects Arm'd, [who] the more theire princes gave, / But this advantage tooke the more to crave” (299-300). The moral lesson taught by Edward's example, as by the others', is no more royalist than any call to temperance and wisdom at any time, and by criticizing an English monarch so severely Denham showed that he was no believer in a divine right theory which claimed that kings could do no wrong. All the versions of Draft I, as if calling attention to Denham's high-mindedness, note in the margin that the poet interpreted Edward's Order of the Garter as a prophecy of the union of England and Scotland under James I, and Denham certainly worded his lines with extreme care, so that it is quite possible to read them as a celebration in the most general terms of the Stuarts' Anglo-Scots alliance. “Possible,” one may say, but not in the least probable, because the most important fact about the poem is that Denham was writing during the aftermath of the Scots treaty in the summer of 1641.

Although the complexities of Anglo-Scots relations constitute the missing piece in the puzzle, the indispensable context for Denham's meaning and intentions, the difficulty of the section on Edward III lies not in its obscurity but in the long-sustained and pervasive importance of the subject to which it implicitly refers. The facts speak for themselves. In August 1640 the Scots routed the English forces at Newburn and remained squatting in the Northern counties for a full year. In September 1640, in a response to their presence, Charles reluctantly took the advice of the peers and issued the writs for the Long Parliament. In October the treaty (or, more strictly, the cease-fire) of Ripon was concluded, and by the next month, when parliament assembled, the negotiations for a full treaty were resumed in London—an action that Clarendon later thought was one of Charles's great mistakes. Agreement was long delayed, often deliberately, and throughout the first seven months of 1641 there were innumerable complaints in and out of parliament about the expense of paying for both armies, and as many expressed hopes that the signing of the treaty was imminent. Petitions were presented and dropped, Strafford was executed and other ministers fled at the threat of impeachment, the root-and-branch bill appeared and disappeared, and the great milestones of the constitutional revolution were erected; but hanging over all parliamentary business, as a matter of the most urgent necessity, was the settlement with Scotland that still had to be arranged. Until that time the armies waited, and the country was in a state of armed truce that nobody could afford.¹⁵ If the poem did not contain more specific evidence that the treaty had been accomplished before Denham conceived his poem, we should never be quite sure if the praise of Charles “Who has within that Azure Round confin'd, / Those Realms which nature for their bounds design'd” (109-10) was a panegyric on the union itself or a piece of hopeful and wishful thinking, written perhaps as early as October 1640. However, the most natural interpretation, not only of the emblematic Garter but of the entire contrast between Charles's wisdom and Edward's ignorance, would always be that Denham was rejoicing in Charles's eventual success, in which the concordia discors of his nature had resolved the discords of his own warring realms.¹⁶

Charles' “better Fate” (93), however, was not only to have made peace by peaceful means, but to have brought about the conditions in which the foreign crusade denied to Edward became again possible. The dream of a protestant war in Europe was an English fantasy that William III came closest to realizing during the seventeenth century, and it always appealed most to the imagination when affairs were going badly at home and the need arose for a distant object that all parties could agree was theoretically desirable. In 1640-42 the ready-made cause was the Elector Palatine's, the recovery of whose possessions had influenced the foreign policy of two reigns.¹⁷ After the meeting of the Long Parliament one of the earliest statements that a foreign war might aid in the resolution of domestic differences was made by the Earl of Bristol, the chief English negotiator of the Scottish treaty, in a “pithie and a judicious speech” on 12 January 1641: “Hee did hope alsoe that God would soe farre blesse us that we should wiselie and happilie compose the present differences soe as both nations being happilie conioined in one Monarchie againe, and setled in peace and obedience under one and the same soveraigne, wee might soon pitch upon some great action that should fullie restore our glory.”¹⁸ In February the king announced the forthcoming marriage of his daughter to William of Orange, which occurred on 2 May, and gave as his third reason for the match “the Use I may make of this Alliance towards the Establishing of my Sister and Nephews,”¹⁹ but it was not until 5 July that the subject came to the foreground and seemed for a long moment to become a national preoccupation. On the very morning on which he abolished the Star Chamber and reminded parliament of his many previous concessions and of the necessity of his journey to Scotland, Charles issued his Manifesto on behalf of the Palatinate. If treating at Ratisbon failed, he said, he would go to war.²⁰

The abolition of Star Chamber made 5 July one of the big days in the revolution, but Gardiner underestimated the effect of the Manifesto: “The Houses listened gravely and gave a decorous answer: but the hearts of the members were no longer in the Palatinate. They had the dread of that ill-starred visit to Scotland before their eyes.”²¹ True, the House never lost its caution where Charles was concerned, but the Manifesto gave it one of its rare excuses to reaffirm its goodwill towards the king. The Commons considered and approved the document in a debate on 7 July, and at a conference between both Houses on 9th Holles's speech was typical of the general reaction: “My Lords, The Loyal Subject of England is so well tuned in a sweet agreeing Harmony to the Person of his Prince, that he is affected with the least Touch upon any part of the Princely Offspring, and answers it instantly with a Sound proportionable. … This then is enough to make us zealous for the Redress of the Prince Elector's Wrongs.”²² On 28 August Rudyard was objecting to sending troops to France or Spain on the grounds that they would depress the affairs of the Elector,²³ and on the same day the Manifesto was read and passed in the Scottish parliament. Lord Loudoun was still talking about it at the end of September as offering a miraculous opportunity to unite England and Scotland in a common cause,²⁴ and as late as November Abraham Cowley and a few others welcomed the king back to London with memories of this happy possibility.²⁵ As Holles had also said in July, both “Point of Policy and Reason of State” directed England to support her allies, “to advance this Kingdom to the highest Pitch of Greatness and Reputation, to make us formidable abroad to the Enemies of our Church and State, and so enjoy Peace and Safety, and Tranquility at home.”²⁶

In all these discussions there is an implicit connection between the Scottish treaty and the foreign war, a connection that Denham himself exploited in Coopers Hill. Charles had succeeded, and could succeed, in schemes which Edward's greedy belligerence had put beyond his reach, but once again the protracted recurrences of the Palatine dream gave us no certain clues about the date at which Denham was writing. Like the rest of the section on Windsor, however, it leads to the probability of post-midsummer composition, and in so far as the bad news on 1 November tended to make Ireland, not Germany, the foreseeable site of a foreign war, we can tentatively assume for the time being that the poem was first conceived during the four late summer and autumn months. Guidelines are useful at this stage because the section that follows on the problems of religion introduces a subject so central to the revolution that Denham's generalized treatment of it offers no help at all with the dating question. It is crucial, nevertheless, for determining the kind of royalism that Denham espoused.

By contrasting the “Lethargicke dreame” of religion in the reign of Henry VIII with the “worse extreame” of the contemporary fervor for religious reform, and by observing the implicit similarities between Henry's “Luxury or Lust” and the “too Active” and “devouring” zeal of his own times,²⁷ Denham pointed to that “temperate Region … Betweene their frigid & our torrid Zone” (151-52). By no stretch of the historical facts, however, should this middle ground between religious extremes be identified with Laudian policies,²⁸ or with any of the most conservative reactions to the clamor for the root-and-branch extirpation of the ecclesiastical hierarchy. The contours of moderation, like those of more radical positions on either side, shifted under the pressures of events, but they always encompassed a measure of necessary reform that was intended to placate the puritans and satisfy the more general sense that innovations had indeed crept into the church and needed to be expunged. The commonest distinction, employed by the king himself as early as January 1641, was between the correction of abuses and the overturning of a settled state. “Now I must tell you,” said Charles to both Houses, “That I make a great Difference between Reformation and Alteration of Government; tho' I am for the first, I cannot give Way to the latter. If some of [the bishops] have over-stretched their Power, and encroached too much upon the Temporality, if it be so, I shall not be unwilling these Things should be Redressed and Reformed, as all other Abuses, according to the Wisdom of former Times; so far I shall go with you.”²⁹ These remarks, which filled D'Ewes with apprehension “in case his Majestie should bee irremooveablie fixed to uphold the Bishops in ther wealth pride and Tyrannie,”³⁰ preceded the great debate on the church on 8 February that Gardiner regarded as a prophetic taking of sides, and the first day on which parties stood clearly opposed.³¹ Falkland on that occasion ended his speech by calling for a lopping of the branches rather than a rooting up of the tree, and others like Pleydall, Grimston, Digby, Colepeper, Rudyard, Selden, Hopton, and Hyde were to follow him.³² As Hyde wrote later, those who knew the constitution of the kingdom knew also “that the bishops were no less the representative body of the clergy than the House of Commons was of the people, and, consequently, that the depriving them of voice in Parliament was a violence, and removing landmarks, and not a shaking (which might settle again) but dissolving foundations, which must leave the building unsafe for habitation.”³³

These were the metaphors that adorned the debate throughout the year, and in June Edmund Waller was arguing that the House should resolve “‘To reform’, that is ‘not to abolish Episcopacy’,” and that as the church's horns and nails had been pared already, the time had come to consider its right use and antiquity.³⁴ Denham's praise for Waller's defense of the church in the second draft of Coopers Hill was in itself a political act that served to identify the poet with the professedly moderate stance that Waller had adopted and vigorously maintained. Waller later became one of the principal spokesmen for the group that resisted the challenge of the Grand Remonstrance, and in June he was clairvoyant about the consequences of meddling with religion too much. Episcopacy was intrinsically mingled with English law like wine and water, and if scripture was offered as an excuse for separating them “I am confident that, whenever an equal division of lands and goods shall be desired, there will be as many places in Scripture found out, which seem to favour that, as there are now alleged against the prelacy or preferment in the church.”³⁵ Even in his first draft, Denham placed himself squarely in the camp of Waller and the other opponents of root-and-branch when he prayed that “may no such storme / Fall on our tymes, where Ruyne must reforme” (127-28), but he thereby also revealed his own commitment to the redress of the worst grievances. “Ruyne” in the historical context meant “root-and-branch,”³⁶ but there is nothing in the first draft which declares that Denham would have opposed the abolition of the bishops' temporal powers, or their exclusion from the House of Lords. He may or may not have objected to such legislation, and he probably viewed with alarm the impeachment of the bishops and the provocative ecclesiastical Orders that the House passed before its recess in September, but his main position is clear, and is no more Laudian than Falkland's or Hyde's, although it was easy for root-and-branchers to ignore the distinction. His concern was lest desires, under the banner of reform, should get out of hand, and his historical account of earlier calentures led him to wish for a moderate solution that could only be achieved by restraint and compromise. Like the earlier description of Windsor, therefore, the section on St. Ann's hill and Chertsey Abbey offers reasons that could be said to appeal to the widest possible spectrum of political opinion, doubtful as it was of the direction in which Pym was leading the parliament, but not royalist or episcopal in any die-hard sense.

An important piece of evidence for the dating of the poem occurs in the next section on “King Thames,” in which “an inconsequential but grotesque eight-line simile,” as the editor calls it,³⁷ is spliced between couplets which explicitly compare the river with a prudent and a wise king (179-86).

Nor with an Angrey & unruly wave,
(Like Profuse Kings) resumes the Wealth he gave:
Noe unexpected inundations spoyle
The Mowers hopes nor mocke the Plowmans toyle
And as a parting lover bids farewell
To his Soules ioy, seeing her Eyelidds swell
He turnes againe to save her falling teares,
And with a parting kisse secures her feares:
Soe Thames unwilling yet to be devorc't
From his lov'd channell, willingly is forc't
Backward against his proper course to swell,
To take his second, though not last farewell.
As a wise king first settles fruitefull peace
In his owne Realmes & with their rich increase
Seekes warre abroade & then in triumph brings
The Spoyles of Kingdomes, & the Crownes of Kings,
So Thames, to London doth at first present
Those tributes, which the neighbouring Countreys sent.

(175-92)

Alan Roper has suggested to me that the simile may be less grotesque than it first appears if the river's two goodbyes correspond to the ebb and flow of its tidal waters, but it remains sufficiently unsatisfactory to compel our attention to the meaning that Denham was trying to convey by his awkward image. In Denham's own terminology for his poem, he saw the Thames more perspicuously with his mind than with his eye, and what he really saw was the king's two goodbyes to his parliament in August 1641.

Charles's departure for Scotland aroused, in Gardiner's words, “an overpowering sense of danger” which tended to make the parties forget their differences: “they were united as yet, as they were never again to be united till 1660, in their resolution that, as far as in them lay, there should not be a military despotism in England.”³⁸ Having obtained one previous delay of the journey which would take Charles through the two armies in the North, the majority in the Commons fought desperately until the very last moment to obtain another postponement. On Saturday 7 August they were still hoping for another fourteen days, but, to cut off further petitions, Charles went to the House of Lords that same afternoon, summoned the Commons, and passed a number of bills, including two concerning forests and ship-money that were important. “After this the lord keeper made a short speech, and then the king bid the parliament farewell, and so departed.”³⁹ Unwilling to take no for an answer, the House took the unprecedented step of sitting all day Sunday, but were unable to deflect Charles's determination to leave for more than one day, from Monday to Tuesday.⁴⁰ His decision could only have been strengthened by the extremely gloomy sermon about mutability and God's punishments to which he had listened that morning.⁴¹ On Monday the House received a message “that when his Majesty upon Saturday, bid the Lords severally Farewel, his Intent then was to both Houses, which if they did not so understand it, his Majesty now commanded to signifie it as his Intention therein.”⁴² On Tuesday 10th, however, having stayed up all night, the king again went to parliament at 10 a.m. “to take his second, though not last farewell,”⁴³ and to sign in person the pacification between England and Scotland. An hour later he was on his way to Edinburgh with the Elector Palatine in the coach beside him. Charles Louis's presence there has the precision of a metaphor actualized in experience, because the hopes of the cause he represented were dependent on an Anglo-Scots alliance, and the continuation of Denham's simile compares the Thames with a “wise king [who] first settles fruitefull peace / In his own Realmes & with their rich increase / Seekes warre abroade.” I must return to the implications of Denham's political attitude, which the later sections of the poem clarify further, but three comments can be made here: first, that Charles's love of parliaments (“his Soules ioy”) was a fiction that he and his friends invariably sought to maintain, and he could in truth point to the Triennial Act and the Act perpetuating the Long Parliament to substantiate his claim. The image of the Thames, puzzling at the literal level, is conceptually uncomplicated: although Charles was unwilling to leave parliament, his “proper course,” as he repeatedly insisted, was to visit Scotland. He therefore “willingly” delayed his departure in order to take a second farewell, and with his “parting kisse” signed the treaty and secured the fears of those who dreaded the object of his journey.

Second, of course, his leaving did no such thing, and Denham was nowhere more “royalist” than in his glossing over the fears that the king's absence enhanced for two or three weeks. By putting the most hopeful construction on the event Denham was himself bathing the swollen “Eyelidds” of the forsaken parliamentarians by emphasizing the positive achievement of the successful treaty, by evoking the possibility of a protestant war, and (this is the third point) by appealing to the widespread hope for the restoration of foreign trade. The complaints in 1641 about the decay of trade were far too numerous to catalogue here, but the title of Henry Robinson's pamphlet in August neatly voices the opinions not only of city merchants but of apprentices, parliamentary committee-men, country burghers, and petitioners across the country: Englands Safety in Trades Encrease. Or, as Sir Thomas Roe said in the House of Commons, the only way to stop the flow of money abroad was “by peace and Trade.”⁴⁴ Such blessings could reasonably be expected to ensue upon the Scottish treaty, especially if men would refrain from questioning the king's motives and “behould his shore.”⁴⁵ A reflective reader might also have wondered if the Thames who temperately refused to “resume the Wealth he gave” was not a reformed character since the days of ship-money and other “unruly waves.” In view of the fact that “inundations,” as I show later, were always associated with the exercise of prerogative power, the Thames in its peaceful role had conformed to the constitutional revolution and flowed evenly in the channel dictated by law. Its digression now from the shores of Westminster was only temporary and the future looked even brighter than the present.

The Thames slides into a passage, marginally noted in the mss. as “Windsor forrest,” the main feature of which is a disquisition on nature's wonderful concordia discors. The river continues to figure in the harmony, but only as one of the “huge extreames” that nature has united, and the section concludes with a strange reference to “our angry supercilious Lords” who frown on the humble poor as the hill frowns on the stream. The editor has taken the opportunity to write the most learned account of concordia discors that we possess, noting specifically that “the word harmonia in Greek always denotes a means of connection between a pair of opposites, not a general agreement among many diverse things. As a result, even in non-Greek discourse on the topic, down to the time of Pope, the word ‘harmony’ and its substitutes, including ‘concord’ and ‘variety,’ usually imply a dyadic, not a multiple, agreement.”⁴⁶ His observation is supported by everything in Coopers Hill so far: by the antitheses combined in Windsor hill and the king's person; by the dialectic between knowledge and ignorance, innocence and desire, that defines a safe center between extremes in politics and religion; and by the implicit celebration throughout the sections on Windsor and the Thames of the newly achieved harmony between England and Scotland. In the immediate historical context, the great example of concordia discors in a world otherwise jarred by furious dissonance was the Anglo-Scots treaty, and it is a curious fact that the only statements of the idea of balanced opposites that can be found in the political literature of 1641 refer precisely to that event. The most official pronouncement came from the Speaker of the House of Commons in a speech before both Houses on 2 December, the first day that Charles attended parliament after his return from the north. It began:

The Observation taken from the unlike Compositions and various Motions of the World made the Philosopher conclude, Tota hujus mundi Concordia ex Discordibus constat.

The happy Conjuncture of both these Nations in the Triumph and Joy of Your Sacred Presence, extracted from the different and divided Dispositions and Opinions, gives us Cause to observe and to admire these Blessed Effects from such contrary Causes. We may without Flattery commend Your Sacred Majesty, the Glorious Instrument of the happy Change, whose Piety and Prudence, directed by the Hand of God, hath contracted this Union from these various Discords.

The Story of these Times will seem Paradoxes in following Generations, when they shall hear of Peace sprung from the Root of Dissention, of Union planted upon the Stock of Divisions, Two Armies in the Field, both ready to strike the first Blow, and both united without a Stroke.

Nothing can reduce these Truths into a Belief but the Knowledge of Your Piety and Justice, who have accomplished these Acts of Wonder by Goodness and Gentleness, without Force and Violence.

This Way of Conquest, this Bellum incruentum, hath been the Rule of the most valiant and puissant Monarchs, advancing Your Glory in Safeguard of One Subject more than in the Death of a Thousand Enemies.

Thus have You erected a Monument of Glory to Your Sacred Memory for all Generations.⁴⁷

In his disastrous reply, Charles acknowledged Lenthall's speech to be “Learned” while contradicting its content with a complaint about the jealousies, frights, and alarms with which his people were still bitten. However, if he had read the eulogistic volumes issued by the university presses to welcome him home, he would have been well prepared for the Speaker's learning. Fellows and students alike burnished their metaphors for the occasion, the most common being those of the head or the soul returning to the body, the spring coming in winter, and the sun dispersing the factious mists. Because of his absence, Charles had had to wait three months for the public encomia he might have expected in August, but it was too late to hide an awareness of the Irish problem which infected the shallow rejoicing with some gloom. Jasper Mayne's panegyric was a typical tune whistled in the dark:

You now returne, as when you did at first
Receive this Crowne, and find in us like thirst
Of your Approach; since by this progresse we
One people of Two late divided see.
One Forme againe doth spread it selfe through all;
And adverse Hemispheeres become one Ball.
And though in some things we walk feet to feet,
Yet that we in our oppositions meet,
And that from this Diversity we grow
Entire, is your great worke; The Heavens move soe;
Where Orbes wheeling 'gaynst Orbes, doe yet agree
In the first Mover, and make Harmony.
And those Iarres, which seemed Discords to our eares,
Compos'd by you, grow Musick in the spheares.(48)

Denham's lines on concordia discors are an extension of his praise of the river (“O could my lines fully & smoothly flow, / As thy pure flood” [etc.]) and carry that praise to the recognition that King Thames is the embodiment of all-wise nature's divine law. The progress from the “grotesque” simile about Charles's departure, to the reflection about the wise king who first settles fruitful peace in his own realms, to the statement that the river is his theme, to the final celebration of concordia discors is an ascending series of generalizations on the subject of the king's wisdom in bringing peace out of discord. Although a shouldernote in the text indicates that “Windsor forrest” enters the poem at line 203 we do not catch even a glimpse of the trees until line 215, and only then in an unfavorable comparison between “the steepe horrid roughnes of the wood” and “the gentle Calmenes of the flood.” Denham's transition here from the Thames as a total image to Thames as part of an image of concordia discors arranged by nature is less difficult to follow if we perceive that the peace-loving and peace-making river continues as the harmonious element even after the roughness of the wood and the roughness of the bellicose hill have been introduced. He needed the transition because he wished to emphasize the opposition that the king's efforts had overcome. “Such huge extreames, when nature doth unite / Wonder from thence results, from thence delight.” The magnitude of Charles's achievement in the treaty was very much on Denham's mind, although in terms of the landscape he was viewing the harmony could be attributed only to nature's handiwork.⁴⁹ The angry supercilious lords with whom the frowning hill is compared were the lords of the privy council, who had been responsible for many years, often with considerable resentment and haughtiness, for seeing that the people were properly mulcted of their ship-money. By introducing tangentially a recollection of their Star Chamber activities Denham managed to dissociate the king from the most heinous offenses of his council, and to proclaim once again that he, the poet, was no supercilious royalist himself.⁵⁰

Denham saw the stag-hunt, which has become the crux of the poem, solely with his “quicke poeticke sight,” so the event took place in his conceptualizing mind's eye rather than within his vision. The hunt is an imaginary, invented, and wholly poetic example, suggesting that the poet has finally succeeded as he promised in making Cooper's Hill his Parnassus.⁵¹ The boundlessness of his fancy has outdistanced his eyesight altogether, and a contemporary reader would have realized that Denham was most inspired, and spoke with his highest authority as a poet, when he claimed such autonomy of perception. It is a little disconcerting, therefore, to be told that the stag is a metaphor for the Earl of Strafford, and the hunt a “quasi-allegorical” account of his rise and fall.⁵² To the most moderate of the editor's comments, that the hunt “bears several overtones reverberatory of the fall of the Earl of Strafford,”⁵³ no exception need be taken, but there are a number of objections to saying more than that. 1. All the records of Strafford's fall testify to his extraordinary courage, whereas the stag alternates between bravery and fear. 2. As O Hehir says, “Strafford was not like a declining statesman [line 255]; he was one.”⁵⁴ 3. If Denham was a “committed royalist” or a sympathizer with the fifty-nine “Straffordians” then one would expect him to have shown more disapproval of the stag's end. Certainly, Strafford seemed “glad & proud to die” and exonerated Charles from the responsibility, but how could a royalist have summed it up as an “Innocent & happie chase” or ever have suggested that Charles was “hunting” Strafford in any sense?⁵⁵ 4. Finally, it has not been made clear what the function of the episode is in the developing argument of the whole poem; its didactic intention is automatically obscure, because, if the stag is chiefly Strafford, then Denham's royalist position is ambiguous, and we cannot be certain how the stag's death contributes to concordia discors. On an ethical level, nature's lesson “to shew how soone / Greate things are made, but sooner farre undone” may be a sufficient explanation for the hunt, especially as Denham punned wittily on the technical term (“to undo”) for the flaying and cutting up of a dead stag;⁵⁶ alternatively, we can import from the “B” text the sententious moral that Denham gave to the scene in 1655, “uncertain waies unsafest are, / And Doubt a greater mischief than Despair” (299-300), but the problems are not thereby solved.

They vanish, however, if we make a slight shift in the question we ask: not “Is the stag Strafford?” but “What did Strafford stand for?” O Hehir has shrewdly observed that on the day of Strafford's death the House of Commons authorized the publication of the second part of Coke's Institutes containing his commentary on Magna Charta, but this act was no more symbolic than the drama it concluded. Strafford was the symbol of arbitrary power, as countless references both inside and outside the courtroom testify, and his death warrant was signed by the king's commissioners, just as Charles was later to sign into law the other bills that marked the demise of unconstitutional government. The monarch of the glen was the obvious choice of a metaphor for absolute rule, partly because of his despotism over the herd, and partly because he was the most privileged of beasts and existed wholly for the king's will and pleasure. In calling him the “Royall Stagge” (245) Denham was also aware that “royal” when applied to the king's power meant the prerogative power that parliament could not lawfully control.⁵⁷ Royal power was the authority that Denham calls “boundles” at the end of the poem, or those inalienable rights of the crown, which should nonetheless, if the king were wise, be drawn “Within the Chanell & the shoares of Lawe.”

If the stag is read as a personification of arbitrary power, or tyranny, or “lawless power” as Denham called it in 1655 (line 326), then none of the previous difficulties arise, and the likeness of the stag to Strafford is explained, as well as the analogy about the declining statement—which recalls Strafford more easily than the other victims of parliament's vendetta. The irresolution of the stag was unquestionably true of the policies of arbitrary government over the years: two wars, two pacifications, ship-money, the Short Parliament, the dissolution, Charles's rejection by the council of peers at York, the calling of the Long Parliament, and the history of concessions and resistance there. Which (if any) of these actions are reflected in the stag's failure to find help in “neither speede nor Art, nor frends nor force” (263) it is difficult to say, although his final standing at bay in the river is likely to be a metaphor for the destruction of arbitrary government in the Long Parliament. The “Streame … more merciles” than the stag's pursuers is perhaps a rendering of the fairly common image of the “stream” of law, of which the king was the “fountain” and the judges the “cisterns.”⁵⁸ The High Court of Parliament would satisfy the associations of the metaphor, and the overflowing of the stream at the end of the poem was another common adaptation of it. Given the predominance of Scotland in the background of Coopers Hill, a conceivable allegorization of the stag's behavior would be to identify his first hesitant resolution that “tis better to avoyde, then meete” with the pacification of Berwick in June 1639 which narrowly averted a pitched battle; the trying of his friends could then become the Short Parliament, and his later assumption of courage in despair would be the confrontation with the Scots in August 1640.⁵⁹ The stag hunt represents the culmination of Denham's inspiration and his argument, but if we can only guess at the possible meaning of his details, he tells us that the stag is arbitrary power at the conclusion of the scene:

This a more Innocent & happie chase,
Then when of ould (but in the selfe same place)
Faire Liberty pursu'd & meant a prey
To Tyrany, here turn'd & stood at Bay

(281-84)

The lines simply exchange the figures of the chase, and it was naturally more innocent and happy for liberty to chase tyranny (as in the stag hunt) than for the situation to be reversed (as at Magna Charta). The stress is on “Liberty,” which instantly transposes the new hunt for the old. The law of concordia discors dictates the alteration of extremes, and Magna Charta was a mirror image of the hunt which had ended when Charles passed the constitutional reforms into law. Denham, like parliament when it published Coke's Second Institute, was quite conventional in juxtaposing the Charta and arbitrary power, since a reference to one often triggered the name of the other, but he was convinced that tyranny was now dead, slain by the king's own “unerring hand,” and it was time to realize how empty were the pretensions that he still ruled by his prerogative or royal powers. “The happier Stile of King, & Subiect” would never replace the epithets “Tyrant, & Slave” unless further demands ceased forthwith. Charles had already “All marks of Arbitrary power [laid] downe” (line 294) by killing the stag, but the country was in danger of catapulting itself into the opposite extreme from the one it had just escaped. Whether tyranny hunted liberty, or vice versa, the result would be the same, and the evil which resistance had set out to destroy would be revived if all parties did not moderate their desires and remember that enough was enough. As Sir Benjamin Rudyard was to say in anguish just before the outbreak of war, England three years earlier would have thought it a mere “Dream of Happiness” to have a parliament at all, or to abolish monopolies, Star Chamber, and the High Commission: “Wherefore, Sir, let us beware we do not contend for such a hazardous unsafe Security, as may endanger the loss of what we have already. Let us not think we have nothing, because we have not all we desire; and tho we had, yet we cannot make a Mathematical Security, all humane Caution is susceptible of Corruption and Failing; Gods Providence will not be bound, Success must be his.”⁶⁰

Magna Charta, believed to have been confirmed more than thirty times in subsequent history, symbolized at this date the freedom of persons from unjust imprisonment and the rights of private property, but it also raised the difficult question of the subject's rights of resistance:

When in that remedy all hope was plast,
(Which was or should at least beene the last)
For Armed Subiects can have no pretence,
Against their Princes, but their iust defence:
And whether then or no I leave to them
To iustifie, who els themselves condemne;
Yett might the fact be iust if we may guesse
The iustnes of an Action from successe.

(285-92)

Denham's “equivocal” attitude, his “highly limited and conditioned acceptance of the barons' actions”⁶¹ is not hard to understand, because he was also thinking about the armed resistance that the Scots had recently offered to the crown. There was no need, except to keep the discourse historical and impartial, to look back to the barons when a topical analogy was so near to hand, and Denham quoted from the Scots' Six Considerations of the Lawfulness of their Expedition into England Manifested, published in August 1640. Their “iust defence,” as Denham smartly summarized it, was a combination of the usual arguments from justice and necessity that were to be thrown back in their teeth when Cromwell invaded Scotland in 1650. They concluded, “Neither have we begun to use a military Expedition to England, as a means for compassing those our pious ends, till all other means which we could think upon have failed us, and this alone is left to us as ultimum & unicum remedium, the last and only remedy.”⁶² Having ennobled and accepted the death of the stag, Denham could raise the question whether the opposition to the king himself, which the opposition to tyranny involved, was not a violation of a sacred duty to obey. He also raised a doubt—probably a popular one with readers who had heard too much about the Scots for too long—if the final remedy had been actually called for, but he acquiesced in so far as the “successe” of that resistance had led within twelve months to a reconciliation. Whether the action was right or wrong on principle would not be known until its success had been tested, and the innocence and happiness of the chase had been determined by the outcome. If, like the “Counterparte” to Magna Charta, the union led to the taking of further advantages, then peace would lead to future bloodshed. The sincerity and justification of the “Armed Subiects” depended ultimately on their willingness to accept the victory they had already won. The new charta established by the treaty had yet to be ratified by the moderation of all those committed to the peace. Thus it is less Denham's ambiguity in these lines that leaves the final impression than his scrupulous fairness in balancing the dangerous extremes of tyranny and resistance.

The precariousness of the mean between them, still a potential rather than an actualized reality in the continuing crisis, is underlined by the concluding image of the deluge that may yet engulf the country. So rapidly can one extreme lead to the other that, like the stag who “All Safety in dispaire of safety plact. / Courrage he then assumes,” the king might be driven to reassert his tyrannical power and his “courage from dispaire recall” (306). The overflowing river is the royal stag in another metaphor, and Denham's last warning that the extinction of arbitrary government will be followed by its revival if the mean is not kept. Hyde was fond of the image, and in his much-printed speech at the impeachment of three barons of the exchequer in July he said: “‘Tis no Marvel, that an irregular, extravagant, arbitrary Power, like a Torrent, hath broke in upon us, when our Banks and our Bulwarks, the Laws, were in the Custody of such Persons. Men who had lost their Innocence, could not preserve their Courage.”⁶³ St. John, arguing against ship-money, had said that the laws are “the Sea-walls, and Banks, which keep the Commons from the Inundation of the Prerogative,”⁶⁴ and Strafford at his trial, on the very day that Denham appeared as a witness, balanced the king's prerogative and the people's “propriety” in these terms:

And Kings are as Gods on Earth, higher Prerogatives than can be said, or found to be spoken of the Propriety or Liberty of the Subject; and yet they go hand in hand, and long may they do so, long may they go in that Agreement and Harmony, which they should have done hitherto, and I trust shall be to the last, not rising one above another in any kind, but kept in their own wonted Channels. For if they rise above these heights, the one or the other, they tear the Banks, and overflow the fair Meads equally on one side and other. And therefore I do, and did allow, and ever shall, for my part, desire they may be kept at that Agreement and perfect Harmony one with another, that they may each watch for, and not any way watch over the other.⁶⁵

The metaphor of inundation was employed most often by the opposition, because it probably derived from Sir Edward Coke,⁶⁶ but Strafford could use it too, so Denham closed with a threat and a sententia that everyone would have understood. Charles had “endured” the curtailment of his prerogatives, but he was also to blame for initiating the cycle, since “kings by grasping more then they could hould, / First made their subjects by oppression bould” (317-18). The danger now appeared from the opposite quarter, and although Denham distributed his final advice with an entirely equal hand to both king and parliament, his argument rested on the assumption that Charles had already made the necessary concessions, and the time was ripe for the people to make theirs.

Before conclusions are drawn, the question about the poem's date must be settled. The negative evidence is stronger than usual, and it is inconceivable that Denham composed the first draft after Charles's next departure from London on 10 January 1642, which was indeed his “last farewell,” as he was not to enter the city again until his trial and execution. The attempt on the five members on 4 January 1642 is another terminal point, because by that one grievous error Charles altered the whole complexion of political affairs, and destroyed the basis of the argument that Denham had been able to advance on his behalf. Some kind of a case, however, could be constructed for a date in November or December, coinciding with the king's return to London and the beginning of the next phase of the revolution, in which party lines were drawn with a new firmness. The fact that Charles's supporters were vociferous in their poetic welcome, and that one of their themes was the benefit he had bestowed by the concordia discors of the Anglo-Scots treaty, at least raises the possibility of Denham's participation in their chorus; but most of the evidence suggests an earlier month between August and October.

First, Coopers Hill is not a coming-home poem. Not only is there an absence of the slightest reference to, or sense of, the king's return (as one would expect if the poem, like the others, was associated in any way with the propaganda surrounding that event), but the “grotesque” simile of the Thames specifically calls attention to his departure. Denham's reworking of the simile in the second draft⁶⁷ cuts out the allusion to a second farewell, presumably because it was neither necessary nor comprehensible. Charles's double goodbye to parliament in August could have had no relevance four months later after he had already returned, and no capital or interest could have been gained by referring to it. Moreover, for a poet of Irish birth with an Irish mother, there is a strange and utter silence about Ireland in Coopers Hill, although after 1 November the news of the rebellion was a subject of ubiquitous concern that even the king's panegyrists could not ignore. Coopers Hill is about peace, and had Charles's remaining realm already exploded before Denham wrote, it would have been damaging to his argument to have suppressed a notice of the balm with which Charles would heal the latest wound. The emphasis on a foreign crusade is also less anachronistic for the months preceding the Irish outbreak. No significance can be attributed to the traditional close of the stag-hunting season on Holyrood Day, 14 September (the modern season extends from 10 August-10 October), but there are other reasons for an “early” date.

The intriguing lines at the beginning of the poem, “And as Courts make not Kings, but Kings the Court, / So where the Muses & their Troopes resorte / Pernassus stands,” can be explained more simply than by the claim that Denham referred tendentiously to the king's power to create prerogative courts.⁶⁸ The muses, like kings, create their courts wherever they happen to be; if they “resorte” elsewhere they take their courts with them. The lines need paraphrase, not explication, but the idea of removing from one place to another is implied, and the natural inspiration for such a thought is, once again, Charles's departure for Scotland, where he installed a court and addressed his Scottish parliament. A close analogue can be found in a pastoral dialogue with which F. Palmer of Christ Church greeted Charles on his return; during the king's absence Arcadia seemed dispeopled, and suffered the discord that he went to slay: “Nor is't a wonder; for where he resorts, / He creates Kingdomes too, as well as Courts.”⁶⁹ Denham's analogy between king and poet is completed by the suggestion that each has recently removed his court, and the likelihood that he alluded to the Northern trip is strengthened by the fact that it had precipitated a fierce debate about the status of the parliament he had left behind. Could it function in his absence, or was the appointment of a custos regni a necessity? Nalson wisely observed of the debate that the locum tenens “was fairly pusht by the Faction, and had they gained this point, they would by his Authority, which they had not yet learnt to separate from his Person, as afterwards they did, have left him little besides the name of a King before his return out of Scotland.”⁷⁰ D'Ewes recorded in his journal that “it was generallie taken for granted” that a custos regni would be needed,⁷¹ although the failure of the House to secure more than a commission with very limited powers led to its adoption of D'Ewes's own notion that it could pass ordinances during the sovereign's absence. Denham's lines are neutral enough; they posit no more power for the king than was usually allowed, and they reinforce the impression that he was out of town when the poem was composed.

Another point in favor of a pre-October date is the sting in the poem's tail. Denham made his threat as impersonal as he could: not “Charles” but “kings” are “by their fall / Reinforc't, their courrage from dispaire recall.” Now all authorities are unanimous that the danger of Charles returning at the head of an army was the fear that inspired the frenzy over his departure, and the frantic efforts to secure a delay. If Denham, therefore, having spent most of his poem allaying that fear and praising the king's wisdom and humanity, then chose to remind his readers that the danger was real after all, he must have been writing before the king's return empty-handed, and before the possibility of raising an army had failed. Gardiner believed that the king's hope of armed assistance had been crushed by 12 October,⁷² but he also observed that after Charles had passed through both armies in August without incident “the natural result was that those of the Parliamentary leaders who had learned enough to predict evil were looked on as scared alarmists, who might have been trying to trouble the waters for their own ambitious ends. … The tide of feeling, which had been running so strongly against Charles, was on the turn.”⁷³ Nicholas on 23 August warned the king of the “great ielousies” in London lest he “make use of some of y^e armyes to y^e preiudice of y^e Parliam^t,” and Clarendon, besides confirming jealousies at this time, recorded others after 19 October when news of the “Incident” reached London on the eve of parliament's reassembly.⁷⁴ Denham sought to capitalize as discreetly as possible upon the fears that Charles's departure had aroused; if the opposition wouldn't listen to reason, it might respond to the threat of force, especially as he was expressing its own sense of danger rather than his. Denham's rhetorical maneuver would have been most effective when the fears were still real, and before it had been proved that the king's renewal of his power was not so easy a matter as he had hoped, or as his enemies feared. By the middle of September the armies had been disbanded and it was possible to feel that the danger of the Scottish visit had been exaggerated, but had not altogether vanished.⁷⁵

Three additional facts, far too curiously related to Denham to be coincidental, to my mind clinch the matter. We know that Denham had a private interest in the first of the two parting kisses with which Charles forsook his parliament, because the “Act for the Certainty of Forests, and of the Meets, Meers, Limits and Bounds of the Forests”⁷⁶ which he signed on 7 August directly affected Denham's property at Egham. The village lies within the Hundred of Chertsey in the Bailiwick of Surrey, and by an action of the court held in 1632 at Bagshot by the Earl of Holland, Chief Justice in Eyre, it had thus been ruled a part of Windsor forest.⁷⁷ Denham had every reason to be relieved by the Act voiding the court itself, because, as Clarendon said, it was “a great benefit and ease to the people, who had been so immoderately vexed by the Justice in Eyre's seat … that few men could assure themselves their estates and houses might not be brought within some forest; the which if they were, it cost them great fines.”⁷⁸ Denham had, as it were, his personal assurance that the king had moderated his prerogatives by righting the wrongs committed during the period of his arbitrary government. Other inhabitants of Egham, however, reckoning they were already liberated by the Act, decided to go on the rampage. Writing to Charles on 31st, Nicholas reported “There hath bene some of yo^r Ma^ties deer killed in Windsor forrest neer Egham by y^e inhabitants of that town & of y^e parishes adioyning, who hunted in y^e day tyme, by 80 & 100 in a company: S^r Ar. Maynwaring hath bene amongst them, and w^th good words & promises hath made them forebeare for y^e p^esent.”⁷⁹ Unaccidentally, in the same letter Nicholas requested permission to reside at his house in Thorpe, three miles from Egham. Charles was angry at the information, and the Lord Keeper arranged a meeting at his country house “to consider of y^e ryot com'itted in yo^r Ma^ties forrest of Windsor, & of some fitting course to prevent y^e killing of any more deere there.”⁸⁰ On 8 September the House of Commons ordered the tumults to be suppressed but promised to vindicate the rights of the subject according to the new forest law.⁸¹ The cause of the riot was stated by D'Ewes, and can be confirmed from the issuance of a writ on 14 September to Sir Arthur Manwaring, John Denham, and others “for inquiring into the bounds of the Forest of Windsor within the bailiwick of Surrey, as they stood in 20 James I.”⁸² The application for a writ, its terms of reference, and the appointment of Denham as one of the commissioners of inquiry all stemmed from the provisions of the Act of 7 August.

The episode was subsequently complicated by the slaughter of two more “Great Stags” on 14 October by four men from Egham with their accomplices. The House of Lords discussed the business on 27 October and planned a conference with the Commons the next day,⁸³ which never occurred because the Commons voted on 28th to consider only bills of general concernment.⁸⁴ Following the escape of the arrested men the Lords issued a warrant to the sheriff of Surrey on 11 November.⁸⁵ On 13 December they ordered Manwaring's commission to adjourn its inquiry from 16 December until after 6 January 1642, and on 5 January they postponed it again until 9 February.⁸⁶ In flagrant violation of the order, the commission met on 7 January and ruled the bailiwick to be outside the forest.⁸⁷ On 11th the Lords stopped all proceedings on the commission's findings, and on 27th they instructed the keepers to take special care of the king's deer.⁸⁸ The order of 11 January was not finally vacated, and the commission's ruling allowed to stand, until 1 January 1648.⁸⁹ Since Denham was one of the twelve commissioners before whom the indenture was made on 7 January,⁹⁰ he was guilty of civil disobedience in a parliamentary cause after he had written Coopers Hill. Many years later, Nalson made the same reflection on the forest incidents that Denham had made at the end of his poem: “how unfit it is for Loyal Subjects to ask, and for Princes sometimes to part with things which seem little or indifferent. … But it was no wonder to see [the common people] follow the Example of their Superiors, who committed daily Riots upon the King's Prerogative and Reputation.”⁹¹ The real stag hunt, like the one in the poem, was an assault on tyrannical power.

With the rest of the evidence leading in the same direction, the actual but lawless version of the stag-hunt in his own village must surely have entered into Denham's conception of his poem at, or shortly following, the end of August. He was certainly at work on it during September, because it was during that month that the news started to leak back that the king was being forced “to give / More then was fitt for subiects to receave” (319-20). “The Subiects Arm'd,” whom Denham had already hinted were the Scots, “the more theire princes gave, / But this advantage tooke the more to crave: / And as by giving the Kings power growes les, / So by receaving, their demands increase” (299-302). Charles was paying a high price for Scottish friendship by capitulating to their insistence that they approve the choice of his ministers, and on 5 September Thomas Webbe wrote to Nicholas that “Ther is something in this businesse more then I can understand; for, when they sent this demand to y^e King at London, it was soe hopelesse a one that they gave order to ther Commissioners not much to stick uppon it, but to take any answer y^e King would make to it, and now, when this is granted, they would have more. … Ther is noe buckler safe enough to feare, nor for y^e ill deserver. Therefore they will never be secure.”⁹² Oh for a king with more power, he added. Endymion Porter took up the lament: “his majesties businesses runn in the wonted channell, suttle designes of gaineing the popular opinion and weake executions for the uphoulding of monarkie. The King is yet perswaded to howlde owte, but within twoo or three dayes must yeld to all.”⁹³ Webbe wrote again on 7 September, “For y^e kings answer goeing farther then was asked made them presume to aske more, but now they have ther owne desir they are against ther wills concluded, unlesse they can start out how their desir ought to be interpreted, which we shall know tomorrow.”⁹⁴ The same letter enclosed a copy of the king's official submission, and by 17th the Venetian ambassador in London was sending notice of Charles's difficulties to the Doge in similar terms.⁹⁵ By that time Nicholas had departed for Thorpe and wrote to Charles that “All things here are in a great still, every one being busy in listening after the proceedings of the Parliam^t in Scotland, where Mr. Th'rer writes the people are stiffe, & seem to be resolute not to recede from their proposic'ons, w^ch in my poore iudgem^t is bad newes, and of very ill example to us here.”⁹⁶ It was indeed an ill example, and Hyde concluded later that Charles “seemed to have made that progress into Scotland only that he might make a perfect deed of gift of that kingdom, which he could never have done so absolutely without going thither.”⁹⁷

Denham was particularly struck by the fiasco of the king's policy in Scotland, and his criticism and anxiety about Charles's mistaken generosity is barely hidden in the first draft. The Londoners, however, were no less greedy than their Northern brethren, because they too preyed on others to supply their wants, “Yet all in vaine, increasing with their Store / Their vast desires, but make their wants the more” (23-24). Both the beginning and the end of Coopers Hill refer to the idea that filled the great stillness which awaited the paquets from Edinburgh. By the end of the first week in September, and in London by 10th, the themes of Denham's poem were complete, and a political climate existed in which all the conditions I have described were simultaneously fulfilled. I should be very surprised if by the date that Denham was instructed to inquire into the bounds of Windsor forest—that is, into the limits of the royal prerogative⁹⁸—he was not also deeply engaged in his own inquiry into the state of the kingdom. Holyrood Day is the poem's ideal date. The close season should begin on political stag hunting, and it is a coincidence too curious to omit that not only had Charles established his court at Holyrood House during his Scottish visit but that a famous legend attributed the foundation of the abbey to David I's miraculous rescue from a huge white stag when he was impiously hunting on 14 September.

Denham played his small part in trimming the flowers of the crown, and the Egham riot is as nice an example as could be found of the situation on which his poem reflected. He could be grateful to parliament, and to John Selden in particular, for introducing the bill that freed his parish from an incubus, and he could be grateful to the king for confirming his constitutional intentions; yet the gratitude of the village had been to commit an outrage against the sovereign, and what more proof did one need that the people's desires were insatiable? The drama in Egham was a microcosm of the state of England, as Nalson observed, and the justice of Denham's analysis can be seen in the fact that when parliament met on 7 September to hold a public thanksgiving for the treaty, it heard two sermons by Stephen Marshall and Jeremiah Burroughes that were as ungenerous as the spirit of provocation could devise: barely a word of thanks to the king, very little about the treaty, but a great deal about the glorious victories of this “mirabilis annus” and the triumphs that were to come. “Wee now see,” gloated Burroughes, “the goates stand on the left hand, and the sheepe stand on the right: we never in our dayes nor our forefathers before us, ever sawe the day of judgment so resembled in our nation.”⁹⁹ Pym could hardly have announced more clearly than by these sermons that he was going ahead with the revolution, and that Charles's concessions meant nothing to him. Denham rejected not only the preachers' animus but their tone, and his remarkably equable voice managed to suppress most of the hostility he felt towards the parliamentary desires. The interests of peace called for a peaceable poem, and the minimizing of the differences that Pym still sought to inflame.

Five years later, when Hyde looked back on these late summer months, he saw only a sequence of errors, accidents, misjudgments, and meddling by the Commons with “the highest matters both in Church and State.”¹⁰⁰ The king's impatience had “hurried him to that expedition without well weighing and preparing how to comport himself through it.”¹⁰¹ When Thomas May recalled the same period he noticed, with less style but more detachment, the growing disaffection with the Commons, the standstill of parliamentary business during Charles's absence, and Falkland's support of the Palatinate cause.¹⁰² Like all later historians, Clarendon and May placed their emphases where they naturally fall, on the extremely busy negotiations and legislation of July, and on the reactions to the Irish rebellion and the Grand Remonstrance in November and December. During the interim the center of political concern shifted to Scotland, and the London scene was left as a comparatively empty stage on which Pym was making preparations for the next act of the tragedy. It is of immense significance, as Wormald remarks, that Hyde himself laid no plans for what was to become his new role when parliament reconvened.¹⁰³ Yet it was during the late summer, after the completion of the constitutional revolution on 5 July and 7 August that the movement began towards the king on the part of men like Hyde, Falkland, Colepeper, Dering,¹⁰⁴ Sir John Strangways, and Sir Benjamin Rudyard. Mrs. Keeler classifies fourty-four M.P.s as “reformers who became royalists,” although some of them did not change until 1642.¹⁰⁵ The recess, therefore, is of vital importance in the formation of the group often known as the “constitutional royalists.” The inadequacy of the term has been explained by Wormald, who observes that in October 1641 “to suppose that Hyde was less ‘parliamentarian’ or any more ‘royalist’ [than he had been before] is to introduce categories that are both irrelevant and misleading.”¹⁰⁶ The phrase has probably come to stay, but it would be quite as just to call the king's new supporters “revolutionary constitutionalists,” because in their own minds they fully accepted and approved of the reforms so far achieved, and had only recently become worried about the direction in which both politics and religion still continued to move. The stag hunt alone in Coopers Hill, not to mention the attitude towards the church or the explicit precepts throughout the poem, make it absolutely clear that Denham was voicing the opinions of a growing body of thoughtful men whose principles were equally parliamentarian and royalist. To emphasize one principle more than the other is to destroy the balance that they thought had now precariously arrived, and on which their hopes for future stability were founded. The doctrine of concordia discors dissolves instantly into warring antitheses when harmony is identified with one of its components, and we do not hear it sung again very strongly until Marvell argued for Cromwell's kingship in 1655.

Coopers Hill has been honored as a poem for three centuries, but it deserves to be more famous as a historical document. It is the only statement in this phase of the revolution to give a comprehensive and coherent account of the “new Royalism”¹⁰⁷ at the moment of its inception. Our present knowledge of the phenomenon is a reconstruction from a thousand sources, the most important of which is Clarendon's History; but letters, diaries, county archives, Guildhall records, and diplomatic correspondence have all contributed a little to the received narrative. Coopers Hill is unique in being the single contemporary writing that attempts to fit all the pieces together and to present a unified argument for the new position. It confirms the accuracy of recent descriptions by Wormald and Zagorin, but it makes more vivid, as only poetry can, the strength of the feelings to which Denham appealed. At their center lay a patriotic regard for England, the monarchy, and the person of the king; no less formidable was the desire for peace, recently symbolized by the treaty, and a wish for a reformed episcopacy between the alternative extremes. By holding out the hope of greater economic prosperity Denham flattered self-interest and the City, and by suggesting the possibility of a foreign war he encouraged religious unity and sentiments of English grandeur. At the same time he called discreetly upon a latent hostility to the Scots, and threatened the radicals and the doubters with a return of prerogative government. Peace with Scotland would bring either a blessing or a curse, depending on England's response to it, and he perceived the dangerous analogy between the demands to which Charles was surrendering in Edinburgh and the unappeasable appetites of the opposition at home. Since it was common knowledge that parliament intended to model its future policy on Charles's concessions to the Scots, Coopers Hill was aimed at countering the maneuver. Calls for unity were frequent among the king's friends at this time, and the urgency with which they besought his early return to London revealed their fear that the Grand Remonstrance, or something like it, was in the offing. Denham's ideas were the more persuasive in that he presented them in the interests of national security, with the impartiality of a detached observer in the county, and under the guise of ordinary moral truisms about innocence, knowledge, and desire. Above all, in the stag hunt and in his criticisms of Edward III, Henry VIII, and the supercilious lords, he revealed his abhorrence of arbitrary government and his attachment to what he believed were the courses of moderation and agreement. His stress on concordia discors was an addition to the terminology of the great debate, which may have been influential the following year when Falkland and Colepeper wrote the king's Answer to the XIX Propositions.¹⁰⁸

Denham's father, by writing a brief supporting opinion in the minority judgment in Hampden's case, was one of the early heroes of the revolution, so his son was qualified by birth to write the manifesto of parliamentary royalism. In his “Elegy on the death of Judge Crooke,” written after Coopers Hill, he renewed his vows of allegiance to the achievements of the revolution in no uncertain terms. Croke had been “The Atlas of our Liberty. … The best of Judges in the Worst of Times. / He was the first who happily did sound / Unfathomd Royalty and felt the Ground.”¹⁰⁹ Nor was Denham compromised by his appearance at Strafford's trial, when he had merely brought one of his father's papers which was not admitted in evidence.¹¹⁰ His poem “On the Earl of Strafford's Tryal and Death” was a tribute to the Earl's courage and eloquence that even his enemies recognized, but it stated that “the glory of thy fall / Outeweighes the Cause” of the execution; his bravery made him “our nations glory” but the cause “our nations hate.”¹¹¹ Denham's local ties also were largely parliamentarian, because Surrey was one of the most radical counties, and had returned twelve out of fourteen members to parliament who were ardent reformers.¹¹² The evidence for thinking that Denham had personal reasons for resenting the excesses of the prerogative has already been given, although it might be added that the M.P.s who applied for the writ to inquire into the bounds of the forest were as radical a group as could have been put together. By defying an order of the House of Lords the commissioners later demonstrated their determination to rescue their bailiwick from the clutches of the crown. Nothing that we can infer either from Denham's other poems at this time, or from his known actions and associations, is inconsistent with the attitudes in Coopers Hill. The poem proclaims a balance, the keeping of which (while balance was still feasible) would always require some judicous concessions by both sides. In its historical context Coopers Hill is a poignant document, because the hope on which it rested was so transitory. Many historians, I think, have felt that Charles was unlucky as well as disingenuous; civil war might have been averted had there been no “Incident” in Scotland, no Irish rebellion—had there been, in fact, a little more time for confidence in the king to be restored. Clarendon's bitterness as he thought back was justifiable, because the understanding between king and parliament for which he argued so eloquently was a mature and rational point of view, that circumstances as well as people thwarted unmercifully. To compare Coopers Hill with the Thanksgiving sermons on 7 September is to feel that Denham was right, and that the objectives of Pym's party, comprehensible though they are, had been too narrowly defined and relentlessly pursued. With less fear of contradiction, it can at least be said that one of the reasons for the enduring fame of the poem is that it expresses a permanent ideal in English political life that was not realized in the seventeenth century until fifty years later.

I hope at another time to consider the serious critical problems arising from the fact that a poem composed with an irenic, albeit polemical, intention was published nearly a year later when Denham's animus against the parliament had greatly increased. Coopers Hill was written with the valid supposition that an accommodation could be reached and appeared in print as strictly royalist propaganda after all hopes of peace had been dashed. In particular, the evaporation of any conceivable benefit to be derived from the Scots alliance leaves one wondering what the poem “means” in 1642. It is a test case for an intentionalist theory of criticism. In the meantime, having asserted the preëminence of Coopers Hill as a document, I will conclude with a related suggestion about its originality as a poem.

Edmund Waller has always been credited with initiating the topographical-political genre, although O Hehir's texts prove that it was not until Denham's second draft that he praised “Upon His Majesties repairing of Pauls.” The evidence that he had read Waller before composing the first draft consists in an echo of one of Waller's lines in his own elegy on Strafford, and the “evidence” that Waller was writing not later than 1639 is that the portico to which he refers was completed in 1637-38. The oddity of this assumption about Waller's precedence is that he had for many years been an active opponent of the court, and as late as September 1641 was regarded as sufficiently parliamentarian to be assigned to the important Recess committee in the Commons. Not until 29 October did Edward Nicholas inform the king that Falkland, Strangways, Waller, Hyde and Holborne had been defending the royal prerogative in the House.¹¹³ In spite of his defense of the church at midsummer, it is unlikely that Waller would have written a poem in overt praise of Charles's policy until he became deeply involved in the defense of the Anglican establishment during the last two months of 1641, and the Horatian motto which he later appended to the poem (“Thus the favor of kings was sought in Pierian measures”) announced a purpose for its composition that would have been less presumptuous at Christmas 1641 than in June.¹¹⁴ Nor was the question to which he spoke—a reformed vs. a reconstructed church—a burning issue until the great debates of 1641. Denham's and Waller's poems were almost certainly products of the same year, and the simplest explanation of their relationship is that Waller wrote his after seeing Denham's elegy on Strafford and the first draft of Coopers Hill, and that Denham returned the compliment by putting him into the second. Denham not only wrote then of Waller's “late theame” (my italics) but acknowledged the success of a rival muse:

Soe to this height exalted I looke downe
On Pauls, as men from thence upon the towne.
Pauls' the late theame of such a Muse whose flight
Hath bravely reacht & soar'd above thy height.

(Draft II, 17-20)

Coopers Hill, as John Scott long ago demonstrated, is full of syntactic ambiguities and inexact expressions. Certainly, in this passage, Waller's muse has flown higher than St. Paul's, but Denham himself was “to this height exalted” far above the cathedral, and the point of the conceit was that Waller's muse (“the best of Poetts”) had the better wings. Denham was recognizing that he had been outstripped, but seems to have rather carefully reserved the credit of the first flight to himself (“Hath bravely reacht & soar'd above thy height”). The comparison was between muses. Neither was he exaggerating when he suggested that St. Paul's was now “Secure, while thee the best of Poetts sings / Preserv'd from ruine by the best of Kings,” because the root-and-branch propositions were dropped in the Grand Remonstrance and it was only mildly hyperbolic to suppose after the recess that the church had been saved.

I suspect that there was considerably more cohesion among the king's new-found friends than the remaining evidence proves, but even if Denham had no previous acquaintance with Waller, the occasion which he would have needed to excuse his showing the senior poet his verses was provided by Waller's appointment on 8 September to the committee entrusted with writing a letter to the sheriffs about the forest riots.¹¹⁵ The committee, with Selden as chairman, was composed exclusively of lawyers, and the letter clearly implied a legal investigation into the facts of the case. Within one week of each other, Denham and Waller were officially required to consider the proper boundaries of Windsor forest. Should Waller have needed a special incentive to write about the church, beyond the recent stimulus to its preservation and reform, it would be easy to find one in the commotion from November 1641-February 1642 about Inigo Jones's procedures in the restoration of St. Paul's.¹¹⁶ Among “those State-obscuring sheds” he had pulled down had been St. Gregory's church, and the parliamentarians were determined to harass him as part of their campaign against the bishops. They eventually let their impeachment lapse, but not before they had given an occasion for anyone to reflect “Upon His Majesties repairing of Pauls.” O Hehir himself has noticed that “in truth the poem … seems more to typify the strength attributed to Denham than the sweetness ascribable particularly to Waller's earlier verse [etc.],” and we can see now a new point and an implicit timing in Waller's remark that Denham “broke out like the Irish rebellion, three-score thousand strong, when no body was aware, or in the least suspected it.”¹¹⁷

Notes

1. Brendan O Hehir, Expans'd Hieroglyphicks: A Critical Edition of Sir John Denham's “Coopers Hill” (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1969), pp. 31-32. All quotations from Coopers Hill are from the first draft of the poem in this edition, hereafter cited as “O Hehir.” Professor Herbert Berry kindly sent me a photostat of the Ms. of Draft I that he discovered in the P.R.O., together with his convincing argument that this Ms. should be the copy text. Since his transcript has not yet appeared, I have followed O Hehir, without whose edition and commentary this revisionist essay could hardly have been attempted. A copy of the 1642 edition in the University of Illinois at Champaign-Urbana has inked corrections in an early hand; most of them are based on the mss. traditions O Hehir has traced, but it adds “assailes” (line 290), “returnes” (line 296), “By” for “But” (line 322), “power” for “powers” (line 342), “striuing” for “stirring” (line 348), “let” for “tell” (line 351). Line numbers from O Hehir's Draft III. To the early appreciations of the poem could be added John Aubrey's quotations from the “B’ text in A Perambulation of the County of Surrey; Begun 1673. Ended 1692 (1718), I, 2; see also III, 164-66. The place of publication for all references is London unless otherwise stated.

2. The History of England, ed. C. H. Firth (1913), I, 87; B. H. G. Wormald, Clarendon (Cambridge, England, 1951), p. 28, dates the formation of the parliamentarian “party” from the small hours of 23 November 1641.

3. Quoted by O Hehir, p.4.

4. John Rushworth, Historical Collections (1721), III, Appendix, 250. Hereafter cited as “Rushworth.” Volume and page numbers follow this edition, not Rushworth's volume numbers.

5. “Who like a man that standing upon the beach at Dover will not beleeve that the Sea hath any shore towards France, until he bee brought to the top of the Hill. It is not within their view to tell better than the Parliament whether there be danger or not. His Majestie indeed hath the most eminent place to observe what Collection of Clouds are in any quarter of Heaven, and what weather it will be, but his calculations (suppos'd to be made by others from a lower ground) are therefore not so well beleeved” (A Discourse upon the Questions in Debate Between the King and Parliament [1642], p. 15).

6. Clarendon, The History of the Rebellion and Civil Wars in England, ed. W. Dunn Macray (Oxford, 1888), I, 390-91. Hereafter “Clarendon,” citing volume and page numbers of this edition.

7. Rushworth, III, 1335; also Cobbett's Parliamentary History of England (1807), II, 628. Hereafter cited as “Parl. Hist.”

8. Quotations chosen at random from An Exact Collection of All Remonstrances, Declarations, Votes [etc.] (1643), sig. B2^r.

9. Clarendon, I, 2.

10. In the interests of his theme Denham made Windsor castle more ancient than it was, and exaggerated the ambiguities of its origins. Froissart attributed the building to King Arthur, and William Harrison speculated that Arviragus might have founded it even earlier. Camden traced the name to a charter of Edward the Confessor and added “I have read nothing more ancient, concerning Windsore.” Everyone knew, however, that the site had changed from Old to New Windsor and that Edward III “heere built new out of the ground a most strong Castle” (Camden). Stow differed only slightly, recording that Henry I built the new castle with the chapel and town of Windsor one mile from Old Windsor, and that Edward III had substantially enlarged it. William Lambarde, in the most careful investigation, dismissed Froissart and King Arthur in favor of the Saxons. The evidence did not permit him to decide whether Old or New Windsor had been the scene of Edward the Confessor's “disporting.” William I enjoyed Windsor, but Henry II moved the palace from “the Bottome to the Hille,” where Edward III later completely rebuilt it. The three kings buried at Windsor were Henry VI, Edward IV, and Henry VIII; and the three kings born there were Edward III, Henry VI, and Edward VI. I have found no connection between Caesar and Windsor beyond Polydore Vergil's statement that Caesar may have forded the Thames nearby. To Lambarde the castle is “renowned for Strengthe, and esteamed for Pleasure,” whereas to Camden it is “lightsome” and “magnificent.” The topography of Windsor was apparently a traditional example of concordia discors. Most writers regularly think of the Order of the Garter when they discuss Windsor, but the most likely “source” for Denham's remarks on the Order is Camden, not Heylin. Camden has all the details that Heylin mentions (who was copying him), besides a greater emphasis on the physical features of Windsor. He characteristically states, for example, “Let us returne againe from persons to places,” exactly in the fashion that Denham structures his poem. I suspect that the topographical poem derives from Camden more directly than from Drayton or Ben Jonson. References: Froissart, Chronicle, ed. Lord Berners, Tudor Translations (1901), Book I, ch. 100; Harrison, “Description of England” prefixed to Holinshed's Chronicles (1587), p. 196; Camden, Britain (1637), pp. 286-93; Stow, Annales (1601), pp. 194, 205; Lambarde, Dictionarium Angliae Topographicum & Historicum (1730), pp. 414-23. See also John Leland's Itinerary, ed. Thomas Hearne (Oxford, 1770), IX, 103, and Robert R. Tighe and J. E. Davis, Annals of Windsor (1858), I, 1-23.

11. (1640), pp. 21-22.

12. John Stow, Annales (1631), p. 276, misnumbered 269; Roe, in Rushworth, III, 1219; Hakewill, The Liberties of the Subject (1641), pp. 51-72.

13. D'Ewes, Journal, ed. Notestein (New Haven, 1923), pp. 196, 215; see also Rudyard's speech in the Short Parliament, in Rushworth, III, 1130, and George Digby's invocation of Edward III for annual parliaments, Rushworth, III, 1352.

14. O Hehir, p. 190.

15. “The vast burden of the two armies” (I, 342) looms over Clarendon's account of the period. The main facts are recorded in S. R. Gardiner, History of England (1899-1900), Vol. IX, hereafter cited as “Gardiner.”

16. The “Tryumph” to which Denham refers (line 75) and which brought the kings of France and Scotland together as prisoners is probably the great joust held in Smithfield in 1357-58. See Stow's Annales (1631), p. 263.

17. See the index to Gardiner, Vol. X, under “Palatinate.”

18. D'Ewes, ed. Notestein, p. 247.

19. Rushworth, IV, 188^r. Calybute Downing was the principal parliamentary pamphleteer for the cause.

20. Rushworth, IV, 308-10. Also in July, Sir Francis Wortley in his Dutie wrote eight pages of heroic couplets in commiseration with the Queen of Bohemia.

21. Gardiner, IX, 405; C. V. Wedgwood in The Great Rebellion: The King's Peace 1637-1641 (New York, 1956), pp. 436, 448, 457-58, gives evidence that the Manifesto was contemptuously received in some quarters as an obvious excuse for Charles to raise an army for use against his own people.

22. Rushworth, IV, 316, who also prints similar speeches by D'Ewes and Rudyard, pp. 311-15; also Parl. Hist., II, 870-80.

23. Rushworth, IV, 381-82. Printed also as a separate, and much referred to.

24. A Second Speech Made by the Lord Lowden … the 24 of Septemb. 1641 (1641), pp. 4-5, misnumbered 6-7; see also The Lord Lowden his Learned and Wise Speech … September 9 1641 (1641), pp. 3-4 [Thomason E 199 (13 & 14)]. The Calendar of State Papers, Domestic Series 1641-43 [CSPD] contains many letters concerning the Palatinate. See especially a letter from the Earl of Bristol on 28 August, in which he notes that “the whole kingdom take[s] that business so much to heart” (p. 106); also letters of 9 September and 2 October, pp. 120, 130-31. The Earl of Northumberland and the Queen of Bohemia had lost hope of immediate help for the cause by the end of November: see pp. 165, 172. The Manifesto was taken very seriously by the Scottish parliament; also by Robert Baillie in July, in Letters and Journals, ed. David Laing (Edinburgh, 1841), I, 357, 387.

25. Irenodia Cantabrigiensis (Cambridge, 1641), sig. K1^v; also John Cragge, Great Britains Prayers … Together with a Congratulatory for the Entertainment of His Majesty out of Scotland (1641), sigs. A3^v-A4^r.

26. Rushworth, IV, 316. Both Houses agreed on 9 September that soldiers should not be permitted to serve the Elector's enemies abroad. John Nalson, An Impartial Collection of the Great Affairs of State (1683), II, 479-81 (Hereafter “Nalson”). The next year the cause was frequently bruited again, and became the seventeenth of parliament's XIX Propositions on 1 June.

27. The radical Sir John Wray urged on 8 February 1641 “that hee conceived wee might as well meddle with Bishopps now as H. 8 did with Abbeies in his time” (D'Ewes, ed. Notestein, p. 336). It had also been suggested that the money collected for repairing St. Paul's be used to pay off the Scots. Sir Roger Twysden, in August, also lamented Henry VIII's greed. See Archœologia Cantiana, II (1859), 177-78.

28. O Hehir, p. 194.

29. Rushworth, IV, 155. A different version of the speech occurs in the Journals of the House of Lords [LJ], IV, 142. Nalson's version is closer to Rushworth's. Notestein comments on the variations in D'Ewes, pp. 279-80.

30. D'Ewes, ed. Notestein, p. 281.

31. Gardiner, IX, 281.

32. Rushworth, IV, 186; Gardiner, IX, 281.

33. Clarendon, I, 406.

34. Parl. Hist., II, 826-28. Lord Digby's speeches in February, and Rudyard's, were in the same vein. Rushworth, IV, 170-74, 183-84.

35. Parl. Hist., II, 827-28.

36. For a full account of the debates, see William A. Shaw, A History of the English Church During the Civil Wars [etc.] 1640-1660 (1900), I, 29-118. Denham repudiated anger and shame as appropriate responses to the present crisis (lines 161-62), but his concluding fear for “what's too neere” was not exaggerated. The root-and-branch bill, together with a drastic but unpresbyterian scheme for the reorganization of the church, had been adopted by the House in July and rested in committee, to be revived only briefly after the recess. “The fright occasioned by Charles's journey to Scotland drove the matter into the background” (Shaw, I, 99). On p. 65 he suggests that 8 June, when the Lords rejected the “Bishops' Bill,” marked the end, unintentionally, of “all dreams of a moderate Church reform.” Wormald in Clarendon, p. 14, observes that the possibility of a reconciliation in the late summer of 1641 was hindered mainly by ecclesiastical radicalism and fear of the king. The fear was brought to a head by the Scottish visit “and actually operated to restrain the radicalism. … [It] probably in the end led to the dropping altogether of the Root-and-Branch Bill.” In view of evidence to be presented later, Sir Edward Nicholas' letter to the king on 19 September is of great interest. He reported rumors of the clergy favoring popery and hoped that Charles would take strong steps to enforce a “tymely moderac'on” and “to declare yo^r reddines to reforme what shalbe thought amisse in it by yo^r clergy & Parliam^t” (Diary and Correspondence of John Evelyn, to which is Subjoined the Private correspondence between King Charles I and Sir Edward Nicholas, ed. William Bray [1889-91], IV, 72). The king could best show his good faith by appointing thoroughly protestant bishops to the vacant sees.

37. O Hehir, p. 217. He does not discuss the simile in his analysis of Draft I.

38. Gardiner, IX, 418; previous quotation p. 415.

39. Parl. Hist., II, 898; also LJ, IV, 349.

40. Sir Ralph Verney, Verney Papers, ed. John Bruce, for the Camden Society (1845), p. 115. The House attended the king at Whitehall at 4 p.m., he says. The Lords had agreed with the Commons the previous day to petition the king for a delay of fourteen days “if it may stand with the Engagement he has made to that Kingdom; howsoever, that he may stay till Tuesday Night Six of Clock, which they are sure will stand with his Engagement” (Journals of the House of Commons [CJ], II, 244-45; also LJ, IV, 349-50). Charles's measly concession was in response to the Lords' pressure. The Scots' commissioners had been appealed to for support, but they naturally refused.

41. A Sermon Preach't to His Majesty, at the Court of White-hall. Aug. 8 (1641). Everyone was involved in the national sin, although “this wild variety of Sects, and lawlesse independencies” were perhaps most to blame (p. 24). Hall's sermon, which is as portentous as any to which Charles listened while awaiting execution, suggests that the feeling at court was nearing despair.

42. Nalson, II, 437.

43. On the two goodbyes, see The Parliamentary or Constitutional History of England (1753), IX, 476: “Then the King took his Leave a second Time of the Parliament, telling them ‘That he hoped to use good Expedition in disbanding of both Armies, and would make all Haste he could to return before Michaelmas.’” Also Parl. Hist., 900; The Diurnall Occurrences, or Dayly Proceedings of … Parliament (1641), 331, 336; LJ, 349, 357. Accounts vary about the time at which Charles left London.

44. Sir Thomas Roe his Speech in Parliament (1641), p. 5. See also, e.g., Lewes Roberts, The Treasure of Traffike (1641) and The Humble Petition of Divers Citizens of London, 24 April, in Rushworth, IV, 233-34. Robinson said, p. 17, that “The decay of trade is in everybodyes mouth” and both wealth and safety were thereby declining.

45. I do not insist upon it, but this is the most likely meaning of the line “Search not his bottome, but behould his shore” (172), which appears to be a version of the thought expressed in the following passage: “What Glass hath this unhappy divided Kingdom from his Majesty's Presence and Audience to contemplate the fair and ravishing Form of his Royal Intentions in, but in the clear and diaphanous Administration of his Justice? And what do these traiterous and illegal Practices aim at, but … to multiply, as by a Magick Glass, the Royal Dispensation of his Favours, into the ugly and deformed Visage of their Suppression of the Liberties [etc.] of his Loyal Subjects” (Captain Audley Mervin on 4 March 1641, in Rushworth, IV, 216). The exactly opposite thought is expressed a little later in the poem: “The Streame is so transparent pure & Cleare / That had the selfe enamoured youth gaz'd here, / So fatally deceav'd, he had not beene, / While he the bottome, not his face had seene” (219-22). Here Denham is arguing that had the king's true intentions been perceived there would have been no cause for alarm about them. The self-enamored youth can see only the intentions and desires written on his own face. Wise nature made this harmony, but the ignorant cannot perceive it.

46. O Hehir, p. 172, his italics. Earl R. Wasserman's analysis of concordia discors in his chapters on Denham and Pope in The Subtler Language (Baltimore, 1959) is also valuable, and his emphasis on perfect political balance remains correct.

47. LJ, IV, 459; also in Rushworth, IV, 453-54, and published as a separate. I cannot resist the speculation that Lenthall had seen Coopers Hill, since he bases the concord so firmly in Charles's character. Lenthall was also a friend and neighbor of Falkland's at Burford and hence in touch with the Great Tew circle, which also included Waller.

48. Eucharistica Oxoniensia (Oxford, 1641), sig. al^r-v. See also Irenodia Cantabrigiensis, already cited, and John Bond, King Charles his Welcome Home (1641). The longest account of Charles's reception, Ovatio Carolina, is printed in Somers Tracts, ed. Sir Walter Scott (1810), IV, 137-51, and in Harleian Miscellany (1810), Vol. V. Provincial welcomes are recorded in Five Most Noble Speeches Spoken to His Majestie Returning out of Scotland (1641), Thomason E 199 (32). The most extravagant and metaphorical celebration of the treaty was John Thornborough's A Discourse Shewing the Great Happinesse, that Hath and May still Accrue to his Majesties Kingdomes of England and Scotland, by Re-uniting them into one Great Britain (1641). Thornborough himself, however, had died in July at the age of ninety, and his tract (which went into three editions) was merely a slightly updated reprint of two pamphlets he had written in 1604 and 1605. It probably did not appear before November.

49. Both Wasserman and O Hehir feel the passage is unsatisfactory, and it is probably another case of Denham seeing more clearly with his mind than with his eye. The uniting of vast extremes, effected by the river, makes the hill an intrinsically Scottish mountain, not a Surrey hillock, with which “our [i.e. English] angry supercilious Lords” are compared. Later in the poem Denham reveals more anti-Scots bias, and his concern with their treatment of the king.

50. Dr. Derek M. Hirst, after one glance at the context, identified the supercilious lords when I was investigating a far less likely possibility. The Grand Remonstrance was stuffed with notices of their iniquities; see especially Rushworth, IV, 445: “Multitudes were called to the Council-Table, who were tired with long Attendances there for refusing illegal Payments. The Prisons were filled with their Commitments: Many of the Sheriffs summoned into the Star-Chamber; and some imprisoned for not being quick enough in levying the Ship-Money, the People languished under Grief and Fear, no visible Hope being left but in Desperation.” For an actual illustration of their surliness see Rushworth, III, 1182. M. D. Gordon, “The Collection of Ship-Money in the Reign of Charles I,” Trans. Royal Hist. Soc., Third Series, 4 (1910), 141-62, and Cora L. Scofield, A Study of the Court of Star Chamber (Chicago, 1900) remain useful accounts of the lords' activities, and Henry E. I. Phillips, “The Last Years of the Court of Star Chamber 1630-41.” TRHS, Fourth Series, 21 (1939), 103-31, links the attack on the court to “the general movement against the episcopacy.”

51. See O Hehir's excellent paragraph on the “poeticke sight,” p. 202.

52. O Hehir, pp. 203-06.

53. Ibid., p. 211.

54. Ibid., p. 204.

55. O Hehir argues, pp. 205-06, 224, that because the chase is not an allegory but a true hunt, the killing of the stag is more innocent and happy than the pursuit of liberty by tyranny; also that Charles's dooming of Strafford was more innocent than the barons' action “because its intention was Strafford's intention, to reestablish a ‘blessed agreement’ between the King and his subjects.” The stag hunt is an allegory and there is a much simpler explanation of the lines. For similar objections, and others, see Herbert Berry's review of O Hehir in Ren Q, 24 (1971), 416-17.

56. The Master of Game, ed. William A. and F. Baillie-Grohman (1904), pp. 23, 201; [Juliana Berners], The Gentlemans Academie, or, the Booke of S. Albans (1595), p. 35. “Rous'd” (line 246) was the correct technical term for breaking or starting a stag, and the river to which a hart fled was called “the soil.” A stag was sometimes distinguished from a hart as a younger beast, four or five years old. All royal forests existed solely for the pleasure of kings, “to put away from them the remembrance of their laboursome toyle.” See John Manwood, preface to A Treatise of the Lawes of the Forest (1615); and also p. 33^r for the king's “burden of cares in matters of commonweale.” This explains how Charles came to be hunting “when greate affaires / Give leave to slacken & unbend his Cares” (243-44). Turbervile cites Pliny to the effect that a hart will prefer to yield to a man rather than the hounds, and moralizes one disastrous hunt: “This example may serue as a mirrour to al Princes and Potestates, yea and generally to all estates, that they brydle their mindes from proferyng of vndeserued iniuries, and do not constrayne the simple sakelesse man to stand in his owne defence … but as by all Fables some good moralitie may be gathered, so by all Histories and examples, some good allegorie and comparison may be made.” Turbervile's Booke of Hunting 1576 (Oxford, 1908), p. 125.

57. E.g. Justice Hutton's argument in Hampden's case: the king “governeth his People by Power, not only Royal, but also Politick: If his Power over them were only Royal, then he might change the Laws of his Realm.” Croke countered by saying that the writ was “not to be maintained by any Prerogative, or Power Royal, nor allegation of Necessity or Danger” (Rushworth, III, Appendix, 164, 181; see also p. 171). Sir John Holland at the beginning of the Long Parliament acknowledged that they had been summoned “by the Royal Power” but complained of “the late Inundations of the Prerogative Royal, which have broken out, and almost overturned all our Liberties, even those which have been best and strongest fortified, the Grand Charter it self” (Rushworth, IV, 27-28). It was extremely common to talk about arbitrary power in the abstract, because nobody wished to refer to the king's personal tyranny.

58. Falkland, accusing Finch, stated that he had “pursued his hatred to this fountain of justice, by corrupting the streams of it, the laws; and perverting the conduit pipes, the judges” (Parl. Hist., II, 695; also in Rushworth, IV, 139). Cf. William Smith in October 1641: “The Law [would fix the king to his crown] if it might runne in the free current of its purity, without being poysoned by the venemous spirits of ill-affected dispositions” (Diurnall Occurrences, p. 398). Also Bagshaw in Nov. 1640: “if the Stream of Justice be by Unrighteousness turned into Gall and Wormwood … those which drink of those Brooks must needs dye and perish” (Rushworth, IV, 26). A similar analogy occurs in the prosecution of Strafford (Rushworth, The Tryal of Thomas Earl of Strafford [1680], p. 722), and was used by Strafford himself, p. 650, and by St. John, p. 679. I think it highly probable that Strafford's brave death colored Denham's portrayal of the stag's last stand, but the stag cannot be Strafford, however, without compromising both Charles and the balance of the poem. Since Strafford was the greatest example of arbitrary power, readers can still insist on his presence behind the episode, but only if they concede that Denham was making a “parliamentary” statement by approving of his death. Such a combination of attitudes was quite possible to someone like Hyde in the autumn of 1641. The lengthening of the stag hunt in the subsequent revision suggests that Denham was personifying the abstraction rather than the man.

59. The fundamental difficulty in allegorizing the details of the stag hunt is that we have no means of knowing if a strict chronological scheme is operating and, if so, where it begins historically. As Dr. Hirst again points out, it is hard to see the Lords in the Short Parliament as shunning either Charles or Strafford (although the appeal to parliament for help failed), and easier to see the friends who “from him flye” as fugitives like Finch and Windebanck, and those who “chase him from thence” as the monopolists and courtiers who saved themselves by turning on their old masters. The unquenchable thirst for blood of “those lesser beasts” may suggest the craving for further constitutional reforms. In any case, the rapidity with which arbitrary government had been undone was regarded even by the parliamentarians as no less than a miracle.

60. Rushworth, IV, 753.

61. O Hehir, p. 206. Denham's tone is echoed by Thomas Wiseman writing to Sir John Penington on 26 August: “For my part, all that I shall say of them [the Scots] is, they have carried away our money, and left us a disjointed and distempered kingdom; and whether the remedy they have given it be not worse than the disease they found it in, I am yet to be satisfied” (CSPD 1641-43, p. 105).

62. Rushworth, III, 1227.

63. Rushworth, IV, 333; cf. his speech against the Court of York which had “so prodigiously broken down the Banks of the first Channel in which it ran, as it hath overwhelm'd that Country under the Sea of Arbitrary Power, and involved the People in a Labyrinth of Distemper, Oppression and Poverty.” Rushworth, III, 1336. Also Clarendon, I, 372.

64. Rushworth, III, Appendix, 257.

65. Rushworth, Tryal (1680), p. 182.

66. Professor Carolyn A. Edie generously sent me a copy of two notes she had taken at the Yale Center for Parliamentary History. In The Massachusetts Historical Society's copy of The True Relation newsletter, Coke is reported as saying on 3 April 1628 “in this poynt the prerogative is like a river, without which men cannot like [live?], but if it swell too high it may loose its own channell.” In another account of what was probably the same speech, though dated 2 April, Harleian Ms. 1601 records “the prerogative of the Kinge like a river but if a river swell you will hardly find a channel.” See also Sir Thomas Barrington's speech in Speeches and Passages of this Great and Happy Parliament (1641), p. 501, and Sir John Holland, quoted in note 57.

67. “Then like a Lover he forsakes his shores,
    Whose stay with iealous eyes his spouse implores,
    Till with a parting kisse he saves hir teares,
    And promising returne secures her feares.”

    (192-96)

    Parliament as the spouse of the king was one of the most traditional of images, and is implied but not stated in the longer simile in Draft I.

68. O Hehir, pp. 181-84.

69. Eucharistica Oxoniensia, sig. à1^v.

70. Nalson, II, 425.

71. B. M. Harleian Ms. 163, fol. 425^v. Important debates about the custos regni took place on 28-29 July and 5-6 August. See CJ, II, 227, 230, 238, 240; also Parl. Hist., II, 891-93, 897-98, and Sir John Holland's diary, Bodleian Ms. Rawl. D. 1099, fol. 177, 179^v, 181-82. For the judges' quandary, see Nalson, II, 430.

72. X, 28.

73. X, 8-9.

74. Evelyn, ed. Bray, IV, 52, and Clarendon, I, 380, 391, 395. See also Nicholas's letter to the Earl of Arundel, 21 August, in The Nicholas Papers, ed. George F. Warner, for the Camden Society (1886), I, 22.

75. However, delays in making the final payments caused the English commissioners in Edinburgh some concern, since the Scots refused to disband their army completely without them. Sir Philip Stapleton and John Hampden wrote to Pym on 13 September asking for immediate action. See The True Copy of a Letter Sent from Thomas Earle of Arundell. … Whereunto is Added the Coppy of Another Letter Sent to Mr. Pym from the Committee in Scotland, Sep. 13 1641 (1641). Nicholas told the king on 9 September that four regiments remained to be disbanded (IV, 85), and on 29th he reported to Penington that two remained (CSPD, 1641-43, p. 125).

76. The text is in Gardiner, The Constitutional Documents of the Puritan Revolution 1625-1660, 3rd ed. (Oxford, 1958), pp. 192-95.

77. Owen Manning and William Bray, The History and Antiquities of the County of Surrey (1804), I, xii-xiii.

78. Clarendon, I, 375.

79. Evelyn, ed. Bray, IV, 60. The villagers' grievances had been exacerbated by further recent enclosures and deer-slaughtering had occurred. In May some of the more moderate parishioners “who have a respect as well to his Majesty's right as to their own,” had petitioned the Earl of Holland for redress (CSPD 1641-43, pp. 318-19).

80. Evelyn, ed. Bray, IV, 64. Besides Littleton, the committee consisted of the Chief Justice of the Common Pleas (Sir John Banks), the Attorney-General (Sir Edward Herbert), Sir Arthur Manwaring, and Nicholas himself.

81. CJ, II, 282.

82. Manning and Bray, I, xiii, who incorrectly dated the writ 17 September. See note b for Denham. D'Ewes reported that the deer had been killed “under pretence of the late statute which passed for the limitation of … Forrests.” He added “Divers spoke to it” (Harl. Ms. 164, fol. 96^v). The correct date of the writ is given in the document cited in note 90.

83. LJ, IV, 406-07.

84. CJ, II, 297.

85. LJ, IV, 434.

86. LJ, IV, 473, 503-04.

87. Manning and Bray, I, xiii.

88. LJ, IV, 506, 547. For other forest riots, see LJ, 595, 602, 608, 652.

89. LJ, IX, 622. An account of all these proceedings is to be found in Tighe's and Davis's Annals of Windsor, II, 157-62. Frederic Turner's account (in Egham, Surrey: A History of the Parish under Church and Crown [Egham, 1926], pp. 150-54) is misdated and garbled, but he states that the Forest Commission would have met at Egham on 25 October if the Earl of Holland had not absented himself. I suspect that Turner had read at least one document that I was unable to find in the Public Record Office.

90. Forresta de Windsor, in Com. Surrey (1646), p. 12. The B.M. call number for this pamphlet, which prints the commission's judgment, is 8122.b.131.

91. Nalson, II, 625. On p. 499 he noted of the October disturbances that the rioters were pretending that the deer were not within the bounds of the forest. See also LJ, IV, 406.

92. Nicholas Papers, ed. Warner, I, 38-39.

93. Ibid., p. 40. On 11 September Porter continued (p. 45): “there is nothing of newes, but one and the same delaye, to bring the King to bee wearie of stayeing here and soe to yeld to all theye desier (which hee is most apt to doo).”

94. Ibid., p. 41. The elder Vane in Edinburgh reported ironically to Sir Thomas Roe on 5 September that “Yesterday his Majesty in his wisdom conceived a paper concerning [the nominating of officers of state] which he sent to the Parliament, and has thereby given them great satisfaction” (CSPD 1641-43, p. 116). From a Scottish point of view the concessions were gained with great difficulty. See Baillie's Letters and Journals (Edinburgh, 1841), I, 389-90. On the 16th when Charles completed his capitulation (Acts of the Parliament of Scotland, V, 354-55) the members of the Scottish Parliament “all arrose and boued themselves to the ground.” Sir James Balfour, Historical Works (Edinburgh, 1824), III, 65. Sir Patrick Wemyss wrote a full account of Charles's misery during the week of 18-25 September, when it might appear that Charles knew he had made a grave mistake: “What will be the event of these things God knows; for there was never King so much insulted over. It would pity any man's heart to see how he looks; for he is never at quiet amongst them, and glad he is, when he sees any man that he thinks loves him; yet he is seeming merry at meat.” A Collection of Original Letters and Papers, Concerning the Affairs of England 1641-1660, ed. Thomas Carte (1739), I, 4.

95. “Private letters confirm all this, but they add that the Scots, not content with all that the king has granted them ask that he shall not in future distribute the offices of the crown to any individual before the kingdom has supplied his Majesty with information about the abilities and merits of the persons to whom he proposes to give them. This demand is certainly an indication that even in the midst of all these official signs of affection they do not lose hold of the intention of encroaching more and more upon the royal authority. I am advised that his Majesty is disposed to gratify them even over such an important request, with the sole object of securing the affections of that nation, and so to deprive the English of the hope of enjoying their efficacious assistance any longer” (CSPV 1640-42, p. 221). Ten days must be subtracted from the date of the ambassador's letter to get the date used in England. On 21 September Webbe wrote (Nicholas Papers, I, 49) “others swore y^e King could not be denied finally, if his Majesty would propose it like a man and stand uppon it. And by y^e way, these swearers say that y^e King might carry everything, if he did not undoe himselfe by yealding.” Many lords had “intreated him to be constant, or at least but to leave them to themselfes and they would carry y^e businesse in despite of the opposers.”

96. Evelyn, ed. Bray, IV, 70-71. Letter dated 18 September.

97. Clarendon, I, 415.

98. Falkland had made the analogy in his speech against Finch: “He practised the annihilating of Ancient and Notorious Perambulations of particular Forests, the better to prepare himself to annihilate the Ancient, and Notorious Perambulations of the whole Kingdom, the Meets and Bounders between the Liberties of the Subject, and Sovereign Power” (Rushworth, IV, 140). The connection is so obvious that Denham could not have missed it.

99. Sions Joy (1641), p. 25. Marshall's sermon was A Peace-Offering to God (1641). J. A. R. Marriott, The Life and Times of Lucius Cary, 2nd ed. (1908), p. 213, notes “It was this growing confidence in the King's good faith which Pym set himself steadfastly to combat.” The many historians who believe that Pym was justified in seeking further guarantees can easily discount my royalism here. I am reacting principally to the sermons, which I dislike.

100. Clarendon, I, 382.

101. Ibid., I, 368.

102. The History of the Parliament of England (Oxford, 1854), pp. 112-21.

103. Clarendon, p. 18.

104. See Derek M. Hirst, “The Defection of Sir Edward Dering, 1640-41,” The Historical Journal, 15 (1972), 193-208, in which he attributes Dering's change in large part to the increasing disturbances in the county during the summer. William Sanderson, A Compleat History of the Life and Raigne of King Charles (1658), p. 431, compares the rioting and freedom of the people during the king's absence in Scotland to “The late Comedy, The World turn'd up side down.”

105. Mary Frear Keeler, The Long Parliament, 1640-1641 (Philadelphia, 1954), p. 12. Valerie Pearl, London and the Outbreak of the Puritan Revolution (Oxford, 1961), p. 122, discovers that the City government “was becoming openly sympathetic to the crown” in August and September.

106. Clarendon, p. 18.

107. The phrase is Perez Zagorin's in The Court and the Country (1969), p. 331. Zagorin's account of events in London during 1641 is excellent, and I have consulted it frequently. I do not know if the phrase “parliamentary royalism” was used earlier than in John L. Sanford's Studies and Illustrations of the Great Rebellion (1858).

108. The Answer, which Corinne Comstock Weston (in Eng. Hist. Rev., 75 [1960], 426-43) has shown to be influential in the debate on the mixed monarchy, is the statement that comes closest to making Denham's position official, although it goes further in emphasizing the balance between the three estates: “… the Balance hangs even between the three Estates, and they run joyntly on in their proper Chanell (begetting Verdure and Fertility in the Meadows on both sides) and the overflowing of either on either side raise no deluge or Inundation” (1642 ed., p. 18). I have discussed the development of Denham's royalism, apparent in his somewhat later drama The Sophy, in “Examples are best Precepts,” Critical Inquiry, I (1974), 273-90.

109. The Poetical Works of John Denham, ed. Theodore H. Banks (New Haven, 1928), p. 157.

110. Denham was listed as a defense witness from 23-29 March (Harmony from Discords, p. 28), but his name appears in Rushworth's transcript only on the fifth day of the trial, 26 March, when Strafford defended his care in preserving his own authority as Deputy and that of his council. Strafford said he would quote King James's instructions and produce a legal opinion: “I desire a Book may be read, a Book in the hands of Mr. Denham, containing certain Answers given by the Lord Chichester [former Deputy], to certain Complaints made against the State, and written with Mr. Baron Denham's own hand, which on debate, was Resolved not to be read, being written only for a private Remembrance.” Rushworth, Tryal (1680), p. 179.

111. Denham, ed. Banks, p. 153.

112. Keeler, pp. 65-66.

113. Letter quoted in Donald Nicholas, Mr. Secretary Nicholas (1955), p. 144. On 7 October, as Derek Hirst informs me from Egerton 2533, f. 243, Waller was busy helping to disband the Carlisle garrison.

114. None of the copies of the 1645 editions of Poems (and the unauthorized Workes) that I have seen contains the quotation from Horace. It was apparently added for the second edition in 1664, although O Hehir has printed it as if it derived from his 1645 copy-text.

115. See note 81. Tighe's statement in Annals of Windsor, II, 158, that Thomas Waller was appointed is incorrect. He had been elected for New Windsor, but was disqualified, and Edmund Waller was the only man of that name sitting in the House.

116. The matter was first raised and a conference requested on 19-20 July. The Commons brought a charge against Jones, which, on 19 November, the Lords ordered to be read on 10 December. He appeared on that day and was given time to reply. On 21 December he pleaded Not Guilty to the charge “in such Manner and Form as therein is expressed.” On 31 January 1642 he was ordered not to leave the country, but after arrangements for further hearings the impeachment was dropped. See LJ, IV, 319, 321, 447, 469-70, 472, 485, 554, 586; Vol. V, 6, 30, 53, 57.

117. O Hehir, Harmony from Discords, pp. 21, 26. This essay began as a diversion while I held a John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation fellowship in 1969-70, and an Overseas fellowship at Churchill College, Cambridge; it was completed with the aid of a grant from the American Council of Learned Societies in the summer of 1973. I am deeply indebted to all three foundations. The paper has profited from the careful scrutiny of Professors Alan Roper and Janel Mueller, and from criticisms it received in seminars at the University of California at San Diego, at the Clark Library, and at the University of Chicago. I am grateful, as usual, to the encouragement of Mr. Quentin Skinner and Professor J. G. A. Pocock, and to a very illuminating letter from Mr. M. J. Mendle about politics in London during the summer of 1641. My notes referring to Dr. Derek Hirst reflect my debt and thanks to him very inadequately. He has done his best to make an historian out of me, and the information he has provided would fill a book. Earl R. Wasserman was the True Founder of the contemporary interest in Coopers Hill, and of my own.