Introduction

This Introduction highlights the poets’ links with each other and with Hobbes, and their flexible allegiances. It maps out the background to their mutually-informing ideas of sovereignty. Although these ideas were shaped by traditional absolutism, they took an unusual and comparatively secular view of sovereignty as an artificial construct. This view was shaped by traditions of Tacitism, neostoicism, and scepticism, and was sharpened immediately following the civil wars by the political debates of the Cavendish circle in Paris and the Engagement controversy in England. In all these respects, the poets’ views evolved through the influence of, but also a critical dialogue with, Thomas Hobbes. Their artificial view of sovereignty relied on the literary imagination to forge and declare political obligations. The Introduction concludes by reflecting on the methods involved in studying the fashioning of political ideas in poetry.

Cowley

Chapter 4 challenges established interpretations of Cowley as a (crypto-)royalist with a revisionist reading of his Poems (1656), particularly the Pindarique Odes and Davideis, as his conscious attempt to shape a poetic identity in Cromwellian England. These texts can be shown to draw on absolutist and defactoist arguments for obeying the Protectorate. The chapter considers Cowley’s complex engagement with Hobbes, tempered by his cautious scepticism, and his more traditionally absolutist concern with the moral constraints that distinguish legitimate sovereignty from tyranny. Cowley shares with Davenant an interest in the artificial nature of sovereignty, and the psychological drivers of conflict between humans. But his high view of absolute obedience is deeply shaped by a neostoic emphasis on concepts of apatheia and constancy, scepticism and self-preservation.

Davenant and the Protectorate

Chapter 5 presents a new account of Davenant’s involvement, alongside Waller, in the poetic and political culture of the Cromwellian Protectorate. It charts how Waller and Davenant allied with the courtly, civilian faction in the Protectorate, yet sought to persuade their patrons of the value of a more absolutist view of Cromwellian power. New readings of Waller’s A Panegyrick upon my Lord Protector, and Davenant’s drama, The First Days Entertainment at Rutland-House, show how these texts drew on sovereignty arguments, informed by Hobbes. Both poets drew increasingly on a language of civility to unite aristocratic power with artificial and absolute sovereignty. The final section focuses on Davenant’s appeal to the leading Cromwellian courtier Roger Boyle, Lord Broghill, identifying for the first time how close Davenant came to endorsing a Cromwellian monarchy.

Conclusion

The Conclusion briefly narrates the decline of the model for political poetry explored in this book, with the deaths of Davenant and Cowley, Charles II’s short-lived experiment with prerogative toleration in 1672, and the political divergence of Dryden and Marvell. It then draws together the forms of sovereignty explored in this book. First, it reflects on the case for reading the poets’ views as secularizing, to the limited extent that they emphasize anti-clerical erastianism. And second, it considers the flexible yet absolute form of artificial sovereignty imagined through poetic imagination.

Davenant

Chapter 1 traces the political views recorded in Davenant’s Preface to Gondibert (1650) and Gondibert (1651). At this time, Davenant loosened his ties with royalism, and imagined a more flexible and artificial form of sovereignty. This view was informed by Tacitism, especially by Lipsius, but the chapter particularly maps out the common ground between Davenant and Hobbes, who both attest to reading each others’ work at this time. The chapter notes Davenant’s views on religion (described by John Aubrey as ‘ingeniose Quakerisme’), on vainglory and the psychological causes of conflict, and on sovereignty, which Davenant founded on force (an argument current in the Engagement controversy), and on the power of poetry to constrain the imagination. Although Gondibert itself peters out inconclusively, the chapter concludes by highlighting its imaginative afterlife among satirists, including John Denham and Andrew Marvell.

Restoration

Whereas most royalist panegyrists of the Restoration (including the penitent Cowley) reviled the ideological currents of the 1650s, Davenant, Waller, and their younger protégé Dryden continued to apply arguments from self-interest and the artificiality and contingency of sovereignty. They magnified Charles II’s exercise of clemency as the mark which betokened his sovereignty, while overriding church and parliament to ensure the reconciliation of ex-Cromwellians with the new regime. The second half of the chapter focuses on Dryden and Orrery’s heroic drama. It presents a new account of their engagement with Hobbes, and illustrates their precarious and artificial vision of sovereignty. The chapter challenges straightforwardly royalist readings of the heroic drama to show how the genre offered warnings and criticism of the regime—though this ultimately led Dryden to repudiate the sceptical model of sovereignty in his iconographical masterpiece of sacred kingship, The Conquest of Granada.

Cavendish

Chapter 3 challenges the conventional understanding of Margaret Cavendish as a royalist, by focusing on her less-studied works of the early 1650s, when absolutist arguments were being pressed (by Davenant and others) in service of more flexible forms of allegiance. The chapter maps and contextualizes Cavendish’s common ground with Hobbes, but especially the suggestively close relationship between her political writings and those of her husband, Newcastle. It compares the critique of cavalier tropes in Cavendish’s poetry with Marvell’s, before moving on to unravel the complex political theory of Cavendish’s first essay collection, The Worlds Olio. Cavendish takes a highly artificial view of sovereignty as a psychological phenomenon stimulated by the sensory experience of ceremony. This belief exists in complex tension with a more ruthlessly defactoist view of sovereignty based on coercive force.

Marvell

Chapter 2 revisits the question of Marvell’s place in the Engagement controversy, to map his ambivalent use of arguments from sovereignty. It contextualizes the mode of cavaliering activism celebrated in several of Marvell’s poems within contemporary republican and Engager challenges to the royalist doctrine of passive obedience. This includes a rapprochement with, and appropriation of, Davenant. This context provides the basis for, first, a new reading of Marvell’s ‘Horatian Ode’ in comparison with the Engagers Marchamont Nedham and Anthony Ascham; and, second, a survey of Marvell’s poetic engagements with Davenant, and their political implications, in the 1650s poems ‘Tom May’s Death’, ‘Upon Appleton House’, and ‘Music’s Empire’. Marvell’s habitual emphasis on modest and participatory government is strategically suspended when he uses defactoist and absolutist arguments to magnify the personal authority of Oliver Cromwell.