In early modern England, horses were the consummate material and symbolic totems of international land conflict. A name given to one of the English Civil War factions, Cavaliers, is itself a name referring to horsemanship. Indeed, the soubriquet points pejoratively to a particular kind of knight-like “swash-buckler on the king’s side who hailed the prospect of war” (OED a.n.3). Perhaps, although the crucial impact of the warhorse on the populace of the period can best be seen in women who were uninvolved in the fighting per se. Elizabeth Dashwood’s father, for instance, had “done well out of the war, selling saddles to both king and parliament.”1 Commerce, here, transcends ideology. Both sides of the conflict require equine equipment. Dashwood’s daughter enjoys a lavish, leisurely lifestyle, in which she is idle enough to record a substantial diary because her father exploits the warring parties’ costly, frantic involvement in horse management. Another female figure of the period, Joyce Jeffreys, is similarly disengaged from participation in the intellectual and military tumults of the time but also gains financially from the increase in demand for horses. R. G. Griffiths brings the written legacy of Jeffreys’s accounts to the attention of scholars. He makes a case for the seventeenth-century spinster’s “consideration for animals” and, particularly, for her attentive devotion to her horses’ health.2 Griffiths also notes that Jeffreys listed “Horse-locks” in inventories of her possessions. The biographer speculates if these are designed to shackle the horses’ feet, “to prevent their running away,” or whether, instead, they are “hanging locks such as padlocks” to prevent theft. Whichever interpretation is favored, the emphasis firmly moves from Jeffreys’s sentimentalized “affection” to her commercial interests: this gentlewoman is revealed to have made plenty of money out of the increased turnover in horses that civil conflict engendered.
The personal contexts of Dashwood and Jeffreys are informed by the upturning curve of demand for material horse accoutrements. It is, however, culturally produced representations of the animal in war that are addressed in this chapter. It is contended that the metaphorical potential of the horse reaches its zenith as it is appropriated by the differing factions that produce civil war texts. The fully fledged climax of equine interventions in cultures arrives in the 1640s and 1650s. This chapter features three sections, the first two of which discuss the build-up to this apotheosis of horse allusion. The first section accounts for the jarring potential for the warhorse. Disparate, pre-1630s works are discussed. Contributions by Jonson, Peacham, and Rubens all betray the artificiality of equine appearances in culture. The animal is self-consciously presented as a notional beast, an unreal entity that is fit to be manipulated by interested parties. There is also, I insist, a theme of squaring-up in other superficially innocuous representations of the horse in culture of this period. A confrontational edge scores across these works, rendering impossible the illusion of harmony in toy-like and celebratory assertions of man’s dominant relationship with the horse. The second and third sections grapple with a supposed binary: that between 1630s peace and 1640s war. Representations of the horse challenge the semiotic differences that inform our perception of these two periods because the horse is seen, in 1630s texts, to body forth the impression that England is a realm that suffers from mounting interior strife. In a sense, the horse is less visual in 1630s works. The second section examines the mounting instances when the language of horse management becomes confused with the language of management of other species, particularly avian and human. Plays and a science fiction narrative conspire to complicate horse imagery. The gathering impression is that the horse cannot now be so easily categorized; it becomes symbolic of the identity crisis that English subjects were experiencing: to shelve the self within a category of willing subject of the state or of rebellious instrument of change. The third section concentrates on the 1640s and 1650s, a time when the horse becomes much more visible in contemporary culture. Now, horses become ostentatiously involved with the competing rhetorics of conflict. Cultural artefacts that involve equine tropes include Irish coins, loquacious beasts in poetic dialogues, and politically charged ballads. Previously pent-up emotions and prejudices erupt in Civil War literature. The horse is a key vehicle of expression for many of these engagements with the conflict—the culturally assembled quadruped is energized by the outbreak of hostilities. At first, it is a symbol of Royalist determination, a wished-for mechanism of harnessed agency. Later, the horse is appropriated more fulsomely by Parliamentary egalitarian movements. It functions as a trope of liberalizing potential, only to later rescind into its more familiar role as a register of bridled detention. In the conclusion, an equine print of the Restoration is read with an Alan Sinfield-inspired reading of the tale that it does not tell. In relation to this, I suggest that a reading of representations of the horse causes us to question the differences between the consciousness of peace and the consciousness of war. Having passed through the Civil War climax of warring-horse constructions, we are now so used to seeing the animals as tools of conflict that any culturally configured beast no longer retains a capacity to dictate just one particular meaning.
“Hardnesse of Draughte”: The Unreality of Peaceable Equine Representations
The contention of this section is that the horse is, generally, presented as a symbol of order and peace in post-Armada and pre-1630s culture but that the evidently unnaturalistic configurations of the beast reveals its role as a cipher for fractious, political diffidence. In his 1577 book on rhetoric, The Garden of Eloquence, Henry Peacham the Elder writes candidly of the limitations of his work. He addresses concerns about accuracy and presentation, assuring the readers that “the nexte edition . . . shall come forth more perfect and trimly pullished.”3 This is striking because it attests to a diffidence that is lacking in the faith that Peacham shows in another aspect of human endeavor: the control of animals. “God of his goodnesse,” he asserts, “hath made man able not onlye to gouerne himself . . . but also to subdue the monstrous beastes to his will.”4 Privileged through gender and species division, the human male is afforded personal autonomy and dominion over other, less independent animals. Peacham does not specify any particular “beastes.” Yet the most ubiquitous symbol of early modern, masculinist dominance over the animal was the domesticated horse. Such authority is exclusively masculine in Peacham’s formulation. In the cited passage, four words—“his,” “man,” “himselfe,” and, again, “his”—underscore female exclusion from Peacham’s interspecies power distribution complex. Thus, although Peacham is self-conscious about the frailties of its presentation, he is boundlessly arrogant about the androcentric nature of subjection discourses in the contemporary, exterior world. The necessity of repeating masculinist words undercuts this suave confidence in gendered privileges. Peacham is not self-conscious about the assumptions of male hegemony that are implicit in his work. But the intrinsic male-centeredness of the culture and language of animal domestication is revealed through this repetition of gendered pronouns.
Peacham the Elder pays tribute to God because He has decided to allow man to make decisions for himself and also for animals. Peacham’s son, Henry Peacham the Younger, seeks to control animals through an artificial mode of appropriation and control: drawing. In The Art of Drawing (1606), Peacham the Younger complains that subjecting the horse to control through the pen is not so easy. “For hardnesse of draughte,” he complains, “I know not anie one beast maye bee compared to the horse.”5 The subject—the artistic manipulation of horses—is too large and multifaceted, Peacham insists, for the format of the printed, gentleman’s manual. He cannot comprehensively cover all of the horse’s traits—“doing the Coruetto [the curvet, spring-like equine jumping], leaping, &tc.”6 Nor can he account for all of his knowledge, he claims: “what I haue omitted it is not through Ignorance, but because I would not trouble thee a learner (as I imagine).”7 Rather than making esoteric tricks accessible, he merely offers a dumbed-down guide to the simpler components of his art. Peacham the Elder’s text indicates the unnaturalness of linguistic configurations of deity-man-creature relations by stressing very firmly the exclusive maleness of the necessary wordings; Peacham the Younger stresses the possible injustice of human dominion over beasts by showcasing the difficulties of rendering their form accurately on paper. The horse is tamed by the artist in an unfair fight that is defined by the man’s possession of and the animal’s lack of the power to artistically shape the subjected other.
An engagement with Peacham the Younger’s discussion of drawing horses brings to light a simple paradox: to make horses look realistic, they have to be drawn in an artificial, non-naturalistic manner. Lacking the critical language of perception awareness, Peacham writes of the necessity of “foreshortning”—“when by art the whole is concluded into one part, which onely appeareth to the sight.”8 For the drawn horse to be believable in its visual construction, then, much of the animal must be rendered invisible. There is a confrontational edge to Peacham’s subject matter. He writes about drawing a horse “with his brest and head looking full in my face.”9 It is a confrontation between beast and man, one in which the artist can win through his manipulation of the pen: “I must of necessity fore-shorten him behinde.”10 Drawing the horse is a leisure pursuit facilitated through an artistic version of what Peacham the Elder maintains is a God-given ability for men to “subdue the monstrous beastes to his will.” To successfully win the battle, to reproduce the servile animal with a pen, the artist must square-up to horses that force such “hardnesse of draught.” And when Peacham writes of horses’ “hardnesse of draughte,” his chosen words can ironically refer to the work rate of the animal, as it feverishly tugs the plough to generate sustenance for its master. The animal performs humans’ work, “drawing” for us so that we will have the leisure time to “draw” it. The Peachams’ works on rhetoric and on drawing, seemingly, discuss bourgeois modes of improvement for a relaxed reader. But conflict often lurks beneath the surface. This theme of the struggle for artistic control over a horse can be seen to be politically ominous in numerous anecdotes and cultural products of this period. Indeed, the Peachams’ struggle to rhetorically or artistically control the horse is a prelude for other texts’ appropriation of the horse as an affirmative symbol of fighting—the horse becomes a cipher for war.
The potential of but not the present actuality of horses in war is stressed in Ben Jonson’s “Epigram” to the equine master, William Cavendish, Earl of Newcastle. The poem initially celebrates Cavendish as a rider who enhances latent equine capacity. Warlike imagery dominates:
I saw you backe your horse,
Provoke his mettall, and command his force
To all the uses of the field.11
The rhymed couplets stress the connection between “horse” and “force,” as if the strength of the animal is necessarily redolent of insistent ability. Jonson’s text also features consonance: through their common index letter, “force” and “field” announce their intention together. Their curt, monosyllabic sounds forcibly convey a harsh and brusque sense of military swiftness. Cavendish will “command” like a fighting leader. “Mettall”—bravery—will be needed, but so will the “mettall” necessary in early modern warfare. The narrator goes on to eulogize the mounted Cavendish by aligning him and his animal with a series of elevated, scarcely credible classical antecedents. The poem was published in 1640 but had been written some time previously.12 Cavendish is not at war, so the comparisons between him and “Hercules” or “Perseus” appear overstated. This is not to accuse Jonson of excessive obsequiousness. It is helpful, rather, to see these exaggerations as being part of a narrative effect, one that, despite initial seriousness, the lauding speaker must degenerate into hyperbole because the military acumen is itself a plaything, not a necessity, at this time of security. Instead of a hagiography to a patron and his collaborating horse, the poem becomes a celebration of the literary collaboration between patron and poet.13 Cavendish’s equine-fashioned image is creating the poetry as much as the poetic mastery of the writer. The animal is galvanized into manifest comeliness when Cavendish mounts it. Cavendish’s seating “did endorse” the “beauties” of the horse. The horse’s attributes are accounted for in the plural, frustrating any attempt to concentrate the ostensible purpose of Cavendish’s equitation: military capacity. So splendid is this beauty-formulating congress between patron and horse that the narrator confesses that “I began to wish myself a horse.”14 The language is very simple, reflecting the direct, basic desires of the fantasizing first person. The idea is too simply expressed because the idea is consciously bizarre. This is a mock call for personal debasement. It is a comic conceit through which intense overstatement signifies a poetic rejection of a simple declaration of the excellence of necessary horse management. The narrator refuses to accept that horse represents only war. But, the fact that the narrator has to begin with warlike discourse is enough in itself to illustrate the link between horse representation and conflict in the period.
The Jonsonian text fabricates a three-way marriage between horse, master, and poet. A painting by Robert Peake, dating from around 1604, apparently celebrates a simpler courtly alliance. The picture presents an image of Henry, Prince of Wales, and Robert Devereux, the third Earl of Essex.15 A hunt has concluded, and a stag, the deceased prey, is displayed in front of the inevitably fresh, sweat-free noblemen. A horse is present, located immediately behind young Henry. We only see half of the beast. The rear portion is absent, not through a Peacham-like “foreshortning,” but by virtue of it disappearing beyond the right edge of the frame. So, the painter has edited out the half of the animal that is most crucial to a hunt’s success. The effect of this partial representation of a beast can, I suggest, be interpreted in two divergent ways. One of these bifurcated views would work to condemn Peake’s image as anti-horse. This tendency would see the removal of the horse’s means of propulsion—that is, the rear legs—as a mechanism that enforces concentrated fixation on the two courtly figures. Essex and Henry, with their matching satin outfits, are revealed as supremely arrogant and haughty. Horse power is edited out of the frame; the human hunters demand that the viewer’s esteem for athleticism is concentrated on them, not on their beastly tool. The other way of reading the equine rear’s exclusion is to consider the painting as a fairly anthropomorphic production. Without its rear legs, the beast becomes a biped. In other words, becoming more humanoid, the horse enters into a trifold marriage, the success of which is laid out in the form of the killed male deer. The stag’s four legs are visible. It is a conquered animal; the horse, contrarily, is a suavely groomed colleague of Essex and Henry. Ultimately, it is perhaps most productive to allow both interpretations to be prominent in a reading of the horse in Peake’s painting. The horse is an ambiguous presence that complicates our view of a union of human figures, one painted to project the solidity of a collaboration that is basically one of political expedience. The contested status of the half-hidden horse questions the independent vitality of the courtly bonds.
In his book examining hunting as it is represented in Shakespearean texts, Edward Berry observes that, in comedies, the dramatist “accentuates the notions of communal bonding implicit in the recreational hunt by repeatedly associating the hunt with love and marriage.”16 In the tragedies, conversely, Berry asserts that “hunting is more likely to be linked with war.”17 Peake’s painting is a text that frustrates any attempt to imprint Berry’s binary onto it. The image tells a story. It is a simple story: Devereux has benefited from the restoration of the Essex earldom; the political marriage between the noble family and the new Jacobean regime is so cosy that the Earl can hunt with the King’s eldest son. It is, as all marriages should be, a fresh start, a sewing together of Elizabethan fissures. A Renaissance comedy, fundamentally, dramatizes a story with a restitute ending. With its political harmony and exterminated prey, Peake’s painting can certainly be termed a comedy. But a presentist reading of the image can showcase its tragic components. In a tragedy, a protagonist of some substance dies. An animalist will point out that a splendid protagonist—the stag—has died in Peake’s story. The unsure status of the horse can extend to the other main animal. If the horse is afforded some dignity as a partner in the hunt, then it is reasonable, the animalist would insist, to see the dead deer as a tragic protagonist. The stag, too, is a collaborator in a creative myth.
Concerning Henry himself, time allows us a more basic tragic reading. He, of course, died in 1611, when still short of his twentieth year. A semi-legendary figure before the Restoration of the Stuarts, Henry still inspires an amount of conjecture to the “what if?” school of popular history in the media—so much so that a major exhibition centered on his life and image was held at the National Portrait Gallery, London, during the winter of 2012–2013. In short, a celebratory, feel-good painting is afforded nuanced insinuations by a host of external and internal baggage, not least of which is the role of the simultaneously diminished and lionized horse. One could argue that political union is a textually formulated invention. All it does is strive to negate its alternative—disharmony—only to draw attention to what it attempts to suppress. Peake’s painting strives to repress memories of the execution of the second Earl of Essex in 1601. Today, the popular image of a Renaissance courtier is that of a man hunting for honors. In Thomas Cockson’s 1600 engraving, the late-Elizabethan Essex is seen on horseback, regaled in full military dress.18 His prey, prominently shown, is a map of Ireland. As Peake presents the third Earl on an equine-assisted political hunt, Cockson presents the second Earl hunting for the trophy of being seen to bridle a spirited Ireland. Again, a retrospective imperative informs a tragic reading. The tragedy is not merely Devereux’s death, but the political split between monarch and servant and between islands of the realm. Knowledge of Essex’s subsequent failure in Ireland alerts us to the general failure of England’s long-term imperial project in Ireland. Reception of this equestrian image went on to reveal a split within England itself. Despite Essex’s inability to broach Irish rebellion on his sword, the picture was widely distributed. It was so popular that Elizabeth’s Privy Council banned it.19 Here, we have a competitive hunt. Crown forces compete with the image of an already-eliminated outlaw. They are competing for control of the reins, as seen by the popular mindset. Essex’s manipulation of the reins can only be mythical and spectral, but it is vivid enough to spur the Council into asserting suppressive measures. Contextualized against another familial equestrian portrait, Peake’s painting has now become a wave in an ever-changing tide of divisive discourses within English politics.
We can look to a minor spat between Princes Charles and Henry to see an equine-flavored continuance of division among James I’s heir presumptives. Henry possessed a toy. This plaything was, admittedly, more posh than a regular child’s trinket. It was a small, bronze statuette of a prancing horse, fabricated by Pietro Tacca.20 The courtier, Edward Cecil, suggested to the Prince of Wales that it would be a fine gesture and a fitting use of a material asset to present the horse to the still-boyish Charles. Henry refused. The brothers, perhaps unwillingly, were drawn into a conflict over ownership of a horse, a metaphorical version of which Charles’s propagandists would fight for forty more years (as seen, for example, in the massive equestrian portraits of Charles by Rubens’s student, Antony Van Dyck). This seemingly harmless incident may reveal Henry’s selfishness or Cecil’s capacity for making unhelpful suggestions. It is a minor episode—but it seems like an appropriate counterpart of, a lesser version of, the following discourse concerning Christianity’s central turning point: Christ’s suffering.
The Stuarts’ ownership disagreement is a petty tug-of-reins between royals. Peter Paul Rubens’s “Calvary,” as the name suggests, is a drawing of the scene of Christ’s death. The drawing’s paper, which is preserved in the National Gallery of Scotland, has a 1598 watermark.21 The crosses of Christ and the two thieves puncture the sky at the image’s upper third. The middle third of the image is dominated by grieving witnesses and mounted, conversing figures. A central, inner square is marked out by these two talking soldiers and their steeds; seemingly, the men are arguing over the spoils of the day’s frenetic executing. The lower third of the drawing shows a trio of vice-like, cowering, and huddled dice players. Their baseness is argued for by the contents of the rest of this bottom third: barren ground and the lowest parts of another horse’s legs. Further up, this animal has its master’s sword at rest, but visually prominent, on its left flank. Keith Andrews shows that Rubens’s image borrows heavily from drawings by Carracci, Elsheimer, and Van Der Straet, among others.22 I think, however, that Rubens’s view offers a unique interpretation. A diagonal line can be drawn through Christ’s head and the lowered head of the right horse of the central two. This diagonal line serves a number of purposes. By aligning the animal with the crucified Jesus, Rubens’s image centralizes the beast as an interpretive focus. It is unclear if Christ is supposed to have already died or not, but his head’s turning away from the mounted men’s quarrel is significant either way. He cannot bear to look at the unseemly, earthly squabble. The horse in question has its head aligned with Christ, but its eyes—their vision restricted because of the limited head movements allowed by the rider’s reins—are directed downward, toward the dice players. As with the Peake production, the artist’s positioning of the animal invites anthropomorphic projection onto the beast. Like Christ, the horse looks away from his master’s truculence. But the horse is unable to avert its eyes away from earthly vice; just able to turn away from the argument, it can only turn to witness frivolous, disrespectfully located gambling. This equine double perspective dissolves our efforts to deign the horse’s bowed posture as merely a hushed sign of reverence before Christ’s sacrifice. The other main horse, on the left, is bowed a little lower. Viewed together, the horses can be seen to look at each other. It seems, at first, to be a sign of understanding between them, a natural rejection of the petty rowing of their riders. However, Rubens’s multilayered imagery suggests another possibility: like the fighting horses of Icelandic Saga prose, they are squaring up to each other for a fight. They are seen as sizing up the opposition, preparing for possible physical confrontation. In this connection, the previously mentioned sword becomes more noticeable in our view—it is sloped in the same diagonal direction as the right-sided horse’s head. The beast is, thus, aligned not only with Christ’s head but also with man’s combative tools. The horse works with Jesus and against Jesus. These horses symbolize Christianity in Europe at the turn of the seventeenth century. They are represented as being drawn to the Son of God. But they are also drawn by their masters toward aggression against one another. The horses function as a cipher for the Reformation’s polarizing legacy. Both sides work with Jesus in that they proclaim to seek to follow his demeanor, lifestyle, and pacifist opinions. In pursuing a martial defence of this choice, though, they are revealed as ungodly in their uncivil propensity to fight for ownership of the harness of true Christ emulation. Rubens’s image, at heart, eulogizes God’s sacrifice. But its horses conspire to force an acknowledgment of the violent fissures that circumvent any desire to celebrate the intensity or piety of sincere, early modern worship. It is a religious conflict that was one of a number of contributing factors brewing up England’s special troubles of the 1630s. During this time, the horse was to have a less ambiguous role in exposing the fractures within Britain’s network of ruling families.
“Slaves Horse Boyes Drudges”: Striving to Avoid the 1630s Rein
In this section, three texts are examined. In these cultural works, the role of the horse can be read in a much more direct light than in the disparately frameworked equine configurations seen in previously cited works. Unashamedly, I present the 1630s as being a decade that works as a prolegomena to the civil wars. In an article that reveals new information about Henry Lawes’s involvement in written attacks on Parliamentarians, Scott Nixon concludes with a sort of salutary warning about critical practice: he claims to have exposed “the dangers of reading the politics of the 1640s back into the literature of the 1630s.”23 It is, of course, a fair and reasonable point. Extra reasons for avoiding the vice Nixon perceives are readily apparent: our retrospective knowledge of later events can serve to patronize the less ingenuous original writers, hopeful predictions can seem more naive than they were at the time, and specific moments in social history can be passed over by a critical lens operating with an overpowerful backward trajectory. However, it is myopic for a latter-day critic to imagine that he or she can enter the mindset of the 1630s, to honestly repress one’s awareness of the two decades of Interregnum that followed. It is not possible to do this with any temporal moment of the past. It is natural to read the politics of 1917 back into the last years of Tsarist Russia or to cloud laudatory accounts of Henry V’s success in 1415 with an awareness of the losses in France that followed hard upon it. The title of Lawes’s piece is designed to surprise us at first. We are, presumably, supposed to express mild shock that Milton had a “Royalist friend,” especially such a vitriolic critic of the low church movement and its political allies. By the end, however, we are to regret our surprise because it has been initiated by our propensity to read the 1640s back into the 1630s. We shouldn’t have assumed that people aligned with intellectual and practical antitheses of the conflict years could not have been linked positively to one another during the decade before: that is Lawes’s lesson. However, all historians of the period know that the binary between Cavalier and Roundhead is not a watertight, neat line of exclusive binary. Cultural critics, too, should not be wholly surprised to find that subjects of Charles I were prone to contradictory impulses.
Every citizen did not share every characteristic of the faction they were most closely identified with. Peacham the Younger, for instance, according to his critical biographer, Robert Ralston Cawley, was “a staunch Cavalier, yet he favored the Puritan ideals of simple dress and plain food. He was an ardent Royalist, yet his highest praise is for a lady whose family were Parliamentarians.”24 Cawley is attempting to surprise us with the complexities and perhaps even the contradictions within his subject. This implication that we are to be surprised is apparent through his double use of the qualifying word, “yet.” Peacham is this thing, yet he is also this opposite thing. Finding out the exact gut feelings of Peacham would be impossible, as it would be for any individual of the period, however apparently bare the soul is laid in commonplace books or personal diaries. For the purposes of this section of the chapter, I generally overlook the contradictory impulses of the individual. Instead, I contextualize the equine references in the three assigned texts within a greater crisis of identity: that of the realm as an entity. The 1630s was a period of mounting internal strife, politically and religiously. England was not able to present a clear image of itself as a kingly autocracy, as a reformed haven for anti-prelates, or as a cooperative collaboration between differing shades of rank and belief. Identity confusion is a central problem for the protagonists of the three texts discussed here. They are constructed as figures who cannot be comfortably shelved on brackets labeled “reaction” or “rebellion.”
Writing about one of the three main texts discussed here, J. W. Lever accounts for some of its Caroline resonances: “the rivalry between royal favourites and landed aristocracy, court and country, had been endemic for centuries; but it mounted to a crisis in the period between the ascendancy of Buckingham and the outbreak of civil war.”25 Lever, quite justly, is reading the 1630s through a retrospective lens that is aware of the crisis of the 1640s. The period that he identifies, between Buckingham’s assassination (1628) and August 1642, when Charles I raised his standard at Nottingham, is helpful if we want to think about a “long” 1630s. The three texts that I engage with fit neatly into this long 1630s. I argue that they each have a similar pattern of equine discourse. Horse imagery commences as a signifier of various forms of entrapment. Then, equine language is used as an expression of hope for escape. Finally, the horse allusions become a signifier of frustrated hopes, of thwarted ambition.
All three of these texts have been hidden from public or scholarly consciousness at some period. Unpublished before 2001, the existence of Musophilus was introduced modestly to us by its discoverer, Elizabeth Baldwin, in 1998.26 The play, which Baldwin conjectures was written “around the late 1620s or early 1630s,” dramatizes a sort of inverse prodigal son narrative. The hero, Musophilus, travels away from home to escape the miserliness of his usurer father, Cremulus. The plot begins and ends with characters speaking about the issue of inheritance. In the play, there is an incessant focus on economic roles in work, on figures’ places in society. This class discourse is couched through equine language. One character, Timothy, a harangued debtor of Cremulus, enjoys a scene in a tavern. He demands good wine. The Boy working in the tavern assures Timothy that the wine he serves is of good quality: “[If] it be not as good as ever you drunck then let me turne bruers [brewer’s] horse and never draw any thing but beare,” he insists.27 If my wine isn’t good enough, argues the Boy, then I am not fit to serve wine and should serve less-prestigious beer instead. The Boy insists that his wine is of excellent vintage. So, there is no chance that he will have to resign from wine-serving and work for a brewer as an alternative. The character jests about an impossible scenario: becoming a horse. What sounds like a totally dismissive notion, that of seeking alternative employment, is complicated by the pun on “beare.” If he becomes a brewer’s horse, then the Boy will “never draw any thing but beare.” If he was a horse working in this sort of capacity, then he would “beare” loads; he wouldn’t draw things like a draft horse. The legacy of the far-fetched horse allusion is that the Boy is dramatically typecast as a figure who will be fit only to shift alcohol around for main characters. He is nameless, functioning briefly only to serve Timothy and his drinking companions. He is constructed as being proud of the wine he serves and his position as conduit between wine-seller and customer, pouring scorn on cheaper lager. But whether serving cheap beer or expensive wine, this is a servile figure trapped within an inn where tedious labor and bad quips abound.
Later, Musophilus, who is a student, disguises himself as a would-be servant. He succeeds in convincing a potential master, Hilarius, a lawyer, that he is of the serving class. But he fails to pass muster as a sufficiently skilled helper. Ordered to bridle Hilarius’s horse before a journey, Musophilus admits that he “cannot tell how to go about it more then your horse.”28 The character is constructed as a figure unsuited for physical acts of labor. Hilarius responds to the inability with caustic amusement: “Ha ha he a true scholler he can neither bridle my horse nor mend my sursingle [girth to fasten materials to a horse’s back].”29 Hilarius’s apparent amusement soon turns to ruthless rejection. “He is not for my service send him gone,” he asserts right after his critique of scholarly disengagement with material matters.30 Two distinct, abrasive announcements are contained within one breathless, unpunctuated utterance. Musophilus’s unsuitability and his enforced dismissal are effected instantly. In a sense, Musophilus is trapped in the opposite way to the wine-bearing Boy. The student cannot work in a capacity lower than his birth suggests, unlike the Boy, who is trapped within a cage of no opportunities for advancement. But Musophilus is meta-theatrically trapped. He is rigidly enveloped as an upper-middling sort. Cremulus’s stinginess has deprived him of the financial trappings of moneyed society, but his supposedly innate class dependency prevents him from exercising unfamiliar, unbecoming duties.
A more obvious form of opportunity-quashing is exhibited in the discombobulated discourses of The Wasp, an episodic, unfinished, manuscript play that dramatizes hopelessly uncoordinated efforts to rein in the excesses of a harsh, dictatorial Roman ruler. Like Musophilus, the play has been largely obscured from well-known view.31 At the conclusion of an enthusiastic, wartime letter to the Times Literary Supplement, J. J. Gourlay complains that his “transcript of The Waspe and the results of my [authorship and theatrical provenance] investigations have not been published.”32 A large part of the previously cited essay by J. W. Lever consists of impassioned exclamations of incredulity as to scholarly and theatrical objurgation of the text. In the play itself, impassioned exclamations rebound against Marianus, the Roman appointee in government in England. Noble subjects proclaim themselves to be tyrannized by his greedy rule. One baron, Devon, having complained about the yoke of Roman oppression, is revealed to the Prorex as a possible insurrectionist. In the presence of his foreign ruler, he backs down from this dangerous accusation and declares his support for Marianus: “Make vs thy bondmens slaves thy horse boyes drudges. Any thing Servile.”33 The lack of punctuation in the manuscript conveys an impression of speedy desperation in Devon’s submission. The lack of commas also generates ambiguity: when telling the Prorex to call him and his colleagues “horse boyes,” is Devon comparing his lowly status to that of a horse boy or to a horse and a boy? Both possibilities are suggested, and both remain valid for an interpretation of Devon’s asserted willingness to wear the bridle of Rome.
Previously, away from the earshot of the Prorex, Devon has stridently bemoaned the Roman exploitation of England’s laboring classes:
The poore he makes
Slaves, & like horses yoakes ’em vp in Teames
to till our owne Land for the Romaines vse.34
Englishmen become like horses in Devon’s critique of Roman brutality. The Prorex’s methods are imperiously disregarding of English rights to English soil (“Land”). Individuality is quashed. Unable to work alone, Rome’s unwilling servants are represented as submerged within anonymous, dehumanized “Teams.” Devon, then, is inconsistent in his approach to Romish subjection; he talks a good fight in private but shambles to an obsequious recline in public. Away from the Prorex, Devon fashions the English as an unwilling horse, brutalized by a harsh rider. In front of Marianus, he professes loyalty. Accused of insurrectionary tendencies, he recoils, insisting that he is a willing horse: “forbeare the spurr.”35 I will run for you, he implores. I will not rebel. Devon’s pronounced outrage at England’s inferiority fails to translate to substantive political interjection. This inconsistency in intent contrasts vividly with the consistency of the equine allusion. The Prorex, speaking with the air of the oppressor rather than the oppressed, is seen to respond to a possible revolt by Devon and his crew. He is characterized as a leader who must appear to be fearless of the threat. Marianus will stimulate the feelings of “splenes” and “bitternes” of his fierce critics: “Any = any thing to drawe them on.”36 The odd orthographic division between the two uses of “any” forces a further gap between the word and its repeat. The actor playing Marianus would ignore the wayward “=” sign, but may say the word “any” twice, as it appears in the text. This would convey the impression that the Prorex is considering this concept carefully before saying it. In other words, the metaphor of the draft horse is considered and deliberate. The more he can agitate his English sots, it is suggested, the more they will collapse in feckless incompetence—and the more he “can drawe them on” to support his imperial role through at least passive bearing, if not affection. Tyrant and tyrannized both present their divergent tactics through a common discourse of slavery: that of rough rider on willing or unwilling horse.
The trope of metaphorical bridling is also explicitly present in the narrative of Domingo Gonsales, the fictive Spaniard who instructs us about The Man in the Moone. Written by Francis Godwin, the Bishop of Hereford, this literary fantasy was published in 1638, five years after Godwin’s death. A modern editor of the tale can only tell us that it was “written between 1580 and 1632.”37 This inexactness has contributed to a critical tendency to speculate curiously about this work. In particular, the nonappearance of the book during the Bishop’s lifetime has led to considerable, generally unhelpful speculation as to the author’s motives for suppressing the work. (Of course, early modern authors alone do not decide whether or not a work will be published, but these critics pass over that.) The fact remains, however, that the work is, in terms of print culture at least, a product of the late 1630s. Thematically, its anxieties seem to reflect many of those that were set to tear the contemporary English political landscape asunder. The story, basically, consists of Gonsales’s account of flying to the Earth’s satellite and there learning from and teaching a bizarre race of aliens. Based on a combination of shrewd astronomical knowledge and fantastic bunkum, the work obviously runs counter to conventional Christian teaching and threatens the whole Creation myth. The contemporary science fiction writer, Brian W. Aldiss, suggests that “possibly because the bishop considered his book went against the teachings of the Church, it had to await publication after his death.”38 Affirming or rejecting Aldiss’s comment is not possible, but it hints at a trope of imprisonment. The implication is that adherence to a faith inhibits the full fruition of creative process—it is a very modern, commercially orientated view that sees printed publication as an obligatory notice of artistic success. This is developed in a complementary but differing manner by Robert M. Philmus. In a review of another modern edition of the text, Philmus’s narrow reading allows him to suggest that “our Anglican bishop had already gone beyond the bounds of proverbial English eccentricity when(ever) he chose a Spaniard and a Catholic as his ‘hero.’”39 Many of the period’s most celebrated plays have heroes who are configured as citizens of countries unfavored by Englishmen. A detailed analysis of equine references—which follow a similar pattern to that in Musophilus and The Wasp—in Godwin’s text indicates that there is a narrative strategy that invokes an acknowledgment of Gonsales’s typographical detention within a national, picaresque stereotype.
Accounting for his earlier movements at Antwerp during the summer of 1569, Gonsales tells us that “certaine of the cursed Geuses set upon mee, and bereaved me of Horse, monie, and all.”40 His otherness as a Spaniard is relaxed through his suffering at the hands of a Guise-led faction. Guise’s most notoriously pogromed victims were the Protestants slain on St. Bartholomew’s Day, 1572. Although a Spaniard, then, Gonsales courts sympathy from a Protestant readership. Later in the text, he falls into the hands of Englishmen at sea. They, it seems, are not totally reprehensible. Indeed, they assist Gonsales “like men of more noble, and generous disposition then wee are pleased to esteeme them.”41 This indicates that Godwin’s text works well inside the prevailing notion that English is civil and normal, whereas Spanish is other and unsavory. Nothing is more flattering for a patriot than to be told by a supposedly antipathetic foreigner that their nation’s fellows are generous toward strangers. The compliment is enhanced when the person who makes the positive comment derives from a hostile nation. So, Philmus’s claim that Godwin’s choice of a Spaniard for protagonist is “somewhat loony” seems wide of the mark.
Gonsales gets involved in conflict involving horses. He stresses that he is not a horse-thief by nature—criminality, he insists, is foisted upon him by circumstances. The Spaniard is unhorsed by thieving braggarts. According to his narrative, this is the first horse-stealing that he comes across. Gonsales gets drawn into a world of brutal, unauthorized repossessions; he does not choose this derring-do lifestyle. Soon, he finds himself in the service of a French nobleman. However, this position is not a success because Gonsales’s “enemies gave it out to disgrace that I was his horse-keepers boy.”42 Servitude is not appropriate for someone like him, he claims. He should be out riding on the horses, not attending to those belonging to others. Later, a better master, this time in the Low Countries, “furnished” Gonsales “with horse, armour, and whatsoever I wanted.”43 Now, apparently, Gonsales is back holding the reins. The stress is on what he—“what I wanted”—desires personally. There is an attempt made to put forward an image of a free person, free of bondage to an unyielding master. But there is also a speedy qualification: “In the time of warre . . . I now and then dressed mine owne Horse.”44 First, a figure such as Gonsales will not decide whether or not a war will be fought. And if he was a fighter of any notable rank, then lesser grooms would be preparing his horse. The character fashions himself as something of an inverse Robin Hood figure. In a battle against the Prince of Orange, he relieves enemy personnel of their money, presenting—“in remembrance of my nobilitie”—the money at court, where he correctly predicts that his cash will win favor.45 His bought nobility is possible through his horsemanship. But it is horsemanship that is facilitated through adherence to a master. Furthermore, it has already been seen that he can lose horses and all else. In failure and in success, Gonsales is prey to the circumstantial, economic difficulties of maintaining control of the reins.
At one point, Gonsales reports to us that it “was my good hap at that time to defeat a horseman of the enemy, by killing his Horse with my pistoll, which falling upon his leg, so as he could not stirre, hee yeelded himselfe to my mercie.”46 The immediate equine entrapment element is the enemy’s prostrate immobility under his assassinated beast. Less immediate, but perhaps ultimately more significant, is Gonsales’s need to kill the animal. On a practical level, the horse is a bigger target and so easier to hit with an early, inaccurate (by later standards) gun. The clear point remains that Gonsales’s earthly fortunes are dictated to by his fortunes or misfortunes concerning horses. Examining these equestrian incidents reveals that Gonsales is not some free-moving, independent figure of self-sufficiency, but a sot deprived by equine management and mismanagement. All three of these 1630s texts, then, initiate a discourse of subservience to equine metaphor. All three of them also exhibit the second of the two phases of expressions of fate through equitation: characters express a desire to grab the reins. They are constructed as figures who fantasize that they will escape their murky lot through linguistic sleights of hand that, they hope, will allow upwardly mobile development away from the mire of bridled subjugation.
Gonsales escapes from a European mire of horse-theft and petty conflict and feloniousness. Initially, he moves to the New World via the ocean. His eventual escape from bridled drudgery is facilitated by an unconventional contraption. In manufacturing the tool, Gonsales combines an awareness of bird power with serendipitous exploration. Regarding the Isle of Saint Helens, he writes that the place is crammed with freely available fruits, meats, and vegetables: “chiefly it aboundeth with Cattell, and Fowle, as Goates, Swine, Sheepe, and Horses . . . and wild Fowle, beyond all credit.”47 With its assertion that the myriad beasts are without “credit,” the text is working on two ironic levels. The availability of such a vast quality and quantity of foods is not credible. The island’s natural resources are “beyond all credit” because such a bounteous supply of foodstuffs cannot be realistic. Unlike in Europe, here, Gonsales does not have to pay for these stomach fillers. There is no need for money—liberated from commercial exploitation of sustenance needs, he is transformed into a being who needs no “credit.” Also, social “credit” is no longer a concern—now, this figure is free from the perils of being condescendingly pigeon-holed as a “horse keepers boy.”
Horses are among the beasts available for Gonsales’s appropriation. However, there is no indication that he uses these beasts for any purpose—he has left behind the tough lifestyle where horsemanship was a necessary skill for his mercenary, peripatetic endeavors in Europe. Instead, he seizes the reins of alternative fauna. He tells us that on this Edenic island, “especially there are to be seene about the Moneths of February, and March, huge flocks / of a certaine kinde of wild Swans . . . that at a certaine season of the yeare, doe vanish away.”48 The migratory patterns of birds were not understood before the nineteenth century.49 There was speculation about avian migrating purposes, belief in some of which produced quirky religious rules. During the early modern period, for example, the meat of the Barnacle Goose was allowed to be eaten by Catholics on Fridays because it was considered a fish. This quirk was based on the “fact” that the species was incubated in trees, before falling into a river where the transformation from fish to fowl was effected. Myrfyn Owen suggests that meat-loving Catholics deliberately assisted the durability of this Barnacle myth.50 It is an example of ignorance enabling transgression of steadfast rules—only on a semantic level does eating the fish-goose on a Friday work within the Church’s dietary instructions. Gonsales exploits the early modern ignorance of emigrating birds’ destinations to render credible his relation of his fantastic journey. He takes these “wild Swans,” harnesses them to a seating rig, and sits back as they fly him to their destination: the moon. There is an emphasis placed on Gonsales’ personal manipulation of these birds. He calls them “Gansas,” which can sound like a short form of the Spaniard’s own name. In doing this, he subtly boasts of his ingenuity at discovering the fowls’ capacity for transporting humans. He is liberated from the life of service in Europe, where dangerous duties have to be carried out with the aid of horses.
Gonsales continues to allude to horses in his account of manipulating the Gansas. He bridles the birds. He harnesses them, preventing their movements when they are not desirous for him. Explaining how he achieved the feat of getting the birds to fly in unison, taking him with them, Gonsales tells us that he “let loose unto my Birds the raines.”51 There is a personal relationship between man and bird. This is suggested through the possessive adjective “my.” It is his ownership of the birds, his inventive usage of their wing power, and his narrative. At another point in the narrative, Gonsales tells us of another starting motion: he “let loose the raines unto my Gansas.”52 Gonsales, then, repeats the phrase, “let loose,” with its evocative consonance and its smooth vowel sounds. This simple repetition is significant because it underscores the Spaniard’s newly gained discourse of power. It is his decision when he will “let loose.” During the Dutch wars, masters and opponents forcefully influenced his movements. Now, being flown by his servile horse-birds, he is liberated through his control of equine metaphors. He holds the reins.
Gonsales has reached the second of the two levels of equine pattern in these 1630s texts. At first entrapped by bridling tropes, he has now found an expression of flourishing subjectivity through mastery of verbal, horse-related discourse. The third and final phase, I argue, is that of frustration, as the limitations of self-fashioning discourse become exposed. As more conventional situations or status quos resume their ascendancy, initially liberating horse imagery rebounds back into descriptions of containment. In Musophilus, we can read this movement in the courtly horse allusions generated by the character, Monsieur Silly. This character is formulated as a gentleman usher with pretensions of entering court. As the name suggests, however, this is a figure of fun and mockery. Failing to achieve any social progress beyond his servile position, he represents a sort of failed, more bestially motivated version of Webster’s Antonio. In the drama, the character’s speeches are often punctuated with references to courtly horses, as if showy knowledge of these equine elites will enable him to converse with England’s top brass.
The horses are Silly’s gods. When swearing an oath, he takes the horses’ names in vain. “By all the court horses I sware I’l be merry,” he proclaims, fashioning himself as an epicurean fellow of pleasure.53 Previously, in exchange for knowledge about Cupid, he has promised to give another character “the best horse in my stable.”54 Such a gift is extremely generous, when placed in the context of early seventeenth-century heirloom culture. In 1609, one Roger Rocke, of Rowley, left, in his will, “to my brother Thomas Rocke the worst of my two horses which my father gave me.”55 In this trace of early modern history, horses are a bonding legacy, crucial in terms of their material value and their familial refractions. A brother is entitled to the lesser of two animals; hence, Silly’s promised presentation of his best horse can fitfully be seen as frivolous and inappropriate. A historical gentleman usher would not have many horses in his possession: Silly does not have this gift to offer. The other character, the would-be recipient, is seen to acknowledge this through his response: “Gramercy horse.” This is a diversionary, meaningless phrase that has been apparently lifted from that self-consciously ridiculous two-character dramatic narrative of 1595—Maroccus Extaticus.56 Later, Silly is seen to be desirous of female company. He hears of Mistress Urina, whom he hopes will “Mak water in my mouth.” The attendant confluence of appetitive salivation, sexual fluids, and urinary emissions reveals the basic functioning of Silly’s unromantic cravings. He will woo Urina with equine expertise:
I thinke it were better, to mak her love me, to discourse lik a courtier of the best horses that belong to the court, ffreck spaniard, Pegg wth a Lanthorne, strawburies and cream flebitte Otho, and such things as these will please hir best.57
Musophilus, at whom this tirade of knowledge-claiming about horses and women is directed, declares that the malapropism-prone Silly is speaking hollow cant. Dismissing Silly with reference to his profession, he asserts that “This mans toung is a gentle man vsher it goe before his witt.”58 We may add to Musophilus’s incredulous response to Silly’s command of the courtly environment by examining some of the conjured horses’ names. Silly constructs the court as a content, stable location where horse management is the sole concern. But some of the names hint at the fractiousness of Charles I’s court.
There is considerable ambiguity with one cited animal, “flebitte Otho.” This name may suggest a link to Othello, where the black, Desdemona-courting protagonist is compared to a Barbary horse. The adjective, “flebitte,” is more pressingly ambiguous. In the twentieth century, the term, “flea-bitten,” somehow, came popularly to refer only to animals that are, or appear to be, infested with parasitic insects (OED 1). However, the term can also refer to a perfectly mite-free beast, one “having bay or sorrell spots or streaks, upon a lighter ground” (OED 2). Both meanings were common in the 1630s, with neither having an ascendancy over the other. Thus, Silly comments on this beast with colored spots or streaks, but his eulogy to this equine celebrity is ruined by the inevitable coming to mind of pest-caused flea-bittenness. Two of Silly’s cited names invoke suspicions of political and religious, rather than merely bestial, shabbiness. One horse is called “spaniard,” immediately calling up stereotypes of picaresque villains, Jesuitical conspirators, and imperially greedy Catholic kings. In other words, enemies of the state are summoned up, quashing Silly’s meditations on a carefree, horse-worshipping, Nephelococcygia-like court.
Religious division is acknowledged more obliquely by the equine name, “strawburies.”59 As is pointed out in the OED, this fruit’s name was frequently used in the counter-Reformation, and afterward, as an “allusion to [Hugh] Latimer’s condemnation of preachers who preach only once a year” (OED II. 9. b). The religious thinking of Latimer, a bishop and famed sermonizer, has been regarded as continuously evolving, from staunch defence of Catholicism up until the early 1520s, to later, energetic condemnation of Romanist covetousness and idolatry, through to eventual martyrdom at the hands of the Marian regime during 1555.60 This horse’s name, then, can conjure up a story of a figure who embodies the intellectual spiritual struggles of the English nation during the Tudor era. At base, it reminds the audience of the abusive quarrels that are seen to go hand in hand with higher theological investigations. To compare a preacher to a strawberry—only ripening and functional once a year, suggests a curt fractiousness at the higher levels of clerical authority. Silly, then, brings to mind the more caustic side of political and religious debate—the sort of conversation that is more likely at court than hippological blathering. Latimer was, under Henry VIII at least, a courtly figure. He talked about rather more than “the best horses that belong to the court,” and Silly, of course, cannot be such a figure. The invocations of deep conflicts that the character brings up show that this is a figure not accredited with the necessary faculties to succeed at court or anywhere else. Like Malvolio, Silly shall not ascend from ushering superior humans; he will not usher fine, courtly quadrupeds: he remains a type that attempts to climb, to liberate the self from servitude, through a mastery of horse knowledge. But he is discovered as lacking the requisite suave dealings with female figures, in tavern games, and with equine discourses. Allusions to the horse have, finally, become the dramatic entrapment of Monsieur Silly.
Returning from his space explorations on the Moone, Gonsales finds himself under arrest in China. The “Mandarine” in charge of the Chinese has no difficulty in conversing with the flying Spaniard, but is gravely distrustful of the visitor’s use of magic-like transit. Gonsales is detained against his will but is held in some comfort: he tells us that he “could not fault any thing, but my restraint.”61 The word “restraint” has not been used by Gonsales before. Previously, he has enjoyed the freedom of the skies and even another world: the master of his horse-geese, he is constructed as a figure liberated like no other in history. Gonsales goes on to account for another aspect of his earthbound melancholy. “In this manner did I continue many moneths, afflicted with nothing so much as with the thought of my Gansas; which I knew must be irrecoverably lost, as indeed they were,” he writes.62 Godwin’s text affords no explanation for the character’s woeful expression of loss for the Gansas. This allows our interpretation of his grief to range from emotional loss, through the Gansas’ worth as material possessions, to the practical loss of his transporting capacity. In the context of his previous freedoms, the figure’s loss of movement agency is marked out as especially crippling. Now no longer holding the reins, he can only negotiate to return to Spain. This is granted, and Gonsales is shipped back to Europe via “Macao.”63 The mention of Macao is, after textual ensconcement within the othernesses of the Moone and China, the first notice of European hostilities. Macao had been an official colony of Portugal since 1533. Since a 1578 battle—often referred to in English culture of the period—Spain had ruled Portugal and would continue to do so until 1640.64 Being earthbound and sans horse-geese has forced the narrator into an albeit obtuse observation of domestic and imperial European strifes. For a putative future that Godwin does not write about, a post-text void, Gonsales can only express hope that his esoteric knowledge will help him by “inriching my Country.”65 Back to square one, Gonsales is once more constructed as a servile figure; as at the beginning, he is a mercenary who must fend for himself by fending for superior others. The last two words of Gonsales’s narrative are composed of an Aphra Behn-like oxymoron. The story of his “fortunate misfortunes” ends here. Gonsales’s unhappy happinesses have been expressed through equine registers: initially a scrapping jobber, he fights for control of the bit; freed, he flies holding the “raines” of his flying sots; and, finally, it is he that is constrained and spurred back to fractious, split Europe.
Last, in this section, an examination of later horse imagery in The Wasp underlines the argument that the horse can appear as a liberating metaphor only to succumb to ultimate containment rhetoric. The play abounds with quotations from Elizabethan and Jacobean drama. The play’s central figure of resistance against the Prorex, Marianus, is Tom Archibald. Frequently, he is compared to Shakespearean figures: he appears before the Prorex disguised as “percy”; he is called an “old Ruffian” by Marianus; and, previously, the leader has addressed him with “et tu Brute.”66 All three figures alluded to—Hotspur, Mark Antony, and Brutus—make efforts in their dramas to access stately power through the use of force. Archibald is frequently seen as diametrically opposed to Marianus—“plaine homespon Tom,” Archibald leads the critique of the Prorex’s indulgence of his egregious favorite, the German, Varletti. A comparison between the construction of Tom and Thomas of Woodstock is made manifest in the text. As I argue in chapter one, Woodstock is manufactured as a character who loudly scolds foreign-influenced misrule, considers liberation through revolutionary seizure of the reins, but ultimately rejects rebellion. Archibald’s career, in this play, follows a similar pattern. So consistent is this pattern, and so frequent are the allusions to the play Woodstock that it is not inappropriate to term The Wasp as a pendant, or sequel, to the earlier play.
“Old Tom” Archibald eats English beef, wears English wool, and rejects all alien innovations. Like Woodstock, he claims to have enjoyed an emphatically successful, horse-signified political past. He insists that “I have followed an execution, when our prowd courses have Ietted in purple Buskins.”67 This is the boastful assertion of a Titus Andronicus-like soldier, a leader holding the reins. But there is one problem with this self-confident brashness: here, Tom is disguised as “percy.” Configured as “plaine” Tom Archibald, he has just, in the previous scene, proclaimed that he would effect a revolt against the Prorex, “but for munition, men, horse & Armor.”68 In this meta-dramatic, role-playing discourse, the fantastic “percy” has the reins; the “homespon,” impotent Archibald does not.
Archibald’s decadently presented opposition figures do hold the reins. After the climb-down of Devon, the Prorex and Varletti are seen as riders, with Tom as the horse. Indeed, among the many titles conferred on the court parasite, Varletti, is “Mr of our horse.”69 In front of Archibald’s son, Marianus threatens to:
go to chaine him [Tom] to a mill
put out his eyes, or blind fold like a horse,
there let him grinde, stint him vnto his taske
& if he loose one mynut let the whipp
make him gaine two fort.70
The critical Archibald will become a beast of burden, a mill horse. Blinded, his only meaningful sentience will be of pain—tiredness will be rewarded with the whip, as a tired horse would be struck by a harsh rider. Later, it seems that Archibald has gained the upper hand, as he holds the literal crown of the Prorex. But he hands it back to Marianus, who has witnessed the episode from hiding. Tom feigns to offer the crown to Geraldine, an English upstart who is now exposed as a genuine traitor. Tom has been play-acting as a figure who would go the full way in ejecting a nation’s leader. “Wood I had more such traitors,” mutters Marianus, constructed as a character relieved to be controlling the bit again.71 The “wood” reference refers to the exploitation of England’s oak wood by characters in The Wasp and Woodstock; it is another indication of the later play’s appropriation and plundering of Woodstock. Tom Archibald resigns the crown to the existing, careless ruler, Marianus. Woodstock hands back the reins to Richard II, symbolically acted out in the scene where Tom speaks of stealing a courtly horse but declines to do so. Earlier in The Wasp, a letter that contains an allegation that Archibald is a genuine traitor has been delivered to the Prorex. The Messenger is exhausted. But it is reported that the beast has fared much worse: “the horse that brought the messenger is falne downe dead,” announces the Prorex-devoted Devon.72 In Woodstock, the horse (whether materially presented on the theater’s stage or not) is spoken to by a character. In The Wasp, despite some two dozen consequential equine references, the beasts are kept demonstratively offstage. The favorite-honoring, unpopular leader has not had to face warhorses of the opposition. The present horses are only visible rhetorically. During the late 1630s, when The Wasp was performed, England’s unpopular, favorite-loving leader had yet to face the warhorses of his internal, British critics. Soon, however, Charles I would—this is reflected in 1640s culture, where the horse, and particularly the warhorse, becomes ostentatiously visible.
Destination Gained: Political Horses in Civil War Culture
The horse goes through three phases in its manifold representations in the cultures of the 1640s and the 1650s. First, the horse becomes lionized in pro-Caroline literature: its status is enhanced and magnified in a loud rallying cry. Then, the image of the horse and rider becomes less courtly and more publicly accessible—subjective notions of quality in equine art become irrelevant. Much of the work discussed herein can be described as agitational propaganda. This theatrical term may be anachronistic because it is a twentieth-century concept. But it refers to culture that deliberately seeks to effect political change in its society; this interventionism is wholly present in much work of the period. In anti-Royalist propagandist culture, the animal is, initially, a canvas onto which idealistic programs of peaceable equity are projected. But, eventually, in the third phase, the equine metaphor winds up as a symbol of feckless pessimism and wastefulness.
During 1639, the Earl of Arundel charged northward to Scotland, hoping to make a determined contribution to the cementing of Charles I’s unionism. The attempt is announced and lauded in a contemporary broadside. The production is illustrated with a Wenceslaus Hollar print that represents the Earl poised readily on an active, prancing horse.73 Arundel and his beast are galvanized into action in an interspecies thrust against Scottish revolt. Graham Parry argues, in a book-length study of seventeenth-century cultural contexts, that the “actual conflicts” of the civil wars inspired little poetry. However, Parry asserts, “consciousness of war is often betrayed by . . . reaching instinctively for military or political idioms or using the vocabulary of destruction and waste.”74 An examination of the warhorse as it is represented in poetry and other culture of the period indicates that military idioms were directly implicated within equine discourses. Hollar’s image of Arundel not only reflects the urgency of 1639’s strife, but contributes to the situation, actively producing an image of swift, conflict-ready Royalism.
Three guide books on military horsemanship—all dating from the early 1640s—showcase an unembroidered, pressingly urgent elaboration of the lionized equine imperative. David Leslie’s 1642 work, Generall Lesley’s Direction and Order, asserts its timeliness in its subtitle. The manual is presented as Most Exact, Compendeous, and Necessary.75 It is claimed, then, that the equine instructions that the publication includes combine encyclopaedic comprehensiveness with minute precision—fitting for the leisure-free times. Above all, the work’s lessons are necessary. Now, warlike equine mastery is an essential tool; Jonson’s 1630s flippancy about Cavendish’s militarily capable steeds is unimaginable in this urgent period. John Vernon’s 1644 work, The Young Horseman, is addressed to the Honest Plain-Dealing Cavalier.76 Elaborate, showy, Castiglione-like verbal equitational prowess is now undesirable. In this immediate environment of war, Royalist horsemanship must be “plain.” Monsieur Silly’s 1630s prattling about the fine court horses seems even more remote and ridiculous now. Vernon tells his cavalry students to place an “iron or brasse chain for false Reines covered over with leather,” for emergency control should the primary reins “chance to be cut.”77 Plainness, despite the work’s claims, is not required so much as duplicitous concealment of back-up tools. Essentially, earthy, effective horsemanship is needed at this temporal moment. Glitzy showmanship is unfit for the matter: practical, life-saving equine skills are the only urgency. John Cruso’s 1644 contribution, Military Instructions for the Cavallrie, is largely concerned with developing fearlessness in the fighting horses. Little else can be accommodated: “for further directions for the art of riding and managing the horse, I referre the reader to other,” previous, more patiently equivocated riding manuals.78 Time and expeditiousness are of the essence; the corporeal thoroughness of Markham, and the silky displays of Cavendish, in their manuals, are replaced with frenetic, matter-of-fact pithiness.
The wished-for manufacture of a fearless, Royalist horse finds an echo in John Ogilby’s translation of Virgil’s Georgics. The ideal, classical horse described sounds like an apogee of equine industry as envisaged in the 1640s manuals:
But when from far a sound of arms he hears,
He knows no stand, he shakes, and pricks his ears
And fierce to charge, fire from his nostrils flies.79
Erectile words—“stand” and “shakes” are linked through consonance to illuminate the bold horse’s refusal to fly from the mire of cacophonous battle. It could be argued that the word “shake” slightly detracts from the unsullied posture of the steady animal. But other erectile words—such as “pricks” and “charge”—predominate; and the horse is not constructed as shaking through fear, but from a rage that urges him to try to shake free from the bridling hold of its master. The animal is compared to a dragon. Again, words with a common index letter unite further to embolden the beast: the horse is “fierce,” and “fire from his nostrils flies.” The ideal horse, then, exceeds the boundaries of merely equine brilliance, becoming a composite entity of earthly and mythical animality.
Among literary critics, Ogilby’s translations have never been widely admired. However, Antony Griffiths and Gabriela Kesnerová have nothing but praise for the “self made autodidact John Ogilby, this remarkable man.”80 They go on to say that Ogilby’s Virgil “set new standards of book production in England” and to laud the “ambitious” expense of the illustrations.81 The pictorial contributions to the folio consist of engravings by Hollar. The critical reception to Ogilby’s poetic work is overshadowed by Hollar’s contribution, a figure for whom, unlike Ogilby, condescending, partial recognition has not blotted the reputation of his works.82 Richard Pennington is explicit in his assertion that Hollar vitalizes Ogilby. Referring to Ogilby’s translation of Aesop’s Fables, he condemns the non-Hollarized first edition as “illustrated with rather coarsely done etchings.”83 The same critic, in the same critical volume, comments more favorably on a later edition of Ogilby’s translation: now boasting the Czech engraver’s work, the book is now “charming, humorous, and admirably etched.”84 In Ogilby’s Aesopian text, awareness of conflict is epidemic: in a dedication, Ogilby expresses a desire “for milder ages”; in one of the fables, a greedy lion is presented as being down on his luck because of “this Civill War.”85 The lion gets kicked by an attractively rendered horse. The parable’s moral is that those suffering due to strife should not wallow but should rise like the proud horse. So elevated is the active horse that the address “His Horseship” is reserved for him. In the milieu of battle, a brave horse is the king of beasts, not the lion.
Phallic imagery is rife in dedications to The Fables of Æsop by two of Ogilby’s Royalist allies. In one of these dedications, James Shirley uses the word, “rise,” three times in a thirty-four-line poem. He writes that Aesop’s fame is not stooping and that, now, thanks to Ogilby, “thy Pen / Hath rais’d.”86 A classical didacticism has, in Shirley’s formulation, risen, like Arundel’s horse, to be a collaborator in the rising of Royalist agency and culture. William Davenant mentions that his dedication is written “From the Tower.” This may, at first, seem like a broken admittance of incarcerated weakness. Davenant had been captured at sea during the summer of 1650 and was moved to the Tower of London before the end of that year, staying there until October, 1652.87 Indeed, he would not be released from Parliamentary custody until the summer of 1654.88 Davenant’s use of the word “From” is telling. If the text said “Inside the Tower,” or “Under the Tower,” then there would be a less positive air to the piece. The use of “from” suggests a forward projection. Royalist writing is still able to emanate from this prison seat; monarchists shall not be always under the yoke of Parliamentary bridling.
In a 1644 poem that celebrates a gift (possibly merely poetic) of a fine horse given to a colonel of a Royalist regiment in Scotland, G. Lawder extends the theme of the horse that transcends normative species limits. Like the Ogilby-translated, Virgilian equine warrior, this Cavalier horse is afforded dragon-like ferocity. The animal’s “rage enflames . . . breathing fire and smoak.”89 And this is all done through equine self-motivation: he “doth himselfe provoak.”90 Thus, the horse is afforded human-like agency. So unequine is the beast’s rejection of its quadrupedian limitations that the poetic narrator claims to “blush, and grieue to call him but a beast.”91 Lawder’s praise of the horse may, perhaps, be turned back and read as a critique of British humans. After all, despite the Royalists’ lionizing of the rise of the warhorse, no horse can have a decision-making contribution to battling. Despite the poetically fabricated capacities of brave steeds, they are sots dictated to by human masters. Too much intellectual and physical stress can be loaded onto the horse. One of the Aesop and Ogilby Fables seems to directly assert this very warning. “Of the Horse and laden Asse” is a narrative about a well-fed, idle horse that refuses to help an overburdened ass. The horse is overly erectile: “Prick’d up with Pride, and Provender, the Horse / Deni’d his aid.”92 The ass dies from his exertions. Consequently, the horse must sumpter all of the burden himself. The illustration shows the crest-fallen horse, carrying a huge load, with its chin stuck resolutely into its vanquished chest. The textual “morall” is a politically neutral comment about the perils of tyrants overtaxing subjects. But there is another, more significant moral lurking below the surface of this supposed exposure of the danger of greed for individuals. We can elevate our horse-enhanced rhetoric, we can propagandize our equine and soldier-sodden culture. But if we fail to cooperate among ourselves, great Royalist works—such as this book—will die the same death as the “Prick’d,” proud horse.
Lawder’s poetic pamphlet has a woodcut of a prancing, riderless horse. This emphasizes the self-motivated independence of the animal, as in the illusions generated by the lionizing hymns to horses by the cavaliers. The woodcut is simplistic in form, two dimensional and almost lithographic in its lack of tonal range. By any strict, fine arts criteria, it is not an aesthetically consequential piece. However, that is not the point; it is the boldness of the decision to canonize the animal rather than a rider that distinguishes the woodcut as well as the poem it fronts. Its aesthetic merit, or lack thereof, is of little relevance for a wider audience today—it is an anonymous piece buried among thousands of other Thomason tracts in the British Library. This anonymity does not extend to all seventeenth-century equestrian works. Visitors to London’s National Gallery tend to be astounded by Antony Van Dyck’s enormous canvass, Charles I on Horseback, painted around 1633. It is a painting that is crucial on so many levels: aesthetically, in terms of equine cultural history, materially and politically. It is one of the few canvases painted within England to have had an entire monograph devoted to it. Much of Roy Strong’s 1972 study reveals a critical struggle to reconcile the celebratory grandeur of the work’s myth-making artistry with the residue of “sadness” that overhangs the image. The melancholy, to some degree, naturally emanates from one’s historical knowledge of Charles’ subsequent humiliations and execution. The rod of rule that Charles holds in his right hand would be removed from this flawed, tragic protagonist. As Strong writes, after January 1649, Charles “immediately became the subject of popular and propagandist “canonization,” and, overnight, the Church of England found its Counter-Reformation Baroque Royal Saint.”93 Strong probably makes too strong a case for Charles as a martyr who represents only a single faction, as his tragedy was mourned by many beyond Anglicanism. Whatever the case, the display at the National Gallery becomes a sort of quasi-religious freak show, a chance to gaze at a doomed proponent of horsebacked, imperial arrogance.
At the British Museum, there is a much less-loved display of Charles I on horseback. Hundreds of times smaller than Van Dyck’s life-sized rendering, a number of equestrian coins are on show. These constitute a sampling of the fifteen separate, officially minted Caroline coins that represent the monarch mounted.94 Even more unloved is a half-crown on display in Belfast’s Ulster Museum. The obverse of this coin features Charles I riding a horse that is trotting animatedly. With a firm but unhurried posture, Charles is relaxed and peaceable; but his raised, right-handed sword suggests his readiness for conflict, should it be necessary.95 Indeed, so pointed is Charles’s sword, that it pierces the legend-holding circle in a rare, variant pressing of the coin.96 Struck around 1642, the coin on display in Ulster is explained away as a “crude,” unofficial copy of the London coin.97 (The censorious adjective, “crude” is also used in the Ulster Museum’s published guide to its great coin collection.)98 The coin was minted by an Irish movement, the so-called Confederates of Kilkenny.99 Given its nationalist pedigree, it may have been expected that the artefact would have been revered and lovingly accounted for in a 2002 exhibition at National Museum of Ireland, Dublin. But here, too, at this event, a celebration of Irish coinage at the time of accession into the Euro, the piece is denounced as “crudely struck.”
The Kilkenny half-crown acquired its upbraiding nickname during the nineteenth century. As Herbert A. Grueber explains, in a still-seminal Victorian study of the British Museum’s numismatic collections, the surviving coins “have of late times received the appellation of ‘Blacksmith’ half-crowns on account of their very rude workmanship.”100 They are named with a class prejudice against those who hammer horse’s shoes. The downtrodden baseness of the unofficial coin is further castigated by Grueber: “the rebels . . . struck money for their own use,” he writes.101 There is an allegation of self-serving, wilful selfishness here. It is implied that crudeness of illegitimate purpose matches the crudeness of the coin’s hammered design. A closer study of the situation in Ireland during the early 1640s may bring us to a more nuanced interpretation of the coin’s meanings. The early Victorian historian T. Crofton Crocker informs us that the early 1640s “are emphatically spoken of at the present day by the Irish peasant as ‘the times of the troubles.’”102 Indeed, during the period, the island was cut up into varying spheres of influence: the northeast was largely held by Scottish opponents of Charles I; the Royalist government held Donegal and Down; the east coast, including the old “Pale” area was Irish dominated, but Royalist; and the Confederates held the rest.103 Given this complex mapping of interested holdings, it can be suggested that the term “rebels” could refer to two or even more of these groupings. A fresh consideration of the coin’s status is, then, highly desirable.
The Kilkenny Confederates are considered rebels against England, but among themselves they are discovered exchanging Anglophone, pro-monarchical coinage. A mixture of old English settlers and indigenous, Gaelic natives, the Confederates were a group that contained contradictory dynamics and impulses. They sought to end direct rule by Britain, but on October 24, 1642, they agreed to uphold a motto that is unimaginable in post-1921 Ireland: “for God, King and Country, the Irish United.”104 During 1643, when Confederate influence was at its peak, a cessation of hostilities was negotiated with the English State, culminating in a mid-September agreement formally “dividing the country into separate spheres of influence.”105 Commenting on the irony of two avowedly pro-Caroline parties having to engage in a peace process, Richard Bagwell writes simply that “both sides were fighting in the King’s name.”106 Jane Ohlmeyer goes further, noting that the Confederates “blatantly violated the King’s royal prerogatives and consistently refused to obey his instructions.”107 She goes on to consider the paradox that these rebels maintained their unalloyed claim to be “loyal subjects.”108 But there is, refreshingly, no indication that Ohlmeyer is intent on uncovering some sort of Confederate hypocrisy in their ambivalent position. I think that this is appropriate. In a nutshell, the Blacksmith’s half-crown signifies the complicated position of the Confederates in relation to the English monarchy. They are prepared to reach accommodation with the British presence in Ireland; pressing equestrian coins, they are even prepared to disseminate and increase the distribution of quasi-mythological images of the horsebacked, foreign King. They may accept English money, literally and metaphorically, but it is their own Irish version of that coinage. It becomes a double-edged but coherent message: the coin speaks for an Irish constituency that will tolerate and even enhance the unionizing imperative of the English if an Irish settlement is reached; but if England was to direct its reins for its own selfish ends, riding roughshod over Ireland, then the Irish shall maintain their capacity and will to run their own affairs.
Its crucial political consequences notwithstanding, on purely aesthetic grounds, the Kilkenny coin will never have the mass appeal of Van Dyck’s version of the Charles I on horseback trope. But both have a considerable and valid role in informing us of the complexities of the positions of Caroline proponents and antagonists during the years of fraction. Certainly, some strict supporters of “bottom-up” historiography would insist that because it must surely have been seen by more numerous and more lowly subjects, the imagery on the “crude” coin is more important than the opulent painting. Presumably, few people from the lower orders of the 1630s would have seen Van Dyck’s painting hung up at the end of the St. James’s Palace Gallery—public touring around stately buildings was not a recognized bourgeois leisure pursuit back then as it is now.109 It is, I think, helpful to puncture some of the mythical qualities concerning this Van Dyck image. On a simple, practical level, the horse’s composition was later used in other equestrian works by Van Dyck.110 This can work to denigrate the uniqueness of Charles’s pose: the flattering painter would boost any well-paying noble ego with a stunning horse work. But the recycling of images—Titian’s similar portrait of the Emperor, Charles V, is a notable forerunner and model—can work to lionize Charles, too. Noting the image’s ancestry and progeny can implicate Charles within a European union of rulers, meshing him into a network of horse-proud holders of reigns and reins. However, it is most productive, I feel, to question the self-consciousness of this Eurocentric cultural moment. By critically examining some contexts lurking behind a contemporary appraisal of the work, we can begin to get past its overpowering aesthetic bridling of us.
In a catalogue of a 1982 exhibition of Van Dyck’s works, Oliver Millar cites the comments of P. de la Serre, a French visitor to St. James’s Palace during November 1638:
There is a portrait of the king . . . armed and on horseback, by the Chevalier Van Dyck. And, without exaggeration, in presenting the state of this great monarch, he has so skilfully brought him to life . . . if our eyes alone were to be believed they would boldly assert that the king was alive in this portrait.111
Millar does not challenge this quotation, preferring to use it as a supportive exhibit for his claims for the longstanding public reverence for the work. That is quite valid, but it is an uncritical citation of an uncritical contemporary comment. There is nothing inherently objectionable about de la Serre’s praise. Gallery visitors today continue to be dazzled and unsettled by Charles’s eyes, as they engage the gazer’s eye, following the mobile viewer around the room; viewed as an almost mimetic rendering of a great horse, the painting cannot be faulted, should we want to find fault. We can add to Millar’s observations about the work by noticing a possible political imperative in this contemporary account of French praise. De la Serre was a member of the suite of Marie de’ Medici. This aristocrat had been Henri IV’s Queen, and, after her husband’s 1610 death, the Regent of her son, Louis XIII. But, seven years before de la Serre’s paean to Charles I on Horseback, Marie had been exiled from court, as a consequence of opposing the machinations of Richelieu. This paints her as something of a victim of that Cardinal’s ultra-Catholic reactions, whereas her exile in the Netherlands perhaps sides her with the Dutch people, who were often constructed as victims of Catholic Spain. Both Charles I and Marie de’ Medici, then, become fashioned as martyrs. Marie’s link to Charles I is cemented through the paintings of Rubens and Van Dyck. The Medici room is one of the most overly extravagant components of that embarrassment of riches, the Louvre in Paris. Large-scale images of Marie, Henri IV, and other French aristocrats and Medicis envelope the large, rectangular room. All of these beatifying works by Rubens flatter, puff-up, and vitalize the myth of a tight, loving, almost godly Medici family unit. It is a manifestation of a mammoth effort to grandiloquize monarchical rule. In the context of 1638, Marie is deprived of all of this. The Van Dyckean pedestaling of Charles I, then, works as a negative indicator of Marie’s loss of her reins. Rubens had, of course, been Van Dyck’s tutor, mentor and role model. De la Serre was hardly in a position to denigrate the painting of Charles I: his comments reflect an anxiety to cherish the legacy of Rubens’s influence, to further canonize the paintings of the Medicis. And, given Charles I’s troubled, post-Ship Tax fiasco position in late 1638, it demonstrates an imperative to enhance the reputation of Royalist works in general.
A link to Marie de’ Medici is visually present in Van Dyck’s painting. Some critics seem to discuss only Charles’s representation in the painting, as if he is the only nonequine being represented within the frame. The horse’s halter is held by a figure known to represent Charles’s riding master, Pierre Antoine Bourdin. This Frenchman first arrived in London during 1603. He was sent over with a consequential gift for the then very young Prince Henry: six horses.112 The present, from Henri IV, was, pronouncedly, crafted as an acknowledgment of James I’s new status as English as well as Scottish King. Even in peacetime, young princes die: if that wasn’t the case, then Van Dyck would never have painted Charles as a monarch, but as a mere prince. Bourdin’s presence is a reminder of the past, of Catholic Henri IV’s struggles to gain Paris in the 1590s, of Henry, Prince of Wales’ death, and of Marie de’ Medici’s fall. But he also prefigures the future. From whichever angle one looks at Van Dyck’s huge work on its current London wall, it is never clear—at least to me—whether the riding master’s eyes are focused on the horse’s head or whether he is looking forward, for dangers. It is a military helmet that the Frenchman holds, not a hunting hat. It is an equestrian image that does not allow war to dominate it, but rather to infiltrate it. Warhorses are more visible in accessible cultures of the 1640s, but their reduced aesthetic imperative does not diminish their political consequence. Van Dyck’s painting is bigger and brighter than the Kilkenny coin, but both equally illustrate the challenged, change-requiring system of monarchy throughout Europe.
With the Medici link established, Van Dyck’s mounted Charles can be read as a notification of absence as much as presence. Furthermore, the afterlife of the image reveals a macabre sting in the equine tail. The image was engraved, produced cheaply for the buying market. Subsequent impressions of the original work were changed to match prevailing circumstances: Charles’s head was chopped off and replaced with that of Oliver Cromwell.113 This is an extreme example of the Parliamentarians’ eventual, albeit temporary, denigration of mounted Caroline grandeur. The monarchical grasp of the reins had been slipping more gradually before 1643, the year of A Dialogve Betwixt a Horse of Warre and a Mill-Horse. Erica Fudge argues that this “play-pamphlet”—a duologue between two argumentative beasts—enforces a simple, Levelling view of contemporary events.114 It is, in Fudge’s view, a corrective call for a more equal distribution of provender, a peaceable reaction to urban, kingly violence. But it can be argued that the text rehearses a rather different anxiety. In fact, I would argue that the Dialogve has the effect of critiquing Parliamentary fecklessness in the face of Royalist aggression. The rising of the Horse of Warre echoes the elevation of the horse in Royalist manuals and poetry, whereas the country Mill-Horse does not rise at all.
A Dialogve’s frontispiece is decorated with a woodcut showing the two talking beasts: the elaborately dressed and furnished warhorse is discovered on top of a knoll, peering down contemptuously at the pack-laden Mill-Horse. The two are thus diametrically opposed. This separation is bodied forth through their opposing positions on the local topography. One is aloft, arrogant, and aggressive; the other is lowly, physically introverted, and burdened. The Mill-Horse, in the text of heroic couplets, demonizes the Cavaliers, asserting allegations about maidenhead plundering, excessive wine consumption, and Guise-like plots to kill masses of Protestants. The Horse of Warre responds to the accusations only with insouciant dismissiveness. But, verbally if not bodily extroverted, the Mill-Horse continues to assert his claims. He also justifies his own lot, even crediting himself with more agency than his more mobile opponent: “I seem not under / Malignants that doe townes and houses plunder,” he boasts.115 This is the pack-laden beast fashioning himself as a figure that voluntarily opts out of contemporary England’s incessant fighting. His comment concerning the Horse of Warre’s activities—“for the King against the Lawes”—seems remarkable, a signifier of the topsy-turvy times, when it is remembered that Charles’s father had insisted, in Basilikon Doron, that on earth the King was God’s appointee to maintain law.116 The Mill-Horse goes on to mock Cavalier horses’ insinuated core of cowardice. Although fanned up by Royalist propaganda, the “Cavalliers horse . . . / At Kenton field beshit themselves for feare,” he taunts.117 Responding to this scatological assault on the coltish mettle of his colleagues, the Horse of Warre threatens to kick the Mill-Horse. This does not occur, as their respective masters harness their beasts and go on their geographically and politically divergent ways.118 At this point, it is important to remind ourselves that, traditionally, mill-horses were often blind or lame.119 Despite his aggressive critique of Royalist callousness and greed, the Mill-Horse has offered no practical assistance to his fellow hungry horses; impotent, he could not have stopped the bullying Horse of Warre from kicking him. As much as asserting the righteousness of Levelling sensibility, the Mill-Horse is excoriating the perceived unreadiness of the King’s enemies for war.
A similarly disgruntled comment on Roundhead malaise is latent within another equine duologue, “A Dialogue Between the Two Horses.” The poem may have been written by Andrew Marvell—although that ascription is dismissed in one sentence by one of his modern editors.120 Even ignoring the attribution controversy, this equine poem has often inspired conflicting readings: for the Victorian, John Ormby, the text’s biases show that Marvell “certainly admired Cromwell”; another nineteenth-century critic, however, J. Stuart, writes that the poem reveals a Marvell “fallen into line with the . . . older Cavaliers.”121 The “Dialogue” was, according to Marvell’s biographer, Nicholas Murray, “written probably in the Autumn” of 1675.122 But Murray, successfully, I believe, insists that the poem is very much a product of civil war discord.
The two talking horses represent two equestrian statues that were designed for erection during the seventeenth-century’s tumults—one of Charles I, the other of Cromwell. Thomas Osborne, the Earl of Danby, commissioned the bronze sculpture of Charles from Le Suew in 1633, but the wars of 1642 had started before the piece’s public emplacement was feasible. In a demonstration of rein holding and casting off, Parliament sold the statue, cheaply, to one Rivet, a brazier. Keying into the Caroline discourse of martyrdom, as discussed by Roy Strong, Rivet sold cutlery that was supposed to have been taken from the dysfunctional, homeless sculpture. So, in a bizarre manner, purchasers of the knives and forks could believe that the monarch was indeed getting food into their bellies. After the Restoration, the brass work was sold—intact—to Danby. It can be seen in London to this day. The poem, then, may be expected to satirize this episode on delusional gulls who buy into purposeless, dead-king worship. Indeed, the poem points to alleged disillusionment among Royalists. The white marble horse complains about the lot of both himself and his brass colleague: they are “slaves by hors and foot.”123 It is a paltry return for “restoring the King.”124 It is a nagging “I told you so” response to the shocked bitterness of the brass horse. With a bathetic rhyme and hopeless nostalgia, the white horse yearns for some better future:
A Tudor a Tudor! We’ve had Stuarts enough;
None ever Reign’d like old Besse in the Ruffe.125
Rhyming an item of once-fashionable dress with a nostalgia-informed, impassioned cry against the current regime trivializes and diminishes the hope for nostalgic improvement. The verse calls to mind not only the historical Elizabeth, but also Shakespeare’s Richard III, with the white horse’s equine-favoured rewrite of Richard’s cry for an escape-facilitating mount. The distant past has civil wars, too—that is the problem with nostalgia. Rosy-tinted views of the past are inappropriate, however dire and disappointing the present.
Another Marvell biographer, Pierre Legouis, complains that the poem is not a successful satire: “the two quadrupeds agree too well . . . the opposition between the two equine characters does not come out clearly enough.”126 Legouis blames various factors for this supposed bluntness, including Marvell’s lack of painstakingness and unauthorized manuscript variations. The lack of sharpness, however, can be read differently I think. It is significant that two former enemies should find their once-divergent stances withdrawn into one mire of disillusionment. Parliamentary inactivity is satirized through its very lack of sharpness. Feckless moralizing about a better past cannot alleviate immediate and future problems. Despite the galvanizing forwardness of great figures such as Cromwell and Fairfax, the Roundhead cause, in these hippological productions, appears moribund and sterile. The Horse of Warre does not need to kick the Mill-Horse to seize the reins: he simply rides roughshod over any victim, encountering only eloquent but ineffective impediments.
Like Charles I, Richard Cromwell only came to rule England through the premature death of elder siblings. Oliver’s son was not destined for greatness. A 1659 woodcut represents Richard as a sleeping owl, riding a horse with closed eyes. The print seems to be a visual exploitation of the prevalence of the proverb, “If the blind shall lead the blind, both shall fall into the ditch.”127 One of Cromwell’s eyes is open, but it is not following the path in front of his sightless beast. The copy of the woodcut in Worcester College, Oxford, has been colored in by a later hand.128 The same blue ink is used to color the horse’s mane and its reins as is used to illuminate the smoke coming from Cromwell’s pipe. This color coordination links Cromwell’s treatment of the horse to the treatment of his breath and lungs: careless and detrimental to all. Another incidental detail compromises the leader’s phallicism—Richard’s sword is broken up by a fold on the print. The owl—Cromwell—is, like the Tawny Owl sometimes is in nature, mobbed by a number of screeching small birds. But he is seen to pay no heed to their complaints. Remote and supine, Cromwell is comfortably numbed, complacently disregarding of the shrieks of society’s smaller figures. The print is complemented with a first-person narration by the Richard-Owl. The verse resembles an early modern, nastier version of the twentieth-century clerihew.129 Cromwell pronounces that:
I am resolved to ride in State.
Not caring what the small Birds prate.
I’le keep my Seat without controul,
If once I flinch they’ll call me Owle.130
It is a brazen assertion of decadent indifference; it argues that the Parliamentary government is parading in self-delusion. It is contradictory to assert that “I’ll keep my Seat without controul”—he is determined to lose control but some level of “controul” is needed to deliberately effect this. It is a bitterly formulated paradox, the implication of which is that Richard has a wilfully self-destructive mentality with regard to running his protectorate and the nation.
Early modern ignorance of ornithology, again, plays a role. Michael Ferber notes this erroneous denial of the Owl’s great night vision and writes that “the owl proverbially has poor eyesight”; Tilley records numerous examples of the proverb, “as blind as an owl.”131 Owls, nocturnal hunters of rodents, have immense eye power. Linguistic research by N. C. W. Spence can be used to complicate the print’s vision of a blind Cromwell. In parts of Europe, the Owl can signify a human addicted to darkness, a recluse, or “an ugly woman.”132 None of these aspects of owldom flatters Cromwell. But perhaps the most damning insinuation of the owl print is teased out if we see Archibald Geikie’s notice of the bird as “a foreboding of death . . . a bad omen.”133 Obviously, we can overstress this aspect of the print from our presentist viewpoint, as we know that the protectorate collapsed within months of the print’s publication. But the image was received with intense enthusiasm by one Royalist in England: the past and future Secretary of State, Edward Nicholas. So direct is the hit on Cromwell’s faltering regime that being “vendible here with an oules head pictured” has, among other factors, “confyned [Richard] to his chamber.”134 For Nicholas, the tide is turning—the smaller birds’ complaints will eventually take effect. Expected new taxes will “open the eyes as well as the purses of the stupid nation.”135 But Nicholas has no right to call the nation “stupid.” Read contrarily, the sharp satire on Richard Cromwell’s imperious dizziness can be turned back onto its head and fabricated as an attack on Royalism. Decadent, monarchical rule inspired a coarse reaction in the nation; the misrule facilitated the coming to power of Richard’s more illustrious father. Blind men riding blind horses should be easy to ungirdle, but Nicholas’s Royalist colleagues have been unable to seize the initiative. The Restoration happens despite the Cavaliers’ equitation skills, not because of them.
Conclusion
At this closing of the chapter, it may be helpful to question some of our assumptions about words such as “containment” and “restraint.” I have argued that in many of these texts the horse functions as a trope of liberating potential only to rescind into a force of bridling detention. Equine representations, ultimately, generate a sort of metaphorical mechanism to solidify recognition of limited autonomy. During the rebels’ conference in Book II of Paradise Lost (first published in 1667), Mammon argues that there should not be another attempt to conquer heaven. In the lesser, lower world of Hell, the outlaws shall appear:
Free, and to none accountable, preferring
Hard Liberty before the easy yoke
Of servile pomp.136
In Milton’s text, at this point, “hard” is a complicating adjective. “Hard Liberty” can be fully realized freedom, an immense, utter lack of fettering restraint. But “Hard” can also mean difficult, with one having to guide one’s own way through the manifold possibilities of a testing existence. A restraining “yoke” can be a crutch as well, a staff onto which identity and belonging can be underpinned. Fashioning his married union as a tying together of agricultural beasts, Adam implores Eve to renounce Satan and to succumb to “God and his just yoke / Laid on our necks.”137 Restraint, in this instance, is a cosseted alternative to conflict with the “grand For,” Satan. At the very end of Milton’s work, Adam and Eve are yoked merely with one another—“hand in hand.” The edgy uncertainness and anxiety that the ending inspires is exacerbated by their sense of “solitary” isolation, a consequence of their revolt against the yoke of their maker. Their liberty invokes in the reader an awareness of nervousness, responsibility, and “slow” tentativeness. Without a dominating, secure hold from a bridle or yoke, the characters only have each other.
A moralistic, Christian reading of Paradise Lost may argue for its credentials as a morality tale, one that rejects the notion that to be bridled and bound is to be limited and servile. Freedom and personal choice, emancipation from the yoke, is humanity’s apparent problem, it could be argued. Adam and Eve’s ultimate nemesis, Satan, also has only his unbridled, uncontrolled self. But this figure, too, through equine allusions, is finally discovered to be haltered and curtailed. It is credible to suggest that considerable sympathy is claimed by the figure of Satan. Some of this sympathy for the rebel is, I think, posited most stridently on the prose Summary—“Argument”—of Book VI. Here, God is constructed as a scheming, military showman: “God on the third day sends Messiah his Son, for whom he had reserved the glory of that victory.”138 This is no mere summary of a portion of the poem’s narrative, but an interpretive intervention, an impassioned acknowledgment of God’s contrivances and magus-like concerns for deft presentation of powers. The plan is carried through, and Jesus earns his victory parade: “Worthiest to reign: he celebrated rode / Triumphant through mid Heav’n.”139 The minions of Heaven “celebrated,” but the punctuation allows for the Messiah to be also the one who “celebrated” his preordained victory. Jesus, the Son and a part of God, is depicted as a martial leader on horseback, an infallible figure. This military prowess is conveyed through the trope of the mounted leader. Milton’s construction of a knight-like Christ is a refraction of Civil War images of horsebacked impressiveness. Through God’s machinations, Christ mounts an other, whereas Satan is the other who is ridden and conquered. Satan is the bridled beast who has not had a chance against the contrived haltering of God; he is like an angry, bitter horse.
Rebuked by an agent of God, Satan responds with great agitation, and, “like a proud steed reined, went haughty on, / Champing his iron curb.”140 The narrator’s use of two particularly judgmental adverbs for the description of this metaphorical horse’s actions— “Proud” and “haughty”—confers a sense of danger and fanaticism to the malign animal. Later, Satan is referred to as having a “proud crest”—he has all of the arrogance of Aesop and Ogilby’s selfish horse, but none of the (albeit enforced) humility that partners vanquished misery.141 Satan fights back against the iron curb of God’s tyranny. The character is constructed as one who makes the choice to rebel against the hierarchy of Heaven, but one who has had no fair opportunity to shelter from the contrived, merciless aspect of God’s scourge. It is appropriate, I would suggest, to argue for a God and a Satan who both use mounted armies for their own purposes. Horses suffer greatly in these conflicts: “And fiery foaming steeds; what stood, recoiled / O’er wearied.”142 That the Bible writers neglect to inform us whether or not animal souls go to heaven allows us to assume that animal wastage is a practical rather than a spiritual problem—or even simply not a problem at all—for Milton’s hard-riding God. Both Satanic and Godly sides are conditioned by their fastenings within linguistic modes of equine allusions. However, neither of the two opposing factions finally bridle us—readers, critics—with a stabilized imprint of what exactly a horse symbolizes in Paradise Lost. Relationships between human figures and equine tropes are ever-changing—implications differ in effect every time that we compare one equestrian engraving to another or one play character’s equine-boosted rhetoric to another’s. Every time that Peacham wants to draw a horse, it would move, he complains. Every time that we introduce a new cultural context, the representative, culturally produced horses shift and confound our attempts to bridle and harness an exact, precise meaning onto them.
Alan Sinfield, insisting that a work’s unfolding can never enforce the desired meaning that an author intends, writes that “Any position supposes its intrinsic op-position. All stories comprise within themselves the ghosts of the alternative stories they are trying to exclude.”143 Some Christians argue that God wrote through Milton and that his work is an example of the Holy Spirit showing us the correct decisions to make, to expose and hence tame our curious inclinations and to yield our necks meekly to the Lord. Together with the Messiah’s sacrifices in Paradise Regained (published, initially, in 1671), the Miltonic project dramatizes the story of a good God defeating a bad Satan. Many ghostly, alternative stories are cancelled out by the narrative. God’s tyrannical bridling of the arch-rebel hints at what is an easily seen alternative reading of the story; this opposing reading would perceive a strong-willed subject being literally demonized and disenfranchised from better society by an unfeeling, forward-planning, self-interested competitor. The tale told on the surface, and the opposite scenario that it seeks to repress, can both be also seen in an etching by Richard Gaywood. This work celebrates the procession of Charles II through London on the day before his coronation on April 23, 1661. In the scene represented by Gaywood, Charles is crowned, carries the scepter and ball of office, and is securely mounted on a sure-footed steed.144 Larger than life, the king’s head seems to be out of proportion with all of the other figures in the procession. This sense of inequality through unequally ascribed space is furthered by the fact that all of the human faces look to the image’s viewer—he or she who looks into the frame is engaged with directly by the figures represented inside the image. An illusion develops whereby it seems as if those interior characters are aware of their presentational responsibilities, as if they know that a carefully contrived image is necessary for the picture to tell a convincing, persuasive picture. Posing and posed, they are proto-photographic models. The big-headedness of the king elaborates a sense of the “unreal” about the occasion as nuanced through Gaywood’s artificial rendering. The centrality of the king in the image is compounded by an examination of all four horses’ heads: they are all, rather coincidentally, dutifully bowed at the same angle. This royalist print seeks to dictate one reading: that dominion over the animals and order in the streets is made possible by the peace that the Stuart restoration facilitates. But having seen the warlike symbolism of the horse throughout the culture of the civil war, we are prompted to see the story that the etching seeks to hide. The alternative vision to that of Gaywood is of a more realistic presentation of the four equine heads. We see ghostly images that are edited out of the etching: agitation, a lack of uniformity, and, above all, conflict. Horse imagery is a metaphorical register of the fissured political allegiances of the peoples of the British Isles during the years of war. And horse imagery also makes the culture fissured. Equine imagery cannot be bound. Circumstances and contexts keep changing, frustrating our attempts to harness. After studying and becoming immersed in these mid-seventeenth-century ebbs and flows, we can almost see the movements of the alternatively postured horses lurking underneath Gaywood’s etching. The image is contrived to drive through the message that, in Charles II’s London, even animals’ hearts and minds will be reconquered by a monarch who will heal the lacerations of the divisive war years. But we can see the opposite of the propagandist story. Here, in the alternative world that Gaywood represses, revolting horses question the long-term viability of Charles’s peace, and begin to tell us a more critical story about the England that will come after 1660.
Notes
1. Mary Abbot, Family Ties: English Families, 1540–1920 (London: Routledge, 1993), 59.
2. R. C. Griffiths, “Joyce Jeffreys of Ham Castle: a 17th Century Businesswoman, parts VII–VIII,” Transactions of the Worcestershire Archaeological Society, 11 (1934), 3; R. C. Griffiths, “Joyce Jeffreys of Ham Castle: a 17th Century Businesswoman, parts I–VI,” Transactions of the Worcestershire Archaeological Society, 10 (1933), 12.
3. Henry Peacham, The Garden of Eloquence, Conteyning the Figures of Grammar and Rhetorick (London, 1577; STC 19497), A3v.
4. Ibid., A4r
5. Henry Peacham, The Art of Drawing with the Pen, and Limming in Water Colovrs (London, 1606; STC 19500), F3r.
6. Ibid., F3v.
7. Ibid., K4r.
8. Ibid., E2r.
9. Ibid., E2v.
10. Ibid.
11. Ben Jonson, The Works of Benjamin Jonson, the Second Volume (London, 1640; STC 14754), Gg4r.
12. Jonson had been dead for three years when the poem was published, together with the other materials put together by Kenelm Digby for the 1640s Works of Benjamin Jonson, James Loxley, The Complete Critical Guide to Ben Jonson (London: Routledge, 2002), 208.
13. It is now well known that Cavendish’s writings were an influence on Jonson, as were Jonson’s on the written work of Cavendish. On this, see Nick Rowe, ‘“My Best Patron”: William Cavendish and Jonson’s Caroline Drama,” The Seventeenth Century, 9 (1994), 197–212.
14. Jonson, Gg4v.
15. Peake’s painting is reproduced in Mark Evans, ed., Princes as Patrons: The Art Collections of the Princes of Wales from the Renaissance to the Present Day (London: Merrell Holberton, 1998), 25.
16. Edward Berry, Shakespeare and the Hunt: A Cultural and Social Study (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 23.
17. Ibid.
18. For a reproduction of the engraving, and for a discussion of the contemporary reception to the image, see Richard McCoy, “‘A Dangerous Image’: The Earl of Essex and Elizabethan Chivalry,” Journal of Medieval and Renaissance Studies, 13 (1983), 313–29.
19. Alzada Tipton, “The Transformation of the Earl of Essex: Post-Execution Ballads and “The Phoenix and the Turtle,”” Studies in Philology, 99 (2000), 60–61, 75.
20. A photograph of the statuette is reproduced in Evans, ed., 38. The accompanying text is the source of my historical information about the piece’s ownership.
21. The Draughtsman’s Art: Master Drawings from the National Gallery of Scotland (Edinburgh: National Gallery of Scotland, 1999), 64. The Rubens drawing is given a large reproduction in this catalogue, 65.
22. Keith Andrews, “An Early Rubens Drawing,” The Burlington Magazine, 127 (1985), 526–31.
23. Scott Nixon, “Milton’s Royalist Friend: the Peculiar Pamphlets of Henry Lawes,” Times Literary Supplement, November 23, 2001, 15.
24. Robert Ralston Cawley, Henry Peacham: His Contribution to English Poetry (State College: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1971), 3.
25. J. W. Lever, “The Wasp: a Trial Flight,” in G. R. Hibbard, ed., The Elizabethan Theatre, IV (London: Macmillan, 1974), 67.
26. Elizabeth Baldwin, “Musophilus: A Newly Discovered Seventeenth-Century Play,” Leeds Studies in English, 29 (1998), 35–47.
27. The Wisest Have Their Fools About Them, ed. Elizabeth Baldwin (Oxford: Malone Society, 2001), l. 543–45. The play’s manuscript does not offer a title; Baldwin had previously called the text Musophilus but gives this new, editorially invented name for her diplomatic transcription. I call the play Musophilus for consistency.
28. Ibid., l. 600–01.
29. Ibid., l. 602–03.
30. Ibid., l. 603–04.
31. When searching for “the wasp” on any electronic, Renaissance-based search facility, the vast majority of hits reference either Aristophanes’ play or Jonson’s cynically rasping character from Barthol’mew Fayre.
32. J. J. Gourlay, “The Waspe,” Times Literary Supplement, 5 June, 1943, 271.
33. The Waspe, ed. J. W. Lever (Oxford: Malone Society, 1976), l. 554–55.
34. Ibid., l. 14–16.
35. Ibid., l. 417.
36. Ibid., l. 351.
37. Francis Godwin, The Man in the Moone, ed. F. C. M. (Hereford: Nagrom, 1959), “Introduction” (no page numbers given).
38. Brian W. Aldiss, “Desperately Seeking Aliens,” Nature, 409 (2001), 1080.
39. Robert M. Philmus, “Murder Most Fowl: Butler’s Edition of Francis Godwin,” Science Fiction Studies, 23.2 (1996), www.depauw.edu/sfs/review_essays/philm69.htm.
40. Francis Godwin, The Man in the Moone: Or, a Discovrse of a Voyage Thither (London, 1638; STC 11943), B2r.
41. Ibid., D3v.
42. Ibid., B2v.
43. Ibid., B2v.
44. Ibid.
45. Ibid., B3r.
46. Ibid.
47. Ibid., C1r.
48. Ibid., C1r–v.
49. On the limited understanding of avian migration prior to and including the eighteenth century, see R. Robin Baker, Bird Navigation: The Solution of a Mystery? (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1984), 1–2.
50. Myrfyn Owen, The Barnacle Goose (Haverfordwest: C. I. Thomas and Sons, 1990), 2.
51. Godwin, D3r.
52. Ibid., D5v.
53. Baldwin, ed., l. 797.
54. Ibid., l. 647.
55. Transcribed in an appendix in Peter Edwards, The Horse Trade of Tudor and Stuart England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), 154.
56. Banks’s horse is, later in the play, directly named, l. 1250–51.
57. Baldwin, ed., l. 765–70.
58. Ibid., l. 771–72.
59. “Strawberry” does seem to have been a common name for horses during the seventeenth century. Sir Richard Newdigate apparently attempted to buy a six-year-old “sandy grey” called “Strawberry” during 1691 but could not afford the £100 asking price. See Edwards, 149.
60. For an overview of Latimer’s career, see David Loades, “Hugh Latimer,” in Hans J. Hillerbrand, ed., The Oxford Encyclopaedia of the Reformation, 4 vols. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996), II, 399–400.
61. Godwin, I5r.
62. Ibid.
63. Ibid, I7v
64. The 1578 conflict’s importance to early modern England is addressed in the introductory material to Charles Edelman’s edition of the related Renaissance plays, The Battle of Alcazar and Captain Thomas Stukeley, Charles Edelman, ed., The Stukeley Plays (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2005), 1–57.
65. Ibid.
66. Lever, ed., l. 2137; ibid., l. 2216; ibid., l. 337.
67. Ibid., l. 1927–28.
68. Ibid., l. 1879.
69. Ibid., l. 1693.
70. Ibid, l. 1510–14.
71. Ibid., l. 2319.
72. Ibid., l. 1473–74.
73. For a reproduction of the image, see Richard Pennington, A Descriptive Catalogue of the Works of Wenceslaus Hollar (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982), 230.
74. Graham Parry, The Seventeenth Century: The Intellectual and Cultural Context of English Literature, 1603–1700 (London: Longman, 1989), 87.
75. David Leslie, Generall Lesley’s Direction and Order for the Exercising of Horse and Foot (London, 1642; Wing N837).
76. John Vernon, The Young Horse-man, or, the Honest Plain-Dealing Cavalier (London, 1644; Wing V253).
77. Ibid., A3v.
78. John Cruso, Military Instructions for the Cavallrie, or, Rules and Directions for the Service of Horse (London, 1644; Wing C7433), C4v.
79. Virgil, The Works of Publius Virgilus Maro (London, 1668; Wing V613), N2v.
80. Antony Griffiths and Gabriela Kesnerová, Wenceslaus Hollar: Prints and Drawings (London: British Museum, 1982), 63.
81. Ibid., 85.
82. For typical remarks on, respectively, Hollar’s “virtuosity” and his “remarkable, scrupulous accuracy,” see Arthur M. Hind, Wenceslaus Hollar and His Views of London and Windsor in the Seventeenth Century (London: John Lane, 1922), 9; and Graham Parry, Hollar’s England: A Mid Seventeenth-Century View (Wilton: Michael Russell, 1980), 20.
83. Pennington, 11.
84. Ibid.
85. Aesop, The Fables of Æsop Paraphras’d in Verse (London, 1651; Wing A689), Bbbb2r.
86. Ibid., A7v.
87. A. M. Gibbs, “Biographical Introduction,” Sir William Davenant: The Shorter Poems, and Songs from the Plays and Masques, ed. A. M. Gibbs (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1972), xxx–xxxi.
88. On Davenant’s imprisonment, see Philip Bordinat and Sophia B. Blaydes, Sir William Davenant (Boston: Twayne, 1981), 22–23; Howard S. Collins, The Comedy of Sir William Davenant (The Hague: Mouton and Co., 1967), 18; Mary Edmond, Rare Sir William D’Avenant: Poet Laureate, Playwright, Civil War General, Restoration Theatre Manager (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1987), 117–18; and Alfred Harbage, Sir William Davenant: Poet Venturer, 1606–68 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1935), 114–17.
89. G. Lawder, A Horse, or, a New-Yeares Gift (London, 1646; Wing L604A), A2v.
90. Ibid.
91. Ibid.
92. Aesop, Ccc1r.
93. Roy Strong, Van Dyck: “Charles I on Horseback” (London: Allen Lane, 1972), 29.
94. Standard Catalogue of British Coins (London: B. A. Seaby Ltd, 1967), 144–72.
95. For a reproduction of the coin’s obverse and reverse, see Anthony Dowle and Patrick Finn, The Guide Book to the Coinage of Ireland from 995 AD to the Present Day (London: Spink and Son, 1969), 65; see also, Peter Seaby, Coins and Tokens of Ireland (London: B. A. Seaby, 1970), 67.
96. For an illustration of this variant, and of its high price-tag for collectors, see R. J. Marles, Year 2000 Edition: Collector’s Coins: Ireland (Torquay: Rotographic Productions, 2000), 21.
97. On the English model of this coin, see J. J. North, English Hammered Coinage, 2 vols. (London: Spink and Son, 1991–94), II, 154, 158–9, and Plate 8.
98. J. D. Bateson, Coins and Medals: A Guide to the Numismatic Collections in the Ulster Museum, Belfast (Belfast: Ulster Museum, 1978), 8. The coin is also illustrated, ibid., 10.
99. For basic guides to this movement, see Ciaran Brady, ed., The Hutchinson Encyclopaedia of Ireland (Oxford: Helicon, 2000), 75–76; and S. G. Connolly, ed., The Oxford Companion to Irish History (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), 108–10.
100. Herbert A. Grueber, Handbook of the Coins of Great Britain and Ireland in the British Museum (London: British Museum, 1899), 236–37.
101. Ibid., 235.
102. T. Crofton Crocker, ed., Narratives Illustrative of the Contests in Ireland in 1641 and 1690 (London: Camden Society, 1841), v.
103. Séan Duffy, ed., Atlas of Irish History (Dublin: Gill and Macmillan, 1997), 65.
104. J. E. Doherty and D. J. Hicken, A Chronology of Irish History Since 1500 (Dublin: Gill and Macmillan, 1989), 46.
105. Micheál Ó Siochrú, Confederate Ireland, 1642–49: A Constitutional and Political Analysis (Dublin: Four Courts Press, 1999), 68.
106. Richard Bagwell, Ireland Under the Stuarts and During the Interregnum, 3 vols. (London: Longman, 1909–16), II, 50.
107. Jane Ohlmeyer, “Introduction: A Failed Revolution?” in Jane Ohlmeyer, ed., Ireland from Independence to Occupation, 1641–1660 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 18.
108. Ibid.
109. On the positioning of the wooden-framed canvas during the 1630s, see Oliver Millar, comp., Van Dyck in England (London: National Portrait Gallery, 1982), 50.
110. See ibid, 105.
111. Quoted in ibid., 50.
112. Christopher Brown, Van Dyck (Oxford: Phaidon, 1982), 166.
113. The story of the changing heads of the engraving is told in G. S. Layard, The Headless Horseman (London: Philip Allan, 1922).
114. Erica Fudge, Perceiving Animals: Humans and Beasts in Early Modern English Culture (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 2000), 159.
115. A Dialogve Betwixt a Horse of Warre and a Mill-Horse (London, 1643; Wing D1347), A1v.
116. Ibid.
117. Ibid., A4v.
118. Ibid.
119. Elwyn Hartley Edwards, Horses: Their Role in the History of Man (London: Willow, 1987), 170.
120. Elizabeth Story Donno, ed., Andrew Marvell: The Complete English Poems (London: Allen Lane, 1974), 218.
121. Ibid., 265.
122. Nicholas Murray, World Enough and Time: The Life of Andrew Marvell (London: Little, Brown and Company, 1999), 219.
123. H. M. Margoliouth, ed., The Poems and Letters of Andrew Marvell, 3 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1971), I, 210.
124. Ibid.
125. Ibid., 212.
126. Pierre Legouis, Andrew Marvell: Poet, Puritan, Patriot (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1965), 183.
127. William George Smith and Paul Harvey, eds., The Oxford Dictionary of English Proverbs (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1957), 51.
128. The print is reproduced, in color, in Sheila O’Connell, The Popular Print in England (London: British Museum, 1999), between 128 and 129.
129. The clerihew is a type of “light verse which consists of two couplets that purport to give biographical information about famous people . . . [it] mocks both the famous and the learned,” Frances Teague, “Clerihew,” in Alex Preminger and T. V. F. Brogan, eds., The New Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993), 219. See also Karl Beckson and Arthur Ganz, A Reader’s Guide to Literary Terms (London: Thames and Hudson, 1970), 35; Chris Baldick, The Concise Oxford Dictionary of Literary Terms (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990), 37–38; and Margaret Drabble, ed., The Oxford Companion to English Literature (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), 210.
130. O’Connell, between 128–29.
131. Michael Ferber, A Dictionary of Literary Symbols (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 147; Morris Palmer Tilley, A Dictionary of the Proverbs in England in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1966), 516–17.
132. N. C. W. Spence, “The Human Bestiary,” The Modern Language Review, 96 (2001), 926.
133. Archibald Geikie, The Birds of Shakespeare (Glasgow: James Maclehose and Sons, 1916), 58.
134. George F. Warner, ed., The Nicholas Papers: Correspondence of Sir Edward Nicholas, Secretary of State, 4 vols (London: Camden Society, 1886–1920), IV, 160.
135. Ibid., 161.
136. John Milton, Paradise Lost, in John Leonard, ed., John Milton: The Complete Poems (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1998), Book II, lines 255–57.
137. Ibid., Book X, lines 1045–46.
138. Ibid., Book VI, lines 8–9.
139. Ibid., Book VI, lines 888–89.
140. Ibid., Book IV, lines 858–59.
141. Ibid., Book VI, line 191.
142. Ibid., Book VI, lines 391–92.
143. Alan Sinfield, Faultlines: Cultural Materialism and the Politics of Dissident Reading (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992), 47.
144. The etching is reproduced in Antony Griffiths, The Print in Stuart Britain (London: British Museum, 1999), 195.