Phalaris and Perillus in Early Modern Print
Of all the classical figures in Pulter’s poem, Phalaris appears most broadly in the archive of books printed 1450–1700. The story of the tyrant is rep…
Emblem 50 is one of Pulter’s most explicitly political poems. Here, as elsewhere in her work, revolutions and repetitions of form, language, and image support an argument that for Pulter the civil wars, and particularly the execution of Charles I, were an affront to natural order (e.g., On that Unparalleled Prince Charles the First, His Horrid Murder8). In much of her other political verse, Pulter laments the death of Charles and other royalist leaders in an elegiac mode, expressing personal and political lament in sighs and tears.1 “Phalaris” works rather differently. As an emblem poem, “Phalaris” might draw from its natural and historical images to offer a moral lesson, but under Pulter’s hand that lesson is strikingly specific to contemporary politics.2 With boldness and perhaps a touch of delight, Pulter links the story of the cruel Sicilian tyrant Phalaris and the brass bull constructed by his court artisan Perillus to the agonizing conditions for royalists living in Cromwellian England. She also explores in a rich counterfactual vein how the regicides suffer the effects of their own instruments of violence. The result is not one of the many Pulterian emblems that critics have described as “grasp[ing] at a belief in a fading ordered world” or as culminating in a lyrical address to God.3 Yes, the verse ends with a picture of “conscience” gnawing at the hearts of so-called Christians, but this is no psalmic hymn or communal lament.4 This is a powerful and vengeful prophecy against what Pulter would argue as the destructive innovations of those who fought Stuart monarchy.
Formally, “Phalaris” works as a double sonnet, constructed, as are many of Pulter’s sonnets, from rhymed couplets.5 The first fourteen lines recount classical examples of violent actors (Perillus, Procrustes, Sciron, Termerus, Sinis) punished by symmetrical acts of violence. The second fourteen lines imagine the same for political actors of Pulter’s day (the earl of Essex, Charles I’s executioners, Oliver Cromwell). The turn of the first sonnet arrives at line 13, where Pulter’s speaker exclaims, “Oh that all those that Flatter Tiranny / Might first their own accursed projects trie.” Punctuated by its spondaic words (“Oh that”), this couplet ends the first sonnet with a strong thesis, the conditions of which will be tested and explored in the poem’s second half. If only, the speaker imagines (or perhaps prays), all political flatterers might suffer the same fate as Perillus. This thesis is further elaborated by a rhyme scheme that intensifies the four lines leading to the center of the poem. The rest of the poem bounds along in rhymed couplets, yet here, at the middle, Pulter employs either an ABAB structure – the trisyllabic “Cruelly” rhyming more closely with the trisyllable “Tiranny”; “Die” with “trie” – or, more simply, an accretive AAAA structure, in which all four words share the same final sound. Either way, the rhymes link the central parts of the poem – ancient and modern, myth and counterfactual – into a single argument: those who try cruel tyranny ought to die. Working from this premise, the second half of Pulter’s poem proceeds, in four-line segments, to conjure up the deaths of those who set the stage for Charles I’s execution, of those who performed the execution, and of those who followed the execution with the sequestration of royalist estates and the deportation of royalist families. The second sonnet ends with a couplet that returns the verse to its emblematic opening: “That Worm will gnaw though for A time ’tis hid / And make them Roar wors then Perillus did.”6
To craft her prophetic emblem, Pulter drew from ancient images and stories which had gained new life and purpose in civil war England. Though we know little of Pulter’s education or what books she read, we do know that she met with friends and relatives in Hertfordshire and in London and that she was almost certainly receiving news and books from the metropole.7 She refashioned these raw materials, adapting and adopting them to her own voice, her own ends.8 The figure of Phalaris, for instance, was widely used by contemporary writers as an example of tyranny, but it was his artisan Perillus who received the harsher treatment in these texts, where he was excoriated for his cunning and flattery (see Phalaris and Perillus in Early Modern Print). In one striking example from 1621, the minister Thomas Granger compares Perillus to Haman from the book of Esther: “So Haman was hanged vpon the same gallowes, that he had prepared for Mordecai, Hest 7. and Perillus was first broyled in the brasen Bull that hee made for the tyrant Phalaris to torment others in. Iob sayth, The Lord taketh the wise in their craftinesse.”9 In drawing out the cruelty and arrogance of Perillus over that of Phalaris, Pulter selected a contemporary interpretation of the story that was at once personal and pragmatic. Working from a moment when accusations of tyranny often flowed in the direction of Stuart monarchy, Pulter chose to avoid that element and focus instead on other agents – on those lower figures, who, like Perillus, were as much to blame for the downfall of the state and were themselves perhaps more cruel.10 With such a focus, Pulter was also free to imagine herself (as she does throughout her collection) as Queen Esther, transferring Mordecai’s death sentence to his courtly antagonist, Haman.
Pulter may have seen herself as an agent of earthly justice meted out against the Perilluses of her world, but the other myths that she invokes in her poem point to a different agent: Theseus. After finishing with Phalaris, Pulter moves to a catalog of criminals and robbers whom Theseus punished, using their own modes of violence against them, on his journey from his hometown of Troezen to Athens, where he would become king: Procrustes, the innkeeper, who “stretcht or Cutt” his visitors to fit his iron-bed; Sciron, a bandit who forced passersby to wash his feet and “kickd [them] down … to the seas”; Termerus, a robber who bashed his head against the heads of his victims; and Sinis, another robber, who tied his victims to bent trees and then released the trees and so split them in two (see Procrustes, Sciron, Termerus, and Sinis in Early Modern Print). Though the poem ends with a vision of conscience doing the work of self-torture, Pulter’s verse cannot shake the figure of Theseus, whose presence behind the stories of the poem’s first half haunts the punishments in the poem’s second half.11 Who will chain the earl of Essex, “that Fell Tyrant that in Newbury Raignd,” “unto the Fatall stag[e]”? Who will submit “those that made the Engine to pull Down” Charles’s “sacred Head” to a similar fate? Who will prompt “Oliver that Pulley [to] trie”? Pulter suggests that the crimes are so obvious that “Were some Condemnd the Ax would moue alone,” and perhaps she sees the agent of punishment as something vaguer, a Rhamnusia or a Nemesis, the figure of revenge. But in order for the executioner’s axe to move alone, “some” must first be “Condemnd.” How, the poem seems to ask, and by whom?
The confidence and vehemence with which Pulter imagines the torture of regicides suggests firm answers to these questions.12 She writes, near the end of the poem, in a prophetic mode: the should’s and would’s become sure’s and will’s. Perhaps this boldness comes from Pulter’s awareness that her verse was not going to circulate,13 but the details of the counterfactuals offer a different explanation. Take the picture of the earl of Essex, who was the general in charge of parliamentary forces at the decisive battle at Newbury on 20 September 1643. Pulter could well have been remembering Essex’s role in that battle, but he had died in 1646, at least eight years before Pulter wrote her poem. What is more likely is that Pulter’s memory of Essex was filtered through a Restoration event: Charles II’s order that Essex’s funeral monument be destroyed. Pulter, who wrote another poem entirely about this event (On the Fall of That Grand Rebel the Earl of Essex’s Effigies in Harry the 7th’s Chapel in Westminster Abbey62), could have also encountered Essex’s name in the popular press where he was, in 1661, being remembered as “the first disturber of our peace” and compared to “Dionysius, King of Sicily … a Tyrant, begot of Tyrants.”14
If the picture of Essex is informed by Restoration contexts, so too are the poem’s images of the other regicides, including Cromwell, being hung on pulleys or chained to the “Fatall stag[e]” where Charles laid his head, “Lamb like on that Alter.” Pulter’s description of Charles’s execution is entirely consistent with contemporary civil war reports and images, as well as with poems like Andrew Marvell’s “An Horatian Ode.”15 But the language of pulleys and chains moves us from the scene of Charles’s death to the scene of the regicides, tried and punished at the Restoration. Though there are anecdotal reports of chains or ropes being at hand to restrain Charles in 1649, none of the contemporary visual representations of the scene show a system of restraint. Instead, it is at the public execution site “Tyburn,” which groans for “those Regicides,” that chains and pulleys are most appropriate. In January 1661, Charles II ordered the bodies of Cromwell, Henry Ireton, and John Bradshaw to be exhumed, hanged, and beheaded—the exact sequence that Pulter imagines for Oliver and the other regicides in her poem. In looking for the Theseus behind the acts of revenge in the poem’s second half, we need look no further than Charles II.16
“Phalaris” ends with a final punishment that stands out in a poem otherwise concerned with domestic affairs: after judgment has been meted out against Cromwell and the regicides, then “should their Children to Jameca goe / Their staits sequstred Widdow Eyes or’eflow.” As with the other details she imagines, this detail points to a Restoration context for the poem. Since the end of the civil wars, England had been pursuing a more active imperial program, beginning with wars to conquer Ireland and Scotland and continuing with the Dutch before finally settling for peace in 1654. The wars in Ireland were particularly brutal, and it is surprising that Pulter, who had Irish roots, chose to include Jamaica and not Ireland in her poem, as she had done in Vain Herostratus (Emblem 28)93.17 But Pulter would have been privy also to the Protectorate’s activities in the Caribbean. Her nephew James Ley, third earl of Marlborough (1618–1665), had participated in military and economic ventures to the region throughout the 1640s and 1650s. In 1660, Ley began petitioning parliament for support to settle Jamaica, and in 1664 he was nominated governor of the colony.18 This personal chronology aligns, as well, with the place that Jamaica occupied in England’s public imagination. In 1655, Cromwell’s forces had invaded Jamaica after failing to make headway in Hispaniola—the intended target of his 1654 Western Design to balance power in the Caribbean—but it was not until after the Restoration that accounts of royalists shipped off to Jamaica proliferated (see Pulter and Jamaica).19 Pulter’s counterfactual reversal of these accounts in her “Phalaris” points, once again, to a composition date after the Restoration.
When Pulter writes of the “accursed projects” of those who flatter tyranny, she is working in the idiom of late Stuart empire-building. And within this idiom, indeed within Pulter’s poem, we can see the paradox of the Restoration: the way that it is premised on forgetting past violence, on acts of indemnity and oblivion, and at the same time on remembering that past, on framing the new projects of monarchy and empire against the emblems of past projects—the emblem of the heads of those who compassed and imagined the death of the king now skewered on London Bridge, the emblem of Jamaica as Cromwell’s failed Western Design, the emblem of Perillus roaring in his bull.20