This is a topical poem, meaning a poem written in response to a specific notable or newsworthy event. The prompt for writing is the desecration of the funeral effigy of the Parliamentarian military leader, Robert Devereux, third Earl of Essex, in Westminster Abbey on November 26th, 1646. The Biblical text preached at Essex’s funeral sermon was ‘Know yee not that there is a Prince, and a great man fallen this day in Israel?’ (2 Samuel 3:38) (Vines, Sig. B1v). Pulter’s poem returns repeatedly to images of those who blunder from great heights. She concludes her poem with an allusion to a fallen icon from the Book of Samuel that invites the reader to reach very different conclusions about Essex’s life and career.
Context Pulter’s poem on these events frames Parliament’s leaders as usurpers of the King’s position, something introduced by her title, which specifically locates the Earl’s effigy in Henry VII’s chapel. This detail introduces the idea of a transgressive intrusion into the space of kings that informs the entire poem and drives the speaker’s sense of outrage. Essex becomes a human example of vice, his self-punishing presumption comparable to other mythological overreachers. The poem’s strongest condemnation comes when the damage to Essex’s effigy is compared to that suffered by the statue of the god Dagon, when the Philistines placed the Ark of Yahweh before him in his temple at Ashdod. The incident is recorded in the Book of Samuel. The superior power of the Ark and of Israel’s god was demonstrated by the mysterious decapitation of Dagon’s statue. By this analogy the damage to Essex’s effigy is a sign that Essex was set up by an idolatrous people as a false rival to a divinely anointed king.
Robert Devereux, third Earl of Essex (1591-1646), enjoyed genuine public popularity as a patriot who in the 1620s had served voluntarily with Protestant armies in Europe in defence of his co-religionists. Edward Hyde, Earl of Clarendon, said that in 1641 Essex was ‘the most popular person of the Kingdom’ (History of the Rebellion, 1.345). Pulter’s fiercely ‘anti-populist’ (Nevitt, p. 58) poem is hostile to the idea of the people as an authoritative political community and argues that it was their admiration that inflated Essex’s ambition. In the lead-up to the outbreak of civil war, Essex joined a highly influential group of members of both Houses of Parliament who drove the opposition to Charles. Parliament subsequently voted for him to become Captain General of its armies.
Charles I issued a royal proclamation on August 9 1642 entitled A proclamation for the suppressing of the present rebellion, under the command of Robert Earl of Essex. In this document, a war between monarch and parliament became a rebellion led by a great lord against his king, undertaking ‘trayterous and rebellious designes’ under ‘pretence of authority of our two Houses of Parliament.’ The proclamation’s description of the Earl’s actions as ‘high treason’ must have recalled to at least some readers the third Earl’s father, also Robert Devereux, the second Earl of Essex, who was executed by Elizabeth I in 1601 for leading an abortive rebellion against her. Pulter alludes directly to the second Earl’s execution in the concluding lines of her poem, drawing a parallel between the father’s beheading and the decapitation of the son’s funeral effigy.
The Earl’s death in London from illness in September 1646 was marked by an elaborate and expensive state funeral on October 22, attended by every member of the London Parliament. The Earl’s body was buried in St John the Baptist’s chapel in Westminster Abbey but as part of the funeral arrangements, a statue or effigy of the Earl was created. A detailed description was published: “[On a hearse] was laid the Statu of the said Earl, having a paire of white Boots, scarlet breeches, a Buff coat (the same as he wore at Edge-hill fight) with his Parliament Robes, a Sword by his side, a Commanders staffe in his hand, and an Earles coronet on his head.”This effigy was carried on a pall drawn by six horses through the streets of London during the funeral procession and finally placed on a canopied hearse, modelled on that of James I, at the upper end of the Abbey. It was intended to lie there for another five weeks in order for the public to view it. However, an intruder or intruders attacked the effigy on November 26. A printed account informed its readership that ‘the head was pulled off and broken to peeces’ and the effigy’s coat, breeches and boots slit. The Earl’s Parliament robes were also thrown down but left undamaged, Most pointedly, the sword ‘was broken in 3 peeces, which was the same sword that he wore in the field.’ (The whole proceedings, unsigned [1v]).
The attack on the effigy served as a symbolic beheading; the slitting of garments and the breaking of the sword as acts of posthumous humiliation. A man named John White, a farmer from Dorset, was eventually identified as the perpetrator, tracked down and imprisoned (Snow, p. 494). Parliament ordered the figure reclothed and placed in a glass case in Henry VII’s chapel where it remained until its removal at the order of Charles II in June 1661.
Textual history This vitriolic tone is uncharacteristic of the majority of the poems preserved in Pulter’s manuscript and it was not included in the groups of poems copied into the manuscript in Pulter’s lifetime. Sarah Ross identifies the hand as that of Angel Chauncey, the rector of Cottered parish church between 1728 and 1762, and a cousin of Hester Pulter’s great-grandson, Pulter Forester (Eardley, p. 34, n. 122). The poem must therefore have been copied posthumously into the manuscript and, like some other poems in Angel Chauncey’s hand (Why Must I Thus Forever Be Confined [Poem 57] and Made When My Spirits Were Sunk Very Low [Poem 66]), may have survived in a loose sheet format. Style and form The poem is written in regular pentameter couplets with the exception of three hypermetrical lines as the poem reaches its rhetorical climax at lines 26-28. The poem imagines Essex’s desecrated effigy and introduces a series of comparative examples drawn from classical sources. This practice suggests the influence of the emblem on the poem’s composition.
The emblem, a sixteenth-century genre, combined images and adages from moralised fables and biblical and classical episodes (see the curation Emblems of Phaeton and Icarus). The genre encouraged its readers to think analogically and to apply the lesson taught by the poem to their own context in order to guide them to more virtuous behaviour. Rachel Dunn has described how the genre in England had an ‘established relationship with the English monarchy’ (Dunn, p. 58). Pulter composed her own book of emblems and Essex may be the figure alluded to as the ‘fell tyrant of Newburgh’ (l. 15) in her emblem Phalaris and the Brazen Bull (Emblem 50) [Poem 115]. Eardley notes that Pulter’s conclusions to those poems frequently offered political judgments on her own society rather than the more universalising moral typical of the genre. In this poem Pulter uses the affordances of the emblem, a genre closely associated with the monarchy, to compose a condemnation of someone who, as she saw it, presumed to make himself a kind of monarch. Characteristically, the poem makes careful use of initial conjunctions to structure the progression of the argument. It uses repetition strategically to develop the emotional force of its claims. The opening twelve lines offer a concise summary of the Earl’s life and death, working through the trio of comparisons. The use of ‘So’ in line 11 heralds a shift in the argument that applies the moral lesson of these overreachers to the Earl’s life. A sequence describing the Earl’s worst actions in life, each line beginning ‘this’ (lines 13, 15, 16) introduces a sense of mounting outrage. Passages beginning ‘yet’ (21) and ‘but’ (29) proclaim the insult of his funeral and the justice of the desecration of his tomb in death. The final couplet offers the epigrammatic conclusion characteristic of the emblem, drawing Royalist readers into a mutual prayer for the fall of their enemies and the success of their king.
Sources Pulter makes three consecutive allusions to classical examples of presumption and over-ambition: Bellerophon, Phaeton and Icarus. Pulter typically makes very pointed choices of exemplars in her poetry and close attention to their meanings reveals more about the lesson Pulter sought to teach in this poem. All three refer to figures who flew too close to the sun or tried to reach the heavens. Pulter here draws on the association habitually made between monarchs and the sun. The preacher Henry Valentine’s remark that ‘As a King is the soule, so also he is the Sun of the Commonwealth’ demonstrates how this comparison was intended to be understood (Valentine, God Save the King, 1639, sig. D1v).
Pulter’s choice of Bellerophon striving to reach the gods in heaven gestures to an interpretation of royal sovereignty that proposes the unapproachability and godlike status of kings. Her allusion to Bellerophon relies on a specific tradition, surviving in a Latin text Astronomica, a mythical history of the constellations written in the second century AD and later attributed to the Roman historian Gaius Julius Hyginus. Several sources state that Bellerophon attempted to fly to heaven on the winged horse Pegasus and angered the gods with his presumption. But Hyginus’s text makes the distinct claim that
“as [Bellerophon] was attempting to fly to heaven, and had almost reached it, he became terrified looking down at the earth, and fell off [Pegasus] and was killed.” (Hyginus, Astronomica, 2.18, trans. Grant)This claim is the basis of Pulter’s allusion. Bellerophon is typically accorded heroic status for his killing of the chimera but the account of his death was also used as an example of presumption: the Roman poet Horace in his Odes, says that Bellerophon’s story ‘provides a weighty moral’ to ‘always strive for what is appropriate to yourself’ and as encouragement to think it ‘wrong to direct your hopes beyond what is permissible’ (Odes, IV.11.XX).
The story of Phaeton, who tried and failed to drive the chariot of the sun survives in multiple sources. Phaeton’s fatal attempt to emulate his father, the sun-god Helios who usually drove the chariot, also invites analogy with Essex’s emulation of the high treason of his own parent.
Pulter may be thinking of the version of his story recounted in Metamorphoses as it describes how Phaeton looked down in fear:
“But when the unhappy Phaëthon looked down from the top of heaven, and saw the lands lying far, far below, he grew pale, his knees trembled with sudden fear, and over his eyes came darkness through excess of light.” (Ovid, Meta., 2.179-184)Phaeton was used as an example of being ‘proudly foolish’ in the work of Pulter’s contemporary, Anne Bradstreet (‘An Elegy upon … Philip Sidney’, l. 109), because his ambition made him overestimate his power to control the forces in his hands. By analogy, Essex unleashed political forces he was unable to control. A failure to heed a paternal warning also dooms Icarus whose story is taken from Metamorphoses. Icarus was warned by his inventor father, Daedalus, not to fly too close to the sun as they escaped from the island of Crete using handmade wings of wax and feathers: ‘I warn you, Icarus, to fly in a middle course, lest, if you go too low, the water may weight your wings; if you go too high, the fire may burn them’ (8.203-05). But
“the boy began to rejoice in his bold flight and, deserting his leader (deseruitque ducem), led by a desire for the open sky, directed his course to a greater height.” (Ovid, Meta., 8.223-225)This choice of a story of an undisciplined and impetuous youth who failed to heed his father’s lesson, deserted his ‘leader’, and then, as a result, fell to his death offers a bitter and partisan reading of Essex’s life.
These three comparisons are followed by three allusions: one to the centaur, Chiron, with whom the Earl is contrasted, and to the gods Hammon and Dagon. Both of Essex’s wives had highly publicised affairs and ‘cuckold’ was used as a derogatory term for a man with an unfaithful wife (see Curation: Attitudes to Essex). The cuckold was popularly portrayed as wearing horns and Pulter unites Essex with the horned god, Hammon (or Ammon), a god worshipped in North Africa across Lybia and Egypt and described by the later Roman writer Silius Italicus as ‘Ammon, the native god of Africa, whose brow bears curving horns’ (Punica, 9.298). Pulter’s other comparison is with Dagon, described in 1 Samuel, 5:1-8 as the chief god of the Philistines. Dagon was thought to be a seagod: Milton, in Paradise Lost, describes him as ‘upward man / And downward fish’ (1.62-63). Chiron is treated differently however. In Greek mythology Chiron was famed as a teacher and is described in the Iliad as ‘the most just of the Centaurs’ (11.831). Although a hybrid animal-human in form, Chiron is distinguished from other centaurs whose animal bodies made them bestial in their appetites. He is represented as a more-than-human figure who exemplified the best qualities of animal and human. In this poem Pulter carefully separates him from those whose hybrid bodies reveal their degraded natures. The reference in the poem to ‘Alcides’ may be a scribal error for Achilles. Chiron is described in several sources as a tutor to many heroes and specifically of Achilles but Alcides (another name for Hercules) is not named as being tutored by Chiron.
Pulter’s allusions chart a comparison between those who worshipped Essex and non-European and non-Hebrew peoples, whereas Charles and his followers are distinguished from them and aligned with Ancient Greek narratives of horse-humans. There is perhaps an implicit defence here of the ultra-royalist military officers, popularly known as Cavaliers, whose association with horses was played on by hostile Parliamentarian writers to portray them as lecherous creatures of appetite (see Chalmers, 2017). The poem positions its other hybrids – Hammon, Dagon, Essex – as unsettling and incongruous combinations who break crucial category boundaries of god and animal and king and subject. All three, according to the poem, are failed or false gods.
Works Cited
Primary Sources
Anon, The Whole Proceedings of the barbarous and inhumane demolishing of the Earle of Essex Tombe, on Thursday night last, November 26. 1646. with a Cronicle of the English Warres (n.p.).
Edward Hyde, Earl of Clarendon, A History of the Rebellion and Civil Wars in England, ed. William Dunn Macray. 6 vols. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1888.
Amelia Grant, ed. and trans. The Myths of Hyginus. Lawrence, KS: U of Kansas Press, 1960.
Homer. Iliad, Volume I: Books 1-12. Translated by A. T. Murray. Revised by William F. Wyatt. Loeb Classical Library 170. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1924.
Horace, Odes and Epodes. Translated by Niall Rudd, Loeb Classical Library 33. Cambridge, MA.: Harvard University Press, 2004.
Ovid. Metamorphoses, Volume I: Books 1-8. Translated by Frank Justus Miller. Revised by G. P. Goold. Loeb Classical Library 42. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1916.
Ovid. Ouid's Metamorphosis Englished by G[eorge].S[andys]. London: John Grismond, 1628.
Hester Pulter, Poems, Emblems and The Unfortunate Florinda, ed. Alice Eardley. Toronto: Iter incorporating the centre for Reformation and Renaissance Studies, Victoria University in the University of Toronto, 2014.
Henry Valentine, God save the King. A Sermon preached in St Paul’s Church the 27th. of March. 1639. Being the day of his Maiesties most happy Inauguration, and of His Northerne Expedition (London, 1639).
Richard Vines, The hearse of the renowned, the Right Honourable Robert Earle of Essex and Ewe. London, 1646.
Secondary Sources
John Adamson, The Noble Revolt: The Overthrow of Charles I. London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2007.
Alastair Bellany, The politics of court scandal in early modern England : news culture and the Overbury affair, 1603-1660. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2002.
Hero Chalmers, ‘“But not laughing”: Horsemanship and the idea of the Cavalier in the Writings of William Cavendish, first Duke of Newcastle’, The Seventeenth Century, 32:4 (2017): 327-349, DOI: 10.1080/0268117X.2017.1394113.
Rachel Dunn, ‘Breaking a Tradition: Hester Pulter and the English Emblem Book’, The Seventeenth Century, 30.1 (2015): 55-73.
Marcus Nevitt, Women and the Pamphlet Culture of Revolutionary England. Aldershot: Ashgate, 2006.
Vernon S. Snow, Essex the Rebel: The Life of Robert Devereux: the third Earl of Essex (1591-1646). Lincoln, Neb.,: U of Nebraska Press, 1970.
Keith Thomas, Religion and the Decline of Magic. London: Penguin, 1991.
— Leah Knight and Wendy Wall
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