Phalaris and the Brazen Bull (Emblem 50)

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Phalaris and the Brazen Bull (Emblem 50)

Poem #115

Original Source

Hester Pulter, Poems breathed forth by the nobel Hadassas, University of Leeds Library, Brotherton Collection, MS Lt q 32

Versions

  • Facsimile of manuscript: Photographs provided by University of Leeds, Brotherton Collection

  • Transcription of manuscript: By Leah Knight and Wendy Wall.
  • Elemental edition: By Leah Knight and Wendy Wall.
  • Amplified edition: By Jonathan Koch.

How to cite these versions

Conventions for these editions

The Pulter Project: Poet in the Making

  • Created by Leah Knight and Wendy Wall
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X (Close panel)Notes: Transcription

 Editorial note

In these transcriptions we preserve as many details of the original material, textual, and graphic properties of Hester Pulter’s manuscript verse as we have found practical. Whenever possible, for instance, original spelling, punctuation, capitalization, lineation, insertions, deletions, alterations, spacing between words and lines, and indentation are all maintained; abbreviations and brevigraphs are not expanded; and superscript and subscript representations are retained. See full conventions for the transcriptions here.
Line number 2

 Physical note

second “i” possibly corrected from “e”
Line number 18

 Physical note

"r" in double superscript
Line number 22

 Physical note

in darker ink than surrounding words
Line number 24

 Physical note

blot after “i”
Line number 28

 Physical note

first “i” is written over an “e”
Sorry, but there are no notes associated with any currently displayed witness.
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Transcription
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[Emblem 50]
Phalaris and the Brazen Bull
(Emblem 50)
Critical Note
The title supplied by Leah Knight and Wendy Wall in the Elemental Edition draws out the figure of Phalaris from within the story of the brass bull’s construction and use in sixth century (BCE) Sicily. Such focus is consistent with Phalaris’s presence in the archive of early modern English print (see Phalaris and Perillus in Early Modern Print). But the poem’s conceit turns on the figure of Perillus, who is punished for his prideful cunning, just as, Pulter hopes, the accursed regicides will be. Perhaps, then, the title of the emblem might as aptly read: “Perillus and Brazen Bull.”
Phalaris and the Brazen Bull
(Emblem 50)
In these transcriptions we preserve as many details of the original material, textual, and graphic properties of Hester Pulter’s manuscript verse as we have found practical. Whenever possible, for instance, original spelling, punctuation, capitalization, lineation, insertions, deletions, alterations, spacing between words and lines, and indentation are all maintained; abbreviations and brevigraphs are not expanded; and superscript and subscript representations are retained. See full conventions for the transcriptions here.

— Leah Knight and Wendy Wall
The aim of the elemental edition is to make the poems accessible to the largest variety of readers, which involves modernizing spelling and punctuation as well as adding basic glosses. Spelling and punctuation reflect current standard American usage; punctuation highlights syntax which might otherwise be obscure. Outmoded but still familiar word forms (“thou,” “‘tis,” “hold’st”) are not modernized, and we do not modernize grammar when the sense remains legible. After a brief headnote aimed at offering a “way in” to the poem’s unique qualities and connections with other verse by Pulter or her contemporaries, the edition features a minimum of notes and interpretative framing to allow more immediate engagement with the poem. Glosses clarify synonyms or showcase various possible meanings in Pulter’s time. Other notes identify named people and places or clarify obscure material. We rely (without citation) primarily on the Oxford English Dictionary (OED), the Oxford Reference database, and the King James Version (KJV) of the Bible. When we rely on Alice Eardley’s edition of Pulter’s work, we cite her text generally (“Eardley”); other sources are cited in full. The result is an edition we consider a springboard for further work on Pulter’s poetry. See full conventions for this edition here.

— Leah Knight and Wendy Wall
Since Pulter uses the formal features of this emblem to reproduce the acts of violence and torture depicted in the poem, I have employed a semi-diplomatic editorial principle in an effort to preserve and highlight these features. Another benefit of this approach is that it retains the original spelling of words, like “stag” (line 16), which had contemporary resonance that is lost when the spelling is modernized. At line 15, I have corrected “Newburg” to “Newbury,” providing a note explaining my reasoning, and I have incorporated the additions to lines 18 and 22 (“our” and “those”) without drawing typographic attention to their inserted status in the original manuscript. The difference between majuscule and minuscule letters is sometimes difficult to discern in the scribal hand of the manuscript (especially for initial k’s and s’s), but every effort has been taken to transcribe those letters uniformly.

— Leah Knight and Wendy Wall
How terribly just to die in the very torture device one invented! Pulter canvasses classical history and myth for tales of lawless, tyrannical figures known for having baked, stretched, chopped, drowned, bashed, and torn their unsuspecting victims to death—only to suffer the same fate themselves. She both wishes for, and finally prophesies, the extension of this pattern of comeuppance to those she condemns as the lawless tyrants of her own day: primarily, the Civil War “regicides” who killed Charles I. Pulter’s fantasy of vengeance escalates from one of racial and national boundary-crossings (the punitive transformation of British Parliamentarians into West Indian slaves) into her enemies’ full descent into Hell. In the conclusion of this revenge fantasy, Pulter imagines their roars of eternal pain echoing the poem’s opening cries, such that, formally, the poem simulates the cycle of justice it describes.

— Leah Knight and Wendy Wall
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 Murder [Poem 8]). 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.
Gloss Note
Sarah C. E. Ross, Women, Poetry, and Politics in Seventeenth-Century Britain (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015), 138–69, and “Tears, Bezoars and Blazing Comets: Gender and Politics in Hester Pulter’s Civil War Lyrics,” Literature Compass 2, no. 1 (2005): 1–14; and Kate Chedgzoy, Women’s Writing in the British Atlantic World: Memory, Place and History, 1550–1700 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 144–53.
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.
Gloss Note
On the uniqueness of Pulter’s emblems within the larger tradition, see Margaret J. M. Ezell, “The Laughing Tortoise: Speculations on Manuscript Sources and Women’s Book History,” English Literary Renaissance 38, no. 2 (2008): 346–9; Alice Eardley, “Hester Pulter’s ‘Indivisibles’ and the Challenges of Annotating Early Modern Women’s Poetry,” Studies in English Literature, 1500–1900 52, no. 1 (2012): 130–2, and “Introduction” to Poems, Emblems, and the Unfortunate Florinda, ed. Alice Eardley (Chicago: Iter Press, 2014), 27–9; Ross, Women, Poetry, 157–69; Helena Kaznowska, “Women Are from Venus: Addressing Female Agency with Classical Allegory,” in Audience and Reception in the Early Modern Period, ed. John R. Decker and Mitzi Kirkland-Ives (New York: Routledge, 2021), 287–90; and Victoria E. Burke, “Gendering the Emblem: Hester Pulter’s Formal Experimentation,” in Feminist Formalism and Early Modern Women’s Writing, ed. Lara Dodds and Michelle M. Dowd (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2022), 92–109.
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.
Gloss Note
Gary Waller, The Female Baroque in Early Modern English Literary Culture: From Mary Sidney to Aphra Behn (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2020), 194–5; and Rachel Dunn, “Breaking a Tradition: Hester Pulter and the English emblem book,” The Seventeenth Century 30, no. 1 (2015): 55–73, especially 63.
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.
Gloss Note
On the Scriptural forms of Pulter’s verse, see Nikolina Hatton, “Hester Pulter’s Psalmic Poems,” Renaissance Studies 37, no. 3 (2023): 364–83; and Sarah C. E. Ross, “Hester Pulter’s Devotional Complaints: ‘Then will I hallelujahs ever sing’,” Journal for Early Modern Cultural Studies 20, no. 2 (2020): 99–119.
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.
Gloss Note
On reading Pulter within the early modern sonnet tradition and her use of rhymed couplets, see Elizabeth Scott-Baumann, “Hester Pulter’s Well-Wrought Urns: Early Modern Women, Sonnets, and New Criticism,” Journal for Early Modern Cultural Studies 20, no. 2 (2020): 120–43, especially 123–5. Scott-Baumann is responding, in part, to the lament of Diana E. Henderson over the silencing of female sonneteers after Mary Wroth; “Where Had All the Flowers Gone? The Missing Space of Female Sonneteers in Seventeenth-Century England,” Renaissance and Reformation / Renaissance et Réforme 35, no. 1 (2012): 139–65. On Pulter’s use of couplets, see also Lara Dodds and Michelle M. Dowd, “Happy Accidents: Critical Belatedness, Feminist Formalism, and Early Modern Women’s Writing,” Criticism 62, no. 2 (2020): 184–6.
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.”
Gloss Note
On this return, see the Headnote to the Elemental Edition of Phalaris and the Brazen Bull (Emblem 50) [Poem 115]. On the ways that the endings of Pulter’s poems “resolve,” “dissolve,” or “involve,” see Liza Blake, “Hester Pulter’s Particle Physics and the Poetics of Involution,” Journal for Early Modern Cultural Studies 20, no. 2 (2020): 72, 88–9.
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.
Gloss Note
On Pulter’s probable use of newsbooks as well as first-hand news from London, see Eardley, “Introduction,” 18–9 and 28–9; Elizabeth Zeman Kolkovich, “In Defense of Indulgence: Hester Pulter’s Maternal Elegies,” Journal for Early Modern Cultural Studies 20, no. 2 (2020): 48–53; Karen Britland, “The Queer Poetics of Hester Pulter’s Poem, ‘Of a Young Lady at Oxford, 1646’,” Women’s Writing 29, no. 3 (2022): 382–401; and Andrea Brady, “Dying with Honour: Literary Propaganda and the Second English Civil War,” The Journal of Military History 70, no. 1 (2006): 9–30. On the work being done to discover Pulter’s sources, see Leah Knight and Wendy Wall, “Poet in the Making: How Hester Pulter Read the Digital Age,” Journal for Early Modern Cultural Studies 20, no. 2 (2020): 2–3. For new connections and associations that have been discovered through corpus-based analysis and social history, see Karen Britland, “Conspiring with ‘friends’: Hester Pulter’s Poetry and the Stanley Family at Cumberlow Green,” The Review of English Studies 69, no. 292 (2018): 832–54. For the political diversity of Pulter’s family, see Eardley, “Introduction,” 9–19.
7 She refashioned these raw materials, adapting and adopting them to her own voice, her own ends.
Gloss Note
Frances E. Dolan has suggested that Pulter’s poetry “absorb[s] and break[s] down its components—as a dunghill does—so that one does not necessarily recognize the components” (“Hester Pulter’s Dunghill Poetics,” Journal for Early Modern Cultural Studies 20, no. 2 [2020]: 32).
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.”
Gloss Note
Thomas Granger, A Familiar Exposition or Commentarie on Ecclesiastes (London, 1621), 259.
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.
Gloss Note
Pulter’s Independent contemporary, John Goodwin had used a similar strategy to defend his accusation of England’s ministers for corrupting the state, writing that “if the Land had a Phalaris King over it, there would be found more then one Perillus to make him brazen Bulls for the tormenting of such Christians, who are either too weak, or too wise, to swim down the stream of a State Religion, or to call men, Rabbi” (The Apologist Condemned [London, 1653], 34).
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.
Gloss Note
Pulter imagines Theseus as avenger of a young royalist suicide in Of a Young Lady at Oxford, 1646 [Poem 43].
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.
Gloss Note
The emblem that follows “Phalaris” in the manuscript—British Brennus (Emblem 51) [Poem 116]—is similarly virulent, but compare this confident vehemence to the self-restrained ending of The Ugly Spider (Emblem 37) [Poem 102]. On Pulter’s attack on Cromwell, see Alice Eardley, “‘Shut up in a Countrey Grange’: The Provenance of Lady Hester Pulter’s Poetry and Prose and Women’s Literary History,” Huntington Library Quarterly 80, no. 2 (2017): 352–3.
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,
Gloss Note
Eardley, “Shut up,” 355–9.
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 Abbey [Poem 62]), 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.”
Gloss Note
Gryffith Williams, “The Declaration of the Just Judgments of God,” in Seven Treatises, Very necessary to be observed in these very bad Days (London, 1661), 43.
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.”
Gloss Note
Dunn, “Breaking a Tradition,” 61.
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.
Gloss Note
The younger Charles also appears in Pulter’s On that Unparalleled Prince Charles the First, His Horrid Murder [Poem 8], Let None Sigh More for Lucas or for Lisle [On the Same (2)] [Poem 15], On the King’s Most Excellent Majesty [Poem 27], And Must the Sword this Controverse Decide [Poem 64], and Virtue’s Duel [Emblem 4] [Poem 70].
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) [Poem 93].
Gloss Note
On Pulter’s Irish connections, see Eardley, “Introduction,” 13–4; Dunn, “Breaking a Tradition,” 62.
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.
Gloss Note
G. G. Harris, “Ley, James, Third Earl of Marlborough (1618/19–1665), Naval Officer,” Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. 3 Jan. 2008; Accessed 26 July 2023. My thanks to Tom Cogswell for pointing out this family connection.
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).
Gloss Note
Carla Gardina Pestana, The English Conquest of Jamaica: Oliver Cromwell’s Bid for Empire (Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2017).
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.
Gloss Note
In arguing for “Phalaris” as Pulter’s missing poem of the Restoration (see Eardley, “Introduction,” 21), I depart from Peter C. Herman’s claim that Pulter changed her political allegiances after seeing the licentious court of Charles II (“Lady Hester Pulter’s The Unfortunate Florinda: Race, Religion, and the Politics of Rape,” Renaissance Quarterly 63, no. 4 [2010]: 1208–46).
20


— Leah Knight and Wendy Wall
1
50When Phalaris for Tiranny Soe ffam’d
When
Gloss Note
Phalaris of Acragas (ca. 570–549 BCE) was a Sicilian tyrant famed for his cruelty generally, and especially for roasting enemies alive by enclosing them in a bronze bull with a fire burning underneath; victims’ screams sounded like the bull roaring.
Phalaris, for tyranny so famed,
When
Gloss Note
The story of Phalaris (d. c.554 BCE), the tyrant ruler of Acragas, Sicily, came to the early modern world through Cicero, Ovid, Seneca, Plutarch, Pliny, and Lucian, and appears across the print record, from Dante’s Inferno XXVII to Sir Philip Sidney’s Defence of Poesie to John Donne’s sermons (see Phalaris and Perillus in Early Modern Print).
Phalaris
Gloss Note
Early modern references to Phalaris focus on his authoritarian rule, often listing him alongside tyrants like Nero, Herod, Nimrod, Pharaoh, Caligula, and Dionysius, as a standard of evil against which to compare contemporary leaders (see Phalaris and Perillus in Early Modern Print).
for Tiranny soe Fam’d
2
Had Seen the Braſen Bul
Physical Note
second “i” possibly corrected from “e”
Pirillusffram’d
Had seen
Gloss Note
The bull was invented (“framed”) by Perillus of Athens as a device for executing criminals; Phalaris admired the device and made Perillus its first victim.
the brazen bull Perillus framed,
Had seen the
Gloss Note
Phalaris’s court artisan, Perillus, cast a bull in brass and presented it to the king as a torture device. The victim would be placed inside the bull and a fire lit underneath so that the cries of the afflicted would seem to come from the bull’s mouth.
Brasen Bul Pirillus Fram’d
3
Hee made him ffirst the Horrid pain Explore
He made him first the horrid pain
Gloss Note
discover; examine; test
explore,
Hee made him First the Horrid pain explore
4
And with his life his cunning out to Roar
And with his life his cunning
Gloss Note
figuratively, breathing out his life (and losing his cleverness) with a loud cry
out to roar.
And with his life
Gloss Note
Perillus’s cunning, arrogant, greedy, and bloodthirsty behavior captured the imaginations of early modern writers, many of whom approved his punishment by Phalaris and some of whom went as far as to say that Perillus was crueler than Phalaris (see Phalaris and Perillus in Early Modern Print).
his cunning out
Gloss Note
Perillus’s roar was a common idiom in the early modern world, as in Andrew Marvell’s “Flecknoe, an English Priest at Rome,” where the titular poet “swell[s], with anger full, / And roare[s] out, like Perillus in’s own bull” (see Phalaris and Perillus in Early Modern Print).
to roar
5
Thus as Pirillus in the Bull was put
Thus, as Perillus in the bull was put,
Thus as Pirillus in the Bull was put
6
Procrustus to his Bed was Stretcht or Cutt
Gloss Note
In Greek myth, the innkeeper and robber Procrustes forced travelers onto a bed and made them fit it either by stretching or cutting off their limbs; he was finally killed by Theseus with his own invention.
Procrustes to his bed was stretched or cut;
Gloss Note
An innkeeper who kept an iron bed to which he fit his guests by chopping or stretching their bodies. In Greek myth, Procrustes was subjected to his own device by Theseus on the last stop of his journey from Troezen to Athens, where he would become king. The story of Procrustes was used in the early modern world as an analogy for the manipulation of another’s words to fit one’s own purposes (see Procrustes, Sciron, Termerus, and Sinis in Early Modern Print).
Procrustus to his Bed was stretcht or
Critical Note
A possible slant rhyme of the couplet (“put/cut”) would, if true for Pulter’s English as in our own, perfectly enact Procrustes’s violent method.
Cutt
7
And hee that Kickd down People to the Seas
And
Gloss Note
In Greek myth, the robber Sciron forced passersby to wash his feet, then kicked them into the sea to be eaten by a sea monster. He was killed when Theseus threw him into the sea.
he that kicked down people to the seas
And
Gloss Note
Sciron, one of the bandits whom Theseus defeats on his journey to Athens; Sciron’s tactic for robbery was to force passersby to wash his feet and then to kick them into the sea below. For the myth’s sources, see Eardley, Poems, 257.
hee that kickd down People to the seas
8
Receiv’d the like Ramnuſa to apeas
Received the like,
Gloss Note
Greek goddess of vengeance (also called Nemesis)
Rhamnusia to appease.
Receiv’d the like
Gloss Note
Rhamnusia or Nemesis, the figure of revenge in Greek myth. Pulter also uses the figure in Upon the Imprisonment of his Sacred Majesty, That Unparalleled Prince, King Charles the First [Poem 13] and Ambitious Apes (Emblem 26) [Poem 91].
Ramnusa to apeas
9
Soe hee that with his fforhead daſh’d out Brains
So
Gloss Note
Termerus was a bandit in Greek myth who murdered passersby by ramming his head against theirs; he was murdered when Theseus smashed his skull (Eardley).
he that with his forehead dashed out brains
Soe
Gloss Note
Termerus, a robber who bashed his head against the heads of his victims. Unlike the other Greek villains mentioned in the poem, Termerus was killed by Heracles (whose head proved harder than the robber’s) and not by Theseus (as in Eardley, Poems, 257).
hee that with his Forehead dash’d out Brains
10
Had like for like, What alſoe was his gains
Had like for like. What also was
Gloss Note
In Greek mythology, Sinis robbed and dismembered travelers by fastening their limbs to pine branches, bending down the trees, and then suddenly letting them go (Eardley); Theseus kills Sinis in similar fashion (as the speaker suggests two lines later).
his gains
Had like for
Critical Note
This comma is the only sentence punctuation in the original manuscript before the terminal period. With it, Pulter signals a caesura in the line, which, significantly, comes just as she introduces Sinis, the splitter of bodies and poetic lines. On the significance of punctation, absent and present, see Alice Eardley, “‘I haue not time to point yr booke … which I desire you yourselfe to doe’: Editing the Form of Early Modern Manuscript Verse,” in The Work of Form: Poetics and Materiality in Early Modern Culture, ed. Elizabeth Scott-Baumann and Ben Burton (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014), 169–71.
like, What alsoe was his gains
11
That tween two Trees did Kill men Cruelly
That ’tween two trees did kill men cruelly?
That tween two Trees did kill men Cruelly
12
Did hee not by the Self Same Tortour Die
Did he not by the self-same torture die?
Did
Gloss Note
Sinis, another of the bandits whom Theseus defeats on his journey to Athens; Sinis assaulted his victims by tying them to bent trees and then releasing the trees and so splitting them in two. For the myth’s sources, see Eardley, Poems, 257.
hee not by the self same Tortour Die
13
Oh that all thoſe that fflatter Tiranny
O, that all those that flatter tyranny
Gloss Note
One of Pulter’s favorite interjections, used over 100 times across her poems.
Oh that all those that Flatter Tiranny
14
Might first their own accursed projects trie
Might first their own accurséd projects try!
Might first their own accursed
Gloss Note
A scheme or proposal. “Project,” used both as a noun and as a verb, developed significant economic and imperialist meanings in the seventeenth century, so much so that “projectors” became a term of abuse for a promoter of bad ventures (Oxford English Dictionary, s.v. “projector, n., sense 1.b”).
projects trie
15
Then that ffell Tyrant that in Newburg Raignd
Then
Critical Note
Eardley suggests the manuscript’s “Newburg” might be Newbury, where in 1643 Robert Devereux, third Earl of Essex, led the army against the king; we have read “Newburg” in the manuscript as a transcription error for “Newbury” (pronounced, here, “Newb’ry,” to fit the meter).
that fell tyrant that in Newbury reigned
Then that
Critical Note
Eardley suggests Robert Devereux, the third earl of Essex (1591–1646), who was the general in charge of parliamentary forces at the decisive battle at Newbury on 20 September 1643 (Poems, 258). Pulter may have been reminded of the general and his role in that battle by renewed attention to Essex at the Restoration, when he was remembered as a chief architect of the civil wars and when his funeral moment was destroyed on the order of Charles II.
Fell Tyrant that in
Critical Note
The manuscript reads “Newburg,” but the reference is almost certainly to the first Battle of Newbury (see above and Eardley, Poems, 258). Nearly all references to “Newburg” in the corpus of early modern English print are to “Nuremburg” in Germany. Although an earl of “Newburg” was created among the Scottish peers in 1660s, neither this title nor the German city presents a convincing alternative to Eardley’s correction.
Newbury Raignd
16
Should first unto the ffat’all Stag bin Chaind
Should first unto the
Gloss Note
This seems to be a Royalist wish that a Parliamentarian leader would have been subject to the fate that awaited Charles I, who was chained and executed on a platform in a venue used sometimes as a theatrical stage. The manuscript has “stag” instead of “stage.”
fatal stage been chained;
Should first unto the Fatall
Critical Note
The manuscript reads “stag,” a suggestively Royalist word (see Elizabeth Kolkovich, The Hunted Deer), but the word is almost certainly “stage,” a reference to the platform on which Charles I was executed outside the Banqueting House of Whitehall. Contemporary accounts, like Andrew Marvell’s “An Horatian Ode,” drew attention to theatricality of the scene: “That thence the royal actor born / The tragic scaffold might adorn, / While round the armèd bands / Did clap their bloody hands” (The Poems of Andrew Marvell, ed. Nigel Smith, Rev. ed, [New York: Pearson Longman, 2007], ll. 53–6).
stag bin
Critical Note
Eardley notes that “Chains were attached to the platform to restrain the king,” but no system of restraint appears in the contemporary visual representations of the execution (Poems, 258). Perhaps Pulter was superimposing the grizzlier scenes of the execution of the regicides at the Restoration onto the original event.
Chaind
17
Then thoſe that made the Engine to pull Down
Then those that made the
Gloss Note
tricky; contrivance; plot or snare; machine, especially of war but also in theater instrument of torture
engine to pull down
Then those that made the
Critical Note
A machine or instrument, often of torture; can also refer to theatrical machinery (i.e. deus ex machina) (Oxford English Dictionary, s.v. “engine, n., senses II.4.b and II.7"). This last sense builds on the line’s theatrical imagery and anticipates the downward motion of Charles’s “sacred Head” onto the famously low execution block—a motion enacted by the line break and the enjambment that follows.
Engine to pull Down
18
His Sacred Head which wore ^
Physical Note
"r" in double superscript
o:r Brittiſh Crown
Gloss Note
that of Charles I, who was beheaded in 1649
His sacred head which wore our British crown.
His sacred Head which wore
Critical Note
This word, which is necessary to fill the line’s meter, was added later in the composition process. The first-person plural pronoun, along with the demonym “Brittish,” aspire to a collective national identity that aligns more closely with a Restoration sensibility, when the “Brittish Crown” was once again “ours,” than with a republican one.
our Brittish Crown
19
When Lamb like on that Alter hee did lie
When lamb-like on that altar he did lie,
When
Critical Note
The language again resembles contemporary reports of the regicide, including Marvell’s “Horatian Ode”: “He nothing common did, or mean, / Upon that memorable scene; / But with his keener eye / The axe’s edge did try. / Nor called the Gods with vulgar spite / To vindicate his helpless right; / But bowed his comely head / Down, as upon a bed” (Poems, ed. Smith, ll. 57–64).
Lamb like on that Alter hee did lie
20
Why did not Oliver that Pulley trie
Why did not
Gloss Note
Oliver Cromwell, who led the Parliamentarians in defeating and executing Charles I during the English Civil War
Oliver that
Gloss Note
part of a gallows for hanging; “pulley” could allude to the use of such a device in torture
pulley try?
Why did not
Gloss Note
Oliver Cromwell (1599–1658), commander of the New Model Army that overthrew the Stuart monarchy and later Lord Protector of the commonwealth which replaced that monarchy.
Oliver that Pulley trie
21
Were Some Condemnd the Ax would moue alone
Gloss Note
Some are so villainous that no executioner would be needed, since the axe would be moved to act of its own accord.
Were some condemned, the axe would move alone,
Were some Condemnd the Ax would moue alone
22
As Tyburn for
Physical Note
in darker ink than surrounding words
thoſe Regicides doe groan
As
Gloss Note
a place of public execution in London
Tyburn for those
Gloss Note
the king’s killers
regicides do groan.
As
Critical Note
London’s principal public execution site, featuring gallows for executions by hanging. The poem’s earlier references to “chains,” “engines,” and “pulleys” seem to point toward this method of execution rather than the decapitation by axe performed at Charles I’s execution and re-imagined in line 21.
Tyburn for
Critical Note
Like “our” in line 18, the word “those” was added later in the composition process. The addition is again a metrical necessity, but the pronoun suggests a finite group of regicides, perhaps the list of those regicides excluded from Charles II’s Act of Indemnity and Oblivion at the Restoration. The word “regicide” had flourished in print discourse around 1649 but then fallen out of the print record for most of the 1650s before returning to public use in 1660 (“N-gram Browser,” s.v., “regicide,” Early Print).
those Regicides doe groan
23
Then Should their Children to Jame’ca goe
Then should their children to
Gloss Note
Jamaica, captured by the British in 1655, was among the islands in the West Indies used to exile Royalists during the interregnum.
Jamaica go;
Then should their
Gloss Note
A reference to the supposed deportation of royalist widows and children to Jamaica, which had come under English rule in 1655 as part of the Western Design pursued by Oliver Cromwell. Accounts of forced emigration circulated primarily after the Restoration and may have been fabricated to signal loyalty to the Stuart cause (see Pestana, English Conquest, and Pulter and Jamaica). Pulter’s nephew James Ley, third earl of Marlborough, was involved in England’s Caribbean ventures and would be named governor of Jamaica in 1664.
Children to Jameca goe
24
Their
Physical Note
blot after “i”
Staits Sequstred Widdow Eyes o’reflow
Gloss Note
regicides’ estates (properties) should be confiscated (or “sequestered”), as the Royalists’ goods were during and after the civil wars.
Their ’states sequestered,
Gloss Note
regicides’ widows’ eyes should be overflowing with grief over their husbands’ deaths.
widow eyes o’erflow.
Their
Critical Note
A reference to the seizure and sale of royalist estates to fund the commonwealth government. As elsewhere in the poem, Pulter employs poetic forms that replicate the punishment: the elision of “estates” to “staits” and “sequestered” to “sequstred” enacts a syllabic theft as well as describing a material one.
staits sequstred Widdow Eyes or’eflow
25
Sure thoſe that doe their ffellow Chriſtians Sell
Sure
Gloss Note
the Parliamentarians who sold Royalists into slavery, as the lines above indicate (“to Jamaica go”), by sending them to the West Indies
those that do their fellow Christians sell
Sure those that doe their
Critical Note
A provocative choice of phrase and argument at a moment when England was forcibly sending thousands of convicted criminals and Irish people to Atlantic colonies and increasingly participating in the traffic of enslaved Africans.
Fellow Christians sell
26
Will in their Conſcience feel the flames of Hell
Will in their conscience feel the flames of Hell.
Will in their
Critical Note
One of only two times (cf. The Ugly Spider (Emblem 37) [Poem 102], line 20) that Pulter uses this theologically and politically charged word in her corpus.
Conscience feel the flames of Hell
27
That Worm will graw though for A time ’tis hid
That
Gloss Note
proverbial for something eating away at one’s conscience; also figuratively, the pains of Hell
worm will gnaw, though for a time ’tis hid,
That
Gloss Note
A common idiom for the work of a guilty conscience, deriving from Mark 9:44–48 (Eardley, Poems, 258).
Worm will gnaw though for A time ’tis hid
28
And make them Roar worſ then
Physical Note
first “i” is written over an “e”
Pirillus did.
And make them roar worse than Perillus did.
And make them Roar wors then Perillus did.
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X (Close panel)Notes: Elemental Edition

 Editorial note

The aim of the elemental edition is to make the poems accessible to the largest variety of readers, which involves modernizing spelling and punctuation as well as adding basic glosses. Spelling and punctuation reflect current standard American usage; punctuation highlights syntax which might otherwise be obscure. Outmoded but still familiar word forms (“thou,” “‘tis,” “hold’st”) are not modernized, and we do not modernize grammar when the sense remains legible. After a brief headnote aimed at offering a “way in” to the poem’s unique qualities and connections with other verse by Pulter or her contemporaries, the edition features a minimum of notes and interpretative framing to allow more immediate engagement with the poem. Glosses clarify synonyms or showcase various possible meanings in Pulter’s time. Other notes identify named people and places or clarify obscure material. We rely (without citation) primarily on the Oxford English Dictionary (OED), the Oxford Reference database, and the King James Version (KJV) of the Bible. When we rely on Alice Eardley’s edition of Pulter’s work, we cite her text generally (“Eardley”); other sources are cited in full. The result is an edition we consider a springboard for further work on Pulter’s poetry. See full conventions for this edition here.

 Headnote

How terribly just to die in the very torture device one invented! Pulter canvasses classical history and myth for tales of lawless, tyrannical figures known for having baked, stretched, chopped, drowned, bashed, and torn their unsuspecting victims to death—only to suffer the same fate themselves. She both wishes for, and finally prophesies, the extension of this pattern of comeuppance to those she condemns as the lawless tyrants of her own day: primarily, the Civil War “regicides” who killed Charles I. Pulter’s fantasy of vengeance escalates from one of racial and national boundary-crossings (the punitive transformation of British Parliamentarians into West Indian slaves) into her enemies’ full descent into Hell. In the conclusion of this revenge fantasy, Pulter imagines their roars of eternal pain echoing the poem’s opening cries, such that, formally, the poem simulates the cycle of justice it describes.
Line number 1

 Gloss note

Phalaris of Acragas (ca. 570–549 BCE) was a Sicilian tyrant famed for his cruelty generally, and especially for roasting enemies alive by enclosing them in a bronze bull with a fire burning underneath; victims’ screams sounded like the bull roaring.
Line number 2

 Gloss note

The bull was invented (“framed”) by Perillus of Athens as a device for executing criminals; Phalaris admired the device and made Perillus its first victim.
Line number 3

 Gloss note

discover; examine; test
Line number 4

 Gloss note

figuratively, breathing out his life (and losing his cleverness) with a loud cry
Line number 6

 Gloss note

In Greek myth, the innkeeper and robber Procrustes forced travelers onto a bed and made them fit it either by stretching or cutting off their limbs; he was finally killed by Theseus with his own invention.
Line number 7

 Gloss note

In Greek myth, the robber Sciron forced passersby to wash his feet, then kicked them into the sea to be eaten by a sea monster. He was killed when Theseus threw him into the sea.
Line number 8

 Gloss note

Greek goddess of vengeance (also called Nemesis)
Line number 9

 Gloss note

Termerus was a bandit in Greek myth who murdered passersby by ramming his head against theirs; he was murdered when Theseus smashed his skull (Eardley).
Line number 10

 Gloss note

In Greek mythology, Sinis robbed and dismembered travelers by fastening their limbs to pine branches, bending down the trees, and then suddenly letting them go (Eardley); Theseus kills Sinis in similar fashion (as the speaker suggests two lines later).
Line number 15

 Critical note

Eardley suggests the manuscript’s “Newburg” might be Newbury, where in 1643 Robert Devereux, third Earl of Essex, led the army against the king; we have read “Newburg” in the manuscript as a transcription error for “Newbury” (pronounced, here, “Newb’ry,” to fit the meter).
Line number 16

 Gloss note

This seems to be a Royalist wish that a Parliamentarian leader would have been subject to the fate that awaited Charles I, who was chained and executed on a platform in a venue used sometimes as a theatrical stage. The manuscript has “stag” instead of “stage.”
Line number 17

 Gloss note

tricky; contrivance; plot or snare; machine, especially of war but also in theater instrument of torture
Line number 18

 Gloss note

that of Charles I, who was beheaded in 1649
Line number 20

 Gloss note

Oliver Cromwell, who led the Parliamentarians in defeating and executing Charles I during the English Civil War
Line number 20

 Gloss note

part of a gallows for hanging; “pulley” could allude to the use of such a device in torture
Line number 21

 Gloss note

Some are so villainous that no executioner would be needed, since the axe would be moved to act of its own accord.
Line number 22

 Gloss note

a place of public execution in London
Line number 22

 Gloss note

the king’s killers
Line number 23

 Gloss note

Jamaica, captured by the British in 1655, was among the islands in the West Indies used to exile Royalists during the interregnum.
Line number 24

 Gloss note

regicides’ estates (properties) should be confiscated (or “sequestered”), as the Royalists’ goods were during and after the civil wars.
Line number 24

 Gloss note

regicides’ widows’ eyes should be overflowing with grief over their husbands’ deaths.
Line number 25

 Gloss note

the Parliamentarians who sold Royalists into slavery, as the lines above indicate (“to Jamaica go”), by sending them to the West Indies
Line number 27

 Gloss note

proverbial for something eating away at one’s conscience; also figuratively, the pains of Hell
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X (Close panel)Elemental Edition
Elemental Edition
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[Emblem 50]
Phalaris and the Brazen Bull
(Emblem 50)
Critical Note
The title supplied by Leah Knight and Wendy Wall in the Elemental Edition draws out the figure of Phalaris from within the story of the brass bull’s construction and use in sixth century (BCE) Sicily. Such focus is consistent with Phalaris’s presence in the archive of early modern English print (see Phalaris and Perillus in Early Modern Print). But the poem’s conceit turns on the figure of Perillus, who is punished for his prideful cunning, just as, Pulter hopes, the accursed regicides will be. Perhaps, then, the title of the emblem might as aptly read: “Perillus and Brazen Bull.”
Phalaris and the Brazen Bull
(Emblem 50)
In these transcriptions we preserve as many details of the original material, textual, and graphic properties of Hester Pulter’s manuscript verse as we have found practical. Whenever possible, for instance, original spelling, punctuation, capitalization, lineation, insertions, deletions, alterations, spacing between words and lines, and indentation are all maintained; abbreviations and brevigraphs are not expanded; and superscript and subscript representations are retained. See full conventions for the transcriptions here.

— Leah Knight and Wendy Wall
The aim of the elemental edition is to make the poems accessible to the largest variety of readers, which involves modernizing spelling and punctuation as well as adding basic glosses. Spelling and punctuation reflect current standard American usage; punctuation highlights syntax which might otherwise be obscure. Outmoded but still familiar word forms (“thou,” “‘tis,” “hold’st”) are not modernized, and we do not modernize grammar when the sense remains legible. After a brief headnote aimed at offering a “way in” to the poem’s unique qualities and connections with other verse by Pulter or her contemporaries, the edition features a minimum of notes and interpretative framing to allow more immediate engagement with the poem. Glosses clarify synonyms or showcase various possible meanings in Pulter’s time. Other notes identify named people and places or clarify obscure material. We rely (without citation) primarily on the Oxford English Dictionary (OED), the Oxford Reference database, and the King James Version (KJV) of the Bible. When we rely on Alice Eardley’s edition of Pulter’s work, we cite her text generally (“Eardley”); other sources are cited in full. The result is an edition we consider a springboard for further work on Pulter’s poetry. See full conventions for this edition here.

— Leah Knight and Wendy Wall
Since Pulter uses the formal features of this emblem to reproduce the acts of violence and torture depicted in the poem, I have employed a semi-diplomatic editorial principle in an effort to preserve and highlight these features. Another benefit of this approach is that it retains the original spelling of words, like “stag” (line 16), which had contemporary resonance that is lost when the spelling is modernized. At line 15, I have corrected “Newburg” to “Newbury,” providing a note explaining my reasoning, and I have incorporated the additions to lines 18 and 22 (“our” and “those”) without drawing typographic attention to their inserted status in the original manuscript. The difference between majuscule and minuscule letters is sometimes difficult to discern in the scribal hand of the manuscript (especially for initial k’s and s’s), but every effort has been taken to transcribe those letters uniformly.

— Leah Knight and Wendy Wall
How terribly just to die in the very torture device one invented! Pulter canvasses classical history and myth for tales of lawless, tyrannical figures known for having baked, stretched, chopped, drowned, bashed, and torn their unsuspecting victims to death—only to suffer the same fate themselves. She both wishes for, and finally prophesies, the extension of this pattern of comeuppance to those she condemns as the lawless tyrants of her own day: primarily, the Civil War “regicides” who killed Charles I. Pulter’s fantasy of vengeance escalates from one of racial and national boundary-crossings (the punitive transformation of British Parliamentarians into West Indian slaves) into her enemies’ full descent into Hell. In the conclusion of this revenge fantasy, Pulter imagines their roars of eternal pain echoing the poem’s opening cries, such that, formally, the poem simulates the cycle of justice it describes.

— Leah Knight and Wendy Wall
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 Murder [Poem 8]). 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.
Gloss Note
Sarah C. E. Ross, Women, Poetry, and Politics in Seventeenth-Century Britain (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015), 138–69, and “Tears, Bezoars and Blazing Comets: Gender and Politics in Hester Pulter’s Civil War Lyrics,” Literature Compass 2, no. 1 (2005): 1–14; and Kate Chedgzoy, Women’s Writing in the British Atlantic World: Memory, Place and History, 1550–1700 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 144–53.
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.
Gloss Note
On the uniqueness of Pulter’s emblems within the larger tradition, see Margaret J. M. Ezell, “The Laughing Tortoise: Speculations on Manuscript Sources and Women’s Book History,” English Literary Renaissance 38, no. 2 (2008): 346–9; Alice Eardley, “Hester Pulter’s ‘Indivisibles’ and the Challenges of Annotating Early Modern Women’s Poetry,” Studies in English Literature, 1500–1900 52, no. 1 (2012): 130–2, and “Introduction” to Poems, Emblems, and the Unfortunate Florinda, ed. Alice Eardley (Chicago: Iter Press, 2014), 27–9; Ross, Women, Poetry, 157–69; Helena Kaznowska, “Women Are from Venus: Addressing Female Agency with Classical Allegory,” in Audience and Reception in the Early Modern Period, ed. John R. Decker and Mitzi Kirkland-Ives (New York: Routledge, 2021), 287–90; and Victoria E. Burke, “Gendering the Emblem: Hester Pulter’s Formal Experimentation,” in Feminist Formalism and Early Modern Women’s Writing, ed. Lara Dodds and Michelle M. Dowd (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2022), 92–109.
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.
Gloss Note
Gary Waller, The Female Baroque in Early Modern English Literary Culture: From Mary Sidney to Aphra Behn (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2020), 194–5; and Rachel Dunn, “Breaking a Tradition: Hester Pulter and the English emblem book,” The Seventeenth Century 30, no. 1 (2015): 55–73, especially 63.
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.
Gloss Note
On the Scriptural forms of Pulter’s verse, see Nikolina Hatton, “Hester Pulter’s Psalmic Poems,” Renaissance Studies 37, no. 3 (2023): 364–83; and Sarah C. E. Ross, “Hester Pulter’s Devotional Complaints: ‘Then will I hallelujahs ever sing’,” Journal for Early Modern Cultural Studies 20, no. 2 (2020): 99–119.
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.
Gloss Note
On reading Pulter within the early modern sonnet tradition and her use of rhymed couplets, see Elizabeth Scott-Baumann, “Hester Pulter’s Well-Wrought Urns: Early Modern Women, Sonnets, and New Criticism,” Journal for Early Modern Cultural Studies 20, no. 2 (2020): 120–43, especially 123–5. Scott-Baumann is responding, in part, to the lament of Diana E. Henderson over the silencing of female sonneteers after Mary Wroth; “Where Had All the Flowers Gone? The Missing Space of Female Sonneteers in Seventeenth-Century England,” Renaissance and Reformation / Renaissance et Réforme 35, no. 1 (2012): 139–65. On Pulter’s use of couplets, see also Lara Dodds and Michelle M. Dowd, “Happy Accidents: Critical Belatedness, Feminist Formalism, and Early Modern Women’s Writing,” Criticism 62, no. 2 (2020): 184–6.
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.”
Gloss Note
On this return, see the Headnote to the Elemental Edition of Phalaris and the Brazen Bull (Emblem 50) [Poem 115]. On the ways that the endings of Pulter’s poems “resolve,” “dissolve,” or “involve,” see Liza Blake, “Hester Pulter’s Particle Physics and the Poetics of Involution,” Journal for Early Modern Cultural Studies 20, no. 2 (2020): 72, 88–9.
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.
Gloss Note
On Pulter’s probable use of newsbooks as well as first-hand news from London, see Eardley, “Introduction,” 18–9 and 28–9; Elizabeth Zeman Kolkovich, “In Defense of Indulgence: Hester Pulter’s Maternal Elegies,” Journal for Early Modern Cultural Studies 20, no. 2 (2020): 48–53; Karen Britland, “The Queer Poetics of Hester Pulter’s Poem, ‘Of a Young Lady at Oxford, 1646’,” Women’s Writing 29, no. 3 (2022): 382–401; and Andrea Brady, “Dying with Honour: Literary Propaganda and the Second English Civil War,” The Journal of Military History 70, no. 1 (2006): 9–30. On the work being done to discover Pulter’s sources, see Leah Knight and Wendy Wall, “Poet in the Making: How Hester Pulter Read the Digital Age,” Journal for Early Modern Cultural Studies 20, no. 2 (2020): 2–3. For new connections and associations that have been discovered through corpus-based analysis and social history, see Karen Britland, “Conspiring with ‘friends’: Hester Pulter’s Poetry and the Stanley Family at Cumberlow Green,” The Review of English Studies 69, no. 292 (2018): 832–54. For the political diversity of Pulter’s family, see Eardley, “Introduction,” 9–19.
7 She refashioned these raw materials, adapting and adopting them to her own voice, her own ends.
Gloss Note
Frances E. Dolan has suggested that Pulter’s poetry “absorb[s] and break[s] down its components—as a dunghill does—so that one does not necessarily recognize the components” (“Hester Pulter’s Dunghill Poetics,” Journal for Early Modern Cultural Studies 20, no. 2 [2020]: 32).
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.”
Gloss Note
Thomas Granger, A Familiar Exposition or Commentarie on Ecclesiastes (London, 1621), 259.
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.
Gloss Note
Pulter’s Independent contemporary, John Goodwin had used a similar strategy to defend his accusation of England’s ministers for corrupting the state, writing that “if the Land had a Phalaris King over it, there would be found more then one Perillus to make him brazen Bulls for the tormenting of such Christians, who are either too weak, or too wise, to swim down the stream of a State Religion, or to call men, Rabbi” (The Apologist Condemned [London, 1653], 34).
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.
Gloss Note
Pulter imagines Theseus as avenger of a young royalist suicide in Of a Young Lady at Oxford, 1646 [Poem 43].
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.
Gloss Note
The emblem that follows “Phalaris” in the manuscript—British Brennus (Emblem 51) [Poem 116]—is similarly virulent, but compare this confident vehemence to the self-restrained ending of The Ugly Spider (Emblem 37) [Poem 102]. On Pulter’s attack on Cromwell, see Alice Eardley, “‘Shut up in a Countrey Grange’: The Provenance of Lady Hester Pulter’s Poetry and Prose and Women’s Literary History,” Huntington Library Quarterly 80, no. 2 (2017): 352–3.
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,
Gloss Note
Eardley, “Shut up,” 355–9.
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 Abbey [Poem 62]), 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.”
Gloss Note
Gryffith Williams, “The Declaration of the Just Judgments of God,” in Seven Treatises, Very necessary to be observed in these very bad Days (London, 1661), 43.
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.”
Gloss Note
Dunn, “Breaking a Tradition,” 61.
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.
Gloss Note
The younger Charles also appears in Pulter’s On that Unparalleled Prince Charles the First, His Horrid Murder [Poem 8], Let None Sigh More for Lucas or for Lisle [On the Same (2)] [Poem 15], On the King’s Most Excellent Majesty [Poem 27], And Must the Sword this Controverse Decide [Poem 64], and Virtue’s Duel [Emblem 4] [Poem 70].
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) [Poem 93].
Gloss Note
On Pulter’s Irish connections, see Eardley, “Introduction,” 13–4; Dunn, “Breaking a Tradition,” 62.
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.
Gloss Note
G. G. Harris, “Ley, James, Third Earl of Marlborough (1618/19–1665), Naval Officer,” Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. 3 Jan. 2008; Accessed 26 July 2023. My thanks to Tom Cogswell for pointing out this family connection.
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).
Gloss Note
Carla Gardina Pestana, The English Conquest of Jamaica: Oliver Cromwell’s Bid for Empire (Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2017).
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.
Gloss Note
In arguing for “Phalaris” as Pulter’s missing poem of the Restoration (see Eardley, “Introduction,” 21), I depart from Peter C. Herman’s claim that Pulter changed her political allegiances after seeing the licentious court of Charles II (“Lady Hester Pulter’s The Unfortunate Florinda: Race, Religion, and the Politics of Rape,” Renaissance Quarterly 63, no. 4 [2010]: 1208–46).
20


— Leah Knight and Wendy Wall
1
50When Phalaris for Tiranny Soe ffam’d
When
Gloss Note
Phalaris of Acragas (ca. 570–549 BCE) was a Sicilian tyrant famed for his cruelty generally, and especially for roasting enemies alive by enclosing them in a bronze bull with a fire burning underneath; victims’ screams sounded like the bull roaring.
Phalaris, for tyranny so famed,
When
Gloss Note
The story of Phalaris (d. c.554 BCE), the tyrant ruler of Acragas, Sicily, came to the early modern world through Cicero, Ovid, Seneca, Plutarch, Pliny, and Lucian, and appears across the print record, from Dante’s Inferno XXVII to Sir Philip Sidney’s Defence of Poesie to John Donne’s sermons (see Phalaris and Perillus in Early Modern Print).
Phalaris
Gloss Note
Early modern references to Phalaris focus on his authoritarian rule, often listing him alongside tyrants like Nero, Herod, Nimrod, Pharaoh, Caligula, and Dionysius, as a standard of evil against which to compare contemporary leaders (see Phalaris and Perillus in Early Modern Print).
for Tiranny soe Fam’d
2
Had Seen the Braſen Bul
Physical Note
second “i” possibly corrected from “e”
Pirillusffram’d
Had seen
Gloss Note
The bull was invented (“framed”) by Perillus of Athens as a device for executing criminals; Phalaris admired the device and made Perillus its first victim.
the brazen bull Perillus framed,
Had seen the
Gloss Note
Phalaris’s court artisan, Perillus, cast a bull in brass and presented it to the king as a torture device. The victim would be placed inside the bull and a fire lit underneath so that the cries of the afflicted would seem to come from the bull’s mouth.
Brasen Bul Pirillus Fram’d
3
Hee made him ffirst the Horrid pain Explore
He made him first the horrid pain
Gloss Note
discover; examine; test
explore,
Hee made him First the Horrid pain explore
4
And with his life his cunning out to Roar
And with his life his cunning
Gloss Note
figuratively, breathing out his life (and losing his cleverness) with a loud cry
out to roar.
And with his life
Gloss Note
Perillus’s cunning, arrogant, greedy, and bloodthirsty behavior captured the imaginations of early modern writers, many of whom approved his punishment by Phalaris and some of whom went as far as to say that Perillus was crueler than Phalaris (see Phalaris and Perillus in Early Modern Print).
his cunning out
Gloss Note
Perillus’s roar was a common idiom in the early modern world, as in Andrew Marvell’s “Flecknoe, an English Priest at Rome,” where the titular poet “swell[s], with anger full, / And roare[s] out, like Perillus in’s own bull” (see Phalaris and Perillus in Early Modern Print).
to roar
5
Thus as Pirillus in the Bull was put
Thus, as Perillus in the bull was put,
Thus as Pirillus in the Bull was put
6
Procrustus to his Bed was Stretcht or Cutt
Gloss Note
In Greek myth, the innkeeper and robber Procrustes forced travelers onto a bed and made them fit it either by stretching or cutting off their limbs; he was finally killed by Theseus with his own invention.
Procrustes to his bed was stretched or cut;
Gloss Note
An innkeeper who kept an iron bed to which he fit his guests by chopping or stretching their bodies. In Greek myth, Procrustes was subjected to his own device by Theseus on the last stop of his journey from Troezen to Athens, where he would become king. The story of Procrustes was used in the early modern world as an analogy for the manipulation of another’s words to fit one’s own purposes (see Procrustes, Sciron, Termerus, and Sinis in Early Modern Print).
Procrustus to his Bed was stretcht or
Critical Note
A possible slant rhyme of the couplet (“put/cut”) would, if true for Pulter’s English as in our own, perfectly enact Procrustes’s violent method.
Cutt
7
And hee that Kickd down People to the Seas
And
Gloss Note
In Greek myth, the robber Sciron forced passersby to wash his feet, then kicked them into the sea to be eaten by a sea monster. He was killed when Theseus threw him into the sea.
he that kicked down people to the seas
And
Gloss Note
Sciron, one of the bandits whom Theseus defeats on his journey to Athens; Sciron’s tactic for robbery was to force passersby to wash his feet and then to kick them into the sea below. For the myth’s sources, see Eardley, Poems, 257.
hee that kickd down People to the seas
8
Receiv’d the like Ramnuſa to apeas
Received the like,
Gloss Note
Greek goddess of vengeance (also called Nemesis)
Rhamnusia to appease.
Receiv’d the like
Gloss Note
Rhamnusia or Nemesis, the figure of revenge in Greek myth. Pulter also uses the figure in Upon the Imprisonment of his Sacred Majesty, That Unparalleled Prince, King Charles the First [Poem 13] and Ambitious Apes (Emblem 26) [Poem 91].
Ramnusa to apeas
9
Soe hee that with his fforhead daſh’d out Brains
So
Gloss Note
Termerus was a bandit in Greek myth who murdered passersby by ramming his head against theirs; he was murdered when Theseus smashed his skull (Eardley).
he that with his forehead dashed out brains
Soe
Gloss Note
Termerus, a robber who bashed his head against the heads of his victims. Unlike the other Greek villains mentioned in the poem, Termerus was killed by Heracles (whose head proved harder than the robber’s) and not by Theseus (as in Eardley, Poems, 257).
hee that with his Forehead dash’d out Brains
10
Had like for like, What alſoe was his gains
Had like for like. What also was
Gloss Note
In Greek mythology, Sinis robbed and dismembered travelers by fastening their limbs to pine branches, bending down the trees, and then suddenly letting them go (Eardley); Theseus kills Sinis in similar fashion (as the speaker suggests two lines later).
his gains
Had like for
Critical Note
This comma is the only sentence punctuation in the original manuscript before the terminal period. With it, Pulter signals a caesura in the line, which, significantly, comes just as she introduces Sinis, the splitter of bodies and poetic lines. On the significance of punctation, absent and present, see Alice Eardley, “‘I haue not time to point yr booke … which I desire you yourselfe to doe’: Editing the Form of Early Modern Manuscript Verse,” in The Work of Form: Poetics and Materiality in Early Modern Culture, ed. Elizabeth Scott-Baumann and Ben Burton (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014), 169–71.
like, What alsoe was his gains
11
That tween two Trees did Kill men Cruelly
That ’tween two trees did kill men cruelly?
That tween two Trees did kill men Cruelly
12
Did hee not by the Self Same Tortour Die
Did he not by the self-same torture die?
Did
Gloss Note
Sinis, another of the bandits whom Theseus defeats on his journey to Athens; Sinis assaulted his victims by tying them to bent trees and then releasing the trees and so splitting them in two. For the myth’s sources, see Eardley, Poems, 257.
hee not by the self same Tortour Die
13
Oh that all thoſe that fflatter Tiranny
O, that all those that flatter tyranny
Gloss Note
One of Pulter’s favorite interjections, used over 100 times across her poems.
Oh that all those that Flatter Tiranny
14
Might first their own accursed projects trie
Might first their own accurséd projects try!
Might first their own accursed
Gloss Note
A scheme or proposal. “Project,” used both as a noun and as a verb, developed significant economic and imperialist meanings in the seventeenth century, so much so that “projectors” became a term of abuse for a promoter of bad ventures (Oxford English Dictionary, s.v. “projector, n., sense 1.b”).
projects trie
15
Then that ffell Tyrant that in Newburg Raignd
Then
Critical Note
Eardley suggests the manuscript’s “Newburg” might be Newbury, where in 1643 Robert Devereux, third Earl of Essex, led the army against the king; we have read “Newburg” in the manuscript as a transcription error for “Newbury” (pronounced, here, “Newb’ry,” to fit the meter).
that fell tyrant that in Newbury reigned
Then that
Critical Note
Eardley suggests Robert Devereux, the third earl of Essex (1591–1646), who was the general in charge of parliamentary forces at the decisive battle at Newbury on 20 September 1643 (Poems, 258). Pulter may have been reminded of the general and his role in that battle by renewed attention to Essex at the Restoration, when he was remembered as a chief architect of the civil wars and when his funeral moment was destroyed on the order of Charles II.
Fell Tyrant that in
Critical Note
The manuscript reads “Newburg,” but the reference is almost certainly to the first Battle of Newbury (see above and Eardley, Poems, 258). Nearly all references to “Newburg” in the corpus of early modern English print are to “Nuremburg” in Germany. Although an earl of “Newburg” was created among the Scottish peers in 1660s, neither this title nor the German city presents a convincing alternative to Eardley’s correction.
Newbury Raignd
16
Should first unto the ffat’all Stag bin Chaind
Should first unto the
Gloss Note
This seems to be a Royalist wish that a Parliamentarian leader would have been subject to the fate that awaited Charles I, who was chained and executed on a platform in a venue used sometimes as a theatrical stage. The manuscript has “stag” instead of “stage.”
fatal stage been chained;
Should first unto the Fatall
Critical Note
The manuscript reads “stag,” a suggestively Royalist word (see Elizabeth Kolkovich, The Hunted Deer), but the word is almost certainly “stage,” a reference to the platform on which Charles I was executed outside the Banqueting House of Whitehall. Contemporary accounts, like Andrew Marvell’s “An Horatian Ode,” drew attention to theatricality of the scene: “That thence the royal actor born / The tragic scaffold might adorn, / While round the armèd bands / Did clap their bloody hands” (The Poems of Andrew Marvell, ed. Nigel Smith, Rev. ed, [New York: Pearson Longman, 2007], ll. 53–6).
stag bin
Critical Note
Eardley notes that “Chains were attached to the platform to restrain the king,” but no system of restraint appears in the contemporary visual representations of the execution (Poems, 258). Perhaps Pulter was superimposing the grizzlier scenes of the execution of the regicides at the Restoration onto the original event.
Chaind
17
Then thoſe that made the Engine to pull Down
Then those that made the
Gloss Note
tricky; contrivance; plot or snare; machine, especially of war but also in theater instrument of torture
engine to pull down
Then those that made the
Critical Note
A machine or instrument, often of torture; can also refer to theatrical machinery (i.e. deus ex machina) (Oxford English Dictionary, s.v. “engine, n., senses II.4.b and II.7"). This last sense builds on the line’s theatrical imagery and anticipates the downward motion of Charles’s “sacred Head” onto the famously low execution block—a motion enacted by the line break and the enjambment that follows.
Engine to pull Down
18
His Sacred Head which wore ^
Physical Note
"r" in double superscript
o:r Brittiſh Crown
Gloss Note
that of Charles I, who was beheaded in 1649
His sacred head which wore our British crown.
His sacred Head which wore
Critical Note
This word, which is necessary to fill the line’s meter, was added later in the composition process. The first-person plural pronoun, along with the demonym “Brittish,” aspire to a collective national identity that aligns more closely with a Restoration sensibility, when the “Brittish Crown” was once again “ours,” than with a republican one.
our Brittish Crown
19
When Lamb like on that Alter hee did lie
When lamb-like on that altar he did lie,
When
Critical Note
The language again resembles contemporary reports of the regicide, including Marvell’s “Horatian Ode”: “He nothing common did, or mean, / Upon that memorable scene; / But with his keener eye / The axe’s edge did try. / Nor called the Gods with vulgar spite / To vindicate his helpless right; / But bowed his comely head / Down, as upon a bed” (Poems, ed. Smith, ll. 57–64).
Lamb like on that Alter hee did lie
20
Why did not Oliver that Pulley trie
Why did not
Gloss Note
Oliver Cromwell, who led the Parliamentarians in defeating and executing Charles I during the English Civil War
Oliver that
Gloss Note
part of a gallows for hanging; “pulley” could allude to the use of such a device in torture
pulley try?
Why did not
Gloss Note
Oliver Cromwell (1599–1658), commander of the New Model Army that overthrew the Stuart monarchy and later Lord Protector of the commonwealth which replaced that monarchy.
Oliver that Pulley trie
21
Were Some Condemnd the Ax would moue alone
Gloss Note
Some are so villainous that no executioner would be needed, since the axe would be moved to act of its own accord.
Were some condemned, the axe would move alone,
Were some Condemnd the Ax would moue alone
22
As Tyburn for
Physical Note
in darker ink than surrounding words
thoſe Regicides doe groan
As
Gloss Note
a place of public execution in London
Tyburn for those
Gloss Note
the king’s killers
regicides do groan.
As
Critical Note
London’s principal public execution site, featuring gallows for executions by hanging. The poem’s earlier references to “chains,” “engines,” and “pulleys” seem to point toward this method of execution rather than the decapitation by axe performed at Charles I’s execution and re-imagined in line 21.
Tyburn for
Critical Note
Like “our” in line 18, the word “those” was added later in the composition process. The addition is again a metrical necessity, but the pronoun suggests a finite group of regicides, perhaps the list of those regicides excluded from Charles II’s Act of Indemnity and Oblivion at the Restoration. The word “regicide” had flourished in print discourse around 1649 but then fallen out of the print record for most of the 1650s before returning to public use in 1660 (“N-gram Browser,” s.v., “regicide,” Early Print).
those Regicides doe groan
23
Then Should their Children to Jame’ca goe
Then should their children to
Gloss Note
Jamaica, captured by the British in 1655, was among the islands in the West Indies used to exile Royalists during the interregnum.
Jamaica go;
Then should their
Gloss Note
A reference to the supposed deportation of royalist widows and children to Jamaica, which had come under English rule in 1655 as part of the Western Design pursued by Oliver Cromwell. Accounts of forced emigration circulated primarily after the Restoration and may have been fabricated to signal loyalty to the Stuart cause (see Pestana, English Conquest, and Pulter and Jamaica). Pulter’s nephew James Ley, third earl of Marlborough, was involved in England’s Caribbean ventures and would be named governor of Jamaica in 1664.
Children to Jameca goe
24
Their
Physical Note
blot after “i”
Staits Sequstred Widdow Eyes o’reflow
Gloss Note
regicides’ estates (properties) should be confiscated (or “sequestered”), as the Royalists’ goods were during and after the civil wars.
Their ’states sequestered,
Gloss Note
regicides’ widows’ eyes should be overflowing with grief over their husbands’ deaths.
widow eyes o’erflow.
Their
Critical Note
A reference to the seizure and sale of royalist estates to fund the commonwealth government. As elsewhere in the poem, Pulter employs poetic forms that replicate the punishment: the elision of “estates” to “staits” and “sequestered” to “sequstred” enacts a syllabic theft as well as describing a material one.
staits sequstred Widdow Eyes or’eflow
25
Sure thoſe that doe their ffellow Chriſtians Sell
Sure
Gloss Note
the Parliamentarians who sold Royalists into slavery, as the lines above indicate (“to Jamaica go”), by sending them to the West Indies
those that do their fellow Christians sell
Sure those that doe their
Critical Note
A provocative choice of phrase and argument at a moment when England was forcibly sending thousands of convicted criminals and Irish people to Atlantic colonies and increasingly participating in the traffic of enslaved Africans.
Fellow Christians sell
26
Will in their Conſcience feel the flames of Hell
Will in their conscience feel the flames of Hell.
Will in their
Critical Note
One of only two times (cf. The Ugly Spider (Emblem 37) [Poem 102], line 20) that Pulter uses this theologically and politically charged word in her corpus.
Conscience feel the flames of Hell
27
That Worm will graw though for A time ’tis hid
That
Gloss Note
proverbial for something eating away at one’s conscience; also figuratively, the pains of Hell
worm will gnaw, though for a time ’tis hid,
That
Gloss Note
A common idiom for the work of a guilty conscience, deriving from Mark 9:44–48 (Eardley, Poems, 258).
Worm will gnaw though for A time ’tis hid
28
And make them Roar worſ then
Physical Note
first “i” is written over an “e”
Pirillus did.
And make them roar worse than Perillus did.
And make them Roar wors then Perillus did.
horizontal straight line
X (Close panel)Notes: Amplified Edition
Title note

 Critical note

The title supplied by Leah Knight and Wendy Wall in the Elemental Edition draws out the figure of Phalaris from within the story of the brass bull’s construction and use in sixth century (BCE) Sicily. Such focus is consistent with Phalaris’s presence in the archive of early modern English print (see Phalaris and Perillus in Early Modern Print). But the poem’s conceit turns on the figure of Perillus, who is punished for his prideful cunning, just as, Pulter hopes, the accursed regicides will be. Perhaps, then, the title of the emblem might as aptly read: “Perillus and Brazen Bull.”

 Editorial note

Since Pulter uses the formal features of this emblem to reproduce the acts of violence and torture depicted in the poem, I have employed a semi-diplomatic editorial principle in an effort to preserve and highlight these features. Another benefit of this approach is that it retains the original spelling of words, like “stag” (line 16), which had contemporary resonance that is lost when the spelling is modernized. At line 15, I have corrected “Newburg” to “Newbury,” providing a note explaining my reasoning, and I have incorporated the additions to lines 18 and 22 (“our” and “those”) without drawing typographic attention to their inserted status in the original manuscript. The difference between majuscule and minuscule letters is sometimes difficult to discern in the scribal hand of the manuscript (especially for initial k’s and s’s), but every effort has been taken to transcribe those letters uniformly.

 Headnote

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 Murder [Poem 8]). 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.
Gloss Note
Sarah C. E. Ross, Women, Poetry, and Politics in Seventeenth-Century Britain (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015), 138–69, and “Tears, Bezoars and Blazing Comets: Gender and Politics in Hester Pulter’s Civil War Lyrics,” Literature Compass 2, no. 1 (2005): 1–14; and Kate Chedgzoy, Women’s Writing in the British Atlantic World: Memory, Place and History, 1550–1700 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 144–53.
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.
Gloss Note
On the uniqueness of Pulter’s emblems within the larger tradition, see Margaret J. M. Ezell, “The Laughing Tortoise: Speculations on Manuscript Sources and Women’s Book History,” English Literary Renaissance 38, no. 2 (2008): 346–9; Alice Eardley, “Hester Pulter’s ‘Indivisibles’ and the Challenges of Annotating Early Modern Women’s Poetry,” Studies in English Literature, 1500–1900 52, no. 1 (2012): 130–2, and “Introduction” to Poems, Emblems, and the Unfortunate Florinda, ed. Alice Eardley (Chicago: Iter Press, 2014), 27–9; Ross, Women, Poetry, 157–69; Helena Kaznowska, “Women Are from Venus: Addressing Female Agency with Classical Allegory,” in Audience and Reception in the Early Modern Period, ed. John R. Decker and Mitzi Kirkland-Ives (New York: Routledge, 2021), 287–90; and Victoria E. Burke, “Gendering the Emblem: Hester Pulter’s Formal Experimentation,” in Feminist Formalism and Early Modern Women’s Writing, ed. Lara Dodds and Michelle M. Dowd (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2022), 92–109.
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.
Gloss Note
Gary Waller, The Female Baroque in Early Modern English Literary Culture: From Mary Sidney to Aphra Behn (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2020), 194–5; and Rachel Dunn, “Breaking a Tradition: Hester Pulter and the English emblem book,” The Seventeenth Century 30, no. 1 (2015): 55–73, especially 63.
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.
Gloss Note
On the Scriptural forms of Pulter’s verse, see Nikolina Hatton, “Hester Pulter’s Psalmic Poems,” Renaissance Studies 37, no. 3 (2023): 364–83; and Sarah C. E. Ross, “Hester Pulter’s Devotional Complaints: ‘Then will I hallelujahs ever sing’,” Journal for Early Modern Cultural Studies 20, no. 2 (2020): 99–119.
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.
Gloss Note
On reading Pulter within the early modern sonnet tradition and her use of rhymed couplets, see Elizabeth Scott-Baumann, “Hester Pulter’s Well-Wrought Urns: Early Modern Women, Sonnets, and New Criticism,” Journal for Early Modern Cultural Studies 20, no. 2 (2020): 120–43, especially 123–5. Scott-Baumann is responding, in part, to the lament of Diana E. Henderson over the silencing of female sonneteers after Mary Wroth; “Where Had All the Flowers Gone? The Missing Space of Female Sonneteers in Seventeenth-Century England,” Renaissance and Reformation / Renaissance et Réforme 35, no. 1 (2012): 139–65. On Pulter’s use of couplets, see also Lara Dodds and Michelle M. Dowd, “Happy Accidents: Critical Belatedness, Feminist Formalism, and Early Modern Women’s Writing,” Criticism 62, no. 2 (2020): 184–6.
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.”
Gloss Note
On this return, see the Headnote to the Elemental Edition of Phalaris and the Brazen Bull (Emblem 50) [Poem 115]. On the ways that the endings of Pulter’s poems “resolve,” “dissolve,” or “involve,” see Liza Blake, “Hester Pulter’s Particle Physics and the Poetics of Involution,” Journal for Early Modern Cultural Studies 20, no. 2 (2020): 72, 88–9.
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.
Gloss Note
On Pulter’s probable use of newsbooks as well as first-hand news from London, see Eardley, “Introduction,” 18–9 and 28–9; Elizabeth Zeman Kolkovich, “In Defense of Indulgence: Hester Pulter’s Maternal Elegies,” Journal for Early Modern Cultural Studies 20, no. 2 (2020): 48–53; Karen Britland, “The Queer Poetics of Hester Pulter’s Poem, ‘Of a Young Lady at Oxford, 1646’,” Women’s Writing 29, no. 3 (2022): 382–401; and Andrea Brady, “Dying with Honour: Literary Propaganda and the Second English Civil War,” The Journal of Military History 70, no. 1 (2006): 9–30. On the work being done to discover Pulter’s sources, see Leah Knight and Wendy Wall, “Poet in the Making: How Hester Pulter Read the Digital Age,” Journal for Early Modern Cultural Studies 20, no. 2 (2020): 2–3. For new connections and associations that have been discovered through corpus-based analysis and social history, see Karen Britland, “Conspiring with ‘friends’: Hester Pulter’s Poetry and the Stanley Family at Cumberlow Green,” The Review of English Studies 69, no. 292 (2018): 832–54. For the political diversity of Pulter’s family, see Eardley, “Introduction,” 9–19.
7 She refashioned these raw materials, adapting and adopting them to her own voice, her own ends.
Gloss Note
Frances E. Dolan has suggested that Pulter’s poetry “absorb[s] and break[s] down its components—as a dunghill does—so that one does not necessarily recognize the components” (“Hester Pulter’s Dunghill Poetics,” Journal for Early Modern Cultural Studies 20, no. 2 [2020]: 32).
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.”
Gloss Note
Thomas Granger, A Familiar Exposition or Commentarie on Ecclesiastes (London, 1621), 259.
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.
Gloss Note
Pulter’s Independent contemporary, John Goodwin had used a similar strategy to defend his accusation of England’s ministers for corrupting the state, writing that “if the Land had a Phalaris King over it, there would be found more then one Perillus to make him brazen Bulls for the tormenting of such Christians, who are either too weak, or too wise, to swim down the stream of a State Religion, or to call men, Rabbi” (The Apologist Condemned [London, 1653], 34).
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.
Gloss Note
Pulter imagines Theseus as avenger of a young royalist suicide in Of a Young Lady at Oxford, 1646 [Poem 43].
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.
Gloss Note
The emblem that follows “Phalaris” in the manuscript—British Brennus (Emblem 51) [Poem 116]—is similarly virulent, but compare this confident vehemence to the self-restrained ending of The Ugly Spider (Emblem 37) [Poem 102]. On Pulter’s attack on Cromwell, see Alice Eardley, “‘Shut up in a Countrey Grange’: The Provenance of Lady Hester Pulter’s Poetry and Prose and Women’s Literary History,” Huntington Library Quarterly 80, no. 2 (2017): 352–3.
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,
Gloss Note
Eardley, “Shut up,” 355–9.
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 Abbey [Poem 62]), 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.”
Gloss Note
Gryffith Williams, “The Declaration of the Just Judgments of God,” in Seven Treatises, Very necessary to be observed in these very bad Days (London, 1661), 43.
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.”
Gloss Note
Dunn, “Breaking a Tradition,” 61.
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.
Gloss Note
The younger Charles also appears in Pulter’s On that Unparalleled Prince Charles the First, His Horrid Murder [Poem 8], Let None Sigh More for Lucas or for Lisle [On the Same (2)] [Poem 15], On the King’s Most Excellent Majesty [Poem 27], And Must the Sword this Controverse Decide [Poem 64], and Virtue’s Duel [Emblem 4] [Poem 70].
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) [Poem 93].
Gloss Note
On Pulter’s Irish connections, see Eardley, “Introduction,” 13–4; Dunn, “Breaking a Tradition,” 62.
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.
Gloss Note
G. G. Harris, “Ley, James, Third Earl of Marlborough (1618/19–1665), Naval Officer,” Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. 3 Jan. 2008; Accessed 26 July 2023. My thanks to Tom Cogswell for pointing out this family connection.
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).
Gloss Note
Carla Gardina Pestana, The English Conquest of Jamaica: Oliver Cromwell’s Bid for Empire (Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2017).
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.
Gloss Note
In arguing for “Phalaris” as Pulter’s missing poem of the Restoration (see Eardley, “Introduction,” 21), I depart from Peter C. Herman’s claim that Pulter changed her political allegiances after seeing the licentious court of Charles II (“Lady Hester Pulter’s The Unfortunate Florinda: Race, Religion, and the Politics of Rape,” Renaissance Quarterly 63, no. 4 [2010]: 1208–46).
20
Line number 1

 Gloss note

The story of Phalaris (d. c.554 BCE), the tyrant ruler of Acragas, Sicily, came to the early modern world through Cicero, Ovid, Seneca, Plutarch, Pliny, and Lucian, and appears across the print record, from Dante’s Inferno XXVII to Sir Philip Sidney’s Defence of Poesie to John Donne’s sermons (see Phalaris and Perillus in Early Modern Print).
Line number 1

 Gloss note

Early modern references to Phalaris focus on his authoritarian rule, often listing him alongside tyrants like Nero, Herod, Nimrod, Pharaoh, Caligula, and Dionysius, as a standard of evil against which to compare contemporary leaders (see Phalaris and Perillus in Early Modern Print).
Line number 2

 Gloss note

Phalaris’s court artisan, Perillus, cast a bull in brass and presented it to the king as a torture device. The victim would be placed inside the bull and a fire lit underneath so that the cries of the afflicted would seem to come from the bull’s mouth.
Line number 4

 Gloss note

Perillus’s cunning, arrogant, greedy, and bloodthirsty behavior captured the imaginations of early modern writers, many of whom approved his punishment by Phalaris and some of whom went as far as to say that Perillus was crueler than Phalaris (see Phalaris and Perillus in Early Modern Print).
Line number 4

 Gloss note

Perillus’s roar was a common idiom in the early modern world, as in Andrew Marvell’s “Flecknoe, an English Priest at Rome,” where the titular poet “swell[s], with anger full, / And roare[s] out, like Perillus in’s own bull” (see Phalaris and Perillus in Early Modern Print).
Line number 6

 Gloss note

An innkeeper who kept an iron bed to which he fit his guests by chopping or stretching their bodies. In Greek myth, Procrustes was subjected to his own device by Theseus on the last stop of his journey from Troezen to Athens, where he would become king. The story of Procrustes was used in the early modern world as an analogy for the manipulation of another’s words to fit one’s own purposes (see Procrustes, Sciron, Termerus, and Sinis in Early Modern Print).
Line number 6

 Critical note

A possible slant rhyme of the couplet (“put/cut”) would, if true for Pulter’s English as in our own, perfectly enact Procrustes’s violent method.
Line number 7

 Gloss note

Sciron, one of the bandits whom Theseus defeats on his journey to Athens; Sciron’s tactic for robbery was to force passersby to wash his feet and then to kick them into the sea below. For the myth’s sources, see Eardley, Poems, 257.
Line number 8

 Gloss note

Rhamnusia or Nemesis, the figure of revenge in Greek myth. Pulter also uses the figure in Upon the Imprisonment of his Sacred Majesty, That Unparalleled Prince, King Charles the First [Poem 13] and Ambitious Apes (Emblem 26) [Poem 91].
Line number 9

 Gloss note

Termerus, a robber who bashed his head against the heads of his victims. Unlike the other Greek villains mentioned in the poem, Termerus was killed by Heracles (whose head proved harder than the robber’s) and not by Theseus (as in Eardley, Poems, 257).
Line number 10

 Critical note

This comma is the only sentence punctuation in the original manuscript before the terminal period. With it, Pulter signals a caesura in the line, which, significantly, comes just as she introduces Sinis, the splitter of bodies and poetic lines. On the significance of punctation, absent and present, see Alice Eardley, “‘I haue not time to point yr booke … which I desire you yourselfe to doe’: Editing the Form of Early Modern Manuscript Verse,” in The Work of Form: Poetics and Materiality in Early Modern Culture, ed. Elizabeth Scott-Baumann and Ben Burton (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014), 169–71.
Line number 12

 Gloss note

Sinis, another of the bandits whom Theseus defeats on his journey to Athens; Sinis assaulted his victims by tying them to bent trees and then releasing the trees and so splitting them in two. For the myth’s sources, see Eardley, Poems, 257.
Line number 13

 Gloss note

One of Pulter’s favorite interjections, used over 100 times across her poems.
Line number 14

 Gloss note

A scheme or proposal. “Project,” used both as a noun and as a verb, developed significant economic and imperialist meanings in the seventeenth century, so much so that “projectors” became a term of abuse for a promoter of bad ventures (Oxford English Dictionary, s.v. “projector, n., sense 1.b”).
Line number 15

 Critical note

Eardley suggests Robert Devereux, the third earl of Essex (1591–1646), who was the general in charge of parliamentary forces at the decisive battle at Newbury on 20 September 1643 (Poems, 258). Pulter may have been reminded of the general and his role in that battle by renewed attention to Essex at the Restoration, when he was remembered as a chief architect of the civil wars and when his funeral moment was destroyed on the order of Charles II.
Line number 15

 Critical note

The manuscript reads “Newburg,” but the reference is almost certainly to the first Battle of Newbury (see above and Eardley, Poems, 258). Nearly all references to “Newburg” in the corpus of early modern English print are to “Nuremburg” in Germany. Although an earl of “Newburg” was created among the Scottish peers in 1660s, neither this title nor the German city presents a convincing alternative to Eardley’s correction.
Line number 16

 Critical note

The manuscript reads “stag,” a suggestively Royalist word (see Elizabeth Kolkovich, The Hunted Deer), but the word is almost certainly “stage,” a reference to the platform on which Charles I was executed outside the Banqueting House of Whitehall. Contemporary accounts, like Andrew Marvell’s “An Horatian Ode,” drew attention to theatricality of the scene: “That thence the royal actor born / The tragic scaffold might adorn, / While round the armèd bands / Did clap their bloody hands” (The Poems of Andrew Marvell, ed. Nigel Smith, Rev. ed, [New York: Pearson Longman, 2007], ll. 53–6).
Line number 16

 Critical note

Eardley notes that “Chains were attached to the platform to restrain the king,” but no system of restraint appears in the contemporary visual representations of the execution (Poems, 258). Perhaps Pulter was superimposing the grizzlier scenes of the execution of the regicides at the Restoration onto the original event.
Line number 17

 Critical note

A machine or instrument, often of torture; can also refer to theatrical machinery (i.e. deus ex machina) (Oxford English Dictionary, s.v. “engine, n., senses II.4.b and II.7"). This last sense builds on the line’s theatrical imagery and anticipates the downward motion of Charles’s “sacred Head” onto the famously low execution block—a motion enacted by the line break and the enjambment that follows.
Line number 18

 Critical note

This word, which is necessary to fill the line’s meter, was added later in the composition process. The first-person plural pronoun, along with the demonym “Brittish,” aspire to a collective national identity that aligns more closely with a Restoration sensibility, when the “Brittish Crown” was once again “ours,” than with a republican one.
Line number 19

 Critical note

The language again resembles contemporary reports of the regicide, including Marvell’s “Horatian Ode”: “He nothing common did, or mean, / Upon that memorable scene; / But with his keener eye / The axe’s edge did try. / Nor called the Gods with vulgar spite / To vindicate his helpless right; / But bowed his comely head / Down, as upon a bed” (Poems, ed. Smith, ll. 57–64).
Line number 20

 Gloss note

Oliver Cromwell (1599–1658), commander of the New Model Army that overthrew the Stuart monarchy and later Lord Protector of the commonwealth which replaced that monarchy.
Line number 22

 Critical note

London’s principal public execution site, featuring gallows for executions by hanging. The poem’s earlier references to “chains,” “engines,” and “pulleys” seem to point toward this method of execution rather than the decapitation by axe performed at Charles I’s execution and re-imagined in line 21.
Line number 22

 Critical note

Like “our” in line 18, the word “those” was added later in the composition process. The addition is again a metrical necessity, but the pronoun suggests a finite group of regicides, perhaps the list of those regicides excluded from Charles II’s Act of Indemnity and Oblivion at the Restoration. The word “regicide” had flourished in print discourse around 1649 but then fallen out of the print record for most of the 1650s before returning to public use in 1660 (“N-gram Browser,” s.v., “regicide,” Early Print).
Line number 23

 Gloss note

A reference to the supposed deportation of royalist widows and children to Jamaica, which had come under English rule in 1655 as part of the Western Design pursued by Oliver Cromwell. Accounts of forced emigration circulated primarily after the Restoration and may have been fabricated to signal loyalty to the Stuart cause (see Pestana, English Conquest, and Pulter and Jamaica). Pulter’s nephew James Ley, third earl of Marlborough, was involved in England’s Caribbean ventures and would be named governor of Jamaica in 1664.
Line number 24

 Critical note

A reference to the seizure and sale of royalist estates to fund the commonwealth government. As elsewhere in the poem, Pulter employs poetic forms that replicate the punishment: the elision of “estates” to “staits” and “sequestered” to “sequstred” enacts a syllabic theft as well as describing a material one.
Line number 25

 Critical note

A provocative choice of phrase and argument at a moment when England was forcibly sending thousands of convicted criminals and Irish people to Atlantic colonies and increasingly participating in the traffic of enslaved Africans.
Line number 26

 Critical note

One of only two times (cf. The Ugly Spider (Emblem 37) [Poem 102], line 20) that Pulter uses this theologically and politically charged word in her corpus.
Line number 27

 Gloss note

A common idiom for the work of a guilty conscience, deriving from Mark 9:44–48 (Eardley, Poems, 258).
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[Emblem 50]
Phalaris and the Brazen Bull
(Emblem 50)
Critical Note
The title supplied by Leah Knight and Wendy Wall in the Elemental Edition draws out the figure of Phalaris from within the story of the brass bull’s construction and use in sixth century (BCE) Sicily. Such focus is consistent with Phalaris’s presence in the archive of early modern English print (see Phalaris and Perillus in Early Modern Print). But the poem’s conceit turns on the figure of Perillus, who is punished for his prideful cunning, just as, Pulter hopes, the accursed regicides will be. Perhaps, then, the title of the emblem might as aptly read: “Perillus and Brazen Bull.”
Phalaris and the Brazen Bull
(Emblem 50)
In these transcriptions we preserve as many details of the original material, textual, and graphic properties of Hester Pulter’s manuscript verse as we have found practical. Whenever possible, for instance, original spelling, punctuation, capitalization, lineation, insertions, deletions, alterations, spacing between words and lines, and indentation are all maintained; abbreviations and brevigraphs are not expanded; and superscript and subscript representations are retained. See full conventions for the transcriptions here.

— Jonathan Koch
The aim of the elemental edition is to make the poems accessible to the largest variety of readers, which involves modernizing spelling and punctuation as well as adding basic glosses. Spelling and punctuation reflect current standard American usage; punctuation highlights syntax which might otherwise be obscure. Outmoded but still familiar word forms (“thou,” “‘tis,” “hold’st”) are not modernized, and we do not modernize grammar when the sense remains legible. After a brief headnote aimed at offering a “way in” to the poem’s unique qualities and connections with other verse by Pulter or her contemporaries, the edition features a minimum of notes and interpretative framing to allow more immediate engagement with the poem. Glosses clarify synonyms or showcase various possible meanings in Pulter’s time. Other notes identify named people and places or clarify obscure material. We rely (without citation) primarily on the Oxford English Dictionary (OED), the Oxford Reference database, and the King James Version (KJV) of the Bible. When we rely on Alice Eardley’s edition of Pulter’s work, we cite her text generally (“Eardley”); other sources are cited in full. The result is an edition we consider a springboard for further work on Pulter’s poetry. See full conventions for this edition here.

— Jonathan Koch
Since Pulter uses the formal features of this emblem to reproduce the acts of violence and torture depicted in the poem, I have employed a semi-diplomatic editorial principle in an effort to preserve and highlight these features. Another benefit of this approach is that it retains the original spelling of words, like “stag” (line 16), which had contemporary resonance that is lost when the spelling is modernized. At line 15, I have corrected “Newburg” to “Newbury,” providing a note explaining my reasoning, and I have incorporated the additions to lines 18 and 22 (“our” and “those”) without drawing typographic attention to their inserted status in the original manuscript. The difference between majuscule and minuscule letters is sometimes difficult to discern in the scribal hand of the manuscript (especially for initial k’s and s’s), but every effort has been taken to transcribe those letters uniformly.

— Jonathan Koch
How terribly just to die in the very torture device one invented! Pulter canvasses classical history and myth for tales of lawless, tyrannical figures known for having baked, stretched, chopped, drowned, bashed, and torn their unsuspecting victims to death—only to suffer the same fate themselves. She both wishes for, and finally prophesies, the extension of this pattern of comeuppance to those she condemns as the lawless tyrants of her own day: primarily, the Civil War “regicides” who killed Charles I. Pulter’s fantasy of vengeance escalates from one of racial and national boundary-crossings (the punitive transformation of British Parliamentarians into West Indian slaves) into her enemies’ full descent into Hell. In the conclusion of this revenge fantasy, Pulter imagines their roars of eternal pain echoing the poem’s opening cries, such that, formally, the poem simulates the cycle of justice it describes.

— Jonathan Koch
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 Murder [Poem 8]). 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.
Gloss Note
Sarah C. E. Ross, Women, Poetry, and Politics in Seventeenth-Century Britain (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015), 138–69, and “Tears, Bezoars and Blazing Comets: Gender and Politics in Hester Pulter’s Civil War Lyrics,” Literature Compass 2, no. 1 (2005): 1–14; and Kate Chedgzoy, Women’s Writing in the British Atlantic World: Memory, Place and History, 1550–1700 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 144–53.
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.
Gloss Note
On the uniqueness of Pulter’s emblems within the larger tradition, see Margaret J. M. Ezell, “The Laughing Tortoise: Speculations on Manuscript Sources and Women’s Book History,” English Literary Renaissance 38, no. 2 (2008): 346–9; Alice Eardley, “Hester Pulter’s ‘Indivisibles’ and the Challenges of Annotating Early Modern Women’s Poetry,” Studies in English Literature, 1500–1900 52, no. 1 (2012): 130–2, and “Introduction” to Poems, Emblems, and the Unfortunate Florinda, ed. Alice Eardley (Chicago: Iter Press, 2014), 27–9; Ross, Women, Poetry, 157–69; Helena Kaznowska, “Women Are from Venus: Addressing Female Agency with Classical Allegory,” in Audience and Reception in the Early Modern Period, ed. John R. Decker and Mitzi Kirkland-Ives (New York: Routledge, 2021), 287–90; and Victoria E. Burke, “Gendering the Emblem: Hester Pulter’s Formal Experimentation,” in Feminist Formalism and Early Modern Women’s Writing, ed. Lara Dodds and Michelle M. Dowd (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2022), 92–109.
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.
Gloss Note
Gary Waller, The Female Baroque in Early Modern English Literary Culture: From Mary Sidney to Aphra Behn (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2020), 194–5; and Rachel Dunn, “Breaking a Tradition: Hester Pulter and the English emblem book,” The Seventeenth Century 30, no. 1 (2015): 55–73, especially 63.
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.
Gloss Note
On the Scriptural forms of Pulter’s verse, see Nikolina Hatton, “Hester Pulter’s Psalmic Poems,” Renaissance Studies 37, no. 3 (2023): 364–83; and Sarah C. E. Ross, “Hester Pulter’s Devotional Complaints: ‘Then will I hallelujahs ever sing’,” Journal for Early Modern Cultural Studies 20, no. 2 (2020): 99–119.
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.
Gloss Note
On reading Pulter within the early modern sonnet tradition and her use of rhymed couplets, see Elizabeth Scott-Baumann, “Hester Pulter’s Well-Wrought Urns: Early Modern Women, Sonnets, and New Criticism,” Journal for Early Modern Cultural Studies 20, no. 2 (2020): 120–43, especially 123–5. Scott-Baumann is responding, in part, to the lament of Diana E. Henderson over the silencing of female sonneteers after Mary Wroth; “Where Had All the Flowers Gone? The Missing Space of Female Sonneteers in Seventeenth-Century England,” Renaissance and Reformation / Renaissance et Réforme 35, no. 1 (2012): 139–65. On Pulter’s use of couplets, see also Lara Dodds and Michelle M. Dowd, “Happy Accidents: Critical Belatedness, Feminist Formalism, and Early Modern Women’s Writing,” Criticism 62, no. 2 (2020): 184–6.
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.”
Gloss Note
On this return, see the Headnote to the Elemental Edition of Phalaris and the Brazen Bull (Emblem 50) [Poem 115]. On the ways that the endings of Pulter’s poems “resolve,” “dissolve,” or “involve,” see Liza Blake, “Hester Pulter’s Particle Physics and the Poetics of Involution,” Journal for Early Modern Cultural Studies 20, no. 2 (2020): 72, 88–9.
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.
Gloss Note
On Pulter’s probable use of newsbooks as well as first-hand news from London, see Eardley, “Introduction,” 18–9 and 28–9; Elizabeth Zeman Kolkovich, “In Defense of Indulgence: Hester Pulter’s Maternal Elegies,” Journal for Early Modern Cultural Studies 20, no. 2 (2020): 48–53; Karen Britland, “The Queer Poetics of Hester Pulter’s Poem, ‘Of a Young Lady at Oxford, 1646’,” Women’s Writing 29, no. 3 (2022): 382–401; and Andrea Brady, “Dying with Honour: Literary Propaganda and the Second English Civil War,” The Journal of Military History 70, no. 1 (2006): 9–30. On the work being done to discover Pulter’s sources, see Leah Knight and Wendy Wall, “Poet in the Making: How Hester Pulter Read the Digital Age,” Journal for Early Modern Cultural Studies 20, no. 2 (2020): 2–3. For new connections and associations that have been discovered through corpus-based analysis and social history, see Karen Britland, “Conspiring with ‘friends’: Hester Pulter’s Poetry and the Stanley Family at Cumberlow Green,” The Review of English Studies 69, no. 292 (2018): 832–54. For the political diversity of Pulter’s family, see Eardley, “Introduction,” 9–19.
7 She refashioned these raw materials, adapting and adopting them to her own voice, her own ends.
Gloss Note
Frances E. Dolan has suggested that Pulter’s poetry “absorb[s] and break[s] down its components—as a dunghill does—so that one does not necessarily recognize the components” (“Hester Pulter’s Dunghill Poetics,” Journal for Early Modern Cultural Studies 20, no. 2 [2020]: 32).
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.”
Gloss Note
Thomas Granger, A Familiar Exposition or Commentarie on Ecclesiastes (London, 1621), 259.
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.
Gloss Note
Pulter’s Independent contemporary, John Goodwin had used a similar strategy to defend his accusation of England’s ministers for corrupting the state, writing that “if the Land had a Phalaris King over it, there would be found more then one Perillus to make him brazen Bulls for the tormenting of such Christians, who are either too weak, or too wise, to swim down the stream of a State Religion, or to call men, Rabbi” (The Apologist Condemned [London, 1653], 34).
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.
Gloss Note
Pulter imagines Theseus as avenger of a young royalist suicide in Of a Young Lady at Oxford, 1646 [Poem 43].
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.
Gloss Note
The emblem that follows “Phalaris” in the manuscript—British Brennus (Emblem 51) [Poem 116]—is similarly virulent, but compare this confident vehemence to the self-restrained ending of The Ugly Spider (Emblem 37) [Poem 102]. On Pulter’s attack on Cromwell, see Alice Eardley, “‘Shut up in a Countrey Grange’: The Provenance of Lady Hester Pulter’s Poetry and Prose and Women’s Literary History,” Huntington Library Quarterly 80, no. 2 (2017): 352–3.
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,
Gloss Note
Eardley, “Shut up,” 355–9.
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 Abbey [Poem 62]), 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.”
Gloss Note
Gryffith Williams, “The Declaration of the Just Judgments of God,” in Seven Treatises, Very necessary to be observed in these very bad Days (London, 1661), 43.
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.”
Gloss Note
Dunn, “Breaking a Tradition,” 61.
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.
Gloss Note
The younger Charles also appears in Pulter’s On that Unparalleled Prince Charles the First, His Horrid Murder [Poem 8], Let None Sigh More for Lucas or for Lisle [On the Same (2)] [Poem 15], On the King’s Most Excellent Majesty [Poem 27], And Must the Sword this Controverse Decide [Poem 64], and Virtue’s Duel [Emblem 4] [Poem 70].
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) [Poem 93].
Gloss Note
On Pulter’s Irish connections, see Eardley, “Introduction,” 13–4; Dunn, “Breaking a Tradition,” 62.
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.
Gloss Note
G. G. Harris, “Ley, James, Third Earl of Marlborough (1618/19–1665), Naval Officer,” Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. 3 Jan. 2008; Accessed 26 July 2023. My thanks to Tom Cogswell for pointing out this family connection.
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).
Gloss Note
Carla Gardina Pestana, The English Conquest of Jamaica: Oliver Cromwell’s Bid for Empire (Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2017).
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.
Gloss Note
In arguing for “Phalaris” as Pulter’s missing poem of the Restoration (see Eardley, “Introduction,” 21), I depart from Peter C. Herman’s claim that Pulter changed her political allegiances after seeing the licentious court of Charles II (“Lady Hester Pulter’s The Unfortunate Florinda: Race, Religion, and the Politics of Rape,” Renaissance Quarterly 63, no. 4 [2010]: 1208–46).
20


— Jonathan Koch
1
50When Phalaris for Tiranny Soe ffam’d
When
Gloss Note
Phalaris of Acragas (ca. 570–549 BCE) was a Sicilian tyrant famed for his cruelty generally, and especially for roasting enemies alive by enclosing them in a bronze bull with a fire burning underneath; victims’ screams sounded like the bull roaring.
Phalaris, for tyranny so famed,
When
Gloss Note
The story of Phalaris (d. c.554 BCE), the tyrant ruler of Acragas, Sicily, came to the early modern world through Cicero, Ovid, Seneca, Plutarch, Pliny, and Lucian, and appears across the print record, from Dante’s Inferno XXVII to Sir Philip Sidney’s Defence of Poesie to John Donne’s sermons (see Phalaris and Perillus in Early Modern Print).
Phalaris
Gloss Note
Early modern references to Phalaris focus on his authoritarian rule, often listing him alongside tyrants like Nero, Herod, Nimrod, Pharaoh, Caligula, and Dionysius, as a standard of evil against which to compare contemporary leaders (see Phalaris and Perillus in Early Modern Print).
for Tiranny soe Fam’d
2
Had Seen the Braſen Bul
Physical Note
second “i” possibly corrected from “e”
Pirillusffram’d
Had seen
Gloss Note
The bull was invented (“framed”) by Perillus of Athens as a device for executing criminals; Phalaris admired the device and made Perillus its first victim.
the brazen bull Perillus framed,
Had seen the
Gloss Note
Phalaris’s court artisan, Perillus, cast a bull in brass and presented it to the king as a torture device. The victim would be placed inside the bull and a fire lit underneath so that the cries of the afflicted would seem to come from the bull’s mouth.
Brasen Bul Pirillus Fram’d
3
Hee made him ffirst the Horrid pain Explore
He made him first the horrid pain
Gloss Note
discover; examine; test
explore,
Hee made him First the Horrid pain explore
4
And with his life his cunning out to Roar
And with his life his cunning
Gloss Note
figuratively, breathing out his life (and losing his cleverness) with a loud cry
out to roar.
And with his life
Gloss Note
Perillus’s cunning, arrogant, greedy, and bloodthirsty behavior captured the imaginations of early modern writers, many of whom approved his punishment by Phalaris and some of whom went as far as to say that Perillus was crueler than Phalaris (see Phalaris and Perillus in Early Modern Print).
his cunning out
Gloss Note
Perillus’s roar was a common idiom in the early modern world, as in Andrew Marvell’s “Flecknoe, an English Priest at Rome,” where the titular poet “swell[s], with anger full, / And roare[s] out, like Perillus in’s own bull” (see Phalaris and Perillus in Early Modern Print).
to roar
5
Thus as Pirillus in the Bull was put
Thus, as Perillus in the bull was put,
Thus as Pirillus in the Bull was put
6
Procrustus to his Bed was Stretcht or Cutt
Gloss Note
In Greek myth, the innkeeper and robber Procrustes forced travelers onto a bed and made them fit it either by stretching or cutting off their limbs; he was finally killed by Theseus with his own invention.
Procrustes to his bed was stretched or cut;
Gloss Note
An innkeeper who kept an iron bed to which he fit his guests by chopping or stretching their bodies. In Greek myth, Procrustes was subjected to his own device by Theseus on the last stop of his journey from Troezen to Athens, where he would become king. The story of Procrustes was used in the early modern world as an analogy for the manipulation of another’s words to fit one’s own purposes (see Procrustes, Sciron, Termerus, and Sinis in Early Modern Print).
Procrustus to his Bed was stretcht or
Critical Note
A possible slant rhyme of the couplet (“put/cut”) would, if true for Pulter’s English as in our own, perfectly enact Procrustes’s violent method.
Cutt
7
And hee that Kickd down People to the Seas
And
Gloss Note
In Greek myth, the robber Sciron forced passersby to wash his feet, then kicked them into the sea to be eaten by a sea monster. He was killed when Theseus threw him into the sea.
he that kicked down people to the seas
And
Gloss Note
Sciron, one of the bandits whom Theseus defeats on his journey to Athens; Sciron’s tactic for robbery was to force passersby to wash his feet and then to kick them into the sea below. For the myth’s sources, see Eardley, Poems, 257.
hee that kickd down People to the seas
8
Receiv’d the like Ramnuſa to apeas
Received the like,
Gloss Note
Greek goddess of vengeance (also called Nemesis)
Rhamnusia to appease.
Receiv’d the like
Gloss Note
Rhamnusia or Nemesis, the figure of revenge in Greek myth. Pulter also uses the figure in Upon the Imprisonment of his Sacred Majesty, That Unparalleled Prince, King Charles the First [Poem 13] and Ambitious Apes (Emblem 26) [Poem 91].
Ramnusa to apeas
9
Soe hee that with his fforhead daſh’d out Brains
So
Gloss Note
Termerus was a bandit in Greek myth who murdered passersby by ramming his head against theirs; he was murdered when Theseus smashed his skull (Eardley).
he that with his forehead dashed out brains
Soe
Gloss Note
Termerus, a robber who bashed his head against the heads of his victims. Unlike the other Greek villains mentioned in the poem, Termerus was killed by Heracles (whose head proved harder than the robber’s) and not by Theseus (as in Eardley, Poems, 257).
hee that with his Forehead dash’d out Brains
10
Had like for like, What alſoe was his gains
Had like for like. What also was
Gloss Note
In Greek mythology, Sinis robbed and dismembered travelers by fastening their limbs to pine branches, bending down the trees, and then suddenly letting them go (Eardley); Theseus kills Sinis in similar fashion (as the speaker suggests two lines later).
his gains
Had like for
Critical Note
This comma is the only sentence punctuation in the original manuscript before the terminal period. With it, Pulter signals a caesura in the line, which, significantly, comes just as she introduces Sinis, the splitter of bodies and poetic lines. On the significance of punctation, absent and present, see Alice Eardley, “‘I haue not time to point yr booke … which I desire you yourselfe to doe’: Editing the Form of Early Modern Manuscript Verse,” in The Work of Form: Poetics and Materiality in Early Modern Culture, ed. Elizabeth Scott-Baumann and Ben Burton (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014), 169–71.
like, What alsoe was his gains
11
That tween two Trees did Kill men Cruelly
That ’tween two trees did kill men cruelly?
That tween two Trees did kill men Cruelly
12
Did hee not by the Self Same Tortour Die
Did he not by the self-same torture die?
Did
Gloss Note
Sinis, another of the bandits whom Theseus defeats on his journey to Athens; Sinis assaulted his victims by tying them to bent trees and then releasing the trees and so splitting them in two. For the myth’s sources, see Eardley, Poems, 257.
hee not by the self same Tortour Die
13
Oh that all thoſe that fflatter Tiranny
O, that all those that flatter tyranny
Gloss Note
One of Pulter’s favorite interjections, used over 100 times across her poems.
Oh that all those that Flatter Tiranny
14
Might first their own accursed projects trie
Might first their own accurséd projects try!
Might first their own accursed
Gloss Note
A scheme or proposal. “Project,” used both as a noun and as a verb, developed significant economic and imperialist meanings in the seventeenth century, so much so that “projectors” became a term of abuse for a promoter of bad ventures (Oxford English Dictionary, s.v. “projector, n., sense 1.b”).
projects trie
15
Then that ffell Tyrant that in Newburg Raignd
Then
Critical Note
Eardley suggests the manuscript’s “Newburg” might be Newbury, where in 1643 Robert Devereux, third Earl of Essex, led the army against the king; we have read “Newburg” in the manuscript as a transcription error for “Newbury” (pronounced, here, “Newb’ry,” to fit the meter).
that fell tyrant that in Newbury reigned
Then that
Critical Note
Eardley suggests Robert Devereux, the third earl of Essex (1591–1646), who was the general in charge of parliamentary forces at the decisive battle at Newbury on 20 September 1643 (Poems, 258). Pulter may have been reminded of the general and his role in that battle by renewed attention to Essex at the Restoration, when he was remembered as a chief architect of the civil wars and when his funeral moment was destroyed on the order of Charles II.
Fell Tyrant that in
Critical Note
The manuscript reads “Newburg,” but the reference is almost certainly to the first Battle of Newbury (see above and Eardley, Poems, 258). Nearly all references to “Newburg” in the corpus of early modern English print are to “Nuremburg” in Germany. Although an earl of “Newburg” was created among the Scottish peers in 1660s, neither this title nor the German city presents a convincing alternative to Eardley’s correction.
Newbury Raignd
16
Should first unto the ffat’all Stag bin Chaind
Should first unto the
Gloss Note
This seems to be a Royalist wish that a Parliamentarian leader would have been subject to the fate that awaited Charles I, who was chained and executed on a platform in a venue used sometimes as a theatrical stage. The manuscript has “stag” instead of “stage.”
fatal stage been chained;
Should first unto the Fatall
Critical Note
The manuscript reads “stag,” a suggestively Royalist word (see Elizabeth Kolkovich, The Hunted Deer), but the word is almost certainly “stage,” a reference to the platform on which Charles I was executed outside the Banqueting House of Whitehall. Contemporary accounts, like Andrew Marvell’s “An Horatian Ode,” drew attention to theatricality of the scene: “That thence the royal actor born / The tragic scaffold might adorn, / While round the armèd bands / Did clap their bloody hands” (The Poems of Andrew Marvell, ed. Nigel Smith, Rev. ed, [New York: Pearson Longman, 2007], ll. 53–6).
stag bin
Critical Note
Eardley notes that “Chains were attached to the platform to restrain the king,” but no system of restraint appears in the contemporary visual representations of the execution (Poems, 258). Perhaps Pulter was superimposing the grizzlier scenes of the execution of the regicides at the Restoration onto the original event.
Chaind
17
Then thoſe that made the Engine to pull Down
Then those that made the
Gloss Note
tricky; contrivance; plot or snare; machine, especially of war but also in theater instrument of torture
engine to pull down
Then those that made the
Critical Note
A machine or instrument, often of torture; can also refer to theatrical machinery (i.e. deus ex machina) (Oxford English Dictionary, s.v. “engine, n., senses II.4.b and II.7"). This last sense builds on the line’s theatrical imagery and anticipates the downward motion of Charles’s “sacred Head” onto the famously low execution block—a motion enacted by the line break and the enjambment that follows.
Engine to pull Down
18
His Sacred Head which wore ^
Physical Note
"r" in double superscript
o:r Brittiſh Crown
Gloss Note
that of Charles I, who was beheaded in 1649
His sacred head which wore our British crown.
His sacred Head which wore
Critical Note
This word, which is necessary to fill the line’s meter, was added later in the composition process. The first-person plural pronoun, along with the demonym “Brittish,” aspire to a collective national identity that aligns more closely with a Restoration sensibility, when the “Brittish Crown” was once again “ours,” than with a republican one.
our Brittish Crown
19
When Lamb like on that Alter hee did lie
When lamb-like on that altar he did lie,
When
Critical Note
The language again resembles contemporary reports of the regicide, including Marvell’s “Horatian Ode”: “He nothing common did, or mean, / Upon that memorable scene; / But with his keener eye / The axe’s edge did try. / Nor called the Gods with vulgar spite / To vindicate his helpless right; / But bowed his comely head / Down, as upon a bed” (Poems, ed. Smith, ll. 57–64).
Lamb like on that Alter hee did lie
20
Why did not Oliver that Pulley trie
Why did not
Gloss Note
Oliver Cromwell, who led the Parliamentarians in defeating and executing Charles I during the English Civil War
Oliver that
Gloss Note
part of a gallows for hanging; “pulley” could allude to the use of such a device in torture
pulley try?
Why did not
Gloss Note
Oliver Cromwell (1599–1658), commander of the New Model Army that overthrew the Stuart monarchy and later Lord Protector of the commonwealth which replaced that monarchy.
Oliver that Pulley trie
21
Were Some Condemnd the Ax would moue alone
Gloss Note
Some are so villainous that no executioner would be needed, since the axe would be moved to act of its own accord.
Were some condemned, the axe would move alone,
Were some Condemnd the Ax would moue alone
22
As Tyburn for
Physical Note
in darker ink than surrounding words
thoſe Regicides doe groan
As
Gloss Note
a place of public execution in London
Tyburn for those
Gloss Note
the king’s killers
regicides do groan.
As
Critical Note
London’s principal public execution site, featuring gallows for executions by hanging. The poem’s earlier references to “chains,” “engines,” and “pulleys” seem to point toward this method of execution rather than the decapitation by axe performed at Charles I’s execution and re-imagined in line 21.
Tyburn for
Critical Note
Like “our” in line 18, the word “those” was added later in the composition process. The addition is again a metrical necessity, but the pronoun suggests a finite group of regicides, perhaps the list of those regicides excluded from Charles II’s Act of Indemnity and Oblivion at the Restoration. The word “regicide” had flourished in print discourse around 1649 but then fallen out of the print record for most of the 1650s before returning to public use in 1660 (“N-gram Browser,” s.v., “regicide,” Early Print).
those Regicides doe groan
23
Then Should their Children to Jame’ca goe
Then should their children to
Gloss Note
Jamaica, captured by the British in 1655, was among the islands in the West Indies used to exile Royalists during the interregnum.
Jamaica go;
Then should their
Gloss Note
A reference to the supposed deportation of royalist widows and children to Jamaica, which had come under English rule in 1655 as part of the Western Design pursued by Oliver Cromwell. Accounts of forced emigration circulated primarily after the Restoration and may have been fabricated to signal loyalty to the Stuart cause (see Pestana, English Conquest, and Pulter and Jamaica). Pulter’s nephew James Ley, third earl of Marlborough, was involved in England’s Caribbean ventures and would be named governor of Jamaica in 1664.
Children to Jameca goe
24
Their
Physical Note
blot after “i”
Staits Sequstred Widdow Eyes o’reflow
Gloss Note
regicides’ estates (properties) should be confiscated (or “sequestered”), as the Royalists’ goods were during and after the civil wars.
Their ’states sequestered,
Gloss Note
regicides’ widows’ eyes should be overflowing with grief over their husbands’ deaths.
widow eyes o’erflow.
Their
Critical Note
A reference to the seizure and sale of royalist estates to fund the commonwealth government. As elsewhere in the poem, Pulter employs poetic forms that replicate the punishment: the elision of “estates” to “staits” and “sequestered” to “sequstred” enacts a syllabic theft as well as describing a material one.
staits sequstred Widdow Eyes or’eflow
25
Sure thoſe that doe their ffellow Chriſtians Sell
Sure
Gloss Note
the Parliamentarians who sold Royalists into slavery, as the lines above indicate (“to Jamaica go”), by sending them to the West Indies
those that do their fellow Christians sell
Sure those that doe their
Critical Note
A provocative choice of phrase and argument at a moment when England was forcibly sending thousands of convicted criminals and Irish people to Atlantic colonies and increasingly participating in the traffic of enslaved Africans.
Fellow Christians sell
26
Will in their Conſcience feel the flames of Hell
Will in their conscience feel the flames of Hell.
Will in their
Critical Note
One of only two times (cf. The Ugly Spider (Emblem 37) [Poem 102], line 20) that Pulter uses this theologically and politically charged word in her corpus.
Conscience feel the flames of Hell
27
That Worm will graw though for A time ’tis hid
That
Gloss Note
proverbial for something eating away at one’s conscience; also figuratively, the pains of Hell
worm will gnaw, though for a time ’tis hid,
That
Gloss Note
A common idiom for the work of a guilty conscience, deriving from Mark 9:44–48 (Eardley, Poems, 258).
Worm will gnaw though for A time ’tis hid
28
And make them Roar worſ then
Physical Note
first “i” is written over an “e”
Pirillus did.
And make them roar worse than Perillus did.
And make them Roar wors then Perillus did.
horizontal straight line
X (Close panel) All Notes
Amplified Edition
Title note

 Critical note

The title supplied by Leah Knight and Wendy Wall in the Elemental Edition draws out the figure of Phalaris from within the story of the brass bull’s construction and use in sixth century (BCE) Sicily. Such focus is consistent with Phalaris’s presence in the archive of early modern English print (see Phalaris and Perillus in Early Modern Print). But the poem’s conceit turns on the figure of Perillus, who is punished for his prideful cunning, just as, Pulter hopes, the accursed regicides will be. Perhaps, then, the title of the emblem might as aptly read: “Perillus and Brazen Bull.”
Transcription

 Editorial note

In these transcriptions we preserve as many details of the original material, textual, and graphic properties of Hester Pulter’s manuscript verse as we have found practical. Whenever possible, for instance, original spelling, punctuation, capitalization, lineation, insertions, deletions, alterations, spacing between words and lines, and indentation are all maintained; abbreviations and brevigraphs are not expanded; and superscript and subscript representations are retained. See full conventions for the transcriptions here.
Elemental Edition

 Editorial note

The aim of the elemental edition is to make the poems accessible to the largest variety of readers, which involves modernizing spelling and punctuation as well as adding basic glosses. Spelling and punctuation reflect current standard American usage; punctuation highlights syntax which might otherwise be obscure. Outmoded but still familiar word forms (“thou,” “‘tis,” “hold’st”) are not modernized, and we do not modernize grammar when the sense remains legible. After a brief headnote aimed at offering a “way in” to the poem’s unique qualities and connections with other verse by Pulter or her contemporaries, the edition features a minimum of notes and interpretative framing to allow more immediate engagement with the poem. Glosses clarify synonyms or showcase various possible meanings in Pulter’s time. Other notes identify named people and places or clarify obscure material. We rely (without citation) primarily on the Oxford English Dictionary (OED), the Oxford Reference database, and the King James Version (KJV) of the Bible. When we rely on Alice Eardley’s edition of Pulter’s work, we cite her text generally (“Eardley”); other sources are cited in full. The result is an edition we consider a springboard for further work on Pulter’s poetry. See full conventions for this edition here.
Amplified Edition

 Editorial note

Since Pulter uses the formal features of this emblem to reproduce the acts of violence and torture depicted in the poem, I have employed a semi-diplomatic editorial principle in an effort to preserve and highlight these features. Another benefit of this approach is that it retains the original spelling of words, like “stag” (line 16), which had contemporary resonance that is lost when the spelling is modernized. At line 15, I have corrected “Newburg” to “Newbury,” providing a note explaining my reasoning, and I have incorporated the additions to lines 18 and 22 (“our” and “those”) without drawing typographic attention to their inserted status in the original manuscript. The difference between majuscule and minuscule letters is sometimes difficult to discern in the scribal hand of the manuscript (especially for initial k’s and s’s), but every effort has been taken to transcribe those letters uniformly.
Elemental Edition

 Headnote

How terribly just to die in the very torture device one invented! Pulter canvasses classical history and myth for tales of lawless, tyrannical figures known for having baked, stretched, chopped, drowned, bashed, and torn their unsuspecting victims to death—only to suffer the same fate themselves. She both wishes for, and finally prophesies, the extension of this pattern of comeuppance to those she condemns as the lawless tyrants of her own day: primarily, the Civil War “regicides” who killed Charles I. Pulter’s fantasy of vengeance escalates from one of racial and national boundary-crossings (the punitive transformation of British Parliamentarians into West Indian slaves) into her enemies’ full descent into Hell. In the conclusion of this revenge fantasy, Pulter imagines their roars of eternal pain echoing the poem’s opening cries, such that, formally, the poem simulates the cycle of justice it describes.
Amplified Edition

 Headnote

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 Murder [Poem 8]). 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.
Gloss Note
Sarah C. E. Ross, Women, Poetry, and Politics in Seventeenth-Century Britain (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015), 138–69, and “Tears, Bezoars and Blazing Comets: Gender and Politics in Hester Pulter’s Civil War Lyrics,” Literature Compass 2, no. 1 (2005): 1–14; and Kate Chedgzoy, Women’s Writing in the British Atlantic World: Memory, Place and History, 1550–1700 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 144–53.
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.
Gloss Note
On the uniqueness of Pulter’s emblems within the larger tradition, see Margaret J. M. Ezell, “The Laughing Tortoise: Speculations on Manuscript Sources and Women’s Book History,” English Literary Renaissance 38, no. 2 (2008): 346–9; Alice Eardley, “Hester Pulter’s ‘Indivisibles’ and the Challenges of Annotating Early Modern Women’s Poetry,” Studies in English Literature, 1500–1900 52, no. 1 (2012): 130–2, and “Introduction” to Poems, Emblems, and the Unfortunate Florinda, ed. Alice Eardley (Chicago: Iter Press, 2014), 27–9; Ross, Women, Poetry, 157–69; Helena Kaznowska, “Women Are from Venus: Addressing Female Agency with Classical Allegory,” in Audience and Reception in the Early Modern Period, ed. John R. Decker and Mitzi Kirkland-Ives (New York: Routledge, 2021), 287–90; and Victoria E. Burke, “Gendering the Emblem: Hester Pulter’s Formal Experimentation,” in Feminist Formalism and Early Modern Women’s Writing, ed. Lara Dodds and Michelle M. Dowd (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2022), 92–109.
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.
Gloss Note
Gary Waller, The Female Baroque in Early Modern English Literary Culture: From Mary Sidney to Aphra Behn (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2020), 194–5; and Rachel Dunn, “Breaking a Tradition: Hester Pulter and the English emblem book,” The Seventeenth Century 30, no. 1 (2015): 55–73, especially 63.
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.
Gloss Note
On the Scriptural forms of Pulter’s verse, see Nikolina Hatton, “Hester Pulter’s Psalmic Poems,” Renaissance Studies 37, no. 3 (2023): 364–83; and Sarah C. E. Ross, “Hester Pulter’s Devotional Complaints: ‘Then will I hallelujahs ever sing’,” Journal for Early Modern Cultural Studies 20, no. 2 (2020): 99–119.
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.
Gloss Note
On reading Pulter within the early modern sonnet tradition and her use of rhymed couplets, see Elizabeth Scott-Baumann, “Hester Pulter’s Well-Wrought Urns: Early Modern Women, Sonnets, and New Criticism,” Journal for Early Modern Cultural Studies 20, no. 2 (2020): 120–43, especially 123–5. Scott-Baumann is responding, in part, to the lament of Diana E. Henderson over the silencing of female sonneteers after Mary Wroth; “Where Had All the Flowers Gone? The Missing Space of Female Sonneteers in Seventeenth-Century England,” Renaissance and Reformation / Renaissance et Réforme 35, no. 1 (2012): 139–65. On Pulter’s use of couplets, see also Lara Dodds and Michelle M. Dowd, “Happy Accidents: Critical Belatedness, Feminist Formalism, and Early Modern Women’s Writing,” Criticism 62, no. 2 (2020): 184–6.
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.”
Gloss Note
On this return, see the Headnote to the Elemental Edition of Phalaris and the Brazen Bull (Emblem 50) [Poem 115]. On the ways that the endings of Pulter’s poems “resolve,” “dissolve,” or “involve,” see Liza Blake, “Hester Pulter’s Particle Physics and the Poetics of Involution,” Journal for Early Modern Cultural Studies 20, no. 2 (2020): 72, 88–9.
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.
Gloss Note
On Pulter’s probable use of newsbooks as well as first-hand news from London, see Eardley, “Introduction,” 18–9 and 28–9; Elizabeth Zeman Kolkovich, “In Defense of Indulgence: Hester Pulter’s Maternal Elegies,” Journal for Early Modern Cultural Studies 20, no. 2 (2020): 48–53; Karen Britland, “The Queer Poetics of Hester Pulter’s Poem, ‘Of a Young Lady at Oxford, 1646’,” Women’s Writing 29, no. 3 (2022): 382–401; and Andrea Brady, “Dying with Honour: Literary Propaganda and the Second English Civil War,” The Journal of Military History 70, no. 1 (2006): 9–30. On the work being done to discover Pulter’s sources, see Leah Knight and Wendy Wall, “Poet in the Making: How Hester Pulter Read the Digital Age,” Journal for Early Modern Cultural Studies 20, no. 2 (2020): 2–3. For new connections and associations that have been discovered through corpus-based analysis and social history, see Karen Britland, “Conspiring with ‘friends’: Hester Pulter’s Poetry and the Stanley Family at Cumberlow Green,” The Review of English Studies 69, no. 292 (2018): 832–54. For the political diversity of Pulter’s family, see Eardley, “Introduction,” 9–19.
7 She refashioned these raw materials, adapting and adopting them to her own voice, her own ends.
Gloss Note
Frances E. Dolan has suggested that Pulter’s poetry “absorb[s] and break[s] down its components—as a dunghill does—so that one does not necessarily recognize the components” (“Hester Pulter’s Dunghill Poetics,” Journal for Early Modern Cultural Studies 20, no. 2 [2020]: 32).
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.”
Gloss Note
Thomas Granger, A Familiar Exposition or Commentarie on Ecclesiastes (London, 1621), 259.
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.
Gloss Note
Pulter’s Independent contemporary, John Goodwin had used a similar strategy to defend his accusation of England’s ministers for corrupting the state, writing that “if the Land had a Phalaris King over it, there would be found more then one Perillus to make him brazen Bulls for the tormenting of such Christians, who are either too weak, or too wise, to swim down the stream of a State Religion, or to call men, Rabbi” (The Apologist Condemned [London, 1653], 34).
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.
Gloss Note
Pulter imagines Theseus as avenger of a young royalist suicide in Of a Young Lady at Oxford, 1646 [Poem 43].
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.
Gloss Note
The emblem that follows “Phalaris” in the manuscript—British Brennus (Emblem 51) [Poem 116]—is similarly virulent, but compare this confident vehemence to the self-restrained ending of The Ugly Spider (Emblem 37) [Poem 102]. On Pulter’s attack on Cromwell, see Alice Eardley, “‘Shut up in a Countrey Grange’: The Provenance of Lady Hester Pulter’s Poetry and Prose and Women’s Literary History,” Huntington Library Quarterly 80, no. 2 (2017): 352–3.
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,
Gloss Note
Eardley, “Shut up,” 355–9.
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 Abbey [Poem 62]), 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.”
Gloss Note
Gryffith Williams, “The Declaration of the Just Judgments of God,” in Seven Treatises, Very necessary to be observed in these very bad Days (London, 1661), 43.
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.”
Gloss Note
Dunn, “Breaking a Tradition,” 61.
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.
Gloss Note
The younger Charles also appears in Pulter’s On that Unparalleled Prince Charles the First, His Horrid Murder [Poem 8], Let None Sigh More for Lucas or for Lisle [On the Same (2)] [Poem 15], On the King’s Most Excellent Majesty [Poem 27], And Must the Sword this Controverse Decide [Poem 64], and Virtue’s Duel [Emblem 4] [Poem 70].
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) [Poem 93].
Gloss Note
On Pulter’s Irish connections, see Eardley, “Introduction,” 13–4; Dunn, “Breaking a Tradition,” 62.
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.
Gloss Note
G. G. Harris, “Ley, James, Third Earl of Marlborough (1618/19–1665), Naval Officer,” Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. 3 Jan. 2008; Accessed 26 July 2023. My thanks to Tom Cogswell for pointing out this family connection.
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).
Gloss Note
Carla Gardina Pestana, The English Conquest of Jamaica: Oliver Cromwell’s Bid for Empire (Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2017).
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.
Gloss Note
In arguing for “Phalaris” as Pulter’s missing poem of the Restoration (see Eardley, “Introduction,” 21), I depart from Peter C. Herman’s claim that Pulter changed her political allegiances after seeing the licentious court of Charles II (“Lady Hester Pulter’s The Unfortunate Florinda: Race, Religion, and the Politics of Rape,” Renaissance Quarterly 63, no. 4 [2010]: 1208–46).
20
Elemental Edition
Line number 1

 Gloss note

Phalaris of Acragas (ca. 570–549 BCE) was a Sicilian tyrant famed for his cruelty generally, and especially for roasting enemies alive by enclosing them in a bronze bull with a fire burning underneath; victims’ screams sounded like the bull roaring.
Amplified Edition
Line number 1

 Gloss note

The story of Phalaris (d. c.554 BCE), the tyrant ruler of Acragas, Sicily, came to the early modern world through Cicero, Ovid, Seneca, Plutarch, Pliny, and Lucian, and appears across the print record, from Dante’s Inferno XXVII to Sir Philip Sidney’s Defence of Poesie to John Donne’s sermons (see Phalaris and Perillus in Early Modern Print).
Amplified Edition
Line number 1

 Gloss note

Early modern references to Phalaris focus on his authoritarian rule, often listing him alongside tyrants like Nero, Herod, Nimrod, Pharaoh, Caligula, and Dionysius, as a standard of evil against which to compare contemporary leaders (see Phalaris and Perillus in Early Modern Print).
Transcription
Line number 2

 Physical note

second “i” possibly corrected from “e”
Elemental Edition
Line number 2

 Gloss note

The bull was invented (“framed”) by Perillus of Athens as a device for executing criminals; Phalaris admired the device and made Perillus its first victim.
Amplified Edition
Line number 2

 Gloss note

Phalaris’s court artisan, Perillus, cast a bull in brass and presented it to the king as a torture device. The victim would be placed inside the bull and a fire lit underneath so that the cries of the afflicted would seem to come from the bull’s mouth.
Elemental Edition
Line number 3

 Gloss note

discover; examine; test
Elemental Edition
Line number 4

 Gloss note

figuratively, breathing out his life (and losing his cleverness) with a loud cry
Amplified Edition
Line number 4

 Gloss note

Perillus’s cunning, arrogant, greedy, and bloodthirsty behavior captured the imaginations of early modern writers, many of whom approved his punishment by Phalaris and some of whom went as far as to say that Perillus was crueler than Phalaris (see Phalaris and Perillus in Early Modern Print).
Amplified Edition
Line number 4

 Gloss note

Perillus’s roar was a common idiom in the early modern world, as in Andrew Marvell’s “Flecknoe, an English Priest at Rome,” where the titular poet “swell[s], with anger full, / And roare[s] out, like Perillus in’s own bull” (see Phalaris and Perillus in Early Modern Print).
Elemental Edition
Line number 6

 Gloss note

In Greek myth, the innkeeper and robber Procrustes forced travelers onto a bed and made them fit it either by stretching or cutting off their limbs; he was finally killed by Theseus with his own invention.
Amplified Edition
Line number 6

 Gloss note

An innkeeper who kept an iron bed to which he fit his guests by chopping or stretching their bodies. In Greek myth, Procrustes was subjected to his own device by Theseus on the last stop of his journey from Troezen to Athens, where he would become king. The story of Procrustes was used in the early modern world as an analogy for the manipulation of another’s words to fit one’s own purposes (see Procrustes, Sciron, Termerus, and Sinis in Early Modern Print).
Amplified Edition
Line number 6

 Critical note

A possible slant rhyme of the couplet (“put/cut”) would, if true for Pulter’s English as in our own, perfectly enact Procrustes’s violent method.
Elemental Edition
Line number 7

 Gloss note

In Greek myth, the robber Sciron forced passersby to wash his feet, then kicked them into the sea to be eaten by a sea monster. He was killed when Theseus threw him into the sea.
Amplified Edition
Line number 7

 Gloss note

Sciron, one of the bandits whom Theseus defeats on his journey to Athens; Sciron’s tactic for robbery was to force passersby to wash his feet and then to kick them into the sea below. For the myth’s sources, see Eardley, Poems, 257.
Elemental Edition
Line number 8

 Gloss note

Greek goddess of vengeance (also called Nemesis)
Amplified Edition
Line number 8

 Gloss note

Rhamnusia or Nemesis, the figure of revenge in Greek myth. Pulter also uses the figure in Upon the Imprisonment of his Sacred Majesty, That Unparalleled Prince, King Charles the First [Poem 13] and Ambitious Apes (Emblem 26) [Poem 91].
Elemental Edition
Line number 9

 Gloss note

Termerus was a bandit in Greek myth who murdered passersby by ramming his head against theirs; he was murdered when Theseus smashed his skull (Eardley).
Amplified Edition
Line number 9

 Gloss note

Termerus, a robber who bashed his head against the heads of his victims. Unlike the other Greek villains mentioned in the poem, Termerus was killed by Heracles (whose head proved harder than the robber’s) and not by Theseus (as in Eardley, Poems, 257).
Elemental Edition
Line number 10

 Gloss note

In Greek mythology, Sinis robbed and dismembered travelers by fastening their limbs to pine branches, bending down the trees, and then suddenly letting them go (Eardley); Theseus kills Sinis in similar fashion (as the speaker suggests two lines later).
Amplified Edition
Line number 10

 Critical note

This comma is the only sentence punctuation in the original manuscript before the terminal period. With it, Pulter signals a caesura in the line, which, significantly, comes just as she introduces Sinis, the splitter of bodies and poetic lines. On the significance of punctation, absent and present, see Alice Eardley, “‘I haue not time to point yr booke … which I desire you yourselfe to doe’: Editing the Form of Early Modern Manuscript Verse,” in The Work of Form: Poetics and Materiality in Early Modern Culture, ed. Elizabeth Scott-Baumann and Ben Burton (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014), 169–71.
Amplified Edition
Line number 12

 Gloss note

Sinis, another of the bandits whom Theseus defeats on his journey to Athens; Sinis assaulted his victims by tying them to bent trees and then releasing the trees and so splitting them in two. For the myth’s sources, see Eardley, Poems, 257.
Amplified Edition
Line number 13

 Gloss note

One of Pulter’s favorite interjections, used over 100 times across her poems.
Amplified Edition
Line number 14

 Gloss note

A scheme or proposal. “Project,” used both as a noun and as a verb, developed significant economic and imperialist meanings in the seventeenth century, so much so that “projectors” became a term of abuse for a promoter of bad ventures (Oxford English Dictionary, s.v. “projector, n., sense 1.b”).
Elemental Edition
Line number 15

 Critical note

Eardley suggests the manuscript’s “Newburg” might be Newbury, where in 1643 Robert Devereux, third Earl of Essex, led the army against the king; we have read “Newburg” in the manuscript as a transcription error for “Newbury” (pronounced, here, “Newb’ry,” to fit the meter).
Amplified Edition
Line number 15

 Critical note

Eardley suggests Robert Devereux, the third earl of Essex (1591–1646), who was the general in charge of parliamentary forces at the decisive battle at Newbury on 20 September 1643 (Poems, 258). Pulter may have been reminded of the general and his role in that battle by renewed attention to Essex at the Restoration, when he was remembered as a chief architect of the civil wars and when his funeral moment was destroyed on the order of Charles II.
Amplified Edition
Line number 15

 Critical note

The manuscript reads “Newburg,” but the reference is almost certainly to the first Battle of Newbury (see above and Eardley, Poems, 258). Nearly all references to “Newburg” in the corpus of early modern English print are to “Nuremburg” in Germany. Although an earl of “Newburg” was created among the Scottish peers in 1660s, neither this title nor the German city presents a convincing alternative to Eardley’s correction.
Elemental Edition
Line number 16

 Gloss note

This seems to be a Royalist wish that a Parliamentarian leader would have been subject to the fate that awaited Charles I, who was chained and executed on a platform in a venue used sometimes as a theatrical stage. The manuscript has “stag” instead of “stage.”
Amplified Edition
Line number 16

 Critical note

The manuscript reads “stag,” a suggestively Royalist word (see Elizabeth Kolkovich, The Hunted Deer), but the word is almost certainly “stage,” a reference to the platform on which Charles I was executed outside the Banqueting House of Whitehall. Contemporary accounts, like Andrew Marvell’s “An Horatian Ode,” drew attention to theatricality of the scene: “That thence the royal actor born / The tragic scaffold might adorn, / While round the armèd bands / Did clap their bloody hands” (The Poems of Andrew Marvell, ed. Nigel Smith, Rev. ed, [New York: Pearson Longman, 2007], ll. 53–6).
Amplified Edition
Line number 16

 Critical note

Eardley notes that “Chains were attached to the platform to restrain the king,” but no system of restraint appears in the contemporary visual representations of the execution (Poems, 258). Perhaps Pulter was superimposing the grizzlier scenes of the execution of the regicides at the Restoration onto the original event.
Elemental Edition
Line number 17

 Gloss note

tricky; contrivance; plot or snare; machine, especially of war but also in theater instrument of torture
Amplified Edition
Line number 17

 Critical note

A machine or instrument, often of torture; can also refer to theatrical machinery (i.e. deus ex machina) (Oxford English Dictionary, s.v. “engine, n., senses II.4.b and II.7"). This last sense builds on the line’s theatrical imagery and anticipates the downward motion of Charles’s “sacred Head” onto the famously low execution block—a motion enacted by the line break and the enjambment that follows.
Transcription
Line number 18

 Physical note

"r" in double superscript
Elemental Edition
Line number 18

 Gloss note

that of Charles I, who was beheaded in 1649
Amplified Edition
Line number 18

 Critical note

This word, which is necessary to fill the line’s meter, was added later in the composition process. The first-person plural pronoun, along with the demonym “Brittish,” aspire to a collective national identity that aligns more closely with a Restoration sensibility, when the “Brittish Crown” was once again “ours,” than with a republican one.
Amplified Edition
Line number 19

 Critical note

The language again resembles contemporary reports of the regicide, including Marvell’s “Horatian Ode”: “He nothing common did, or mean, / Upon that memorable scene; / But with his keener eye / The axe’s edge did try. / Nor called the Gods with vulgar spite / To vindicate his helpless right; / But bowed his comely head / Down, as upon a bed” (Poems, ed. Smith, ll. 57–64).
Elemental Edition
Line number 20

 Gloss note

Oliver Cromwell, who led the Parliamentarians in defeating and executing Charles I during the English Civil War
Elemental Edition
Line number 20

 Gloss note

part of a gallows for hanging; “pulley” could allude to the use of such a device in torture
Amplified Edition
Line number 20

 Gloss note

Oliver Cromwell (1599–1658), commander of the New Model Army that overthrew the Stuart monarchy and later Lord Protector of the commonwealth which replaced that monarchy.
Elemental Edition
Line number 21

 Gloss note

Some are so villainous that no executioner would be needed, since the axe would be moved to act of its own accord.
Transcription
Line number 22

 Physical note

in darker ink than surrounding words
Elemental Edition
Line number 22

 Gloss note

a place of public execution in London
Elemental Edition
Line number 22

 Gloss note

the king’s killers
Amplified Edition
Line number 22

 Critical note

London’s principal public execution site, featuring gallows for executions by hanging. The poem’s earlier references to “chains,” “engines,” and “pulleys” seem to point toward this method of execution rather than the decapitation by axe performed at Charles I’s execution and re-imagined in line 21.
Amplified Edition
Line number 22

 Critical note

Like “our” in line 18, the word “those” was added later in the composition process. The addition is again a metrical necessity, but the pronoun suggests a finite group of regicides, perhaps the list of those regicides excluded from Charles II’s Act of Indemnity and Oblivion at the Restoration. The word “regicide” had flourished in print discourse around 1649 but then fallen out of the print record for most of the 1650s before returning to public use in 1660 (“N-gram Browser,” s.v., “regicide,” Early Print).
Elemental Edition
Line number 23

 Gloss note

Jamaica, captured by the British in 1655, was among the islands in the West Indies used to exile Royalists during the interregnum.
Amplified Edition
Line number 23

 Gloss note

A reference to the supposed deportation of royalist widows and children to Jamaica, which had come under English rule in 1655 as part of the Western Design pursued by Oliver Cromwell. Accounts of forced emigration circulated primarily after the Restoration and may have been fabricated to signal loyalty to the Stuart cause (see Pestana, English Conquest, and Pulter and Jamaica). Pulter’s nephew James Ley, third earl of Marlborough, was involved in England’s Caribbean ventures and would be named governor of Jamaica in 1664.
Transcription
Line number 24

 Physical note

blot after “i”
Elemental Edition
Line number 24

 Gloss note

regicides’ estates (properties) should be confiscated (or “sequestered”), as the Royalists’ goods were during and after the civil wars.
Elemental Edition
Line number 24

 Gloss note

regicides’ widows’ eyes should be overflowing with grief over their husbands’ deaths.
Amplified Edition
Line number 24

 Critical note

A reference to the seizure and sale of royalist estates to fund the commonwealth government. As elsewhere in the poem, Pulter employs poetic forms that replicate the punishment: the elision of “estates” to “staits” and “sequestered” to “sequstred” enacts a syllabic theft as well as describing a material one.
Elemental Edition
Line number 25

 Gloss note

the Parliamentarians who sold Royalists into slavery, as the lines above indicate (“to Jamaica go”), by sending them to the West Indies
Amplified Edition
Line number 25

 Critical note

A provocative choice of phrase and argument at a moment when England was forcibly sending thousands of convicted criminals and Irish people to Atlantic colonies and increasingly participating in the traffic of enslaved Africans.
Amplified Edition
Line number 26

 Critical note

One of only two times (cf. The Ugly Spider (Emblem 37) [Poem 102], line 20) that Pulter uses this theologically and politically charged word in her corpus.
Elemental Edition
Line number 27

 Gloss note

proverbial for something eating away at one’s conscience; also figuratively, the pains of Hell
Amplified Edition
Line number 27

 Gloss note

A common idiom for the work of a guilty conscience, deriving from Mark 9:44–48 (Eardley, Poems, 258).
Transcription
Line number 28

 Physical note

first “i” is written over an “e”
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