Although the word “siege” does not appear until the final line of “The Caucasines,” it cements the figurative connection the emblem develops between being infested with waves of pests and being militarily invaded by various political factions. In an extended analogy, the speaker compares infestations that took place in ancient history to contemporary political power shifts. The Caucasines, the speaker informs us, struggled with a locust infestation until “selucides” (5), a type of bird, appeared out of nowhere and relieved them. The speaker then relates how the Egyptians were plagued by serpents until they, too, received help from a bird, this time the ibis. In this second example of infestation, however, the ibis spreads filth, and so the seeming rescuer becomes a bigger problem than the serpents. Things are even worse in the speaker’s own time: the “sad kingdom” the speaker inhabits similarly suffers an infestation, and not once, but twice, the seeming solution turns out to make things more terrible still. Marginal notes in the manuscript direct readers to equate Presbyterians with locusts that first “did o’er Run” England; Independents with “animals” (snakes) that devoured the locusts, but in turn “over all did crawl;” and the Protector, Oliver Cromwell, with the ibis that destroyed the snakes, but polluted everything “sacred” (14, 18, 20, 24). These infestations thus analogize anti-Royalist political factions (albeit conflicting factions) that contributed to the eventual seizure of power from the king through military force. AE notes that the Presbyterians wanted to settle with the king, and the Independents forced them out of parliament (n. 493), but, arguably, they were part of a complex process that led to the power shift and to Charles I’s execution.
Oxford English Dictionary (OED), s.v. “annoy, v.,” sense II.5 and sense II.6, September 2023.
The poem’s linking of infestation and invasion dehumanizes the Parliamentarians who seized power from Charles I. Pulter’s imagery of swarming locusts and snakes to represent anti-Royalists bears thematic similarity to her use of the hydra in other poems, such as Aurora [1] [Poem 3], Universal Dissolution [Poem 6], On those Two Unparalleled Friends, Sir George Lisle and Sir Charles Lucas, Who Were Shot to Death at Colchester [Poem 7], Pardon Me, My Dearest Love [Poem 42], and A Solitary Complaint [Poem 54]. As Frances E. Dolan remarks of poem 7, “the ‘horrid Hydra,’ ‘Cursed Rabble,’ ‘black army,’ and ‘sacriligious rout’ all link the Parliamentary cause, the New Model Army, and their supporters as a disorderly mob.”3 Similar to the monstrous hydra, swarming insects and reptiles in “The Caucasines” represent this same multitude as beastly and vicious, and made up of proliferating heads, such that for each head removed, two more can instantly fill the space. “Invocations of the swarm,” Joseph Campana finds, “tap into anxieties not merely about human masses but rather about hovering, leaderless collectivities whose appetites and impulses pose a threat to the idea that sovereignty was, whether by monarch or the by the people, necessary.” Joseph Campana, “The Bee and the Sovereign (II): Segments, Swarms, and the Shakespearean Multitude,” in The Return of Theory in Early Modern English Studies, Volume II, ed. Paul Cefalu, Gary Kuchar, and Bryan Reynolds (Palgrave Macmillan, 2014), 60.
But the depiction of the Parliamentarians as crawling vermin also tugs against its obvious implication of Royalist superiority. For seventeenth-century readers, locust and snake infestations would likely call to mind biblical plagues, which typically signalled divine wrath. Through Moses, for example, God afflicted the Egyptians with several plagues for refusing to free the Israelites, including one of locusts (Exodus 10:12), and the Israelites themselves were subjected to a plague of serpents for speaking against God (Numbers 21:6). Pulter engages elsewhere with the idea that God will make use of vermin, the lowliest creatures, to exact justice, as Thomas Ward and Molly Hand each observe. Thomas Ward, ed., Emblem 17 [Poem 83], by Hester Pulter (Poem 83, Amplified Edition), in The Pulter Project: Poet in the Making, edited by Leah Knight and Wendy Wall (2018); Molly Hand, ed. The Bishop and the Rats (Emblem 46) [Poem 111], by Hester Pulter (Poem 111, Amplified Edition), in The Pulter Project: Poet in the Making, edited by Leah Knight and Wendy Wall (2018). When God (who is to mercy most inclined)
To Punish or to try hath once designed
A people, each reptile or insect
Or basest animal will not neglect,
But will their habitation so annoy. Hester Pulter, Emblem 17 [Poem 83] (Poem 83, Amplified Edition), ed. Thomas Ward, in The Pulter Project: Poet in the Making, edited by Leah Knight and Wendy Wall (2018), 1–5. Given this context, does “The Caucasines” obliquely worry that the afflicted Royalists are not faultless?
This tug of doubt is present from the opening line’s reference to the “Caucasines,” inhabitants of Mount Casius. The likely source for the poem’s details about the “selucides” saving the Caucasines from the locusts, Pliny’s Natural History, provides information about Mount Casius itself, namely that it was sacred to Jupiter, that at its foot stretched the Serbonian bog, and that its summit offered such an exceptional vantage point that someone standing there could, “with a little turning of his face and body … at one time see both day and night.” Philemon Holland, Trans., The History of the World: Commonly Called the Naturall Historie of C. Plinius Secundus (London: Adam Islip, 1634), book 5, ch. 12, p.100. STC (2nd ed.) 20030; book 5, ch. 13, p.100; book 5, ch. 22, pp. 102–3.
“The Serbonian Bog,” in Brewer’s Dictionary of Phrase and Fable, 19th ed., ed. Susie Dent (Chambers Harrap, 2012, online version 2013), DOI 10.1093/acref/9780199990009.001.0001; John Milton, Paradise Lost, ed. Scott Elledge, 2nd ed. (New York: Norton, 1993), book 2, ll.592–4.
Elizabeth Scott-Baumann, ed. The Revolution [Poem 16], by Hester Pulter (Poem 16, Amplified Edition), in The Pulter Project: Poet in the Making, edited by Leah Knight and Wendy Wall (2018). The inescapable feeling of enduring a siege or infestation comes across structurally in Pulter’s use of repetition. Lines 10–11 repeat the rhyming words from lines 1–2, but with a shift in verb tense (“annoyed” / “destroyed” and “annoy” / “destroy”), signalling through form what the content makes clear – essentially the same thing happened all over again in another context. Sustained repetition of both words and rhymes, with “deplore,” “implore,” “before” (3–5), then “more,” “before” (12–13), and finally “before,” “deplore” (18–19), emphasizes the sense of enduring the same things, inescapably and without variety.
The final five lines, however, offer hope of escape from the feeling of constant besiegement. Even though every seeming salvation previously backfired, the speaker doggedly resolves to appeal to God once more, and, fixing on the future as the unknown, envisions a saviour coming from the seas. These lines perhaps convey more than an emblematic notion of relief finally emerging out of rough times. As Stefan Graham Christian points out, speculation that the poem dates between 1658 and 1660 is tempting, “since it so manifestly looks for hope to materialize from the ‘Seas,’ and it was well known that Charles II, living on the continent since 1651, must return by sea to his country” (380). In the final lines, the speaker turns away from the Caucasines and Egyptians to another, more recent point of comparison for the weary Royalists – the Protestant citizens of La Rochelle. When besieged by the French king’s Catholic forces in 1572 and 1573, the Rochelais did receive relief from the seas when many fish unexpectedly washed ashore, saving them from starvation, as Leah Knight and Wendy Wall observe in the Elemental Edition of this poem. The poem closes on this hopeful note, the final word “wish” signifying at once the more-than-fulfilled wish of the sixteenth-century Rochelais and the still-active Royalist wish for the restoration of the monarchy.
In more recent history, however, La Rochelle was again besieged by French royal and Catholic forces, and in 1628, having lost many citizens to starvation, capitulated. John A. Lynn, “La Rochelle, siege of,” in The Oxford Companion to Military History (Oxford UP, 2004); “La Rochelle,” in The Oxford Dictionary of Phrase and Fable, 2nd ed. (Oxford UP, 2006). Adam N. McKeown, Fortification and Its Discontents from Shakespeare to Milton (New York and London: Routledge, 2019), 84–5, notes that when La Rochelle surrendered, only around 5000 of its inhabitants were alive, compared to 25000 “a year earlier.” By royal declaration, the “towers, sea walls, and all other fortifications” of La Rochelle were razed to the ground.
See Melchior Tavernor, A true and most exact map of the siedge of Rochell, presented to the Kings Majestie the first day of May, 1628 (Paris: Melchior Tavernor, 1628; to be sold by Thomas Walkely, at the Eagle and Childe in Brittaines Bursse, 1628). STC (2nd ed.) 23716.5 (“Tavernor” here is an anglicized version of “Tavernier”); “Malignants remember Rochell: or, A warning to the Protestants of England” (London, 1645). Wing (2nd ed.) M325; “Treasons anatomie, or, The duty of a loyall subject in vindicating his gracious soveraigne, against those horride aspertions, cast upon him, concerning his fathers death, the reliefe of the Rochellers, and the rebellion in Ireland” (London, 1647), 11–13. Wing (2nd ed.) T2083.
Roger Lockyer, “Buckingham, George Villiers, 1st duke of (1592–1628),” in The Oxford Companion to British History, 2nd ed., ed. Robert Crowcroft and John Cannon (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015).
— Leah Knight and Wendy Wall
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