Emblem 25 is a Royalist polemic—a strong written argument against a group of people—but we don’t know it until the poem’s concluding lines. Like many of Pulter’s emblems, the poem begins by drawing the reader’s attention to specific situations in the natural world. This Royalist emblem poem meditates on two creatures. First, a “flying fish” fights for her life, diving in and out of the sea as she tries to avoid predators in both the air and water. Pulter’s second example is a wounded “hart” (a red deer), “oppressed” by hunting dogs and vulnerable to human predators. Finally, in line 15, the poem’s political objectives come into focus as Pulter turns to her main subject: the betrayal of Charles I by the Scottish army in 1647, a key event in the English Civil Wars (1642–1651).
Before turning to the highly charged language of the poem’s closing lines, it is useful to consider how Pulter frames her political argument. Importantly, this is a poem, not a formal political tract or pamphlet—the kind of short, cheap vernacular work usually printed in quarto that intervened explicitly in ongoing public and political debate. The pamphlet in particular was an important political tool during the English Civil Wars, and both Royalists and Parliamentarians wielded the genre to cultivate public sympathy. While pamphleteers employed a range of rhetorical and literary figures to persuade, their arguments tended to be straightforward and plainly stated. For more on the pamphlet genre and its political and social contexts during the Civil Wars, see Joad Raymond, Pamphlets and Pamphleteering in Early Modern Britain (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), especially Chapters 5-8.
The poem unfolds as an accumulation of examples, not unlike Upon the Death of My Dear and Lovely Daughter, Jane Pulter [Poem 10], which employs some of the same imagery to emphasize Jane’s vulnerability. Here in Emblem 25, Pulter introduces her linked examples with the echoing chorus “so have I seen” (line 11) and “so have I known” (line 15). She coaxes her readers along with examples that, at first, seem distant from human events, but gradually give way to a vehement political stance. Her creaturely examples rely on the striking visual language we find across her emblem poems: her “flying fish” has “shining wings,” and she “springs” and “dives” in the “swelling” and “frothy” sea (lines 1-6). Pulter’s alliteration draws our attention to the creature’s vulnerability. Her “helpless, harmless” fish is pursued by “hungry hawks” and “whales” that “watch” (lines 7-8). She also manipulates gender pronouns throughout the poem in service of her political argument. Both flying fish and wounded hart are given female pronouns (she/her), even though the term “hart” was most commonly used to refer to the male stag red deer. When Pulter then uses male pronouns (he/him) to refer to Charles I, the female pronouns haunt the second half of the poem. Pulter counts Charles among the “helpless,” “harmless,” “guitless” female creatures of the poem’s first half, amplifying his vulnerability within the context of this poem (“everywhere enclosed” by his “foes”). In the poem’s closing lines, Pulter references an event that occurred toward the end of the Civil Wars, just a few years before Charles’s eventual execution. Charles sought refuge with the Scottish army in May 1646 but, as Alice Eardley recounts in her note on this poem, the Scots negotiated with the English Parliament and turned Charles over to them in January 1647. Alice Eardley, ed. “Emblem 25,” Poems, Emblems, and The Unfortunate Florinda (Toronto: Iter Inc., 2014), 220 n.212.
On one hand, the poetic political emblem is an especially keen rhetorical move, fitting for the extraordinarily divisive period of the English Civil Wars. Is Pulter perhaps offering her own version of “how to talk to your family about politics during the holidays” (see, for instance, Jamilah King’s November 2019 article in Mother Jones)? On the other hand, we have to think critically about Pulter’s rhetorical prowess in this poem. Does her argument land? Pulter’s accumulated examples work to garner sympathy for the Royalist cause, ultimately drawing on the widespread comparison of Charles I to Christ that found its most affecting expression in the Eikōn Basilikē (1649), a spiritual biography attributed to Charles himself. Each of her examples describes violent action against vulnerable creatures, and Charles Stuart is portrayed as the most vulnerable of all (“the thought of this such horror brings / to my sad soul” [line 16-17]). Her sharp polemical tone in the poem’s final lines, however, might give us pause. Does our reading of this emblem ultimately result in a sympathetic stance toward Charles’s plight? — Leah Knight and Wendy Wall
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