Arthur Capel, first Baron Capel of Hadham, one of the wealthiest men in England, lived in Hadham Hall, only a few miles from Broadfield, home of his cousin Arthur Pulter. Hester Pulter is thus likely to have met him, even though her verse tribute to him gives no sign of personal knowledge. Capel was an interesting figure who deserves a full biography1, yet today he is mainly known from a portrait by Cornelius Johnson of him, his wife, Elizabeth Morrison (1609/10–1661), and their children. In the 1630s Capel maintained some distance from the king’s religious and political directions, and it is perhaps indicative that he chose an artist of Dutch origins and of strong Reformed views, while the portrait highlighted his country estate. Johnson was nonetheless closely imitating a portrait of the king and his children by the latest fashionable court artist, Anthony van Dyck.2 Capel’s aristocratic status was recent and based on extensive landed wealth, partly gained through his marriage.

Cornelius Johnson (Cornelius Janssen van Ceulen), ‘The Capel Family’. Reproduced by permission of the National Portrait Gallery under a Creative Commons license.

At the beginning of the political crisis, Capel aligned himself with critics of the king and was the first MP to present to Parliament one of the petitions which Pulter so deplored. But he quickly came to believe that firm action was needed to defend church and crown against new dangers, and fought for the king in the first Civil War. Though an effective soldier, he also sought to use persuasion: after the king’s imprisonment by the army, he proposed a delegation from a group of prelates to warn Parliament of its un-Christian conduct. He took up arms in the second Civil War, and from then on his life was a series of cliff-hanging reversals. The army seized his sixteen-year-old son as a hostage until Elizabeth Capel gained his release. He fought and was captured at Colchester with Lucas and Lisle, who were shot on the orders of Sir Thomas Fairfax under strong pressure from Henry Ireton and the army. Capel escaped their fate because he and two other peers, Lord Norwich and Lord Hastings, were to be tried by Parliament. The treatment of royalist uprisers became a highly divisive issue. One MP longed “to see the day when we may hang the greatest Lord of them all, if he deserves it, without trial by his peers; and I doubt not but we shall have honest resolute judges to do it, notwithstanding Magna Charta.”3 But Capel had allies in Parliament, and on 18 November, at a time when the Presbyterian faction in Parliament had enough influence to offer concessions to the king, Capel and other royalist ringleaders including Lord Hastings were given the mild sentence of banishment, and Hastings fled. After Thomas Pride’s purge of the Presbyterian MPs on 6 December, the ascendent Independents wavered over whether the king or the others should be tried first. In the end the Commons, bypassing the Lords, which it would soon abolish, set up a High Court of Justice to try the king, deferring the treatment of the other royalists. Capel, imprisoned in the Tower of London, wrote appeals, based on constitutional and religious arguments, to a leading peer and to a Parliamentarian — possibly Cromwell — to circumvent the trial of the king. These failing, he attempted a bold escape by wading through the moat, but was then betrayed and recaptured. The king’s trial was followed by a new High Court of Justice to try five royalists including Capel and Norwich. This was, Kingston writes, “an incident in the drama, which, next to the execution of the King, created a greater amount of interest than any event since the termination of the War” (p. 108). Capel’s spirited defense of himself at his trial on constitutional grounds aroused the admiration of the Leveller John Lilburne, who had turned against the republic as a new tyranny. Capel and Norwich were both sentenced to death, but in another last-minute reversal Norwich was pardoned; Capel, however, was not reprieved, despite a petition from his wife, to whom he wrote an eloquent final letter. That letter expounds a “patriarchal” political ideology: king as head of state and father as head of household are divinely ordained and mutually supportive. Urging his wife to follow his advice, Capel quotes the fifth commandment, “Honour your father and your mother,” as the basis of his support for the king. Capel was beheaded on 9 March 1649 along with two other royalist peers. He gave a brave and defiant speech on the scaffold, praising Prince Charles and the royal children and wishing that they might all be kings. His heart was placed in a silver box, to be buried with the king.

The twists and turns of Capel’s fate thus exemplified the accelerating pace of revolution, and many tributes to him quickly appeared in print, taking advantage of some temporary loopholes in the censorship system.4 The Famous Tragedie of King Charles I, a closet drama in which the deaths of Lucas and Lisle are portrayed, ends with a Chorus who points out the heaped victims of Cromwell and his allies on the stage; the last body he points to is Capel’s, praise of whom brings the play to a close. A broadside elegy for Capel proclaimed that

and proposed that he should be buried in Colchester (Obsequies on that Unexemplar Champion of Chivalrie and Perfect Pattern of True Prowess, Arthur, Lord Capell, London, 1649). The volume The Princely Pellican, a prose tribute to Charles I, ended with an elegy for Capel. A Mournfull ELEGY upon the three Renowned Worthies, Duke HAMILTON, the Earle of HOLLAND, and the ever to be honoured Lord CAPEL ended with praise of Capel. In a volume which rallied a host of royalist poets to praise the young Lord Hastings (who may have been present at Colchester, as his uncle Henry Lord Hastings was), the pioneering journalist Marchamont Nedham declared that Hastings promised to have been as brave as Capel. Nedham’s elegy was preceded by one by Andrew Marvell, who had published an angry elegy for the Duke of Buckingham, another prominent royalist victim of the second civil war (Lachrymae Musarum, London, 1649, sigs. F1v–5r). Capel and Villiers received elegies together in Vaticinium Votivum or, Palæmon’s Prophetick Prayer…With several elegies on Charls the First. The Lord Capel. The Lord Francis Villiers. “F. H. Philomusus” added to an elegy for Charles I further tributes to Capel, Hamilton and Holland.

The following documents provide contexts for the Capel poem. The first group consists of letters and documents published posthumously, some of which could have been known to his circle at the time. His appeal to an army leader, probably Cromwell, shows his acute awareness of the dangers of a military dictatorship, on which point Levellers came to agree with him. The letters also show his close bond with his wife. These are followed by some contemporary tributes, and a different perspective on the trial of Capel and others by the republican Lucy Hutchinson.

The following letters offer final injunctions to Capel’s wife. The first urges her to conform to models of female obedience, and to avoid what many men claimed to be a female tendency to allow passion to overrule reason. These ideals are grounded in religion, under which obedience to the king is subsumed, as obedience to the Fifth Commandment, “Honor thy father and thy mother, that thy days may be long upon the land which the Lord thy God giveth thee.” In the second letter, Capel declares that God will take his place as a father, another reason for her not to grieve excessively. The king as father is not found in Pulter’s poems on the regicide.

This letter, from George Morley, later Bishop of Winchester, to Capel’s chaplain Edward Symonds, describes Capel’s religious positions in his last hours, combining a Protestant stress on “the Merits of Christ only” with solemn reception of the sacrament, but still so attached to his wife that his composition is disrupted. His paternal advice to his son is for honesty rather than revenge.

In his last speech on the scaffold, originally printed with several others, Capel insists that his theological position is in the mainstream of English Protestantism. Many Puritans believed that the Church of England, especially under Charles I, had become compromised by idolatry, its love of ritual being combined with an ‘Arminian’ theology of free will which implied that salvation came through formal religious observance rather than faith alone. To some, this seemed merely a way-station towards a return to the Catholic church. Capel defends church and king by proclaiming that far from being a Catholic, he believes with most Puritans that good works have nothing to do with salvation, but that such a belief is quite compatible with the the Thirty-Nine Articles, the confessional statement of the recently-abolished Church. Again he takes the Fifth Commandment as the basis of his political beliefs, and ends with a tribute to Charles I and to his son. The idea that Charles II might “exceed” his father’s virtues seems to imply some reservations behind Capel’s loyalty. As he had done in the letter to his wife, he counsels against violence and revenge. This narrative concludes with one of several different accounts of his behavior on the scaffold; here it is not the king but his wife who has his last words.

The several speeches of duke Hamilton earl of Cambridg, Henry earl of Holland and Arthur lord Capel, upon the scaffold immediately before their execution on Friday the 9. of March (London, 1649); Bodleian Library C 15.6 (26) Linc.

John Quarles, son of the celebrated devotional poet Francis Quarles, having published a 132-page volume of personal and political laments, culminating in an elegy for Sir Charles Lucas, brought out the following year a commemoration of the king followed by an impassioned lament for Capel, with a description of his courage at his execution suggesting that he may have been present.

Another elegist, like Pulter, thought of Lucas and Lisle while mourning Capel, and revived memories of Colchester. This elegy uses dramatic metaphors for his dignified comportment on the scaffold, as Marvell would do for Charles I in his “Horatian Ode.”

Theatrical imagery is also found in another anonymous elegy, which also, unusually, refers to Lady Capel, finding her husband’s death to be a form of freedom:

The princely pellican, royall resolves presented in sundry choice observations, extracted from his majesties [Charles i’s] divine meditations (London, 1649); Bodleian Library, Wood 492(1).

The unidentified “F. H.” chose a more complex rhyme-scheme from the other elegists, and drew attention, as Pulter does, to the question of whether it was disrespectful to Charles to draw again on elegiac tropes.

The Kentish poet Thomas Philipot also addressed the question of mourning Capel after Charles, using the imagery of the body politic, with echoes of John Donne’s The Second Anniversary: even after the head (the king) was cut off, part of the body still had some agency.

One pamphlet presented the deaths of Lucas and Lisle as part of a satirical tragedy, with Cromwell and Ireton pulling the strings, and ended with the dead bodies of those killed at Colchester, concluding with a tribute to Capel.

The execution of Charles I and the attendant constitutional revolution, the establishment of a republic and the abolition of the House of Lords, outraged not only conservatives but also the Levellers who had called for constitutional reforms but wished them to be grounded in legal precedent. Thus John Lilburne can be found cheering on Lord Capel as he spoke at his trial in what was clearly a rigged court. This pamphlet was bound next to an elegy for Capel in one contemporary pamphlet collection, along with royalist and Digger pamphlets, indicating the remarkable range of opinions jostling with each other in the press.

Two elegeis. The one on His late Majestie. The other on Arthur Lord Capel (London, 1645; Bodleian Library, C15.6 (4) Linc.), p. 8.

Engraving published 1659 of John Lilburne behind bars after imprisonment in 1653. Reproduced by permission of the National Portrait Gallery under a Creative Commons licence (D27921).

Lucy Hutchinson and her husband viewed the trial with rather different emotions. They had shared some of the Levellers’ unease with the dominance of the military behind the establishment of the republic, and their close friend Henry Ireton had moved quite close to the Levellers in later 1648. The Levellers’ attacks on their allies in Parliament, however, went too far for them, and they threw their weight behind the new regime. Lucy Hutchinson explains that while Colonel Hutchinson had reservations about the illegality of the trial of Capel and the others, he also shared enough of the anti-aristocratic sentiment current amongst radicals at the time to wish to favor a commoner over any aristocrat: he championed Sir John Owen, who had prayed and taken the sacrament with Capel.

Capel’s wife Elizabeth died in 1661. The Kentish poet Thomas Philipot published two tributes to her along with a reprint of his 1649 elegy for her husband. Using floral imagery for a conventional list of her virtues, he passes over her bold interventions for Capel.