In The Complaint of Thames4, Pulter situates herself within the early modern European discourse of royal and imperial rivers, yet she does so not through the customary celebratory register, but through a tone of elegiac reflection, articulating the loss of royalist cultural values in the context of the Civil War. In Pulter’s poem, the Thames’ decision to abandon London and provoke a drought serves as a symbolic enactment of how rivers in literature often register political transformation. Within royalist discourse, territory is frequently imagined as a political body unified under the sovereign, with the king as its head, governing and sustaining the whole. Pulter draws on this metaphorical framework to reconceptualize London’s hydrography: in the absence of the monarch, the princely river likewise proposes to withdraw, as the Thames threatens: “Then Heaven, just Heaven, withhold thy rain, / And I will leave my channel once again, As when my holy Albian’s blood was split” (15-17). Only when the city has burned in punishment for having slandered the king and queen “Then I, triumphant with my watery train, / Will make this city quagmires once again” (29-30). This logic resonates with both epic and chorographic traditions that envision the river as a figure of political unity and geographical coherence, as well as with the pageantry that celebrated the Thames as a stage for civic festivity and royal authority. Furthermore, in this focus on inversion—from pageant to elegy, from epic to lament, from flow to drought, from monarchy to Civil War—Pulter also decides to give a female voice to a river that has been constantly masculinized by the poetic and iconographic tradition, a feature that will allow her to further explore the gendering of poetic voice in political contexts.

Across the continent, rivers—especially those coursing through major cities—were central to displays of royal and princely power. The Tagus in Lisbon, the Seine in Paris, and the Arno in Florence, among others, functioned as stages for spectacle, celebration, and sovereign assertion. The Thames was no exception: it was a vital artery of civic life, hosting Lord Mayors’ processions and grand water pageants in which monarchs paraded in expressions of royal authority. In this poem, the river mourns the loss of that celebratory tradition, disrupted by the Civil War, where the collapse of monarchical order is metaphorized through the material destabilization of the land itself, reflecting a conception of the nation as intimately rooted in its land and waters. To understand the cultural and political weight of what the Thames laments, we will examine how poets in early modern England and beyond articulated a poetics of royal rivers, imagining them in the context of monarchical and imperial imaginaries, crafting visions of territorial concord, sovereign power, and, at times, unruliness and disorder. In early modern political thought, rivers became key instruments in articulating sovereignty over the land, with hydrography functioning as a means of inscribing authority onto the landscape. Finally, we will explore the gendered connotations of a river that, in this royalist tradition, is usually imagined as male.

Alongside the culture of waterborne celebrations on Europe’s rivers, we find epic poems that glorify empire through territorial allegories of power—traditions in which rivers play a central role. This literary lineage can be traced back to Virgil’s Aeneid, particularly to the prophetic vision delivered by the Tiberinus—the river god of the Tiber—to Aeneas as he sleeps. In this dream, Tiberinus designates the future site of Rome, marking it as the divinely ordained foundation of imperial rule.

Virgil, Aeneis. The works of Virgil containing his Pastorals, Georgics and Aeneis: Adorn’d with a hundred sculptures / translated into English verse by Mr. Dryden (London, 1697), 378. Courtesy of the Newberry Library

As early modern intellectuals turned to the medieval myth of Troia Nova or New Troy to imagine London as an imperial city, images of imperial rivers—such as those framed by Virgil—gained renewed relevance.

Within this tradition that links hydrography to the building of nation and empire, Edmund Spenser integrates these motifs in The Faerie Queene, an epic poem whose imperial aspirations parallel those of Virgil. In Book IV we find the celebration of the marriage of the river Thames and the river Medway, where the Thames is celebrated as a kingly river. The wedding is attended by the famous rivers of the world (including the Americas) alongside all the rivers of England, producing a hydrographic map of power that converges in the royal figure of the Thames.

These nuptial allegories encode and stabilize territorial power through hydrographic symbolism. In the context of the union between the Thames and the Medway, river marriage becomes a formal device for imagining political harmony and naturalized sovereignty. Within the tradition of English river poetry, the Thames itself is figured as the offspring of such a union, in this case of the Rivers Tame and Isis, who produce the royal river of Thames, legitimizing its centrality within the national landscape. This union is staged in the fifteenth song of Michael Drayton’s Poly-Olbion (1612), which narrates the marriage of the Tame and the Isis and the birth of the Thames. Each song of this chorographic poem is accompanied by a regional map; in the case of this song, the two rivers meet in Oxfordshire. Drayton imagines this hydrographical feature through personified figures—river gods who embody the streams. The engravers’ decision to crown these figures underscores their status as royal rivers, especially given that they are imagined as “parents” of the Thames.

Marriage of Tame and Isis in Michael Drayton’s A Chorographicall Description of All the Tracts, Rivers, Mountains, Forests, and Other Parts ... of Great Britain ... : Digested into a Poem / by Michael Drayton ... London: Printed for Iohn Marriott, Iohn Grismand, and Thomas Dewe, 1622. Courtesy of the Newberry Library

As was mentioned above, rivers found a place not only in epic poems, but also in royal celebrations such as triumphal entries, masques, ballets, and intermezzi, serving as powerful emblems of territorial control and sovereign authority. In the renowned triumphal entry of Archduke Ernest of Austria into Antwerp in 1594, one of the many arches constructed for the occasion symbolized Habsburg dominion over a global empire, an imagery that echoes Edmund Spenser’s unification of the world’s rivers in The Faerie Queene to commemorate the allegorical marriage of the Thames and the Medway. The arch celebrated imperial power, particularly following the 1580 Iberian Union through which Portugal was annexed to the Habsburg monarchy. It featured river gods representing the Ganges and the Hydaspes (or Jhelum) from the Indian subcontinent, the Tagus in Portugal, and the Río de la Plata in the Portuguese-controlled regions of South America.

Arcus triumphalis Lusitanorum. Descriptio Publicae Gratulationis ... in Aduentu Sereniss. Principis Ernesti Archiducis Austriae engravings by Martin de Vos (Antwerp, 1594). Oxford, Bodleian Library MS. Douce 387: https://digital.bodleian.ox.ac.uk/objects/46ff8d52-905a-499d-9653-1c92452caa54/ © Bodleian Libraries, University of Oxford. Shared under: CC BY-NC 4.0.

The Thames had its own local history within the broader European context of royal rivers, serving as the site of grand celebrations in early modern London. Most notably, it hosted the Lord Mayor’s procession, in which the newly appointed mayor of the City of London would travel by river to mark the beginning of his term. This ritual transformed the Thames into a celebratory space that affirmed the city’s grandeur and the vitality of civic life, an important dimension of early modern European ceremonial culture. Although the river was not used for coronations during the late Tudor and Stuart periods, it retained a symbolic presence in these royal festivities. In the case of James I’s triumphal entry into London, for instance, the first arch he passed through represented the city itself, with the Thames personified as a river god at its center.

Stephen Harrison, The arch's of triumph erected in honor of the high and mighty prince. Iames. the first of that name. King, of England. and the sixt of Scotland at his Maiesties entrance and passage through his honorable citty & chamber of London. vpon the 15th. day of march 1603, engravings by William Kip (London, 1604). © The Trustees of the British Museum. Shared under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-SA 4.0) licence.

Detail of the central pillar with the Thames personified as a river god.

Beyond triumphal entries, the Thames also figured prominently in court masques, where the river symbolically entered the confined space of the court theater, as we will see below. This tradition of court masques is echoed in Pulter’s poetry, where she allegorizes Queen Henrietta Maria as Chloris (both in The Invitation into the Country2, lines 27-28, and The Complaint of Thames, 1647.4, lines 5-7), likely alluding to Ben Jonson’s Chloridia (1631), in which the Queen also represented Chloris. The Thames appears explicitly in Tethys’ Festival (1610), a masque by Samuel Daniel with designs by Inigo Jones, performed at Whitehall during the reign of James I. In this performance, Queen Anne assumed the role of Tethys, Queen of the Ocean, while Princess Elizabeth personified the nymph of the Thames. Other noblewomen and countesses embodied various English rivers, reinforcing a symbolic geography that celebrated dynastic and territorial unity.

With the Restoration in 1660, it is no coincidence that the Thames stood at the center of the celebrations. The river symbolically enacted the restoration of territorial unity to a nation fractured by civil war, reclaiming its princely character. Two years later, in 1662, the river once again became a stage for royal spectacle with the arrival of Catherine of Braganza. Her entry into London by way of the Thames was marked by the Aqua Triumphalis, a fluvial procession that celebrated the royal marriage and reaffirmed the river’s ceremonial and symbolic significance.

Aqua Triumphalis. The Entry of the Queen in London on the River Thames, welcomed by the Lord Mayor and the citizens of London, surrounded by little boats representing the different guilds in the foreground, several houses to the right; from a series of seven prints showing the journey of the Infant Catherine of Braganza from Portugal to marry Charles II in London (London, 1662). © The Trustees of the British Museum. Shared under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-SA 4.0) licence.

Detail of the personification of the Thames. Second rowboat ascending from the bottom margin, with a river god bearing a trident and the word “Thames” by its side.

As the monarchs navigated the river, they encountered various allegorical figures who performed songs in their honor. In John Tatham’s description of the celebration, we see that two rivers, the Isis and the Thames, are personified in the pageantry, each dedicating a song to the king and queen. The Thames’s song celebrates the restoration of Charles II’s throne and gestures toward the elemental disorder that Pulter invokes in her poem, though here it is reversed. Whereas in Pulter’s poem the Thames threatens to recede and dry up (lines 11-20), in Tatham’s account the river is newly enclosed within the bounds of the nation, its course re-stabilized by the monarch’s return. The song also participates in the genre of the river marriage signaled above, staging a symbolic union between the Thames and the Tagus, the river of Lisbon, from which Catherine of Braganza arrived.

As noted earlier, rivers often served as symbols of national concord and sovereign authority. Conversely, rivers were also used to represent moments of crisis and disorder. Pulter reconfigures these traditions to mourn the chaos of the civil war, channeling the voice of the Thames to articulate her royalist position. The river’s rage thus aligns with a broader literary tradition in which riverine landscapes are imbued with political significance, responding dynamically to moments of historical rupture. This association between political power, unruliness and rivers figures prominently in Shakespeare’s Richard II, where Bolingbroke’s desire for usurpation is allegorized as a tempestuous river:

Finally, as we have seen above, the Thames is consistently gendered male in early modern literature, iconography, and festival culture. Following the Roman precedent, the principal river of an empire is represented in masculine form: Virgil personifies the Tiber as the male river god Tiberinus, and English poets adopt similar models. In Spenser’s The Faerie Queene (Canto IV), the male Thames marries the female Medway, while in Drayton’s Poly-Olbion, a male Tame unites with a female Isis, producing a male Thames (as illustrated in the image below). Such literary conventions are mirrored in London’s triumphal iconography, which consistently depicts the Thames as a masculine river god. Pulter’s The Complaint of Thames, 1647.4, however, feminizes the river—a significant and deliberate departure from these conventions. This poetic intervention engages directly with the male-dominated tradition of English river poetics, particularly the vision of Spenser, and can be read in two complementary ways: first, as an acknowledgment that the epic, triumphal mode is no longer tenable in the fractured political reality of the Civil War, yielding instead to the elegiac tones of pastoral; and second, as a deliberate effort to assert a female poetic voice within a tradition that had consistently imagined the Thames as male, thereby recasting both the river and Pulter’s own authorship.

Personification of the Thames.

Michael Drayton, Poly-Olbion (London: 1612), 245. Courtesy of the Newberry Library.

Similarly, Philip Galle’s Semideorum marinorum amnicorumque (Of Sea and River Demigods) presents a series of engravings depicting oceanic and fluvial deities, an exclusively male pantheon that extends from Neptune to the river gods of the Danube, Rhine, and Tiber, and culminates with the Thames, figured as a male river god melancholically pouring his waters into the stream.

River Thames.

Philip Galle, Semideorum marinorum amnicorumque sigallariae imagines perelegantes, in picturae statuariaeque atris tyronym usum(Antwerp, 1586), 55. Wikipedia Commons.

However, there are certain exceptions to the general claim that the Thames is personified male. Michael Drayton, who personifies the Thames as male in his Poly-Olbion, feminizes the Thames in one of his sonnets:

Another work that feminizes the Thames does so in order to articulate a rape: Thameseidos (attributed to Edward Wilkinson and to William Evans) from 1600, where a feminized Thames is being constantly chased by Neptune:

Although with exceptions such as these, the Thames was generally subject to male personification by male poets, who crafted their poetics within a context of celebratory national imagining. Pulter writes in the aftermath of this tradition of grand national epics that celebrated the Thames as the royal river, whose flow symbolized England’s greatness. These representations not only affirmed monarchy, territorial unity, and sovereignty, but also consistently imagined the river as male. Writing in a very different political and cultural moment, Pulter reframes the Thames within the crisis of the Civil War, revealing both the shifting cultural uses of rivers and the gendered dimensions of England’s hydrography. In the disillusioned atmosphere of a waning world—an aesthetic that marked seventeenth-century Europe and, more specifically, the turmoil of the English Civil War—Pulter finds her poetic voice in lament, offering a distinctly female, riverine perspective.