Attitudes to Essex

The battle over how Essex’s complex and divisive actions should be interpreted and what his posthumous reputation should be captures in microcosm the divisions of the civil war. Poetry was a much-resorted-to weapon in this battle of reputation and interpretation and the same person could easily be the object of vicious satires from one side and soaring panegyrics from the other. Robert Devereux, third Earl of Essex (1591–1646), was one such person. Essex, as one of the leading aristocrats to declare for Parliament, is framed by Pulter as a class traitor without honour or loyalty but was represented by Parliament’s supporters as a man of courage and integrity.

He had long had an ambivalent attitude at best to royal courts. His father, also Robert Devereux, and the second Earl of Essex, had been Elizabeth I’s last favourite but his short-lived rebellion in 1601 meant he was beheaded as a traitor when his son was 10 years old. The subsequent disgrace was felt deeply but the second Earl’s reputation was rehabilitated after the succession of James VI and I and the earldom restored to his eldest son.

The third Earl’s experience at James’s court was marred by his direct but innocent involvement in the most staggering sexual scandal of the Jacobean period. His wife, Francis Howard, was enabled, with the King’s support, to win an annulment of her marriage, in order that she might marry Robert Carr, Earl of Somerset in 1613. The annulment was on the carefully investigated grounds of Essex’s non-consummation of the marriage. The publicity and humiliation led Essex to leave court and London returning only in 1616 to see his former wife’s trial alongside her husband Carr for arranging the poisoning of a prominent opponent of their marriage, Sir Thomas Overbury (see Bellany, 2002).

Essex subsequently served in the ongoing wars in the Low Countries for five years gaining the military experience that would see him invited to take command of Parliament’s armies in 1642. He also served assiduously in the House of Lords and and consistently supported Parliament’s investigations into corruption and maladministration among royal ministers. His relationship with the court of the new king, Charles I, was tense on this and many other levels. The Earl felt wrongly blamed for military failures in the 1620s and 1630s culminating in an abrupt dismissal from court by Charles in 1639, following the capitulation of a royal army before forces invading from Scotland. He also had to endure the humiliation of his second wife having a public affair with the courtier Sir William Uvedale in the same decade. Pulter mocks Essex for his wives’ conduct in her poems by describing him as ‘horned,’ that is wearing the horns associated with a cuckold, a man cheated on by his wives. Essex was deeply sensitive to slights on his honour and the King’s failure to admit him to the Order of the Garter, a sign of royal favour, compounded his disaffection with the King’s policies.

However he was able to capitalise on the affection in which his father’s memory was held, and he enjoyed his own public regard as a heroic figure who fought to defend his fellow Protestants abroad and as a stalwart supporter of Parliament’s grievances. He raised his own troops of soldiers easily which continued right through to the 1640s when his name, standing and reputation as a commander were vital to Parliament’s ability to fight the war.

Edward Hyde, Earl of Clarendon, a close advisor to Charles I and later Charles II acknowledged that the respect and popularity Essex enjoyed was essential to Parliament’s ability to raise an army:

[He] had been so entirely their founder that they owed not more to the power and reputation of Parliament than to his sole name and credit: the being able to raise an army, and conducting it to fight against the King, was purely due to him, and the effect of his power.

Edward Hyde, Earl of Clarendon, A History of the Rebellion and Civil Wars in England, ed. William Dunn Macray, 6 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1888), 3.455.

The admiration in which Essex was held by his soldiers is suggested by the book of poetry dedicated to him by the soldier-poet William Mercer. Mercer applauded Essex for his courage in accepting his commission from Parliament to lead their armies and this can be fruitfully contrasted with Pulter’s condemnation of that acceptance in her poem (line 17):

To thee, even thee, who if I dare protest,
Did then accept, when no man thought it best
To be beginner, nor to put his hand
To contradict his Soveraigns command,
To thee whose courage, by consent, I say,
Was found the fittest to command the day:

William Mercer, Angliæ speculum: or Englands looking-glasse, (London: 1646).

The poet Anne Bradstreet, in a poem from a book of verse that Elizabeth Sauer suggests Pulter owned (Pulter Reads Bradstreet’s Tenth Muse), also praised Essex:

Go on brave Essex, shew whose son thou art,
Not false to King, nor Countrey in thy heart,
But those that hurt his people and his Crown,
By force expell, destroy, and tread them down[.]

Anne Bradstreet, “A Dialogue between Old England and New, concerning their present troubles. Anno 1642,” The Tenth Muse lately sprung up in America. Or severall poems, compiled with great variety of wit and learning, full of delight … By a Gentlewoman in those parts (London, 1650), pp. 187–90. Transcribed by Elizabeth Sauer, Brock University.

This is again in clear opposition to Pulter’s argument that Essex was categorically seeking to hurt the Crown. Essex’s death in 1646 (see Headnote: Context) was greeted by Parliamentarian poet, John Wild, very differently to Pulter. Where Pulter is outraged by the ‘triumph after death’ (l. 22) ordered for Essex, Wild considers it inadequate to Essex’s greatness.

John Wild, An Elegie upon the Earl of Essex’s Funeral

And are these all the rites that must be done,
Thrice Noble Essex England’s Champion:
Some men, some walls, some horses put in black,
With the throng scrambling for sweet-meats and Sack,
A gawdy Herald, and a velvet Herse,
A tatt’red Anagram with grievous verse,
And a sad Sermon to conclude withall,
Shall this be stil’d great Essex’s Funerall?
Niggardly Nation, be asham’d of th’ods,
Lesse valour among Heathen made men Gods,
Should such a Generall have dy’d in Rome,
He must have had an Altar not a Tombe,
And there instead of youthfull Elegies,
Grave Senators had offer’d sacrifice
To divine Devereux: ô for a vote
(Ye Lords and Commons ye are bound to doo’t)
A vote that who is seen to smile this year,
A vote, that who so brings not in a tear,
Shall be adjudg’d Malignant: It were wise
T’erect an Office in the People’s eyes
For issuing forth a constant sum of tears;
There’s no way else to pay him his arrears.
And when we have drain’d this Age’s eyes quite dry,
Let him be wept the next in History,
Which if Posterity shall dare to doubt,
Then Gloster’s whispering walls shall speak him out:1
And so his Funerall shall not be done,
Till he return i’ t’ Resurrection.

John Wild, An Elegie upon the Earl of Essex’s Funeral (London: 1646).

1. (Gloster’s whispering walls) Essex’s forces relieved the Royalist siege of the city of Gloucester in 1643. His victory at the subsequent battle of Newbury in September 1643 enabled his army to return safely to London and broke a string of Royalist successes in the south of the country.

The Parliamentarian and Presbyterian activist Josiah Ricraft, an ardent Essex supporter, recorded a memory of Essex’s popularity with the people and especially his soldiers.

[I]n some measure to speak of what he did most gallantly perform in the time he was late Lord Generall of England, which was in the yeare 1641 and upon the third of July in the said year his Excellency rode through London to take a view of his voluntarie Citizens and Apprentices of London that had listed themselves under him, and were met to be mustered in the new Artillery, whither their renouned Generall no sooner came, but was entertained with shouts of joy, flinging up their hats into the ayre, and crying with a loud voice, (We will live and die with you my Lord;) and he answered, ‘And I by the help of God, am ready to do the like with you.’ Never was Generall better beloved by his Souldiers then he was, many of them to this day with heavy hearts shake their heads and cry, Adieu brave Devereux adieu[.]

Josiah Ricraft, A Survey of Englands Champions (London, 1647), sig. A2v.

Historians of Parliament’s cause stressed Essex’s patriotic and honourable conduct. Thomas May, in his History wrote:

The Earl of Essex was by a great and unanimous consent of both Houses chosen General of that Army, and of all Forces raised for the Parliament; with whom they protested to live and die in that Cause. The Earl of Essex was a Gentleman of a noble and most untainted reputation, of undoubted loyalty to his Country and Prince; having always (what course soever the Court steered) served in an honourable way, the right Interest of the English Nation, and the Protestant Religion; and to that end had formerly engaged himself in the Palatine War, and service of the Netherland United Provinces: insomuch as at this time, when they sought a Lord to undertake the high charge of commanding in chief, there seemed to be no choice at all; but we may say of this Election, as PATERCULUS did of another, Non quaerendus erat quem eligerent, sed eligendus qui eminebat [(he had no) need to search for one to choose [as his successor] but merely to choose the one who towered above the others. (Loeb)]

Thomas May, The History of the Parliament of England (London, 1647), sig. Mm4v-Nn1r, quoting the Roman historian Velleius Paterculus on Octavian’s choice of Tiberius as his successor in his Compendium of Roman History.

Pulter’s poem can then be understood as participating in these wars of reputation and offering a highly partisan and class-conscious account of Essex’s life and actions.