Shipwrecks and Civil War
What is the connection between Pulter’s obscure reference to the drowning of “Beauclarks Children” (l.37) and her Royalist sympathies in the wake of the Civil War?
In the closing lines of “The Stately Mooz” Pulter uses a watery metaphor to reflect on the state of the world:
- For wee are in A Sea of Sorrows Tost
- And when we’re most Secure wee’r nearest lost
- As Beauclarks Children did their wrack deplore
- With Greater grief beeing in the Sight of Shore
- Then Seeing our lives Soe frail and Casuall bee
- Let mee depend (dear God) on none but thee.
The distant but unreachable “Shore” perhaps reflects the Christian’s desire for salvation and escape from our “Sea of Sorrows.” However, Pulter specifies the metaphor with a historical reference to “Beauclarks Children” (l.37). While the ship of state would have been a familiar metaphor to many in the seventeenth century, including Pulter (see This Stately Ship108), Pulter here refers to a very real medieval shipwreck that destabilized the English state and led to a civil war.
Henry I, also known as Henry Beauclerc, was the son of William the Conqueror and King of England from 1100 to 1135. In 1120 disaster struck his reign when his only legitimate male heir, William Adelin, drowned in a shipwreck off the coast of Barfleur. Two of Henry’s illegitimate children, Richard and Matilda also died, as did many important nobles. Consequently, this left Henry’s daughter, also called Matilda or sometimes Maud, as his only surviving legitimate heir. The shipwreck is thought to have occurred because of the sailors’ drunkenness. Following Henry I’s death a period of civil war, sometimes called the Anarchy, broke out in England between Henry’s daughter Matilda and his nephew Stephen over the throne.1 While Stephen ultimately became King of England, it was Matilda’s son who succeeded him to become King Henry II.
Many of Pulter’s poems and emblems demonstrate clear Royalist beliefs. Alice Eardley dates Pulter’s emblems to between 1653 and 1658, the period of the Cromwellian Protectorate directly after the English Civil War and execution of Charles I in 1649.2 The story of a medieval shipwreck that threw the crown into crisis and precipitated a civil war might have prompted Pulter’s sympathies in her contemporary moment of monarchical crisis.
Many early modern histories contain variations of the shipwreck story and Pulter’s source is not clear. Below are four different accounts of the shipwreck taken from early modern histories that variously attribute the cause of the accident to drunkeness, divine justice, divine providence, or fate.
John Hayward offers one of the fullest historical accounts in his The Lives of the III. Normans (1613). His version contains details, like many early modern accounts, that are now considered apocryphal, including William Adelin turning back to rescue his sister (here called Mary rather than Matilda). Hayward, like Pulter, also mentions the ship’s close proximity to the shore.
So they loosed from land somewhat after the King; and with a gentle wind from the Southwest, danced through the soft swelling floods. The sailors full of proud joy, by reason of their honourable charge; and of little fear or forecast, both for that they had been accustomed to dangers, and for that they were then well tippled with wine; gave forth in a bravery, that they would soon outstrip the vessel wherein the King sailed. In the midst of this drunken jollity the ship strake against a rock, the head whereof was above water, nor far from the shore. The passengers cried out, and the sailors laboured to wind or bear off the ship from the danger; but the labour was no less vain than the cry: for she leaned so stiffly against the rock, that the steerage brake, the sides cracked, and the Sea gushed in at many breaches.
Then was raised a lamentable cry within the ship; some yielding to the tyranny of despair, betook themselves (as in cases of extremity weak courages are wont) to their devotions; others employed all industry to save their lives, and yet more in duty to nature, than upon hope to escape: all bewailed the unfortunate darkness of that night, the last to the lives of so many persons both of honour and of worth. They had nothing to accompany them but their fears, nothing to help them but their wishes: the confused cries of them all, did much increase the particular astonishment of every one. And assuredly no danger dismayeth like that upon the seas; for that the place is unnatural to man. And further, the unusual objects, the continual motion, the desolation of all help or hope, will perplex the minds even of those who are best armed against discouragement.
At the last the boat was hoisted forth, and the King’s son taken into it. They had cleared themselves from the danger of the ship, and might safely have rowed to land. But the young Prince hearing the shrill shrieks of his Sister Mary Countesse of Perch, and of the Countess of Chester his cousin, crying after him, and craving his help; he preferred pity before safety, & commanded the boat to be rowed back to the ship for preservation of their lives. But as they approached, the boat was suddenly so overcharged with those, who (struggling to break out of the arms of death) leaped at all adventures into it, that it sunk under them: and so all the company perished by drowning. Only one ordinary Sailor, who had been a butcher, by swimming all night upon the mast escaped to land; reserved as it may seem, to relate the manner of the misadventure. This ship raised much matter of novelty and discourse abroad; but never did ship bring such calamity to the Realm: especially for that it was judged, that the life of this Prince would have prevented those intestine wars, which afterwards did fall, between King Steven and Matild[a] daughter to King Henry.
Sir Walter Raleigh is less sympathetic in “The Preface” of his unfinished History of the World (1614). He does not mention the subsequent civil war, but he does attribute the disaster to God’s punishment of sinners. Raleigh refers to Matilda as Maud.
Among our Kings of the Norman race, we have no sooner passed over the violence of the Norman Conquest, than we encounter with a singular and most remarkable example of God’s justice, upon the children of Henry the first. For that King, when both by force, craft, and cruelty, he had dispossessed, over-reached, and lastly made blind and destroyed his elder Brother Robert Duke of Normandy, to make his own sons Lords of this Land: God cast them all, Male and Female, Nephews and Nieces (Maud excepted) into the bottom of the Sea, with above a hundred and fifty others that attended them; whereof a great many were Noble, and of the King dearly beloved.
In The First Part of the Historie of England (1612) Samuel Daniel closes his account of the ship by also noting the role of God’s judgment and providence in the accident. In light of this, perhaps the shipwreck story also provided Pulter with a welcome previous example of the strange workings of divine providence in our “frail and Casuall” (l.39) lives to help her rationalize the execution of Charles I and subsequent Cromwellian Protectorate. Daniel’s reflection on the constantly turbulent succession of the English crown and the role of divine providence in this also potentially resonates with Pulter’s description in “The Stately Mooz” of our constant insecurity and her resolution to depend on God alone.
Which sudden clap of God’s judgement, coming in a calm of glory, when all these bustlings seemed past over, might make a conscience shrink with terror, to see oppression and supplantation repaid with the extinction of that, for which so much had been wrought, and that the line masculine of Normandy expired in the third heir, as if to begin the fate laid on all the future succession, wherein never, but once, the third, in a right descent, enjoyed the Crown without supplantation or extinction, to the great affliction of the kingdom and himself, to leave his other issue subject to the like overturnings; which may teach Princes to observe the ways of righteousness, and let men alone with their rights, and God with his providence.
Where Hayward attributes the shipwreck to the drunkenness of the sailors, and Raleigh and Daniel to God’s divine intervention, in the Holinshed Chronicles (1587) the shipwreck is given both as an example of God’s punishment and of rapidly changing fortune. William Rufus is King William II, Henry I’s elder brother and predecessor.
Here (by the way) would be noted the unadvised speech of William Rufus to the shipmaster, whom he emboldened with a vain and desperate persuasion in tempestuous weather and high seas to hoist up sails; adding (for further encouragement) that he never heard of any king that was drowned. In which words (no doubt) he sinned presumptuously against God, who in due time punished that offence of his in his posterity and kindred, even by the same element, whose fierceness he himself seemed so little to regard, as if he would have commanded the storms to cease; as we read Christ did in the gospel by the virtue and power of his word. Here is also to be noted the variableness of fortune (as we commonly call it) or rather the uncertain and changeable event of things, which oftentimes doth raise up (even in the minds of princes) troublesome thoughts, and grievous passions, to the great impairing of their quietness: as here we see exemplified in king Henry, whose mirth was turned into moan, and his pleasures relished with pangs of pensiveness, contrary to his expectation when he was in the midst of his triumph at his return out of France into England. So that we see the old adage verified, Miscentur tristia laetis;1 and that saying of an old poet justified;
- Saeva noverca dies nunc est, nunc mater amica.2
1. The Latin adage “Miscentur tristia laetis” originally comes from Ovid’s Fasti VI.463. The Loeb edition translates this as “sorrow is sometimes blent with joy.” Ovid, Fasti, trans. James G. Frazer, rev. G.P. Goold, Loeb Classical Library 253 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1931), VI.463.
2. The Chronicles marginally references this quotation as from Hesiod’s Works and Days. The Loeb edition translates this line from the original Greek as “One time one of these days is a stepmother, another time a mother.” Hesiod, “Works and Days,” in Theogony. Works and Days. Testimonia, ed. and trans. Glenn W. Most, Loeb Classical Library 57 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2018), l.825.
After the Cromwellian Protectorate ended in 1659, this story of the royal line surviving despite the shipwreck and subsequent civil war was used by some as a justification for the restoration of Charles II to the English throne. For example, William Prynne, a pamphleteer and parliamentarian who had opposed the execution of Charles I, used the example of the restoration of “the right heir,” Henry II (Matilda’s son), “to the Crown by friendly agreement” after the reign of the “Usurpser Stephen” to argue that restoring Charles II by similar agreement was “the only probable, speedy way not now to end our present wars, oppressions, distractions, Military Government, and restore peace, and prosperity in our Nations.”3 While Pulter’s emblems were likely written before the Restoration, the ultimate survival of the royal line despite the shipwreck might have meant that this story also contained traces of hope for her that the Royalist cause might weather the current “Sea of Sorrows.”
Footnotes
1. For an account of the shipwreck see C. Warren Hollister, Henry I, ed. and completed by Amanda Clark Frost (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2001), pp.276–279 and Catherine Hanley, Matilda: Empress, Queen, Warrior (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2019), pp.43–46.
2. Alice Eardley, “Introduction,” in Poems, Emblems and the Unfortunate Florinda, by Hester Pulter (Toronto, Iter Press, 2014), 21.
3. William Prynne, Concordia Discors, or the Dissonant Harmony of Sacred Publique Oathes, Protestations, Leagues, Covenants, Ingagements (London: Printed for Edrward Thomas, 1659), sig. E2v. EEBO. [Spelling and italicization modernized.]