“The chiefe aime of the embleme is, to instruct us, by subjecting the figure to our view, and the sense to our understanding,” Henri Estienne paradigmatically wrote in The Art of Making Devices (1646) (7). That is, the emblem poems found in early modern emblem books are designed to educate their readers, by providing an image with a clear moral for readers to apply to their own lives. Given this aim, it is not surprising that emblem books frequently discuss the obligations between parents and children, one of society’s foundational educative relationships. While Pulter’s depiction of matricide specifically may be unprecedented (see headnote), Emblem 29 nonetheless draws from a longer generic tradition, in which the relationship between parents and children is central to familial and political order.

Warnings Against Parental Indulgence

Even as Emblem 29 ends decrying the sins of children, it pays tribute to Pulter’s emblem predecessors in its commentary upon parents and parenting. In characterizing the sparrow as the “indulgent” mother of the “ungrateful” cuckoo, Pulter takes up the language of earlier emblem books warning parents of the dangers of profligate children.

Indeed, the topic has persisted since the genre’s inception in England. Thomas Palmer, the earliest known English emblematist, uses the image of a willow tree in Two Hundred Poosees (c. 1560s) to decry “[t]he indulgence of parents,” lamenting those who allow their children “to spende their thrifte / on hollowe knaves and quenes.”

Thomas Palmer, The Emblems of Thomas Palmer: Two Hundred Poosees Sloane MS 4794, ed. John Manning (New York: AMS Press, 1998), 50.

Nearly eighty years later, George Wither’s A Collection of Emblems (1635) picked up on the theme, and used an image of wood burning on an altar to criticize “Parents that uphold / Their thriftlesse Children in unlawfull Pleasures.” Like wood “consume[d]” by fire, Wither warns, parents’ health and wealth are consumed by overindulging their children. “With Cares, it weares them out, ere they are old,” he intones, “And ere their Lives consume, consumes their Treasure.”

George Wither, A Collection of Emblems, (London, 1635), 15.

The most graphic admonition, though, comes from Geoffrey Whitney’s A Choice of Emblems (1586). Literalizing the parental consumption depicted in Wither’s poem, Whitney relates the story of a thief, on his way to execution, who bites off the nose of his sorrowing mother. When the horrified onlookers protest, the thief explains, “She was the cause that made me do amiss, / For if shee had correction usde [sic], I had not come to this.” As the poem’s Latin epigraph states, “From parents’ leniency comes the ruin of their children.”

Geoffrey Whitney, A Choice of Emblemes, (Leyden: Christopher Plantin, 1586), 155.

Though tame in comparison to Whitney’s, Pulter’s emblem follows in this tradition, at least initially. Pulter’s opening characterization of the relationship between the sparrow and the cuckoo leads the reader to expect an injunction against lenient parenting similar to those above. Such a characterization lulls the reader with fulfilled generic expectations, only to have them undermined in the subsequent lines.

Political Parenting

If English emblem books have a tradition of addressing parents, they also have a legacy of addressing children—that is, subjects, the king’s children. The metaphorical relationship between a parent and his children is central to renaissance political theory, and consequently to English emblem books invoking it. Works like King James I’s The True Lawe of Free Monarchies (1598), Basilikon Doron (1599), and Robert Filmer’s Patriarcha (written c. 1628) helped to formalize the long-standing analogy of the king’s relationship to his subjects as that of a parent to his children. Basilikon Doron, for instance, notes that a “good King” cares for his subjects “as their naturall father and kindly Master,” believing “his greatest contentment standeth in their prosperitie, and his greatest suretie in having their hearts, subjecting his owne private affections and appetites to the weill and standing of his Subjects, ever thinking common interesse his chiefest particular” (29). In this passage, James tries rhetorically to equalize the inherently unequal parent-child relationship, redefining “subjection” as referring to the king’s “subjecting” his own will to the needs of his people. Yet it is difficult to escape from the hierarchy implicit in the paternal metaphor. It is precisely because of this hierarchy that the “king as father” analogy was a favorite among royalists, as an image of monarchy’s benevolent, yet unquestioned supremacy.

This patriarchal understanding of monarchy is necessarily a key feature in Henry Peacham’s emblem book, Minerva Britanna (1612). The original Latin version of this emblem book—published in manuscript with gold-embossed color illustrations as a present for James I and his son Prince Henry—sourced its poems directly from Basilikon Doron. Even after the emblem book was revised (and translated) for print publication, the influence of the king’s treatise on Peacham’s emblem book remained explicit in the poems’ epigraphs and footnotes. Accordingly, Minerva Britanna perpetuates a patriarchal notion of monarchy that urges its readers’ submission. The poem below, for example, assures readers that it is “natur[al]” to obey princes as “gladly as our Parents,” drawing a distinction between tyrants like the Roman emperor Nero and “good Princes” acting in the best interests of their subjects.

Henry Peacham, Minerva Britannia, facsimile ed. (London, 1612; Menston, Yorkshire: Scholar Press, 1969), 144.

Though the king and queen are never explicitly mentioned in Emblem 29, Pulter’s contextualization of the parent-child relationship in reference to her own nation (ll. 17-22) suggests that she is following Peacham’s emblematization of the monarchical parent. If the opening lines of her poem speak conventionally to indulgent parents, the second half of the poem castigates children—English children—for their failure to adhere to the political theory espoused by James and the emblem books he inspired. Charles I’s execution is not just the failure of subjects, but of the children he reared.