Pulter often used the word “revolution,” but how far were her political views revolutionary? There are several layers to disentangle. From contemporaries down to today’s historians, the causes and meaning of the mid-century political upheavals have been subject to much debate. Some have read them as the first of a series of epochal modern revolutions ushering in modern economic and political orders. A socio-economic analysis was already being broached by contemporaries like Lucy Hutchinson. Soon after its first printing in 1806, her Memoirs of the Life of Colonel Hutchinson was translated into French at the behest of François Guizot’s history of what he termed La Révolution d’Angleterre, the first part composed before his own major period of political power under Louis Philippe from 1832, the second after his displacement during the revolutions of 1848. Guizot hailed the English and French Revolutions as the two greatest events in history, despite his many reservations about both — and about Lucy Hutchinson.1 Karl Marx formed his own ideas of a bourgeois revolution in hostile dialogue with Guizot, and a host of works by Christopher Hill over many years tested Marxist models against a growing awareness of the importance of religious factors. From the 1970s Hill became a prime target for “revisionist” historians. These were responding in part to a large increase in the availability of local manuscript sources which presented empirical challenges to some larger social and economic models. While differing on many points, the revisionists generally took a sharply deflationary view of the mid-seventeenth-century conflicts, now seen as a short-term breakdown in a consensual political order, fuelled by the difficulty of ruling three kingdoms and by separate religious fanaticism. This is not so unlike the view of some royalists at the time. These debates have been replayed in contemporary poetry.2

In the last few years there has been a qualified return to taking a larger view of the English Revolution in a global perspective, now with a heightened awareness of the costs of “progress,” from the emergent slave trade to environmental impact. New work influenced by disability history highlights the scale of the war’s violence and loss of life, sometimes brushed over in more glamorized accounts, and shows its particular impact on a number of named women in Pulter’s Hertfordshire.3 Questions of gender are receiving fuller attention — documents by women did not square with the revisionist emphasis on “high” politics.4 Research continues to bring out the period’s innovation, notably the first regular newsbooks presenting opposing political positions, and a press unprecedentedly broad in social and intellectual range. A recent installation at Nottingham Castle Museum presents the manuscript of Memoirs of the Life of Colonel Hutchinson as part of a narrative of rebellion in the City through the Luddites to Black Lives Matter and the LGBT+ movement.

nottinghamcastle.org

The Memoirs manuscript in Nottingham Castle with video of civil war scene. Photograph by David Norbrook.

Pulter’s poetry may not fit so easily into such a narrative but certainly reflects rebellious times. At a semantic level, “revisionist” critiques of the term “English Revolution” point out that in the seventeenth century “revolution” normally referred to cyclical changes rather than permanent shifts. Strikingly, Pulter’s manuscript places these issues together: three impassioned political poems are followed by The Revolution16, The Circle [1]17, and The Desire18. Liza Blake writes: “dissolution, resolution, revolution, and involution These repetitions of words and concepts appear across the different poems in her work, from the political poetry … to the religious, cosmological, and philosophical poetry.”5 Blake and other critics have shown that Pulter uses this and related terms in complex senses, sometimes referring to the radically new Copernican cosmology, and often moving from recurrence to final permanent change. As for the political upheavals of her time, Pulter never calls them a “revolution” but her successive poems give a powerful sense of shocked responses to events which in turn seem to her “unparallelled,” (On the Horrid Murder of that Incomparable Prince14, line 2), and which indeed involved an unprecedented degree of popular involvement in public affairs. Her poems nonetheless seek parallels in history and mythology, both to find a secure framework in chaotic times and to deepen their poetic resonance.

In political terms, her poems are counter-revolutionary: Pulter fiercely attacked what seemed to her a chaotic Babel of new voices, culminating in the political revolution of 1649. And yet the confidence with which as a woman poet she offered her judgements on public affairs was something new. A generation earlier, male poets had often preceded political comments with an apology for venturing on mysteries of state normally confined to a small circle, and for a woman poet to enter on this terrain was still bolder. Katherine Philips prefaced an attack on a defender of the regicide with the declaration that “I think not on the state” — though she continued with a scorching critique of the republic, which was placed at the head of the 1664 and 1667 editions of her poems (see Exploration: Women Writers and the English Revolution). For her part, Pulter made no apologies, and like her Fidelia, she had no doubt about her equal intellectual standing with men. Unlike many contemporary women, she does not justify her speech by her association with her husband, about whom she is most conspicuously silent in the manuscript. (There is a striking difference from Margaret Cavendish and Lucy Hutchinson, whose husbands both encouraged their writing and were acknowledged in it.) While many royalists grounded obedience to the king in the Fifth Commandment, in children’s obedience to their father (the “patriarchal” political theory), the father of Pulter’s children, living and dead, is passed over. Her public poems are striking in their self-confidence and also in their literary self-consciousness, experimenting in forms and genres. While like other contemporary poets she aims to chronicle events somewhat in the manner of the new weekly newsbooks, she also engages with the more universal poetic ambitions of John Milton.

On the Fall of that Grand Rebel the Earl of Essex’s Effigies in Harry the 7th’s Chapel in Westminster Abbey62, responding to an event on 26 November 1646, begins with a traditional political language:

Using the classical image of the populace as the Hydra, the many-headed monster, Pulter presents the events as part of a traditional cycle, the revolution of Fortune’s wheel; at the end Essex’s fate is compared to that of his father, who had followed a traditional pattern of aristocratic rebellion against a sovereign to whom they owed allegiance. And indeed, as John Adamson has shown, Essex and other aristocratic Parliamentarians did look to medieval precedents.6 But Pulter noted some quite unprecedented developments:

This vivid phrase catches the combination of new military technology with the mechanisms of print: from the 1620s Parliament had begun presenting a series of proposals to the King which, though cast as humble petitions, increasingly challenged his ultimate authority, until it claimed the right to raise forces against the King’s. And in the 1640s what Pulter terms “pop’lar breath” (line 11) began to present petitions, whose appearance in print moved their impact beyond traditional elite circles, escalating demands for wider constitutional reform. Hertfordshire presented more petitions to Parliament than any other county, quickly backing them up with volunteer fighters.7 The first such petition was in fact presented by Arthur, Lord Capel, later to be celebrated by Pulter as a royalist martyr, but he quickly went over to the king when he saw the emergent power of the popular breath, and he campaigned out of the county. Even though there were many royalists amongst the gentry, the county’s proximity to London meant that Parliament retained control, and the Parliamentary committees in St Albans and Hertford were dominated by urban radicals and by members of the lesser gentry. This was indeed a revolutionary dispersal of those traditionally considered the county’s natural rulers. Arthur Pulter maintained neutrality, taking no role in any county committee while avoiding any sanctions as a suspected royalist; there is evidence that he had some Puritan sympathies (Ross, “‘This Kingdoms Loss,’” 140). Parliament’s dominance meant that there was no fighting in Hertfordshire, but the county saw more troop movements than anywhere else as soldiers passed through it to the north and east. Quartering of soldiers caused much grievance. Some troops were stationed at Pulter’s own Broadfield in 1644, in which year her son-in-law, John Forrester, signed a bill for the militia committee, so some of her family sustained Parliamentary connections.8

Broadfield (“Bradfield”) is to the north, in Odsey Hundred (marked in pink), with Cottered just to the south-east, and Cumberlow Green to the south-west, in Broadwater Hundred (marked in green). Maps of the period still prioritized river traffic over roads, but the major Great North Road (today’s A1) ran a little west of Broadfield.

Blaeu’s map of Hertfordshire, 1665, David Rumsey Map Collection, David Rumsey Map Center, Stanford Libraries, licensed under a Creative Commons License.

It is Forrester’s wife, Margaret, along with her sister Penelope, whom Pulter invites to “come, make haste away” to the country (The Invitation into the Country2). This poem gains remarkable force as the stock theme of the superiority of rural to urban life is gradually undermined. With the king in captivity to the army, and Broadfield itself not free from the military — “Enameled vales and crystal streams / Prove now, alas, sad Broadfield’s dreams” — the poem turns the invitation into a bid for comfort in shared grief, the landscape being tainted:

Vivid assonance and alliteration make the first couplet beat with a military pulse, and the brief pastoral reprise with nymphs in the shadows is broken with the sinister image of stalking soldiers. These are the effects that Marvell aimed at in “The Nymph Complaining for the Death of her Fawn” and in “Upon Appleton House” amongst other poems. Karen Britland has pointed out that Thomas Stanley’s circle of royalist poets, with whom Marvell would have some association, was based a few miles from Broadfield Hall.9 Whether, or however, Pulter and Marvell knew each other’s work, they both conveyed intense emotions about contemporary disruptions through mythopoeic distancing (another example being The Lark46). In The Complaint of Thames, 1647, When the Best of Kings was Imprisoned by the Worst of Rebels at Holmby4, the river is agonized at having been polluted by the London radicals, denouncing its “licentious [“Unrestrained by law, decorum, or morality,” Oxford English Dictionary 2] dames.” Pulter may again be thinking of petitioning: while this activity in itself alarmed conservatives, the emergence of petitions specifically by women in the 1640s caused especial panic amongst many Parliamentarians as well as royalists — though, as Ann Hughes points out, mainly when their claims were opposed on other grounds.10 In the poem’s remarkable climax, the Thames wishes that the whole city should “unpitied burn,” and ends with a fantasy of avoiding the city by going underground, bearing the rebels with her to eternal punishment. This unusual conclusion may have been suggested by Milton, who in the 1645 Poems twice alluded to the nymph Arethusa, transformed into a river to escape the river-god Alpheus and passing under the ocean to Greece. In Lycidas the myth signifies the beauty of pastoral poetry which runs under the sterner voices of Phoebus and St. Peter (Ovid, Metamorphoses, 5.574–641; Arcades, lines 30–31; Lycidas, lines 85, 132. Arcades was printed in 1645 immediately after the sonnet to Pulter’s sister, Lady Margaret Ley). The lyrical river poetry of classical and English topographical and pastoral verse here turns hellish.

Pulter’s title refers to the king’s being held in captivity on the orders of Parliament, an event she also commemorated in Upon the Imprisonment of his Sacred Majesty, That Unparalleled Prince, King Charles the First13. This poem is placed in the manuscript before a blank page, then followed by two poems on the death of Charles I, followed by a blank page and then by The Revolution16, so that political and universal changes are placed in some kind of balance. We do not know whether such blanks had any particular significance, but these two poems are linked formally by using rhyming triplets, and they deploy her characteristic vocabulary: Poem 13 rhymes “dissolved” and “involved” before the conclusion’s determined “To pray and weep for him I am resolved.” Ruth Connolly shows how tightly controlled and generically self-conscious this poem was, in contrast with more troubled and openly topical contemporary poems, and suggests that Pulter may have written such poems but not preserved them. Certainly, “far from being cut off from events Pulter had access to a constant supply of news and London newsprint and was constructing herself as an active combatant in the Royalist struggle to control the narrative of Charles’s defeat” (Ruth Connolly, Headnote to Upon the Imprisonment of his Sacred Majesty, That Unparalleled Prince, King Charles the First13). This poem was probably written in early 1647, soon after the king’s imprisonment. Shocking as Pulter found that event, what followed was still more unparalleled: in June 1647 a group of soldiers seized the king, fearing that the faction then dominant in Parliament would make a deal that would ultimately restore him to full power. The radicals of the New Model Army, often in collaboration with Leveller reformers, were now political players, sometimes resisting their own commanders.

When royalists rose again in the spring and summer of 1648, they were decisively defeated, one of their last stands being at Colchester, where Sir Thomas Fairfax took the city and on 28 August ordered the execution of Sir Charles Lucas and Sir George Lisle. Pulter’s neighbor and relation Arthur Lord Capel escaped this fate as an aristocrat and was imprisoned pending trial by his peers. Pulter’s poetry shares the shock of so many royalists at the treatment of their officers, and opens, like many topical poems of the time, as if she has just heard a piece of news: “Is Lisle and Lucas slain? Oh say not so” (On those Two Unparalleled Friends, Sir George Lisle and Sir Charles Lucas, Who Were Shot to Death at Colchester7). Once again she attacks the dominance of the “Hydra:”

The Independents are linked with religious, irreligious or ethnic Others to discredit them. Words of one, then two, then four syllables enact a swelling tide of disorder that breaks chaotically through the line-break at “all.” Once again, however, Pulter distances herself from many contemporary polemics, seeking to universalize Lisle and Lucas through myth and history.

As Frances E. Dolan points out (Curation: Commemorating the Dead), Pulter may well engage here with Lycidas, a poem meditating on a shockingly unexpected death and finding consolation in fame. Pulter’s repeated “Had they been there” of characters who might have saved him parallels Milton’s “Had ye been there.” One of them is Mars, who was “tried on the Areopagus”; Pulter is likely to have known, and strongly disliked, Milton’s Areopagitica with its passionate defense of the new democratic print culture. Pulter introduces as characters the Parcae or Fates, who draw out, measure and cut the thread of life; for a moment Clotho hesitates, enacting the time when it seemed possible that Lucas and Lisle might be reprieved, before Atropos “with her fatal scissors snipped them both.” The vivid alliteration and assonance here perhaps refines on Milton’s “Comes the blind Fury with th’ abhorred shears, / And slits the thin spun life” (Lycidas, lines 75–6: Milton, unusually, conflates the Fates with the Fury). Poetic admiration as well as Milton’s friendship with her sister could have drawn her back to Milton; it is even possible, though unlikely, that through her Pulter knew that Milton had recently addressed a sonnet to Fairfax “at y^e seige of Colchester.” Though the title indicates that the sonnet was written before the deaths of Lucas and Lisle, and it ends with a call for peace, the poets were poles apart: for Milton, Hydra’s heads are those of royalist rebellions. Nonetheless, Pulter was clearly an attentive reader of this poet, partly because for all their political differences, he shared her preference for more ambitious, mythopoeic verse over topical polemic.

Pulter was still absorbing the news about Lucas and Lisle when much more astonishing news reached her. With a speed that probably bewildered Fairfax as well as Pulter, the royalists’ defeat led to a new wave of radical petitions, a military purge of Parliament, and the trial and execution of the king on 30 January 1649. This last event surprised even many Parliamentarians, and came after a dizzying series of moves and counter-moves. As Presbyterians in the Commons moved to a new treaty with the king, and looked to be allowing royalist ringleaders like Capel to go free, Levellers and radical soldiers outside Parliament organized a petitioning campaign in support of a Remonstrance of the Army, which demanded exemplary justice on the king and leading figures in the second Civil War. A petition from Pulter’s Hertfordshire, where Levellers were strong, urged Fairfax as Pater Patriae to act decisively on the army’s demands.11 These petitions have often been read as “regicide” rather than “republican,” demanding Charles’s execution as a blood-sacrifice; but as Nora Carlin has shown, they called for wide political reforms and did not focus solely on the king. Some recent historians have denied that the call for justice necessarily demanded his death; even until the day before his execution, it is possible that some attempts were made to spare him provided that he made some kind of recantation. That, however, would have meant acknowledging limits to his authority which he would not accept.12 While English kings had been deposed and even murdered before, for a king to be put on trial by subjects was a radical break with the past, and even revisionist historians may allow that this was a political, if not a social or economic, revolution. Other historians are exploring the way the revolution opened up English trade and commerce on a global scale.13 The destruction of the English church, with freedom for different forms of Protestant worship, was another momentous break with the past.

Capel’s trial and execution followed quickly in the wake of the king’s. Pulter responded to these events in three very different poems. Their dates cannot be certainly known, as the surviving manuscript does not follow chronological order, but with the exception of Upon the Imprisonment of his Sacred Majesty, That Unparalleled Prince, King Charles the First13, the poems on Charles may plausibly have been written in the manuscript order. The Lucas and Lisle poem is immediately followed by On that Unparalleled Prince Charles the First, His Horrid Murder8, indicating that the original pages with these poems may have been kept together. On the Horrid Murder of that Incomparable Prince14, and Let None Sigh More for Lucas or for Lisle [On the Same (2)]15, follow together a little later, with a blank page separating Poem 14 from the preceding poem on the king in prison in 1647, and another blank separating Poem 15 from its successor. This may indicate that they had been written together on a folded sheet or “separate.” Poem 8 represents the poet’s shock at the regicide through an extended set of cosmological analogies, and declares that Parliament’s “devils” will.

The uncharacteristic “feminine endings” of the final couplet, with trailing eleventh syllables, seem to hint at doubts about the return of Charles II, which Pulter casts as an “Unless,” leaving the final emphasis on “frustrate.” In fact, by placing so much emphasis on the analogy between the king and the indispensable sun, Pulter has made it hard to imagine a royal restoration. Though “On That Unparalleled Prince Charles the First: His Horrid Murder” follows the Lucas-Lisle poem in the manuscript, the focus on the king’s centrality leaves no room for other royalists. Though she declares that “Our spirits exhale in sighs” (line 16), the poet does not otherwise explicitly voice emotion.

Poems 14 and 15 seem to represent a new departure. Poem 14 focuses on the expression of emotion, albeit in a carefully controlled form. Poem 15, connected by its opening to the previous poem, looks back to Pulter’s elegy for Lucas and Lisle and tries to relate her mourning for them and more recently for Arthur, Lord Capel, to the emotions aroused by the barely comprehensible regicide, coming at the end to a more confident prophecy of the return of Charles II (see Headnote to Let None Sigh More for Lucas or for Lisle [On the Same (2)]15).

In terms of political content, Pulter’s polemical poems accord with the royalists for whom there was nothing positive in the Revolution. Even here there are potential complexities: Capel was championed by the Leveller John Lilburne, for whom the establishment of the republic was a military coup betraying earlier promises of major democratic reforms (see Curation: Arthur, first Baron Capel (1604–49)). The Levellers had their own appeal to women, though to lower social ranks than the poets of the gentry: ten thousand are said to have signed a petition for Lilburne. Nevertheless, much as Pulter would have disapproved of these women, the confidence with which she articulated her poetic voice as a woman was something relatively new (see Exploration: Women Writers and the English Revolution). In her political poems, topical concerns never overbalance her recurrent concern for the craft of poetry; in subtle ways these poems tie in with other works in the manuscript of her collected poems. A historiography of the Revolution omitting women like Pulter will be incomplete.

Footnotes