On the King’s Most Excellent Majesty

Edited by Andrea Crow

“On the King’s Most Excellent Majesty” is a densely allusive and highly ambiguous political poem. While on the surface the poem implies an encomium to Charles I and his wife Henrietta Maria, the speaker’s expressed desire for political stasis continually comes up against the inevitability of cycles of dissolution and transformation that are so central to Pulter’s poetry. Even as the poem articulates a Royalist longing for the continuation of Charles’s reign, it simultaneously suggests that such resistance to change is as outmoded as the geocentric model of the universe. The poem develops comparisons also made elsewhere in Pulter’s work between Charles I, the sun god Phoebus (the Roman equivalent of the Greek Apollo), and Julius Caesar. Its engagement with figures from Roman literature is in dialogue with the also notably ambivalent final book of Ovid’s Metamorphoses, in which Caesar, like Charles and Henrietta Maria in this poem, is transformed into a star. Although this poem is written from a speaking-position located prior to the Interregnum, such ominous allusions to the death of a ruler suggest that this poem might have been written after Charles’s death. “On the King’s Most Excellent Majesty” also demonstrates the importance of women’s authority in Pulter’s work: Minerva is one of several recurring powerful female characters in Pulter’s collection. In this poem, she emphasizes the centrality of women’s roles in maintaining the state by creatively incorporating the myth of Apollo’s birth under the olive-tree that Minerva created, and by reworking Ovid’s depiction of a ruler’s apotheosis to include Henrietta Maria, treating her as equal to Charles in terms of her significance to the fate of the country. The queen is not mentioned in the title of this poem, but its structure serves to equate her importance with that of the king, turning from praise for Charles in the first eight lines to praise for Henrietta Maria, and finally collapsing both into a third-person collective “they” in the final eight lines.

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Victorious palm1
, triumphing laurel2
 boughs,
Encircles round3
illustrious4
Caesar’s5
 brows,
Whose valor fills with wonder future story
Whilst virtue crowns him with immortal glory.
Let bright Minerva’s6
olive tree7
still grow8
To shade his throne9
, whence truth and peace may flow
Down to our humble orbs10
; O let him live
Still to receive from Heaven, to us to give11
.
And let his lovely, loyal, royal12
queen13
To all succeeding ages still be seen
A most unparalled14
 pattern of true love,
Begun on earth, ending in Heaven above.
O let them in their shining spheres be fixed
And never with prodigious15
 meteors mixed,
But by the primum mobile16
 turned round:
Lasting as Delia’s17
 let their race18
 be found.
And when those glittering globes19
 are all dissolved,
Let them in endless glory be involved20
;
Till when, let grace and blessing from above
Descend on them, and all that do them love.