This political lyric responds to a crisis in Royalist representations of Charles I. In particular, it participates in the collective reshaping of the king’s image made necessary by military failure. In late April 1646 Charles I had slipped quietly, and in disguise, out of his wartime capital of Oxford and surrendered his person to the Scottish army at Southwell, near Newark, after a succession of defeats had ended the Royalist war effort. This act of personal surrender, greeted with confusion and puzzlement by Royalists, ended the first phase of the English Civil War. The English parliament and their former Scottish allies rapidly moved into negotiation with Charles, seeking his agreement for a new settlement of Church and State. Charles’ attempts to play off internal disagreements and rival proposals from either side foundered and in December 1646, exasperated by Charles’ cavilling, the Scots struck a deal with the English Parliament. The agreement saw the Scottish army withdraw from England and hand over Charles in return for payment of their pay arrears. This agreement, wrote Samuel Gardiner, the nineteenth-century historian of the Civil Wars, “was the transaction Royalist partisans were soon to qualify as the dispatch of a Judas who sold his Lord for money” (III.188). Even opponents were shocked: John Milton, in Eikonoklastes (1649), commented that “the Scots in England should sell thir King […] and for a price so much above that, which the covetousness of Judas was contented with to sell our Saviour, is so foule an infamy and dishonour cast upon them, as befitts none to vindicate but themselves” (VI.394). This depiction of the agreement proved vital when these partisans embarked on their controversial but highly successful transformation of the defeated monarch into a figure of Christ-like suffering.
Pulter’s poem draws on this comparison and other significant tropes to participate in this Royalist effort to rehabilitate Charles. Pulter’s poem alludes directly to the monarch having been “bought and sold” and if this is a topical reference, this poem may date to early 1647 (see note on date below). At this point, Charles had accepted the English Parliament’s invitation to journey south towards London, and was being met, according to one newsbook, with popular welcome, the crowds anticipating a political reconciliation between King and Parliament and an end to the burdens of war. Pulter’s poem does not participate in this mood of optimism. Rather, she composes a furious denunciation of the perfidy of both the Scots and the English, and frames the king in sacral and suffering terms as a “Job-like saint” (line 13).
Pulter’s confident framing of the monarch’s morally unimpeachable position offers a counterpoint to the more uncertain accounts by Royalist poets such as John Cleveland and Henry Vaughan, both of whom struggled to account for the King’s decision to surrender to the bitterly loathed Scots (see Loxley, Royalism and Poetry, pp. 138–147; Wilcher, Writing of English Royalism, pp. 246–249; Potter, Secret Rites, pp. 62–64). It may well be that Pulter also wrote poems in this vein and that she had copied out only those poems that sustained her manuscript’s carefully crafted presentation of tenacious and outraged loyalism. The tone of Pulter’s poem is markedly different from these poems and its affective force is channelled through the introduction of Nemesis in line 4. This allusion is carefully chosen. Broadly identified as the goddess of vengeance, Nemesis specifically symbolises indignation at wrong-doers who rejoice in their actions and her role is to punish their outrageous presumption. (See the Curation Nemesis for this poem.) Nemesis exercises her vengeance when wrongdoers are at the height of their apparent success, as indeed Parliament appeared to be, having secured the person of the king and seemingly concluded the war in victory. Contemporary characterisations of Nemesis acknowledged that whilst her actions are inevitable, the timing of them is uncertain. Pulter’s poem manages the waiting period by resorting to a patient endurance of wrongdoing in imitation, the poem implies, of Charles himself. Her allusion to Job is as carefully selected as Nemesis. The Book of Job, an Old Testament account of a faithful but afflicted servant of God, articulates its protagonist’s confusion, suffering, and uncertainty. The analogy with Job, oppressed but ultimately assured in his faith and innocence, enabled Pulter and other loyalist writers to fashion a portrait of Charles that elided any complex questions of the king’s political failings. Pulter’s selections of Nemesis and Job frame Charles’ opponents unambiguously as the ungodly hypocrites who afflict God’s servants. Together such representations of the monarch and his opponents would culminate in Eikon Basilike (1649), a book issued in the king’s name on the day of his execution (see Skerpan Wheeler, 1999). Its portrayal of a monarch martyred for his conscience, a depiction anticipated here by Pulter, proved extraordinarily successful and enduring (but see Potter, 1999).
StylePulter’s use of triplets in religious poetry is influenced by George Herbert, whose poetry serves as an important formal model for the development of her verse portrayal of Charles as a figure of Christ-like suffering. Pulter is one of a number of Royalist writers who find inspiration in Herbert for this purpose. Two analogues to Pulter’s poem draw directly on “The Sacrifice,” a poem Herbert composed using stanzas of iambic pentameter triplets and a refrain. “The Sacrifice,” written in Christ’s voice, builds on a medieval lyric tradition called the “Complaint of Christ” monologues (Wilcox, p. 94). An anonymous poem entitled “His Majesties Complaint to his Subjects” (see Gottlieb, 1991; Potter, p. 174) uses the same form and is clearly loosely modelled on “The Sacrifice.” The “Complaint,” a copy of which was bought by the London bookseller George Thomason in June 1647, echoes Pulter’s language of a monarch exchanged for money: “I have been truckt for, bought and sold, yet I/Am King (though prisoner) pray tell me why/I am removed now from Holdenby?” (ll. 57–59). “The Sacrifice” also served as a model for another poem in pentameter triplets written in the King’s voice, “Verses said to be composed by His Majestie upon his first imprisonment in the Isle of Wight” which portrays the monarch as a martyr-in-waiting (Gottlieb, p. 218; Potter, 174). Pulter’s poem clearly sits within this Herbert-influenced tradition but she innovates the convention by omitting the refrain, instead creating the required sense of dialogue and complaint through a series of deft borrowings from the Caroline court lyric “Aske me no more.”
“Aske me no more,” which Scott Nixon has convincingly argued is probably by William Strode, was printed in Thomas Carew’s Poems (1640) but circulated widely in manuscript both as a song and poem. The poem was set to music by William Lawes, one of the King’s personal musicians (see BL Add MS 31432, fol. 11, reproduced in Bickford-Jorgens, ed. English Song, 1600–1675, vol. 2). The allusion to this poem in her opening line makes a plangent return to the culture of poetry and music associated with Charles’ pre-war court, repurposing verses closely associated with the monarch and his servants as lines of protest and lament (for Pulter’s poetic networks, see Britland, “Conspiring with ‘Friends’”). Nixon notes that “Aske me no more” “commences with an imperative, responds to a question, constructs an argument, and attempts to persuade its addressee” (Nixon, p. 113). [See also the Curation to Poem 11 entitled Poems in Conversation]. Pulter gives this structure a judicial emphasis, outlining the charges against the King’s enemies before demanding their punishment. The speaker takes the first three stanzas to outline her grievance, and uses “then” to begin each of the final three stanzas, uniting the second half of the poem in a series of linked imperatives: “Then seeing they … /Let”; “Then let”; “Then aske.” The poem is largely unpunctuated and its use of enjambment mimics a speech delivered without pause and an imagined vengeance descending unchecked from the heavens. Its anger distinguishes this poem from the “sympathetic collectivity” that Sarah Ross finds in her analysis of Pulter’s pastoral complaint poems, where animated and feminised fluvial landscapes replicate and repeat the speaker’s woe (Ross, 183–202 (192)). The choice of Nemesis as the responsive female figure amplifies the poem’s anger, creating the expectation of future satisfaction for indignant loyalists. Yet the whole poem finally turns on instances of knowledge unspoken or unknown: the speaker’s request that their imagined interlocutor ask “no more” for answers; the uncertainty of precisely when the unrighteous will be punished; the perplexity of a monarch afflicted without cause. This crisis facing Royalism is diagnosed by the conclusion’s presentation of the speaker as simultaneously “dissolv’d” and “resolv’d,” unswayed in belief yet devastated by the disastrous turns that the wars had taken.
DateThe dating of this poem poses an interesting challenge with some implications for how we interpret Pulter’s war poetry. If it is composed around the time of the events it describes, it anticipates some key Royalist strategies for representing the monarch after his military defeat. However, it may have been originally composed at any point up to this, and it is unknown whether it was revised at any point before its copying into Pulter’s manuscript. Nonetheless, exploring the dating in more detail is important to order to position Pulter’s poem not only part of her own oeuvre but also within the larger Royalist “war of the pen” which was conducted with renewed force and vigour after the cessation of armed hostilities. Such participation complicates a vision of Pulter as an isolated figure. Positioning this poem in a precise political moment suggests that 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. As the note on context records, Pulter’s depiction of Charles as a proto-martyr was a mainstay of Royalist representations of Charles by 1648 and Pulter’s allusion to Parliament’s payments may be intended to develop the parallel Royalists had begun to draw between the suffering of Christ and the treatment of the King.
If Pulter’s references to the King are topical ones the earliest likely date for the composition of this poem is early 1647. The title’s mention of “imprisonment” means it postdates Charles’ surrender to the Scottish army in May 1646, but line 8’s reference to buying and selling the king may narrow the date further. The English Parliament made a financial agreement with their Scottish allies in December 1646, a deal that included the handover of the person of Charles. Payments were made on December 16, 1646 (Gardiner, Civil War, III.180), January 30, 1647 and February 3, 1647. The Complaint of Thames [Poem 4] specifically mentions Holdenby (or Holmby) House in Northamptonshire, some 55 miles from Pulter’s home in Cottered, where the king arrived, a de facto prisoner of Parliament, on 16 February 1647. The absence of any mention of Holdenby in this poem’s title might suggest a date of composition after December 16 and prior to news of the King’s arrival reaching Cottered. Given how close Holmby was to Cottered, it is likely that Pulter did not have to rely on printed information for news of the King’s arrival but Charles’ agreement to Parliament’s proposals to travel there was in print in London by 26 January (Thomason / E.372[8]). If Pulter was inspired by the King’s anticipated arrival to compose this poem, this makes the earliest likely date of composition to be sometime between mid-January and mid-February 1647, offering the intriguing possibility that the poem performs an act of vengeful lamentation on behalf of a monarch who was now imprisoned close to Pulter’s own home. Primary SourcesCharles I and others. Eikon Basilike. Ed. Jim Daems and Holly Faith Nelson. Peterborough, Ont.: Broadview, 2007.; The English Poems of George Herbert. Ed. Helen Wilcox. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2007.; English Song, 1600–1675, vol. 2. Ed. Elise Bickford-Jorgens. New York: Garland, 1986.; Lady Hester Pulter: Poems, Emblems, and The Unfortunate Florinda. Ed. Alice Eardley. Toronto: Iter Inc. and the Centre for Reformation and Renaissance Studies. 2014.; The Complete Works of John Milton, Vol. VI: Vernacular Writings and Republican Writings. Ed. N. H. Keeble and Nick McDowell. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2013.
Secondary SourcesBritland, Karen. “Conspiring with ‘friends’: Hester Pulter’s Poetry and the Stanley Family and Cumberlow Green.” Review of English Studies, NS, 69.292 (2018): 832–854.; Cust, Richard. Charles I: A Political Life. London: Pearson Longmann, 2007.; Gardiner, Samuel. History of the Great Civil War. 4 vols. London: Longmann, 1901–05.; Gottlieb, Sidney. “A Royalist Rewriting of George Herbert: ‘His Majesties Complaint to his Subjects’ (1647).” Modern Philology 89.2 (1991), 211–224.; Loxley, James. Royalism and Poetry in the English Civil Wars: The Drawn Sword. Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1997.; Nixon, Scott. “‘Aske me no more’ and the Manuscript Verse Miscellany.” English Literary Renaissance, 29.1 (1999): 97–103.; Potter, Lois. Secret Rites and Secret Writing: Royalist Literature 1641–1660. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1989.; Potter, Lois. “The Royal Martyr in the Restoration: National Grief and National Sin”. The Royal Image: Representations of Charles I. Ed. Thomas N. Corns. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1999, 240–262.; Ross, Sarah C.E. “Complaint’s Echoes.” Early Modern Women’s Complaint: Gender, Form and Politics. Ed. Sarah C.E. Ross and Ros Smith. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2020, 183–202.; Skerpan Wheeler, Elizabeth. “Eikon Basilike and the Rhetoric of Self-Representation.” The Royal Image: Representations of Charles I. Ed. Thomas N. Corns. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1999, 122–140.; Wilcher, Robert. The Writing of Royalism, 1628–1660. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2001.
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