"A Spirituall Song of Submission": The Eikon Basilike, Prayer and Poetry in a Seventeenth-Century Royalist Miscellany

Abstract

"A Spirituall Song of Submission":The Eikon Basilike, Prayer and Poetry in a Seventeenth-Century Royalist Miscellany Francesca Cioni In its textual and material history the Eikon Basilike tells the story of the textual and material cultures of the loyal Royalists who composed, produced, read, and shared it. Despite official suppression by Parliament, the Eikon appeared in dozens of different imprints between Charles' death and the Restoration, in various forms and formats, for specific readerly uses: folios featuring the full text with lavish engravings; abridged duodecimos for pocket reference; versions digesting the Eikon into commonplaces, advice, or rhyming devotional verse.1 The variety of such printed forms bespeaks the broad and wide-ranging appeal and use of the Eikon by late-seventeenth century readers. The proliferation of scribal copies that circulated more easily without attracting notice of parliamentary censors offers an intimate glimpse into not only readers' use of and relationship to the text, but also the operation of the literary, political, religious, and social circles through which the Eikon circulated. MS Eng 625, a copy of Eikon Basilike held at the Houghton Library, is one of such text.2 A substantial portion of the Eikon is included, closely following the 1649 edition (a copy of which is held at the University of Illinois); the volume also includes several printed engraved portraits of Charles I, and a handwritten prayer of contrition. The composition of this manuscript Eikon represents an act of pious commemoration of the deposed monarch; tracing its compilation can tell us much about the reception of the Eikon in the late-seventeenth century, and its role in establishing Charles' reputation and the textual practices of Royalist loyalism. [End Page 3] But the volume tells another story. If we rotate the codex 180° and open it from the other end, we find a miscellany of original religious, commendatory, and philosophical verse, comprising an ambitious range of styles: acrostics and anagrams; hymns and songs; and long philosophical poems on human sins and divine mercy. Three prayers that begin the volume, collected under the heading "Orationes miscellane," suggest their writer's political and ecclesiastical loyalism (including the prayers "For ye king" and "For ye church"). These are followed by a collection of apparently autograph poems: "The Returne," a song; an occasional poem on the poet's recovery from smallpox; an anagram and an acrostic to the collection's apparent patron Mary Midmore; a "Spirituall Song of Submission" a version of George Herbert's "Submission"; and four long poems: "The Review," "The Grand Deceit, and the Great Evill under the Sun," "Divine Mercies Miracles," and "Gods method in curing Sinners." The variety of poetic forms gathered in the miscellany not only serve to demonstrate their author's literary skill of their author, but also perform, in their diverse ways, his religious and political loyalty to a monarchy and a church recently restored. From the relatively direct expression of royalist and Anglican beliefs in his prayers and longer theological verse, to the verbal and literary dissection of his patron and of Herbert's verse in the praise poems and "Song of Submission," Shirley's verse gives textual form to these loyalties. The volume's reproduction of the Eikon Basilike and assembly of images of Charles are acts of political loyalty; but it also materializes pious devotion in its reformulation of scripture, and social relationships in its praise poems to Mary Midmore. These social, textual, religious, and political acts are performed through diverse means of reformulation of particular texts and figures: its collator Drew Shirley and its apparent patron Mary Mid-more as well as George Herbert and Charles I, whose works, together with the Bible, form the volume's source material. Drew Shirley, whose name appears on the first leaf of the Eikon, and in whose hand the miscellany seems to be written, is not a prominent historical figure. He is not published in print, nor is he politically active, and he is only recorded in this manuscript and in records of his matriculation at Exeter College, Oxford in 1656, his will, and his burial.3 The latter both occur at Chiddingly, Sussex in 1707, in the same village where one...