'A Storm of Lamentations Writ': 'Lachrymae Musarum' and Royalist Culture after the Civil War

Abstract

ABSTRACT This article examines in detail a printed collection of elegies, Lachrymae Musarum, published to mourn Henry Hastings, a young man who died just after the execution of King Charles I. Including elegies by Andrew Marvell, Robert Herrick, Mildmay Fane, and John Dryden, the volume represents a compelling insight into Royalist culture after defeat in the Civil War. The article argues that the volume taken as a whole represents both profound mourning for what has been lost and also an expression of hope for the future. Lachrymae Musarum, a collection of elegies published to mourn the young aristocrat Henry Hastings, who died from smallpox on the eve of his wedding, was published soon after Hastings's death on 20 June 1649. The news of this death evidently provoked mourning beyond his family and their circle, because some (Marchamont Nedham, Andrew Marvell, and a group of Westminster schoolboys including the young John Dryden) sent in poems of condolence that were included in a postscript to the volume. Henry was the only son of Ferdinando, Earl of Huntingdon, and the main body of the volume contains elegies written by friends and associates of this powerful Midlands family. These included aristocrats such as Mildmay Fane (Earl of Westmorland), Lord Falkland, Sir Arthur Gorges, and Sir Aston Cokaine; (1) the writers John Hall, Richard Brome, and Alexander Brome; and several clergymen, and former clergymen, including Robert Herrick, three of the Pestel family, Francis Standish, John Cave, and John Joynes, a Hastings family chaplain. Just over a year after Hastings's death, Joynes would preach a joyous sermon on the baptizing of Theophilus Hastings, who continued the Hastings family line after the tragic death of the family's only son. (2) However, what Joynes referred to as the 'late inestimable loss' of Henry Hastings clearly became an occasion for considerable public mourning, and there is a pressing sense in Lachrymae Musarum that Hastings's death had implications beyond the family circle. As Francis Standish urged: Forbear, forbear, Great house of Huntingdon, T'engros this Grief, as if 'twere all your own: The Kingdom has a share; and every Eye Claims priviledge to weep his Elegie. (3) Indeed, the public demand for the volume must have exceeded expectation, as a second edition was printed in 1650: this death, or more accurately, this occasion for public mourning, was one in which, it was perceived, the kingdom had a share. A broadside depicting Henry's tombstone was published (4) and Henry's grandmother, Lady Eleanor Douglas, herself a notable poet, did not contribute to Lachrymae Musarum, but instead published Sions Lamentation (1649) for Henry. (5) The reason for this considerable public grief for a young man who had not, in fact, made any remarkable personal achievements was, in part, the close proximity of his death to the regicide: Francis Standish makes this clear when he asks 'What though our loss be great; so great that none | In our Age has exceeded it, but One' (p. 27). Despite being cautious in his wording, Standish leaves the reader in no doubt that Charles I's execution is also in his thoughts and, in this way, Henry's death becomes bound up with lamenting the regicide. Indeed, such elegies as there were for Charles closely resemble elegies in Lachrymae Musarum, lending weight to the suggestion that Hastings was mourned, at least to some extent, as a surrogate for Charles. (6) More than this, however, Hastings's death came to stand, as John Joynes put it, as a 'Cypher for these many yeers'. (7) As a promising young aristocrat, one who was, according to his grandmother, 'inclining to the Royal party' (p. 8), Hastings's death came to represent the Royalist war dead and, more widely, was emblematic of a court culture that seemed to be on the verge of extinction. (8) Some of the poems in Lachrymae Musarum might seem, as Andrew Marvell puts it in his poem, 'disconsolate', (9) seeing the death of Hastings as the final signal of the end of an already beleaguered Royalist culture. …