Cowley's Verse Satire, 1642-43, and the Beginnings of Party Politics

Abstract

Political parties which are recognized and named by the I68os were not much in evidence prior to the civil wars. Although conditions for party formation had been developing since the Reformation, the vertical model of king/subject held the cultural imagination and so defined political reality. By 1640, however, other models could be conceived: for instance, Oliver St John could speak of a ruling parliament as a 'great body politic' comprehending 'all from king to beggar',1 and verse satire of the i64os, as we shall see, provides some evidence that political activity could be perceived as a function of party organization. I will argue that satire of Horatian kind, in particular Cowley's second satire, helped to make the new political vision possible. The genre both reflects and alters its subject, and the form which it imposes brings an otherwise vague political structure into clearer focus. The phenomenon of party politics has been broadly described by a number of social and literary historians. Lawrence Stone, for example, puts the origins of political parties in the i57os and I58os, when 'a vacuum of religious zeal was created by the non-preaching, non-proselytizing, absentee clergy of the church established by Elizabeth' which 'was filled by two groups of dedicated and determined men who differed utterly in their religious loyalties and beliefs'. The first was made up of seminary priests, who built a post-Reformation Catholic minority. The other was a group of Puritan ministers and preachers, either Marian exiles returned or younger men whose muses were Protestant martyrs. Stone cites J. E. Neale's judgement that the Puritan lobby in the Elizabethan House of Commons was the first political party in English history, and adds that 'the congregations clustering around the Puritan lecturers in the urban churches of the 162os and 163os were the models for ideological party organization'.2 Mark Kishlansky, who studies political party formation through parliamentary selection, locates evidence for political organization in shifts from 'unified choice' candidates to contests. Kishlansky cites David Underdown's broad formula that 'between the Elizabethan era ... and the crisis of the Popish