‘Sing old Noll the Brewer’: Royalist Satire and Social Inversion, 1648–64

Abstract

One month after the trial and execution of Charles I, a royalist newsbook, Mercurius Elencticus, reported on the activities of the man widely thought most responsible. Having murdered his king and destroyed his country, Oliver Cromwell now, according to this account, intended to 'set up his Trade of Brewing againe'. Indeed, he apparently planned to apprentice the king's young son:For the other day, being in the presence of the Duke of Glocester, he stroak'd him on the head and like a mercifull Protector and faithfull Guardian, saith, Sirrah, what trade doe you like best? would not a Shooe-maker be a good trade for you? Shooe-makers are Gentlemen, I can assure you and so are Brewers too; and if you like either of those Trades, I will provide you a good master ... and move the Parliament to give you something (if you prove a good boy and please your Master) to set up your Trade.1When the young duke replied that he 'hop'd the Parliament would allow him some means out of his Father's Revenew to maintain him like a Gentleman and not put him to Prentice like a slave', Cromwell lost his patience: 'Nose Almighty makes answer; Boy, you must to Prentice, for all your Father's Revenue will not make half satisfaction for the wrong he hath done the Kingdom and so Nose went blowing out'.2The explosion of popular print in England in and after the civil war years included not only parliamentarian but royalist propaganda aimed at a broad political audience.3 From the mid-1640s, royalist satire gave Cromwell an increasingly prominent role.4 The events leading up to the regicide and the actual trial and execution of Charles I seemed to signal the disintegration of order in church, state and society. Royalist newsbooks and other popular printed texts not only disseminated accounts of disorder, but actively produced images of social inversion, reducing ideological opposition to mere class aspiration.5Recent historical work downplays the extent of class upheaval - in least in England - during the civil wars.6 Yet the image of social inversion, of rule by 'Mechanicks', loomed large in printed discourse. Satire on Cromwell as brewer uniquely evoked social disorder and disruption while at the same time exposing the hypocrisy of the publicly pious Lord General and (later) the Lord Protector. Yet while the brewer image evoked fears of class inversion among contemporaries, it appealed to a wide public in the unpredictable form of popular print. As such, it could also have more complex, even ambivalent effects.Oliver Cromwell, of course, was not a brewer. He was a gentleman who lived off his lands, except for a tenuous period when he sold his property and became a tenant farmer in St Ives before inheriting a maternal uncle's land in Ely.7 That there may have been brewers in Cromwell's family was convenient. 8 The figure of brewer - as opposed to, say, blacksmith or shoe-maker - was well-suited to stigmatize Oliver's morality as well as his social status. Satire on Oliver as brewer placed a prominent Puritan in the alehouses and popular festivities which, as David Underdown has argued, were a prime target of Puritan moral reformation.9 But the dominant emphasis was on class. In this satire, the rather nebulous category of 'brewer' was downscaled socially - to the rank of yeoman or 'mechanick', one who labours for day wages with his hands.10 Above all, the brewer image highlighted the fact that Cromwell was not the hereditary, royal heir to the throne.Cromwell the brewer was thus a comic inversion of Charles the tragic martyr- king and of the high aesthetics of the courtly beautiful.11 Such satire shows links with what Bakhtin has termed the aesthetic of grotesque realism, produced appropriately not in court masques and baroque art collections but in newsbooks, doggerel verse, playlets and ballads.12 This was royalist, rather than republican or radical satire; the image of Cromwell as brewer implicitly reaffirmed single-person rule by stressing how unfit Cromwell was to be that single person. …