The Insults of Defeat: Royalist Responses to Sir William Davenant's Gondibert (1651)

Abstract

The nose has a small but special place in the politics of interregnum England. Oliver Cromwell's, bulbous and red, gave royalist polemicists a conspicuous target for their discontent with Republican and Protectoral statecraft. For those satirists and newsbook writers of the period who remained loyal to the Stuart dynasty, Cromwell's nose revealed his manifold failings. Hyperactive and oversized, it indicated a prodigious sexual appetite ill-suited to a Puritan demagogue; as red as the copper used to heat hops in beer making, it revealed a fondness for drink and a family background in brewing, expressive of a conservative fear of social inversion, a terror that 'mechanicks' had finally seized the levers of power.1 Laura Lunger Knoppers has persuasively argued that the royalist satire which constructed Cromwell as 'Snout' or 'his High Nose' is part of a Bakhtinian semiotic system which situates the grotesque body of Cromwell in opposition to the classical, unified corpse of the dead martyr king, 'the ambivalent mirror image of the courtly body'.2 This article considers the direction royalist satire might take when the nose, appetite and politics under scrutiny belonged to a once eminent member of the Caroline court. Through an analysis of poems written in response to the publication of Sir William Davenant's epic poem Gondibert, it suggests that Davenant's nose played an important symbolic part in enabling some royalists to negotiate the realities of political defeat and make sense of the complex realignments and shifts in allegiance following the civil war.Even though the Hertfordshire royalist Lady Hester Pulter never met Davenant, she clearly thought that she knew his face. 'To Sir Wm D: Upon the Unspeakable Loss of the Most Conspicuous and Chief Ornament of his Frontispiece' is a 1650s poem which works through the meanings of William Davenant's nose, lost to venereal disease in the early 1630s.3 Written sometime after Davenant had been released from his imprisonment in the Tower of London as a royalist 'delinquent' in the English civil wars in October 1652, the poem is gently satirical, comparing the malformation of its subject's physiognomy with the corruption of a text or theatrical set. It is, however, acutely aware of Davenant's cultural importance in Cromwellian England - deformity and social standing mean he is 'Prodigious' - and opens with a sympathetic identification of the aristocratic woman writer with the disfigured cavalier:Sr:Extreamly I deplore your lossYou'r like Cheapside without a CrossOr like a Diall and noe GnomanIn pitty (trust mee) I think noe manBut would his Leg or Arm exposeTo cut you out another NoseNor of the Female Sex thers noneBut'd bee one flesh though not one BoneI though unknown would sleight the painThat you might have soe great a gainNay Any Fool did hee know ittWould give his Nose to have yor Wit.And I myself would doe the sameDid I not fear 'twold Blur my Fame.For who but that Bright eye aboveWould know m' twere Charity not Love.Then Sr your Pardon I must BegExcuse my Nose accept my Leg.4Davenant is a shared reference point, albeit a maimed one, amid the ruins of political defeat. Pulter's opening similes give voice to a continued impulse to read the times through him even if vandalism or neglect have rendered such an interpretive act impossible. He is a landmark which endures in the mind despite parliament's attempts at its obliteration, like Cheapside deprived of its cross in one of the most famous instances of parliamentary iconoclasm in the recent conflict.5As much as Pulter's poem values Davenant and his wit it is also wary of his disruptive potential. At first glance this appears to be a fairly straightforward denunciation of the moral laxity which led Davenant, a married man when he contracted venereal disease, to lose his nose in the first place. …