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Chapter 5 presents a new account of Davenant’s involvement, alongside Waller, in the poetic and political culture of the Cromwellian Protectorate. It charts how Waller and Davenant allied with the courtly, civilian faction in the Protectorate, yet sought to persuade their patrons of the value of a more absolutist view of Cromwellian power. New readings of Waller’s A Panegyrick upon my Lord Protector, and Davenant’s drama, The First Days Entertainment at Rutland-House, show how these texts drew on sovereignty arguments, informed by Hobbes. Both poets drew increasingly on a language of civility to unite aristocratic power with artificial and absolute sovereignty. The final section focuses on Davenant’s appeal to the leading Cromwellian courtier Roger Boyle, Lord Broghill, identifying for the first time how close Davenant came to endorsing a Cromwellian monarchy.

Whereas most royalist panegyrists of the Restoration (including the penitent Cowley) reviled the ideological currents of the 1650s, Davenant, Waller, and their younger protégé Dryden continued to apply arguments from self-interest and the artificiality and contingency of sovereignty. They magnified Charles II’s exercise of clemency as the mark which betokened his sovereignty, while overriding church and parliament to ensure the reconciliation of ex-Cromwellians with the new regime. The second half of the chapter focuses on Dryden and Orrery’s heroic drama. It presents a new account of their engagement with Hobbes, and illustrates their precarious and artificial vision of sovereignty. The chapter challenges straightforwardly royalist readings of the heroic drama to show how the genre offered warnings and criticism of the regime—though this ultimately led Dryden to repudiate the sceptical model of sovereignty in his iconographical masterpiece of sacred kingship, The Conquest of Granada.