Royalism and Poetry in the English Civil Wars

Bestiaries of feeling: flies, snails, toads and spiders in Richard Lovelace’sLucasta: Posthume Poems(1659)

“…2 As James Loxley notes, it is the "continued self-possession" of the speakers which provides the "capacity for action that their frozen antithesis so strikingly lacks." 3 Wood's history suggests this space eventually proved illusory, for the poet at least. Like the beggar, Lovelace in his final days stood outside the law for want of possessions and position.…”

Cavalier and she-majesty: the cultural politics of gender in Jane Cavendish’s poetry

“…James Loxley reads a comparable absence from later Cavalier verse as a significant silence registering the king's absence and powerlessness. 21 When he does appear, however, he is celebrated, identified like Newcastle as a 'greate Example', this time of the ideal monarch. As a 'just president for Kings', he bodies forth both moral virtue ('your lookes teach piety') and political justice ('Your greater actions, knowes noe Tyranny'), and is duly acclaimed by his loyal subjects in the concluding line: 'And this all Tongues may justly speake of thee' (p. 12).…”

Poetry, portraiture and praise: Suckling and Van Dyck, Lovelace and Lely

“…This, though, leaves out something of the poem's occasion in ignoring the crucial relationship between painter and patron. 35 The work was commissioned and paid for by Algernon Percy, tenth earl of Northumberland and jailer of the king's youngest surviving children, Princess Elizabeth and Henry, Duke of Gloucester. It seems likely, too, that Northumberland commissioned a painting of them with the Duke of York that was transported from Hampton Court, where Charles I had been imprisoned in 1647, to the earl's residence at Syon House in April 1649.…”

“…Lely's double portrait is itself directly modelled on a Van Dyck painting of Charles and Henrietta Maria which was then hanging in the 'great closet' or 'queen's cabinet' at Somerset House (Figure 4); that royal residence, in which the queen had lived and which housed her Catholic chapel, had been -like the royal children -in the care of Northumberland since 1645. 39 Lely clearly knew the work, and given his relationship with Northumberland would have had opportunities to study it close up in preparing his own double portrait. It is possible that this painting is a lurking presence in another poem published in Lucasta, 'Amyntor's Grove', which would make of that a closely related -but interestingly different -work in ekphrastic epideictic.…”