Appendix: Notes on relations between individual works described in the Introduction

1. The exact relationship between the various poems enumerated in the Introduction is a subject that no doubt deserves further investigation. Here I offer only a few observations to supplement Estate Haan’s 1992 article on the subject. NOTE 1 Michael Wallace’s in Serenessimi Regis Iacobi . . . and Francis Herring’s Pontificia Pietas are so similar in conception, structure, narrative strategy, and particular details, that one must have been written with awareness (and to a large extent in imitation) of the other. Hence one of these two poets must have been the first to adapt Peele’s formula to the new situation of the Gunpowder Plot. But which was written first? Both are dated 1606, but neither was registered with the Stationers’ Company and so we are denied the evidence that would allow us to settle the issue beyond doubt. One consideration appears to suggest the priority of Herring’s work. Poems featuring this new model Machiavellian Satan ultimately depend on Tasso and are calculated to take advantage of the current English fad for that writer, whereas Tasso made no similar impression on Scottish authors and readers, and it is therefore likelier that Peele’s formula would first be applied to the Plot by an Englishman. NOTE 2
2. At lines 27f. of Wallace’s poem, Pluto summons his council:

So Pluto convokes his council at Gentili’s Plutonis Concilium 11f.:

And likewise at Thomas Watson’s Sixth Eclogue from Amintae Gaudia, 34f., we read:

Wallace describes James’ reign as a new Golden Age in a passage that begins (43ff.):

Compare Pluto’s alarm at the prospect of a new Golden Age to be precipitated by Elizabeth’s birth at Watson’s Sixth Eclogue 28ff.:

The ultimate model for such passages is Vergil, Eclogue iv. Cf. particularly 4ff.:

ultima Cumaei venit iam carminis aetas;
magnus ab integro saeclorum nascitur ordo.

3. The conception of Phineas Fletcher’s Locustaeis sufficiently similar to that of the poems of Wallace and Herring that its author must be presumed to have been familiar with both works. Indeed, the alternative title Pietas Iesuitica itself serves to establish familiarity with Herring’s Pontificia Pietas. On the other hand, the poem begins with an infernal council such as had been portrayed by Wallace, whereas there is no equivalent scene in Herring. Though he might have acquired this idea directly from Tasso (perhaps with a little help from John Donne), there is no similar ambiguity about the indebtedness of his demon Aequivocus to Wallace’s Abaddon, a character conceived in very much the same way, and who performs exactly the same function in the story (Campion introduced a similar, unnamed character in his equivalent passage inDe Pulverea Coniuratione I.75ff.). Likewise, the description of the House of Parliament and the prospective session there, coupled with the speaker’s advice about blowing it up at 554ff. resembles in Serenissimi Regis Iacobi 202ff. rather more closely than the equivalent passage at Pontificia Pietas 168ff. Therefore Fletcher seems to have been familiar with both earlier printed Gunpowder Plot poems. At least in its final form, his work may perhaps be described as an embroidery on those of his two predecessors, with a great deal more interest in showing how the Plot fit in with the strivings of the international Jesuit octopus, and a healthy admixture of satire.
4. In De Pulverea Coniuratione Thomas Campion’s insistent denial (II.13ff.) that there was any unusual portent on the night of November 4 - 5, especially one of a celestial nature, invites interpretation as a response to, and quite likely as an implied rebuke of, Wallace’s description of a solar eclipse at In Serenissimi Regis 279ff. Other signs of familiarity with that work are visible. Campion’s nameless hooded Jesuit who advises Satan that Parliament ought to be blown up (I.96ff.) bears a strong resemblance to Wallace’s Abaddon, as do the speeches these two figures deliver. Second, Campion’s pun on the name of Ignitius Loyola at I.305 is borrowed from line 159 of In Serenissimi Iacobi. An outburst of indignation at the Plotter’s misuse of the rite of Communion at I.282ff. looks like an elaboration on a similar expostulation by Wallace (255f.). Catesby’s speech at I.184ff., in which he reproves a confederate for being insufficiently daring and stresses the need to wipe out the entire royal family, rather than just James, appears modeled on Falsus’ similar advice at Herring’s Pontificia Pietas 148ff. Other details suggest familiarity with that work. The description of Fawkes’ trip to Belgium in May 1605 (I.563ff.) finds a match in Herring’s poem (116ff.) but is not mentioned in that of Wallace. The unhistorical detail (I.679f.) that the pretext for searching the Whynniard house (whence the Plotters tried to drive a tunnel into Parliament’s cellar) was to hunt for some garments that had been stolen from Queen Anne looks indebted to Pontificia Pietas 355f. The same may be true of the expression of anxiety that the Abbey might have been damaged in the explosion (II.30ff.), for Herring gives voice to a similar fear (250f.). More generally, the articulation of Campion’s poem into two Books resembles that of Herring’s expanded second two-Book version. For although Herring gives each portion of his work its own title, it is really a continuous narrative in two parts. The first deals with the hatching of the Plot and the arrest of Fawkes, and the second with the fate of the rest of the Plotters. It is probably no accident that Campion distributes his material according to the same scheme. Though the two works are quite different in detail (Herring’s sequel is much more mythologized and, like its predecessor, is largely devoted to anti-Catholic rhetorical excursions) they both contain some parallel episodes: Digby’s feigned hunt, and the fate of the Plotters when run to earth at Holbeach by a sheriff’s posse.
5. Like Fletcher’s Locustae, therefore, albeit in a very different way, De Pulverea Coniuratione is an expanded and elaborated rewriting of these two works. In part, this was accomplished by the addition of a welter of additional heavenly and infernal interventions in the course of the story. But the chief new ingredient was a new fidelity to the historical record, coupled with far more detailed and realistic characterizations of the Plot’s dramatis personae.
Ever since Grosart broached the idea, it has frequently been written that Milton’s primary source of inspiration was Fletcher’s Locustae and perhaps his accompanying The Apollyonists. NOTE 3 At first sight this idea seems no more than fatuous, inasmuch as Fletcher’s volume was not printed until 1627. NOTE 4 But plenty of Elizabethan and Jacobean literature circulated in manuscript form, and so the possibility that Milton read this Cambridge work cannot be excluded on a priori grounds. But there are more substantial reasons for rejecting Grosart’s theory. There are no obvious verbal echoes or close imitations of the sort that have allowed the conclusion that Fletcher and Campion had read and learned from the previous Gunpowder Plot poems of Wallace and Herring. And some of the narrative components in Milton’s poem are familiar from others in the series under discussion, but are either not to be found in Fletcher or at least not only in Fletcher. In short, Milton’s poem bears a certain resemblance to that of Fletcher, but his similarity looks generic rather than specific. I do not think there is any detail in In Quintum Novembris, Anno Aetatis 17, large or small,that is indisputably indebted to Locustae. While the possibility that Milton had read this work prior to its publication cannot be disproven, it is hard to think of any way in which the poem would necessarily have been different if Fletcher had never put pen to paper. It might seem most probable that he would have read works already printed, Wallace’s, Herring’s, or both, and this possibility can scarcely be excluded. But the strongest points of specific resemblance in fact involve Alabaster’s Elisaeis and Campion’s De Pulverea Coniuratione. There is, after all, nothing more far-fetched in the idea that Milton read these works than in the suggestion that he read Fletcher’s Locustae in manuscript, as he would have had to do. All three poems are of Cambridge provenance. When Milton’s infernal Summanus overflies England and looks down on the white cliffs of Dover (25f.), this replicates the similar view seen by flying Papacy at Elisaeis 294f.
6. Other narrative features may very well have been inherited from Alabaster. There is a plot move devised by Peele and adopted by Alabaster, in which there is a kind of chain reaction beginning with Pluto or Satan, involving either the Pope or at least Papacy personified, and ending with the recruitment of a human agent to do the crime in question. In both poems a rather satirical description of the Vatican is combined with this narrative sequence. Herring employed a rather simplified derivative of this same pattern, but Milton replicates it in a more fully developed form, linked to a description of Rome. The most economical explanation is that he acquired this from Alabaster. In their edition of Milton’s poetry Carey and Fowler pointed out the indebtedness of Milton’s description of the hideous place to which the Pope summons his agent (139ff.) to Vergil’s description of Hell gate surrounded by personified abstractions (Aeneid VI.273ff.), imitated by Spenser at Faerie Queene II.vii.21ff. NOTE 5 Alabaster&emdash;demonstrably a friend of Spenser&emdash;imitates the same model, with some quite similar details, in his description of Papacy’s home at Elisaeis 153ff. and the picture of the interior of St. Peter’s at in Quintum Novembris 60f. resembles that given at Elisaeis 203ff. Hope’s bedside speech to Catesby at de Pulverea Coniuratione I.162ff. bears a strong resemblance to Summanus’ similar speech to the Pope at in Quintum Novembris 92ff., considerably more so than the beginning of the only other bedside speech in this series of poems, Alabaster’s Elisaeis 346ff. When Deception appears to the sleeping Pope in Peele’s Pareus there is no speech, and the poems of Wallace and Herring do not contain equivalent scenes. And the monkish disguise adopted by Summanus at in Quintum Novembris 79ff. distinctly recalls the appearance of the nameless hooded fiend of de Pulverea Coniuratione I.85ff.; the physical resemblance is considerably closer to this figure than to Wallace’s Abbadon or Fletcher’s Aequivocus. NOTE 6
7. It also seems possible that Milton had read Campion’s Ad Thamesin. This is suggested in the first place by the evident echo of Ad Thamesin 7, deus aetherea qui fulminat arce, at 167 (despicit aetherea dominus qui fulgurat arce). Likewise, Milton’s description of the tower of Rumor at 169ff. is rather in the style of Campion’s Spenserian emblematic creations in that poem: the House of Dis, the House of Avarice, and the Fountain of Envy.

 

Notes

NOTE 1 O’Connoralso discusses the relationship of some of these works in introducing his edition of Alabaster’s Elisaeis.

NOTE 2 Only one consideration might seem to point to the opposite conclusion. Herring Latinizes Guy Fawkes’ surname as Fauxius, whilerring employs the form Falsus, and it might seem that the direct transformation of Fawkes into Falsus was neither natural nor self-evident, but would surely make good sense if a pun on the French faux is involved. But this would presume that an English writer could not manufacture a pun based on a French word. Fawkes is also called Faux in The Apollyonists, Phineas’ Fletcher’s English version of his Locustae, although in the Latin work he uses different punning etymologies of the name (618ff.).

NOTE 3 In his edition of Fletcher’s complete poetry, I.cccxviii. This is made in the course of a long essay largely devoted to arguing that Milton reflected Fletcher’s works in Paradise Lost, a claim that need not be considered here. Milton may of course have read Locustae and The Apollyonists after they had appeared in print.

NOTE 4 Grosart tried to anticipate this objection by alleging that “Fletcher’s poems were published in 1626-27 . . . and in truth the coincidence of date goes far to shew that the young poet had instantly possessed himself of the volume.” But Fletcher’s volume is unambiguously dated to 1627, i. e. not prior to March 25, 1627, because the old style calendar was in force, whereas Milton celebrated his eighteenth birthday on December 9, 1626. By the minimum possible reckoning, therefore, Milton must have completed his poem no less than three months before Locustae appeared in print.

NOTE 5 The Poems of John Milton (edited by John Carey and Alistair Fowler, London - New York, 1968).

NOTE 6 It is well known that the disguised Summanus is described in language borrowed from the verbal portrait of St. Francis in George Buchanan’s Franciscanus I do not think this excludes my suggestion.