Houyhnhnm Land

By some minor miracle my proposal for the SHARP 2010 conference – this year’s theme: Book Culture from Below – was accepted, so I’m off to Helsinki next week. Still can’t quite believe it’s actually happening, but needless to say I’m really excited. I’m particularly looking forward to the two panel discussions on conceptualising book history from below and on fairy tales in popular print. My hotel has wi-fi, apparently, so I will try to do a post at the end of every day about what’s gone on.

My own paper is called ‘To Have No Newes Is Good Newes’: Newsbooks and Readers during the Early English Commonwealth, 1649–1650′ and is part of the Friday morning session, if any readers of this blog are there and at a sufficiently loose end to sit through it. Failing that, if anyone’s going and wants to meet up for coffee at some point then let me know!

By way of follow-up to yesterday’s post about pro- and anti-Cromwellian manuscript poems, here is a short manuscript libel about John Lilburne which I came across today. It was doing the rounds in the summer of 1658, but I suspect it may date back to the late 1640s. Bonus marks to the author for managing to combine both anagram and acrostic, two favorite devices of the seventeenth-century pamphleteer:

The anagram of John Lilburne
O J burne in hell

If a bold traitour gainst his god & King
Of money may have share, John Lilburne bring.
He kicks gainst King, gainst parish, gainst prophett too
No mischiefe under heaven that he’ll not doe,
Laws sacred, national, and most humane
Illegall are, if Jack (the Jew) complaine
Lend mee your aid, you limners that can paint
Brittaine’s white devils, or his black grime saint
Vaine, Mildmay, Bradshaw, Martin, and Jack Pim,
(Rouges most compleat) punies unto him.
None but himselfe, himselfe can parallell.
Expect thus by him, O J burne in hell.

The image is an anonymous engraving commemorating Lilburne’s acquittal in 1649: AN514450001, © The Trustees of the British Museum.

In mid-May 1653, a man pulled up at the Royal Exchange in a carriage, got out, and fixed a portrait of Oliver Cromwell onto the wall. The picture was titled ‘It is I’, and along with Cromwell’s coat of arms had this poetic inscription:

Ascend three thrones great Captain and Divine
By the will of Go (o Lion) for they are thine.
Come priest of God, bring oyle, bring robes, & gold
Bring crownes and sceptres, itts now high time, unfold
Your cloistered baggs, your state chests, lest the rod
Of steele & iron of the King of God
Chastise you all its wrath, then kneel and pray
To Oliver the torch of Zion starre of day.
Then shout O merchants, Citty and Gentry sing.
Let all men bare-head cry, God save the King.

Eighteenth-century sources say that the portrait was quickly taken down and taken to the Lord Mayor, who in turn took it to Cromwell. They claim that the Lord Mayor was apparently worried about Cromwell’s reaction, but that Cromwell laughed it off and told him not to worry about such trifles.

Whether or not Cromwell’s reaction is a true story, the portrait itself was undoubtedly real. Despite the relatively small number of people who would have seen the portrait before it was taken down, it managed to reach a much wider audience. The verses were copied down and circulated in manuscript: variations of the poem survive in the Clarendon, Folger, Rawlinson, Tanner and Harleian manuscript collections, and in George Thomason’s collection of manuscript ephemera (which is where the version above is taken from). It also prompted a satirical response in the form of another manuscript poem, including these verses:

Antichrists three Crownes, for they are thyne
To which we wish thee three Headds like Cerberus grim
For thou art fiend enough to be like him.
Ansd to each Head a face took, wish we thee,
For thou hast Nose enough for them all three.

My image is an engraving of Oliver Cromwell by Richard Gaywood after Pierre Lombart and Robert Walker, published by Peter Stent in the late 1650s: AN403221001, © The Trustees of the British Museum.