Representing Revolution in Milton and his Contemporaries: Religion, Politics, and Polemics in Radical Puritanism & The Writing of Royalism 1628-1660. (Reviews).

David Loewenstein. Representing Revolution in Milton and his Contemporaries: Religion, Politics, and Polemics in Radical Puritanism

Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001. xiii + 413 pp. $59.95. ISBN: 0-521-77032-7.

Robert Wilcher. The Writing of Royalism 1628-1660

Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001. xii + 403 pp. $64.95. ISBN: 0-521-66183-8.

These two books, though polar opposites in politics, share not only a publisher but a critical perspective. Both are literary studies firmly rooted in history, indeed in a traditional sensibility of history-as-politics (and, of course, early modern politics' twin, religion). Both are sparing in critical mots de jour and gestures to "theory." If many historians will welcome this rapprochement with "history" at least as they and these writers understand it, others may not. To judge from the program of the 2001 meeting the North American Conference on British Studies, many early modern historians have run right by these would-be colleagues and have embraced the issues of "cultural studies." Whole panels (some of them tantalizing) engage "the politics of feasting," "gender, class, and consumer behavior," "sight, smell, and taste," "social and cultural space," "masculinity," "working women," and "early cultures of the object." Has the mad dash to the middle led some on each side, as it were, to overshoot the mark?

Wilcher's book, in particular, will raise that question. There should be no caviling at his determination to treat with equal attention all manner of written (and some iconic) manifestations of royalism -- satires, printed texts of parliamentary speeches, occasional news pamphlets and periodic newsbooks, argumentative tracts, as well as the Cavalier verse of one's expectation. Nor can there be any objection to his laudable commitment to learning from the historians, rather than merely proof-texting from them. But Wilcher has learned his lessons so well and so tightly chronologizes his contexts that his chapters usually begin with, and often return to, extended narratives of a sort more often encountered in a standard textbook. The result is often satisfactory enough from a historian's point of view, though developed almost entirely from secondary sources and ineluctably somewhat sterile. For this reader, though, the question is simply "why?" Could not Wilcher's own contribution have proceeded more directly?

At Wilcher's table, where chronology is always trumps, the poets' progress is always first filtered by the public context. Figures with long activity trajectories -- Sir John Denham and Abraham Cowley most notably, and also William Davenant, John Cleveland, and Francis Quarles -- come into and out of the story at intervals. For example the successive versions of Cooper's Hill receive their treatments at the presumed date of their reworkings. Along with the press of events upon authors, there is also the matter of generic transformation, the "gradual development of different kinds of writing" to address the "changing political environment" (6). Wilcher points to the emergence of royalist satire in 1641-2, a genre in this case driven by social and religious contempt, as a counter to parliamentary publicists' fear-mongering.

Unashamedly Wilcher intended this to be a useful book, a self-professed "survey" (2) rather than a display of critical pyrotechnics. Perhaps it will sidestep the usual, though unfair, fate of such efforts: sub-specialists will tend to applaud the whole even as they stab their nibs at the parts. Wilcher's first chapters will strike some as spotty and not as well informed of the key details as later ones. For example, he apparently does not appreciate the critical role of the events of 1628-9 in forming the first stratum of gentry "royalism," which emerged in such tracts as Kynaston's "True Presentation" and Filmer's Patriarcha, and he seems wholly unaware of the non-, indeed anti-Laudian conformism (identified most notably with Archbishop John Williams) to which Charles turned after Laud's fall. Equally, though, Wilcher can be penetrating, sometimes within the boundaries of a survey, occasionally beyond. More clearly than in James Loxley's Royalism and Poetry in the English Civil Wars: The Drawn Sword, Wilcher isolates the often sanguinary edge of royalist resistance in its heady days. Cowley's The Civil War, he suggests, is a timeline of one partisan's response to royalist fortunes at battle, from the still boyish prodigy's first fears about bloodshed to a phase of determination to praise his side's "glitt'ering Swords" to a sense of futility and loss following the death of his Great Tew patron, Falkland. Wilcher's treatment of the role of Humphrey Moseley as publisher-coordinator of the royalist verse of the 1640s is similarly shrewd. Most intensive, and successful, is the treatment of Henry Vaughan, with its suggestion that by the end of 1650 Vaughan was girding up again for sedition.

There are some blind spots. This reader would have liked a more extensive examination of the royalist responses to the Engagement and moral and practical challenges posed by the victors upon the defeated along with a consideration of the divisions within the royalist camp, of which Wilcher is aware but with which more could have been done. Studies of partisans, of course, are hard to inoculate from partisanship; this may underlie other limitations, as, for example, the wholly uncritical acceptance of the royalist view of the 1630s as halcyon days. But this, in the main, is a reliable and very helpful study. One word that suggests itself is magisterial.

Partisanship looms even larger in David Loewenstein's examination of the religious and political radicalism that he seeks as context for John Milton's great poems. The book comes in two parts. The first develops, in successive chapters, the religious and political radicalism of John Lilburne, Gerard Winstanley, Abiezer Coppe and Anna Trapnel, and George Fox, and concludes with its first sally into "literature," on Marvell's responses to radical polemic. The second part reads Milton's major poems in the context of the earlier material. Until the chapter on Marvell, it must be said that Lowenstein's presentation is in several respects quaint, a sort of reading that was common from the 1930s to the 1960s. It announces, as if it were a novelty, that religious perspectives shaped politics (2-3) and that this has somehow been "ignored"; it uncritically but endlessly repetitively assures us that an entity called "radical Puritanism" included, somehow, precisely those who broke with radical reformed religion's basic tenets -- predestinarian soteriology, the leadership of a learned preaching clergy, godly discipline, the centrality and historicity of Scripture. Conflating shrillness and verbal violence with real conceptual radicalism, Loewenstein misses or slights the rejection of Puritan orthodoxy by figures like Walwyn (who is scanted here), and by Coppe, Winstanley and Fox. But above all, Loewenstein's argument is based upon the old assumption that the events of the 1640s and 1650s constituted a capital-R reified "Revolution" like unto the French and Russian, and its corollary that a figure's radical bona fides is his conformity with later ideal types of The Revolutionary. In ways large and small, Loewenstein will lead his less informed readers astray. Lilburne's personal courage as well as his cantankerousness and exhibitionism are not in themselves markers of radicalism; one hears nothing in this account of Lilburne's repeated and sustained rapprochements with royalism. Nor does Loewenstein seriously entertain whethe r the Levellers' opponents' iterations of the Levellers' socially destructive anarchism had any truth -- Lilburne must be, tout court, a bourgeois liberal. (One suspects that Loewenstein's account owes far too much, even to faulty bibliography, to a dated and unreliable biography, Pauline Gregg's Free-born John, published in 1961.) Winstanley, we are told three times (48, 60, 71), "converted to communism," a phrase that reveals much more about Loewenstein's perspective than about Winstanley. Winstanley's proclamation of the universal treasury of the earth and his bands of squatting Diggers had no sense whatever that there was such an entity (sect, doctrine, party) to join. No less revealing is his apparent surprise that the Diggers "like the early Quakers" were "rejected by the larger culture" (49). While Loewenstein does appreciate Winstanley's "mythopoeic" (50-51) manipulation of Scripture and appropriately stresses his determined anti-clericalism, what is lost is much that makes Winstanley such an astonish ment.

By contrast, Loewenstein has something to offer in his insistence upon the omnipresence of the prophetic and often apocalyptic in the language of most his chosen radicals. Well it may be that Coppe, Fox, and Winstanley were refashioning this idiom of rage; it is nonetheless true that they resorted to it even when they were at cross-purposes with its more orthodox applications. And while Loewenstein mistakenly sees this idiom as distinctively "radical Puritan" -- it was in fact shared more broadly across the Protestant spectrum -- he is surely right to see Milton as participating in it. Lowenstein's very useful encounter with Milton's anti-Irish, anti-Catholic Observations upon the Articles of Peace with the Irish Rebels (1649) establishes the garden-variety anti-Irish, anti-Catholic rage of Milton's "most disturbing prose work" (193). Loewenstein then turns to the major poems. Paradise Lost is read, as others have done, as both activist and political. Loewenstein also goes to unusual lengths to establish the falsity of Satan's surprising republicanism. Treading in Blair Worden's tracks, Loewenstein insists Satan's rhetoric is a trick of mimicry and usurpation. So largely it is, but there is another reading possible: that Satan's republicanism arises also from the egalitarianism of hubris, Satan's equation of himself with God. Predictably but less convincingly, Paradise Regained receives a similar reading. Not pacifist, quietist, retreatist, Loewenstein insists, it is militantly inward, with a kinship to Quakerism and "apocalyptic subversiveness" (243). The problem here is that Loewenstein, in denying the quietist orientation, precisely makes its case, for what else is quietism but a militant, inward expectation that God (or History) will sort out in time what mere human agency at the moment cannot? But it is with Samson Agonistes that Loewenstein's scheme comes into its own. The poem, as Loewenstein brilliantly reads it, is indeed "The Saint's Revenge" (chapter title), about a "spectacular act of 'horrid' destruc tion" (270). Even at the time of Loewenstein's writing, Loewenstein acknowledged the poem (and kindred expressions in other authors) "unsettling" (270, 280, 291) and "disturbing" (273, 279), as must be the murderous "activism of the vengeful godly saint" (290). Unlike Loewenstein, I write in the wake of the terrorist attacks, which confirm in their way the full hideousness of Milton's fantasy of exterminatory hatred upon "all who sat beneath" (line 1652). Even the details ring home: Milton subtly shifted the terms of the Samson story in Judges to exclude personal motives and denied the implication of suicide. Like the modern terrorist "martyrs" who deny their deaths constitute the sin of suicide, Milton's Samson's death is only "by accident" ("The argument"; the sense here is Aristotelian), the consequence of "dire necessity" (line 1666). One can only wonder whether Milton (and Loewenstein) recalled at this juncture the lines of Paradise Lost (Book IV, 11. 393-4): "So spake the Fiend, and with necessity, I Th e Tyrant's plea, excus'd his devilish deeds."