The Shakespearean or early modern pumpkin

For a malapropism:

Clown. …for mine own part, I am (as they say, but to perfect one man in one poor man) Pompion the great sir.

Berowne. Art thou one of the Worthies?

Or, of course, for rotundity:

Or ‘We’ll use this unwholsome humidity, this gross-watery Pumpion’

Merry Wives of Windsor III. iii. 38

For all kinds of jokes:

“The Welsh-man purchased the Pompion for the Mare’s Egg and got never a Colt from it” (Richard Boulton, Richard, A letter to Dr. Charles Goodall (1699)

In cookery:

“Why a piece of Pompion being put into a Pot wherein Flesh is boyling, makes the same tender. A piece of Pompion put into a Pot in which Flesh is boyling, doth make the same more tender than ordinary.

The Reason is, because the Pompion abounds with strong Spirits, and a sowrish Juice: Now it is manifest that all sowr things are endued with a resolving virtue, which daily experience shews us concerning Vinegar. And PLINY assures the same concerning sharp pointed Docks, viz. that being boyld with Flesh, it makes it more soft and tender; because its sharp and corroding quality doth dissolve the Texture of the Fibres.”

~ A worthwhile tip, and from no less a source than An entire body of philosophy according to the principles of the famous Renate Des Cartes in three books, 1694.

And of course for carving. Assembling this little collection took me to The Essex champion, or, The famous history of Sir Billy of Billerecay and his Squire Ricardo (1699), which is a piece of sub-Quixote buffoonery by William Winstanley. Sir Billy having taken to delusions of knight-errantry and picaresque chivalry, an Innkeeper induces a groom to try to frighten their credulous guest. The groom dresses in a bear’s skin, and carries “on his shoulder a lighted Candle in the Rinde of a Pompion, cut out with the resemblance of Nose, Eyes, and Mouth, it looked most dreadfully.” But Billerecay Billy summons his resolution, and smites him hard enough to split the pumpkin and extinguish the candle. The groom thinks the cracking noise was his own skull, and flees, leaving Billy convinced that he has vanquished the devil.

Or the OED gave me W Kenrick, Falstaff's Wedding (1760): “Hast thou never seen a pumpion, fantastically carv'd and set over a candle's-end, on a gate-post, to frighten ale-wives from gossiping by owl-light?” But that's out of my period. That's my pumpkin for tomorrow, the gourd of Avon.

"I'll burn my books!" - John Allen, stationer, does just that, 1657.

John Allen's Printer's Mark. In some printing jobs, he collaborated with Richard Noon, whose sign was the seven stars.

I have been looking at the case of the printer John Allen, author of Judicial astrologers totally routed, and their pretence to Scripture, reason & experience briefly, yet clearly and fully answered, or, A brief discourse, wherein is clearly manifested that divining by the stars hath no solid foundation ... published by J.A. for publick good, Printed for John Allen (1659).

This is very typical anti-astrological writing: haggling over the Bible texts they always cited for and against astrology (like Jeremiah 10, 2), busily explaining away Daniel in the Book of Daniel as something completely different from the Chaldeans also consulted by Nebuchadnezzar.

Allen, a man rooted in the book trade, knowledgably deplores William Lilly’s massive sales: that his almanacs sold 30,000 copies a year, and Allen imagines the problem likely to be caused if all these diabolically deluded readers of astrology, morally awakened, burned all these almanacs. He does indeed appear generally interested in book burning: he cites approvingly Acts 19, 19 “Many of them also which used curious arts brought their books together, and burned them before all men”. Nor is he very far off from recommending the burning of astrologers, but he settles, as the witch-hunters sometimes reluctantly did, for hanging, after the provisions of the 1604 statute against witchcraft.

Like many of these denunciations of astrology, Allen’s work is particularly interested in the converts, those who did practice the art, and then recanted of it: ‘holy Master [William] Perkins’, and the much cited case of Henry Briggs, ‘Geometry-reader at Oxford’ (the Savile professor of Mathematics, who produced tables of logarithms):

“… Mr. Briggs left that study. Yea, he affirmed that he would undertake to the skilfullest Astrologer in the world, that let him set down any conclusion touching either man or State, yea, or weather, and he would prove that it would fall out so, and that it would not fall out so, from their own Rules and Principles: He said also that his opinion was, that they that addicted themselves to the practise of divining Astrology, the Devil did at first lend his secret assistance, and at length by degrees, if God prevented not, entice them into a contract.”

 The first part of this does sound quite plausibly what a professor of mathematics might have said: that astrology has just too many variables. But when Allen claims that the Savile Professor of Mathematics came to believe the study of astrology led on to a diabolic pact, we might suspect some editorializing, in line with his own approval of drastic measures.

What’s behind all this becomes apparent in the second edition of the work, as put out by Allen ‘for publick good’. I imagine he might have been giving copies away, and hence the rapid second printing of an unremarkable book, which he’d have had done in house, ‘The Rising Sun in Paul’s Churchyard’. For we arrive at confession time:

“The former Part of this Book finding a general acceptation with the Judicious, (and Gods wonderful deliverance of me from so great a snare, when I was for many years a Student in this abominable practice of Judicial Astrology)…”

For this is the same John Allen who had published John Gadbury’s Coelestis Legatus: OR, The Coelestial Ambassadour Astrologically Predicting the Grand catastrophe that is probable to befall most of the Kingdoms and Countries of Europe in 1656, Magia Adamica (in the same year), and Astrology proved Harmless, useful, Pious – the wildly unstable Richard’s Carpenter’s sermon to the Society of Astrologers,  1657.

What happened to John Allen is amusingly told in a pro-astrological pamphlet of 1660, A brief answer to six syllogistical arguments brought by Mr. Clark, minister of Bennet-Finck, London: against astrologers, and astrologie, London : Printed for Samuel Speed, at the sign of the Printing-Press in Pauls Church-yard, 1660.

“This is the nativity of Mr John Allen, Stationer, as himself hath made it known to several: it was rectified by diverse eminent Accidents; from which I shall excerpt one onely, which I adjudge the greatest of all, viz. On Friday, August 21. 1657. he burnt and destroyed in printed books and Manuscripts, the worth of one hundred pounds, and upwards: in the height of this (strange) action, his Zeal (or Folly rather) wrought so furiously, that for haste to destroy his Books, he had nearly set a house of one of his Neighbours on fire. When the man came to himself, (for without question, he was then in a Frensie) he reported that several Presbyterian Ministers excited him thereunto. Whether that be true, I know not; but it is most certain, destroy his books he did: and in all probability (had not worthy and ingenious persons of his own profession, interposed their Moderation and reason) he had in the heat of his Enthusiastick Zeal, destroyed most (if not all) of his Estate."

The writer obviously knew Allen in the days before his dramatic conversion, and smugly points out that astrologers had foretold something like this happening. Nor does he miss the readily made joke about the Moon being in the ascendant when Allen performed his lunatic act:

“Now to shew Mr Allen a reason in Art for this his unhappy misfortune, (although he cannot deny but he was forewarned of it near three full years before it happened unto him) I shall take the boldness to acquaint him, that then the moon was directed to the Quartile of the Sun, and the place the direction happened in, was the ascendant…”

£100 worth of books was certainly a big bonfire: four thousand books if they were at the usual sixpence, though almanacs seem to have gone for half that. It was a big step for a stationer to make, and a decisive shift out of a market whose lucrative nature Allen knew well.

Joseph Beaumont allegorises Hearing, complete with ear wax: Psyche, 1648

I have been lecturing on George Herbert, and this led me to Joseph Beaumont’s Psyche (1648 and 1651), where there is a remarkable tribute to Herbert’s poetry placed in a context which shows Beaumont to have been sensitive at some level to Herbert’s own moral difficulties about poetry (‘How wide is all this long pretence!’).

Beaumont wrote much of  Psyche during 1647 when ‘The Turbulence of these Times having deprived me of my wonted Accommodations of Study; I deliberated, For the avoiding of mere Idleness, what Task I might safeliest presume upon, without the Society of Books’. The work (as its title indicates it will be) is a psychomachia: ‘I endeavour to represent a Soul led by divine Grace, and her Guardian Angel, (in fervent Devotion,) through the difficult Temptations and Assaults of Lust, of Pride, of Heresy, of Persecution, and of Spiritual Dereliction, to a holy and happy Departure from temporal Life, to heavenly Felicity.’

Beaumont's dedication of his work!

Psyche sounds heavy work, then, but it actually goes rapidly along. As the soul, Psyche is female, and in Canto II undergoes a trauma of temptation nearly yielded to: she goes into a grove, where her conscience falls asleep, and she is assailed by a boar charging straight out of Venus and Adonis, then is rescued into greater danger by Aphrodisias, who seems close to the hyper-verbal wooer in Shakespeare’s A Lover’s Complaint. He lays on thick a tale of her being his destined love, and of offers he has refused in anticipatory fidelity to meeting her at last:

So spake the glorious Impostor; and

Granting commission by a graceful kiss
To his own snowy yet lust-burning hand,
Sent it to treat with Psyche's , and to press
With feeling eloquence that Project He
Hop’d would conclude in tactile villainy …

(What a cad!). Psyche is wavering badly. The boar’s tusk has already torn through her ‘dainty gown’, and she’s unduly receptive: ‘Forgetful Psyche now inchanted quite / By these harmonious Wiles, set ope her breast / To the loose fancies of unclean Delight”, to the extent that she is about to yield to sex before marriage (‘We did wed above’, Aphrodisias has alleged, so they have no need for ‘human ceremonies’) when her conscience wakes up, and she runs home to repent.

Of course Beaumont could not easily have depicted a male soul. But it is remarkable how fervently this celibate Cambridge don throws himself into the assault of the male seducer upon the soul, whose female nature, via the connection with Adonis, can so readily suggest the maidenly male.

Seduction is a very male, and very literary business. Aphrodisias has all the skills of amatory literature: “with no less success
/ I tun’d my heart to those soul-conquring Charms / Which flourish in smooth Numbers”, he boasts.

After this early trauma, Psyche turns very devout indeed, and by Canto IV, ‘The Rebellion’, the senses have had enough of her austerity:

A knot of friends with Her together born,
And brought up under one soft roof of skin,
Began to stomach that imagin’d Scorn,
She heap’d on them…

First, Opsis, sight, speaks of the joys she could offer, and complains of the way she is disregarded

“To some sad blurrèd Prayerbook she ties
My cheerly Spotless sight; or forceth me
To stare so long on th’unregarding skies,
That with dull seeing I forget to see…”

We are very much in Spenser’s Castle of Alma. The interesting part comes when hearing takes over:

She (Opsis) ending thus; impatient Acoe,
Who thought her Sister’s Speech by all too long,
Step’d back into their common Treasury
Kept by Anamnesis, (where lay the throng
Of their ideal wealth,) and bade her make
Ready her Train, whilst she its Prologue spake.

Beaumont is far more anatomical than Spenser ever tried to be: here’s the dwelling of Acoe, complete with ear-wax:

My House is secret; cautious winding ways
And privy galleries into it lead:
By which abstruse state I my glory raise
 …. The outward room’s oblique, that violent Sounds
May manners learn, and not rush in too fast;
And narrow, to protect my private bounds,
Which by no stealing Vermin must be past.
Yet if they venture, I have lime-twigs there
To check their rashness, trusty Wax and Hair.

And at this Chamber’s end is plac’d my Drum
Made of a Parchment soft and thin and dry,
And ready-corded. But the second Room
Is of my active Tools the treasury:
My Hammer's and my Anvil’s dwelling’s there,
By which I forge all Sounds I please to hear.

As you’d expect, Acoe summons up the best things you could hear: oratory comes first, then music, with all of ‘Music’s Utensils’ …. the Harp, the Lute,
The Organ (moderator of all Songs)
The Viol, Cymbal, Sackbut, Cornet, Flute,
The Harpsichord, Theorbo and Bandore,
The gallant Trumpet, and a thousand more.

But things complicate further when King David appears, as an introduction to poetry. It begins to seem as though Acoe may have a point, and Psyche’s austerities may be wrong. Beaumont, who seems at this point to have taken over entirely from Acoe, mentions Pindar, and Horace, then, in a parenthetical stanza, the poetry of Herbert:

(Yet neither of their Empires was so vast
But they left Herbert too, full room to reign;
Who Lyric’s pure and precious Metal cast
In holier moulds, and nobly durst maintain
Devotion in Verse, whilst by the spheres

He tunes his Lute, and plays to heav’nly ears.)

He continues (considering his own level of indebtedness) with a rather ungrateful mention of Spenser:

Yet with a goodly Train doth Colin sweep:
Though manacled in thick and peevish Rhyme,
A decent pace his painful Verse doth keep:
Right fairly dress’d were his wellfeatur’d Queen,
Did not her Mask too much her beauties screen.

He goes on to praise the verse of his friend Richard Crashaw, by this time in exile:

those polish’d Temple Steps, which now
Stand as the Ladder to thy mounting fame;
And, spight of all thy Travels, make’t appear
Th’art more in England than when Thou wert here.

After the writers he approves of, the allegorical context returns with the dismissive mention of merely amatory poets:

Some distance thence, in flow’ry wanton groves
Luxurious Amorosos sate, who by
The thrilling Key of Sports and Smiles and Loves
Effeminated their quaint Melody.
Nimble Theocritus and Naso were
The leading Lords of all that revel'd there.

Acoe concludes mournfully:

‘This vocal Honey, and much more than this
She cry’d, ‘to court and solace Psyche, I
Would gladly drop: but she so sullen is
That what makes all Rocks move and Tempests rest,
In foul disdain she in my face doth cast.

‘She talks indeed of glorious Melody,

Seraphic and Cherubic Anthems : yet
What faith can flame with so much Charity
As to believe the holy Hypocrite…’

It’s all a bit like Satan offering Christ the pleasures of learning in Paradise Regained. Beaumont clearly thinks that he can mark out heavenly poetry from that of ‘Amorosos’. Even so, Psyche thinks she can hear a still superior poetry, and the poem partly endorses this, by indicating that the pains Psyche inflicts upon herself lead to higher (if rather masochistic sounding) pleasures:

For whilst all-ravish’d Psyche, feasts her heart
With amorous sighs and pains, and day by day
Riots and surfeits in delicious smart,
Which relish sweeter to her Soul …

Is Herbert in or out, is Psyche right, or Acoe / Beaumont? It seems to follow Herbert’s own scruples about even the most conscientious religious poetry: aren’t there simpler, yet higher, acts of worship?

The ‘rebellion’ of the senses continues. Osphresis and Geusis follows, the smell and the taste, the latter given a terrific list of the smorgasbord of animal life consumed in this period, while Touch is so rousing that even the other senses are shocked into disapproval:

Soft Ticklings, Courtings, Kisses, Dalliance,
Embraces which no modest Muse must tell;
For all the Company at their first glance
Started and turn’d from that bold spectacle.
Which Haphe marking, insolently cries,
‘Out, out on these demure Hypocrisies...

Joined by Fancy with the Passions, the senses all fall out with one another over leadership, until Disdain chosen as leader. Psyche sends Logos to negotiate, and offer pardons to all those who surrender now. But Logos is subdued and bound, and then the next emissary, Thelema, the will, is subverted. When this happens, Psyche herself wavers once more.

The politics of all this are clear up to a point: it’s a rebellion in the microcosm, and allows Beaumont to talk about rebellion in the larger world. He intrudes into his narrative to do so:

And here I challenge any heart to read
This story’s riddles, and forbear to sigh;
Seeing servile feet tread down the noble Head,
And common Slaves with tyrannous Licence fly
Upon their Lord: O who secure can be,
When Reason must be bound, and Passion free!

But in the larger rebellion, it was the royalist side that had all the followers of the senses and the passions: the psyche of the nation was assailed by austere Puritanism. Beaumont, as poet, is drawn to the side of the rebel senses, he can’t give as much imaginative life to Psyche’s austerities as he did to the pleasures which assail her. But he counted upon his reader, and had apologized in advance for any departures from sound doctrine:

“I will venture to cast my self upon thy Ingenuity, with this only Protestation, that If any thing throughout this whole Poem, happen [against my intention] to prove Discord to the Consent of Christ’s Catholic Church, I here Recant it aforehand.”

My main image is the sumptuous allegory of hearing by Jan Breughel the Elder, working in the studio of Rubens in 1618.

Over ingenious Palingenius: John Jackson, 1611

I have been reading, belatedly considering my interests, Walter Stephens’ Demon Lovers. My only excuse is that the library had it shelved (actually rather acutely) with theology rather than in the 301’s with the witchcraft scholarship. Stephens’ long disquisition argues strongly that it was anxieties about the existence of any kind of spirit world that drove the demonologists. The witch became a vital research assistant, the expert witness to the existence of demons. The argument made by Stephens was epitomised in the opening sentences John Gaule’s Select Cases of Conscience Touching Witches and Witchcraft (1646): ‘He that will needs persuade himself that there are no witches, would fain be persuaded, that there is no Devill; and he that can already believe that there is no Devill, will ere long believe that there is no God. For there are the same grounds or motives both for the Atheist, and the Adiabolist.”

I was interested enough in Stephens’ book to buy a copy, and look at the reviews returned by the JSTOR database. These were properly admiring, but perhaps rather cautious. Supplying a sincere motive, a driving inner compulsion, for the demonologists is a long step towards a kind of rehabilitation of that ghastly set. But I suppose any major reassessment will have this effect.

I thought I’d try Stephens’ argument the other way round: did witchcraft, and its immediate, even carnal experience of the reality of demons, crop up automatically in treatises on the immortality of the soul? I landed on John Jackson’s The soule is immortall, or, Certaine discourses defending the immortalitie of the soule against the limmes of Sathan of 1611 as a trial text. Well, no, it didn’t: maybe it was just too desperate an argument, to argue that the anxious reader has an immortal soul on the basis that witches, after all, indubitably manage to sell their souls to devils who manifest in reliable and convincing ways.

But Jackson’s book offered its own interest. As the title reveals, it is actually an anthology of translations, lengthy (and sometimes overlapping) extracts from the best arguments Jackson can find for the soul’s immortality. We have ‘Matheus Dresserus’, ‘Athenagorus’, Xenocrates on the soul (a Socratic dialogue), ‘Guilermus Houppelandus ‘of the immortalitie of the soule’, and, most interestingly, Palingenius, from the Zodiacus vitae of 1543.

This is a large part of Jackson’s translation of Palingenius’s ‘Capricorn’. He uses, like Barnaby Goodge did before him, in his translation of the first six signs of the zodiac, a ballad metre of 8 and 6. It’s a very strange performance:

Because thou shalt believe
I will declare to thee,
By reason good, the state of soul,
Immortal for to be …

… Which thus I prove. If death do take
from us the soul away,
If that we have no other life,
but in this body here:
Then God may be accounted ill,
and shall unjust appear.
For thousands every day we see,
that flourish prosperously,
In riches, substance and renoun,
in reigns and empires high.
Yet idle lubbers, naught, unlearned,
that sin at liberty,
And run the race of all their life
in great prosperitie.
On th’other side we may behold,
the just oppressed to be:
With spiteful chance, a wretched life
and piteous poverty:
Thus either God unrighteous is,
that doth this thing permit:
Or after death, hath every man,
as he deserveth fit:
Or else he doth disdain the deeds,
of mortall men to know,
Besides, what gratious mind in God,
what goodness doth he show?
If this be all that he doth give,
a life so short and vain,
That swiftly runneth to an end,
and doth no time remain:
The half whereof is spent in sleep,
the rest in grief and toil?
And dangers great as fast doth fleet,
as rivers swift in soyle.
Therefore go to, O wretched men,
build gorgeous Churches high,
And let with costly offrings great,
your altars pestered lie.
Set up your joyful branch of bays,
your sacred doors about:
With pomps of proud procession pass,
let hymns be rattled out.
Spend frankincense, and let the nose
of God be stretched wide;
With pleasant smoke do this, and add
more honour much beside.
That he preserve your goodly life,
wherein doth you torment,
Sometime great cold, and sometime heat,
now plague, now famishment.
Now bloody war, now sickness great
or Chance to sorrow at:
Sometime the busy fly,
sometime the stinging gnat,
The chinch and flea; rejoice I say,
that here you lead your life,
With thousand painful labours great,
in travail, toil and strife.
And after, in a little space,
in pain you drop away:
And lumpish lie in loathsome Vault,
to Worms a grateful prey.
O worthy life, O goodly gift:
man in this world is bred,
Among the brutish Beasts and fools,
and knaves, his life is led,
Where Stormes and flakie Snows, and Ice,
and Durt, and Dust, and Night,
And harmful air, and clouds, and mists,
and winds. With hellish sight,
And grief and wayling raignes: where death
beside, doth work his feat.
Is this our goodly country here?
is this our happy seat,
For which we owe such service here,
unto the Gods above:
For which it seemeth meet with vows
the heavenly saints to move?
And if none other life we have,
then this of body vain:
So frail, and full of filthiness,
when death hath carcase slaine.
I see not why such Praises should,
of God resound in Air.
For why we should such honour give,
to him in Temples fair;
That hath us wretches framed here,
in this so wretched soyle:
That shall for evermore decay,
after so great a toil.
Wherefore least God should seem unjust
and full of cruelness,
Shall well deserving counted be,
we must of force confess,
That Death doth not destroy the Soule,
but that it always is,
None otherwise then Spirit in Air
or Saints in heavens bliss:
Both void of body, sleep, and meat.
And more, we must confess,
That after death, they live in pains,
or else in blessedness:
But let this reason thee suffice,
for if thou do it show
Unto the wicked kind, they laugh;
no light the blind doth know.
But thou, believe for evermore,
and know assuredly,
(For ground of saving health it is)
That Souls do never die.
Exempted from the Sisters power,
and fatal Destiny.

This was a standard argument: that you have to believe that the soul is immortal, because without faith in an afterlife, ‘infinite evils should remain unpunished’, as ‘Houppelandus’ puts it (p. 71) in this anthology’s first big discourse.

But the argument in Palingenius continuously wavers towards the other possible conclusion, the Book of Job’s deduction of ‘Curse God and die’, or he even starts to sound like an ungainly 17th century Swinburne, piling up the woes that indicate that it isn’t so much that we must await God’s justice, but rather, that there simply is no God. What kind of God, after all, would create flies, gnats, chinches (bed-bugs) and fleas?

No wonder the Inquisition had problems with Palingenius (if this translation is at all accurate). The poem accumulates until a bitter and undermining irony can be suspected, a tale of a God who has either turned his back (are you really going to build a church to praise the author of all this goodly life, where your preservation will only be to reserve you for more suffering?), or is actively malign. The miseries of human existence are so manifold in this side of the exposition. The verses are trying to say that these miseries force you to believe that the soul has to be immortal, must face a reckoning. But the account of the misery of life concentrates for too long on things that have no possible human cause. Bad men can hardly face punishment in the next life for having created bed bugs. Is this all there is, the poem is asking, and briefly wavers into reference to plural Gods “Is this our happy seat, / For which we owe such service here, / unto the Gods above”. But then the writer apparently comes clean: “I see not why such Praises should, / of God resound in Air”, before the final assertion of the punishment in the hereafter argument. Palingenius belatedly returns to the evil doers, but only to say that they just laugh at arguments like this last frail hope.

The other major way of arguing the soul’s immortality was to cite the Bible: two of Jackson’s writers busy themselves with assembling the texts that mention rewards or punishments. But there’s still a tendency to flirt with disaster: ‘The Adversaries of this Truth, the dear dearelings of the Devil’ allege sundry places of the scriptures to disprove the immortalitie of the Soule”, says ‘Dresserus’ (p.131), and officiously goes on to gather together all the gloomiest bits of Ecclesiastes and the Psalms, blithely aiming to answer them all, having also done the devil’s darling’s work for them.

A search on Palingenius returns lots of hits about (Sarah) Palin’s peculiar genius. But these are informative:

http://www.math.dartmouth.edu/~matc/Readers/renaissance.astro/4.0.Palingenius.html
http://www.archive.org/stream/zodiacusvitaeofm00wats/zodiacusvitaeofm00wats_djvu.txt

“Others there have been, that said or affirmed, that (souls) doe change their sexe or kind, and doe turn unto the infirmitie of Womans nature”, says one of Jackson’s writers rambling through views of the soul’s destination after the body’s death (pp. 31-2). Imagine having transmigrated into Sarah Palin!

Thomas Barton's 'Brief Relation' (revised version)

Mary Barton's poem about Charity

In 1661, William Barton was a man of 28 years, a butcher by trade, married and living in Shrewsbury. Brought up in a godly household, he could as a child recite whole Bible chapters and psalms. His brother affirms that he was charitable to the poor. This brother, Thomas Barton, is patently the author of A brief relation of several passages of the life and death of William Barton of Shrewsbury, in October, 1661 (1664), though the work is down on EEBO as anonymous. Thomas, writing the account, is named and directly addressed by his brother at one point (p12).  

But William was also prone to being a ‘companion of vain persons, spending time with them in the Alehouse’. Even amongst them, he would ‘speak for God and his People’. But this residual public godliness was tied up with a propensity for vainglory and lying. He would pray ‘in his family, and sometimes in secret, though, as he after complained, very seldom’. William was clearly struggling to maintain a respectable front.  

William fell deeper into ‘evil courses’ – gaming and ‘company-keeping’. He kept trying to repent of his ways, but found he could never resist if a regular drinking companion asked him out. We get the intimate family details: his mother would quiz him on how much he had spent during one of these bouts – he would affirm that he had spent no more than two pence, but this was always a lie. In danger of arrest for debt, Barton held off any attempt to detain him by brandishing a knife, saying ‘Keep off me, you know not what I may do; do not come near me, lest I set you to sleep with your fathers’.   Despite this, an over-keen apprentice to an officer of the town said that he would take Barton ‘dead or alive’. One evening, Barton went out of his house, despite his wife’s plea that he stay in to avoid any more trouble. As he later put it, having heard her request, ‘I having a readiness to do contrary, out I went’. He said to her in leaving, ‘Dost thou think that I will be afraid to go about my business for fear of an Apprentice boy?’But the persistent officer’s apprentice tried to tackle Barton (who was ‘full of drink’) from behind as he stood in his mother’s shop. Barton struck behind him with his knife, wildly, and killed the youth who was trying to arrest him with a single blow.   He was dragged off to prison, so drunk that he was barely aware of his crime. There he fell asleep in the straw, and when he came to, thought that what they told him of the murder was invented to scare him, and frighten him into better ways.   Barton came with a jolt to conviction of sin: ‘mightily awakened with the apprehension of his guilt, and of God’s severity against Sin’. His early bible learning came back to assail him: he spent his time ‘multiplying scripture against himself’.    

The greater part of this narrative of Barton’s last days (both before his inevitable conviction and equally inevitable execution) deals with the murderer’s thoughts about his sin, and the state of his soul. ‘Many choice things … were spoke by him at several times, which I am not able to set down’, his brother apologises to the reader. But there’s plenty.  William Barton, murderer, was on semi-public display, in leg-irons, laid in straw in the gaol. If ‘children or others stood to gaze on him’, Barton would prevent the gaol keeper from sending them away: ‘Let them look on me, and see the fruits of sin’, he would say, and show them his gyres.   Barton is encouraged by the godly who come to see him to make ‘an ingenious confession’ (that will be OED sense II † 4, ‘Used by confusion for INGENUOUS or L. ingenuus … honest, candid, open, frank’) – ‘without any hiding or sparing of himself’.

Barton readily set about the task which his intellectual training had prepared him for so well. At times, he sounds like a provincial John Donne: ‘I dare not look behind me, for my works sink me into Hell, and I can see nothing before me but an angry God’. His drinking provides him with a symbol or analogy for having filled himself with sin: ‘I was as full of sin as I could hold’, or worse, ‘As full of sin as I could hold, till I was become all Sin.’ As he talks, he is unconsciously rehearsing elements of the final confessional speech he would make at the gallows: ‘I loved a little Ale better than God, and better than myself’.    Bible texts inform his limitless self-reproach: ‘I have been a Son of many reproofs, but I hardened my neck And how is God’s word made good upon me in this? He that being often reproved, and hardeneth his neck, shall suddenly be destroyed’. (It is Proverbs 29, 1, as given in the King James Authorized Version.) A woman who was one of his former drinking companions visits him: he earnestly tells her to ‘Spend no more time as you spent it with me’.   

For some of his listeners, his ‘ingenious confession’ is all rather too much, and they try to argue him back to a sense of proportion: ‘Some of the company then by, said, ‘William, you were not so bad as you make your self now’. But William came up with a devastating reply: that the former goodness they kindly impute to him, as far as it went, only means that (in the way of goodness) ‘I did but enough to leave me inexcusable’.

William keenly, obsessively, analyses where his godliness failed. He recalls how he would formerly look forward to Sabbaths, and listen intently to the sermons he heard. But Mondays always saw him ‘turned into the world again’. Religion seemed to let him down. Even worse, six months before ‘this brake out’ (he means, his final spewing forth in murder of the sin with which he had been fully charged), he had turned to the Bible, and turned the pages, ‘I would turn it and turn it, and methoughts I would fain find some new thing; nothing would serve but something that was new; I could begin to read no where, but it was that which I knew before; I thought I knew it all already, and so I would lay it down and never read’. For a 17th century Englishman, this sounds a dire situation indeed: to be failed by God’s word. (One thing that is striking about this sad narrative is that Thomas does not mention any clergyman or elder coming to talk to his brother: the godly of the town seem to take on that role collectively.)  

Understandably, under this intense pressure from within, and from without, Barton’s mood swings wildly. He can assert that ‘my tongue shall sing aloud of his (God’s) Righteousness, though it should be upon a gallows’. When his links are knocked off, hurting him in the process, he affirms that ‘I will bear the indignation of the Lord’.     But shortly afterwards, his brother and sister find him yellow in the face, ‘his countenance as if he had not been the same man’, and he says: ‘All is gone now, I am in the dark’. But even then he soon he returns to his ‘former rapture of joy’.    

As he is taken to execution, he proclaims that ‘Sin is going to be executed’. Again, we have a moment when one of the godly community stands in for a minister (though the intervention proves not to have been well judged):‘A Friend going with him, cheared him up with the words of Dr Tayler of Hadley going to his martyrdom: ‘It is but one step to my Father’s House.’ But the martyr’s confidence is too much for the fragile Barton, who collapses again into ‘Ah! But I am not such a one’.   On the scaffold, Barton prays for the Holy Spirit to assist him in his final address to the onlookers (‘Now Lord help me to honour Thee’). He is represented as repeating many of his previous formulations: how he could never listen to counsel, how he hardened his neck, ‘I being often reproved hardened my neck’, and that shocking assertion about how he effectively ‘loved a little Ale better than God’.   He had pleaded innocent to the charge of wilful murder, and, on the gallows, he repeated his argument that he never meant to kill the officer’s apprentice. In a rather murky passage, he says that he forgives anyone present who ‘did plot or contrive that which is now come to pass, the casting away of my life’. (Barton can still see himself as in part a victim, despite all the self-accusations.)     In all this eloquence, both on the scaffold and previously in prison, with its mixture of bible locutions, there is almost a sense that Barton was reading his lines from the script his culture had ingrained in him.

Yet there is one moment that is totally unexpected in a 17th century man, as Barton in this vein of ‘ingenious confession’ suddenly voices this (p25): ‘I have been cruel to Horses, in making them do more then they were able; and cruel I have been to men’. That’s a Keith Thomas moment for you (I think of Man and the Natural World 1500-1700). It is the one mention of animals in the narrative, nothing else is said about this cruelty, but William Barton, for a moment, transcends his engrossing soul-drama, departs from talking about himself in the manner which the godly community expected of him (for in all the very penitent Barton says, there’s a faint continuity with his earlier performance of public piety). Here, he seems to purge himself of an unexpected crime, suggest a wider reflectiveness. It’s an impressive moment. 

Thomas Barton, writing this account, has throughout interspersed references to their sister Mary, who had died of illness in 1658, three years before William’s final disaster. Mary had been one of those who had regularly admonished her peccant brother. He was always on her mind: ‘she carried him upon her heart’, the narrative says. Mary was godly through and through, given to visiting church yards by night ‘the better to put myself into a dying condition’.   Then, as a final surprise to us, and ending the volume, ‘Here follow also some Verses, made by the same Mary Barton, in the praise of Charity’. It is a versification after 1 Corinthians 13. I have put the quatrains onto a single image, which heads this post.  It does not seem to me that Thomas Barton is adding this to even up the moral balance on his family, insinuating a saint to match the sinner: for William Barton struggles though from sin to an exemplary death. He is like Frank Thorney in ""The Witch of Edmonton. On the gallows, his one demur is when the officers presiding try to chivvy away the townsfolk who are giving William one last farewell, perhaps a final embrace. As William gets to the scaffold, ‘Chearfully looking upon the multitude, he said, ""All these are to see sin shamed. When the Officers bade them stand off from him, he said, ""O do not keep God’s people from me this little moment that I am to be in the World, they are my delight, and my comfort.’

Thomas Barton’s Brief Relation is a revealing work, of great integrity. He manages to keep his own feelings out of the account; there’s a great dignity in which he swerves from any account of the hanging itself to this appended tribute to his dead sister. I do not think it’s a silent reproach: William did not lack charity in his last days, and in general accepted his punishment. The godly of Shrewsbury seem to have accommodated him as a drunk, and forgiven him as a penitent about to face God. William could not accept himself as no-good son, his faith was too ingrained. In that part of his life, faith assailed him. But, as murderer, faith came to his rescue, sustained him till his death, as he accepted himself as thoroughly penitent.

The shining Button

To the church at Alton Priors, in Wiltshire. I tend to find that a deconsecrated church like this, cleared of the necessary human clutter for a congregation of service books, chairs, kneelers, notices, elderly harmoniums and the rest, a church pared back to the almost bare building, feels more contemplative and (if one were so minded) prayerful.

A trapdoor in the nave can be opened to reveal a large sarsen stone, apparently deliberately broken off at one end. This is a very old place of worship; the yew tree in the churchyard outside, divided by age into two splayed arboreal brackets, is supposed to be 1,700 years old itself.

This brass memorial plate by the altar is set above the tomb chest of William Button. He is depicted rising from the tomb, which, in the plate, bears on its lid these six lines of verse:

This was but one though taking roome for three

Religion, wisdome, hospitalitie.

But since heaven gate to enter by is straight

His fleashes burden here he left to wait

Till the last trump blowe open the wide gate

To give it entrance to the soule it’s mate.

The edge of the tomb reads ‘The last enemy that shall be destroyed is death’ I Cor. 15, and along the left edge, ‘It is sown a natural body’. Beneath this, his family coat of arms.

The angel top central is blowing the last trump through a trumpet which is also a key. This is labelled ‘The key of David’ [Revelations 3, 7]. A precatory roll emerges from the trumpet’s mouth, which reads ‘It is raised a spirituall Body 1. Cor. 15’ [verse 44], the second part of the verse with which the left tomb edge is labelled.

On the palm leaf he bears: ‘Death is swallowed up in victory’ (again, 1 Corinthians, verse 54)

Top left, a grid-like design (probably meant to suggest a heavenly gate swinging wide open) with three suns and three phases of the moon is labelled ‘This is the gate [ ] the Lord’, and the corresponding section on the top right, ‘The righteous shall enter in at it’ (Psalm 118, verse 20).

Button is resurrecting with a full head of hair and a vigorous body, not as a 64 year old. He is probably meant to be 33. I especially like his glorified and radiant foot. Around his tomb, others are also rising from the grave, two very Blakean figures of men to the right, and another man, and a woman veiled by her loose hair, to the lower left.

The genealogical bit is on the front side of the tomb, which with its contracted forms expanded, reads:

“William Button Esq dying Anno domini MDLXXX (1590), Aet[atis suae] LXIIII (64) left by his wife Mary daughter to Sir William Kellwey Knight VI sons Ambrose Knight. William, who married Jane daughter to John Lambe of Coulston: John, Francis, Edward & Henry. II daughters. Dorothie married to John Drake of Mount Drake in the Countie of Devon Esq & Cecilie married to Sir John Mewys of Kingston in the Isle of Wight Knight.

Erected by Sir William Button knight Grand child to the first William and Sonne and heire to the latter, in pious memorie.”

There’s an ODNB life of the middle William, who purchased a Jacobean baronetage in 1621, and died in 1655. The writer of this life has the first Sir William Button dying in 1599, which I can’t explain. The third William Button, the grandchild who erected this tomb, was the subject of a funeral sermon in 1660, An antidote against immoderate sorrow for the death of our friends: taken from an assured hope of our resurrection to life and glory. Delivered in a sermon preached in the parish-church of North-Wraxall in Wiltshire, the 12th. of Aprill 1660. at the funeral of Sr William Button Baronet. By Francis Bayly his houshold chaplain. Either his chaplain could lie without shame, or he was a genuinely pious man as described. The monument to his grandfather must date to some time before he succeeded his father as baronet, though I am puzzled by the protocol here. But his father was a man who became an MP solely to stave off arrest for debt, so hardly likely to have been erecting elaborate monuments.

This funerary artefact is just like the title page of an early 17^th century book: artistically unsophisticated, a visual object just about swamped by text, the power of the divine word; crowded with its simple meaning. The averted face of the resurrected subject seems an oddity of the handling (perhaps no one had any notion of how the first Sir William Button had looked decades before). Yet there’s something grand too: Sir William has his back on the world: his tomb opens, and the gate of heaven swings simultaneously wide. His transition will be as swift as, say, that of the soul in Donne, which ‘Dispatches in a minute all the way / Twixt heaven, and earth’.

At Kilcolman Castle

Kilcolman Castle, which I was pleased to be able to revisit a few days ago, having misplaced the photographs I took on a visit two or three decades ago. It’s not an easy place to get to see: a colleague tells me that the landowner detests all mention of Spenser, and is reputed to remove any signs directing the curious. I hiked across a couple of fields covered in long wet grass, was shocked three times on electric fences, climbed over lots of barbed wire, and discovered on my way back that the herd of cows I had seen grazing were large and rather too curious young bulls, who had me backing out of their field, and smartly back over the electric fence that I’d first thought of as surely too rusty to be electrified…

 Window at first floor level

But it’s an evocative place for the Spenserian. He is not supposed to have lived in the keep of the old FitzGeraldine castle, but it must have been very familiar to him, and some of the masonry looks post-medieval. The tower stands slightly off the crest of a low, grassed-over limestone outcrop. The only other piece of substantial early masonry is a ruined turret quite a surprising distance away, which indicates that Kilcolman, once described as “a large castle, old, and dilapidated, which at the present time has no use except to shelter cattle at night’, once would really have been so. Perhaps it had a palisade rather than a curtain wall.

View from the surviving tower back to the keep

I do not know if any archaeology has been done here. Maybe some 19^th century gentlemen poked around. The outcrop has suggestions of former buildings all over. To the south, Spenser had his own bog, now a nature reserve, which among the lines wishing away all the bad things from the wedding night in ‘Epithalamion’, especially brings alive: “Ne let th’unpleasant Quyre of Frogs still croking / Make us to wish theyr choking.”

Home for the unpleasant choir of frogs?

 

At the north west of the outcrop, there’s another feature of Spenser’s imagination, a cave running back into the hill. It could only be through here that, on the 15^th October 1598, when Kilcolman was attacked “Spenser and his family escaped through an underground tunnel, known as the fox hole, leading to caves north of the estate (the tunnel is still recorded as extant in 1840)”, as the ODNB rather vaguely puts it. There must have been a sousterrain from the old keep. I fondly imagine that somewhere in this lost tunnel Spenser left a small iron chest containing, say ‘The Legend of Sir Peridure, Of Constancy’ – the rest of Book VII. He certainly had time to work on extra portions of his great poem, though not very much after James fitz Thomas Fitzgerald, ‘the súgán earl of Desmond’ began his 1598 rebellion.

'Therein is eaten out a hollow cave...'

Earlier in our week in Ireland, I had found my way to Smerwick, and the desolate remains of the Fort d’Oro, where Spenser was probably present when Arthur, Lord Grey de Wilton ordered the massacre of the surrendered garrison (9^th November 1580). The local musuem says that the fort was named because scattered along the foreshore were lumps of Canadian stone, glittering with pyrites, brought back as gold by Martin Frobisher's expedition for the North-West passage.

Fort d'Oro

If Spenser himself wasn’t a man of blood, most of his superiors and associates were, and he defended and advocated brutality. Kilcolman seems to have been very much targeted by the rebels in 1598: Spenser had quite clearly been an aggressive land-grabber, and the native Irish had reason to remember who it was that Spenser had served (and tried to remake into ‘Arthegal’).

‘The iron hand and the velvet glove: 

Come live with me and be my love.’