Introduction vi

While this poem is rare in its explicit attention to the king, an analysis of the politics of libels reveals a remarkable range of political positions. Traditionally, libelling had been accepted, especially in London, as a form of crisis communication between the people and their rulers (Croft, “Libels” 270). Like many early modern riots, such libels were essentially conservative, begging for the restoration of an order perceived to be lost. Others served as weapons in factional disputes at court, at a time when struggles for power could effectively centre on contests over the reputations of prominent statesmen. (This, indeed, is perhaps the principal explanation for the plethora of poems on the death of Cecil.) And others still used conventional discourses of denigration in order to touch upon issues of wider concern, including some of the nation’s most fundamental values. At law, the doctrine of scandalum magnatum, under which numerous libel actions were brought to the Star Chamber, held that to libel a person in public office was also to libel the government, and hence the king himself (Bellany, “Poem” 156). As Francis Bacon recognized, counsellors and court favourites were placed in especially precarious positions; writing to Buckingham, he warned that “the King himself is above the reach of his people, but cannot be above their censures, and you are his shaddow” (Letter 2). This potential was exploited in the years immediately before and after Buckingham’s assassination. When libels laud the assassin, John Felton, for liberating the country “from one mans thrall“, they teeter uneasily between a celebration of order restored and a contrary suggestion that the very system within which Buckingham operated might itself be irreparably cankered (“You auntient Lawes of Right; Can you, for shame”).

Such poems have prompted some to identify libels with the development of political opposition in the years preceding the Civil War (Cogswell, “Underground”; Holstun 143-191). But while particular poems unquestionably contain traces of radicalism, it would be misleading to approach either the politics or poetry of this period as in any way coherent. As recent historical scholarship has demonstrated, the development of opposition, from the 1620s to the 1640s, was a complex and uncertain process. In this context, much of the value of libels lies in the way that they document this process, revealing critical struggles over the meanings of political figures and events. In some cases, the satiric strategies of the poems seek simply to strip away myths of power. As Harold Love comments about Restoration satires, they function by “neutralising or evacuating the dominant fictions of state” (175). In other cases, their practices of stigmatization and discrimination create the potential for new discourses of confrontation. Ultimately, although libels may not be aligned with an identifiable and coherent oppositionist movement, and although their politics are at times provocative and evasive rather than rational and purposeful, they decisively contribute to political change. They help to make opposition conceivable: and speakable.