3. Merit rewarded: The Hanoverian appointments, 1715–1813

Chapter One showed that in the decades following its establishment, the office of poet laureate underwent significant changes, moving from a vague, honorific position to a more specific and functionary role. By the time of the Hanoverian succession, it had become fixed in a particular niche within the lord chamberlain’s department, tasked with providing the biannual odes that would be performed at court on the royal birthday and on New Year’s Day. This chapter will investigate related matters for the century following George I’s accession, focusing on how and why each laureate was appointed. On this basis, it will make wider points about the laureateship’s role, situation and significance.

To begin with, this chapter will survey the appointments of the Hanoverian period as a whole, from Nicholas Rowe in 1714 to Robert Southey in 1813. It will then identify patterns, and use the evidence relating to each individual appointment to shed light on the others. Lastly, it will use three case studies to explore the wider questions about how the laureateship was conceived and what significance it had. It will emphasize two particular themes: the networks that underlay each laureate’s appointment, and the purpose that the laureateship was expected to fulfil. Each laureate was appointed by the will of a single person or small group of people in informal discussion, and each appointment came after a brief but intense period of activity in which various self-appointed candidates promoted their claims and besought their friends to intercede for them. It is therefore worthwhile to explore what sorts of network were coming into play in each case, and where those networks were physically and conceptually situated. As for the purpose of the laureateship, it will be shown that the rationale behind each appointment consists in the complex relationship between the exigencies of patronage and ideas of ‘merit’.

Because the second section of this chapter will attempt to make sense of the appointments that have been surveyed in the first section, and because the case studies that constitute the third section all fall within the wider period explored in the first and second sections, some of the information presented here will be mentioned in more than one place. This repetition will hopefully be excused as necessary. The approach taken in this chapter is essentially that of a snowball which, rather than being rolled downhill so as to gather momentum, is rolled continually around the same wide field of snow, steadily gathering mass. To have adopted a different approach, in which thematic arguments, comparisons and case studies were inserted at the chronologically appropriate moments within the descriptive overview of the appointments, would have compromised the nature of the overview, disrupted the coherence of the analysis and confused the themes of the case studies.

Overview of the appointments

There is no direct evidence as to who selected Nicholas Rowe for the laureateship in 1715. He was famous for the strength of his Whig politics, and, throughout his life, he managed to accumulate sinecurial and non-sinecurial public offices during periods of Whig ascendancy; but he was also an eager place-hunter during the years of Tory dominance at the end of Anne’s reign.1 Alexander Pope later told a story in which Robert Harley, the Tory first lord of the treasury, hinted to Rowe that it might be worth his while to learn Spanish, whereupon Rowe spent many months diligently learning the language, expecting that he was to be appointed to a position responsible for dealings with Spain, only for Harley to tell him, ‘Then, sir, I envy you the pleasure of reading Don Quixote in the original.’2 Whether or not in connection with this, Jonathan Swift claimed (also many years after) that he used to intercede with Harley on behalf of Rowe and other Whigs, trying to get them government places in spite of their politics.3 Clearly, then, Rowe was no stranger to place-hunting, and, as a genial man who enjoyed a wide and well-placed circle of friends (including Pope), he may well have put himself forward for the laureateship when it became vacant in 1715.4 He would certainly have known how best to advance his claim.5 Joseph Addison seems to have distrusted him somewhat, on account of his superficiality and glibness;6 but even these were the qualities of a seasoned courtier and place-hunter, and they would have done him no harm in gaining such offices as were to be gained through court attendance, seeking favours of great men and calling upon friends for timely intercession.

Whether the laureateship was indeed such an office remains to be established. But, if it was, Rowe was the ideal man to acquire it; and, since he did acquire it, and there is no other evidence as to how, it seems reasonable to put forward these particular means as a possibility. But he was also the foremost tragic playwright of his day, and was a famously ardent Whig. Therefore, without yet exploring the relationship between these three potentially key recommendations of his (place-hunting prowess, publicly recognized poetic merit and famous Whiggery), each of these three qualities can be provisionally suggested as having, in his case, determined the bestowing of the laureateship.

There was a great bustle among the literary community upon Nahum Tate’s death, with many writers trying to gain the laureateship.7 But only two or three of Rowe’s competitors are now identifiable. One was John Dennis, another Whig man of letters, whose popularity and reputation as an imaginative writer were lesser than Rowe’s. He would certainly have made a better controversialist and disputational writer, if that had been what court and government officials were looking for, because he was primarily known for his literary criticism and his generally trenchant prose; but on the other hand, his politics were idiosyncratic, and he had been known for public discords with other Whig writers.8 Although he was already one of the king’s waiters at the Customs House, he was not as personally endearing or well connected as Rowe.9

Dennis’s candidature is known only from contemporary newspapers, as is that of a man named William Ellis, whose candidature seems to have been a hoax or joke.10 Some newspapers even reported that Dennis had been made laureate, suggesting that his candidature proceeded quite far.11 The last candidate to note is John Oldmixon, who did not appear in the newspapers, but, in a letter of 1718, claimed that he would have been appointed to succeed Tate if it had not been for Rowe, to which fact (Oldmixon stated) Samuel Garth could testify.12 The tenor and context of Oldmixon’s letter (which will form this chapter’s first case study, below) give reason to believe that he was exaggerating on this point, particularly given his non-appearance in contemporary newspapers, but he was presumably at least known to have a claim on the office. The nature of this claim would have rested on his tenacious Whig politics and his standing as a man of letters; by 1715, he was primarily known for Whiggish prose tracts and more miscellaneous non-fiction writings. But he was somewhat lacking in connections, living in Somerset and linked to London chiefly through his communications with Jacob Tonson.13

In 1715, then, the laurel was gained by a pre-eminent tragedic playwright with impeccable Whig credentials and the means and abilities to acquire court patronage. As well as an indeterminate number of now-invisible competitors, he defeated two fellow Whig writers who lacked his courtliness and connections and whose writings were not only less celebrated than his, but had come to centre on non-fiction prose. There is no evidence as to who may have made the appointment decision, although Oldmixon believed Samuel Garth, the poet, physician and Kit-Cat Club stalwart, to have infallible knowledge on the matter. The lord chamberlain at the time was the duke of Bolton, who had only just taken up the position and was widely regarded by contemporaries as a buffoon.14 He was, however, a staunchly pro-Hanoverian Whig and former Junto follower, and his correspondence shows that he was concerned with favouring those who were known to be loyal to the new regime.15 Although he technically had the office in his gift, he perhaps would not have exerted much agency over the matter, or would have bowed to the arguments and intercessions of others. But any preference he did show would have surely been for someone known to be a strong Whig, like Rowe.

For 1718, although there is likewise no direct evidence, the case is clearer. Laurence Eusden, the Cambridge Fellow and budding poet, had already been forging a small place for himself in the Addison–Steele nexus of literary London, contributing to Steele’s Poetical Miscellanies (1714) and to The Spectator and The Guardian, and addressing poems to Halifax and Addison.16 In 1717, he published a reasonably popular epithalamium on the wedding of the duke and duchess of Newcastle, at a time when Newcastle was not only lord chamberlain and a prominent member of the Kit-Cat Club, but was also trying to establish himself as a great literary patron in the mould of Dorset (one of his forebears as lord chamberlain, and another Kit-Catter) and Halifax (also a Kit-Catter).17 In 1718, the laureateship became vacant, and Eusden was promptly appointed. The unreliable Cibber–Shiels biographical compendium of the mid century, The Lives of the Poets, was to attribute this appointment to Newcastle, and was also to offer its opinion that Eusden deserved the honour, being morally unblemished and a not inconsiderable versifier.18

The only other known candidate was Oldmixon, whose aforementioned letter dates from this time, and consists of a plea to Tonson to intercede on his behalf with Newcastle. However, Oldmixon made vague reference to Thomas Tickell, John Hughes and John Dennis, seeming unsure as to whether or not they would contend with him;19 and Garth had apparently written to Newcastle encouraging him to favour Leonard Welsted.20 Pat Rogers, in a note to his transcription of Oldmixon’s letter, states, ‘There were indeed alleged to be many candidates for the vacant post.’ But he bases this claim on John Sheffield’s poem ‘The Election of a Poet Laureate in 1719’, which was simply a new, topical iteration of the ‘Session of the Poets’ tradition of poems, and included depictions of most major writers of the time vying for the laurel crown, at least several of whom were evidently never in contention for the laureateship.21 Rogers does admit as much, and then adds, more plausibly, ‘the poem may perhaps reflect a degree of excitement and charged interest in quarters of literary London somewhat remote from Grub Street’.22 In any case, beyond Oldmixon and Eusden (and perhaps Welsted), it is impossible to find any other definite contenders.

It seems almost certain that Newcastle made the appointment decision. Given his later activities as a patronage magnate, and his later reputation for jealousy, pettiness and paranoia, it is probable that he made this decision alone.23 However, one of Addison’s biographers has speculated that Addison may have advanced Eusden’s claim.24 Moreover, there were certainly times during Newcastle’s tenure that George I (or someone close to him) selected someone for a position in the lord chamberlain’s jurisdiction, with Newcastle required to do no more than rubber-stamp the decision. Similarly, there is evidence of Newcastle deciding upon an appointment to a different office and then seeking the king’s ratification for it.25 In the case of a poetic office, though, it seems improbable that George I would have been overly concerned with the decision, given his incomprehension of English and dislike of ceremony.26

For the 1730 decision, the evidence is much better. The newspaper press had developed substantially, and a greater number of letters from the time have survived.27 Colley Cibber, Lewis Theobald and Stephen Duck were the main candidates, perhaps along with Matthew Concanen; and Richard Savage was in some sense involved as well.28 Cibber was appointed. The claim made in his autobiographical Apology (1740) that ‘Part of the Bread I now eat, was given me, for having writ the Nonjuror’ has generally been taken to refer to the laureateship.29 He also wrote there, ‘In the Year 1730, there were many Authors, whose Merit wanted nothing but Interest to recommend them to the vacant Laurel.’30 Certainly, he was on good terms with various high-ranking Whig peers and politicians, and was recognized as a firm adherent to, or even oblique bulwark of, the Walpole ministry. The Non-Juror had played a significant part in this, while also being hugely successful among theatregoers and eliciting the hefty financial favour of George I. The duke of Grafton, lord chamberlain 1724–57 and close friend of George II, esteemed Cibber both socially and (although apparently not much interested in books)31 as a playwright, as did Walpole, Henry Pelham and Newcastle.32 Cibber had also recently dedicated his and Vanbrugh’s comedy, The Provok’d Husband (1728), to Queen Caroline.

Cibber’s biographer Koon has further adduced, as a reason for his appointment, that by 1730, his plays enjoyed more popularity on the stage than any other living playwright’s.33 But Swift, Pope and their circle of correspondents had something to say on the subject too. Lady Elizabeth Germain wrote to Swift over two months after Cibber’s appointment, ‘if it was the Q. and not the Duke of G: that picked out such a Laureat she deserves his Poetry in her praises’.34 Pope reported, in a letter of 1728, ‘I am told the Gynocracy are of opinion, that they want no better writers than Cibber and the British Journalist.’35 Germain’s suggestion came in the same sentence as her admission that she was not well acquainted with Pope, so it may be the case that Swift had merely passed Pope’s report on to her, and that she was responding to it, rather than having had the testimony from another source; but in any case, this suggestion of the influence of Queen Caroline (and her female entourage) is noteworthy, and will be discussed as the second case study. Swift’s own analysis was more mercurial:

as to Cibber if I had any inclination to excuse, the Court I would alledge that the Laureats place is entirely in the Lord Chamberlain’s gift; but who makes Lord Chamberlains is another question. I believe if the Court had interceded with D. of Grafton for a fitter Man, it might have prevailed.36

However, it was widely felt at the time that the favourite poet of Queen Caroline was Stephen Duck, and that, whether or not everyone else was simply following her lead, Duck was in fashion at court. Both before and after the matter of the laureateship, Caroline showered bounties on Duck, and they did not slip off his back. He was given offices, a home, a wife and a pension. But he had no politics to speak of and no connection with Walpole’s ministry, and his writings (all lyric poetry), though fairly popular in publication, were something of a novelty act, being rooted in his background as a rustic labourer who had taught himself to read and write.37 Furthermore, Duck was away from court around the time of Eusden’s death, attending the deathbed of his first wife, and Hopkins has suggested that this absence was the critical factor in his failure.38

Theobald, meanwhile, was solidly present at court at this time, attending daily and wearing himself out specifically so as to acquire the laureateship. But although he had a wide-ranging literary output, he was not as distinguished a writer as Cibber, and, by his own admission, he had no powerful patrons.39 Neither was Richard Savage as distinguished or well connected as Cibber, and he would probably have been considered too unreliable for the laureateship anyway (although he later became Caroline’s ‘Volunteer Laureate’, writing her birthday poems in exchange for a pension).40 Matthew Concanen was a solid Whig and journeyman poet who, at some point around 1730, attracted the patronage of Newcastle, but who was never especially successful or well respected; he does not loom large in the competition for the office.41 Surprisingly, then, it would seem that Colley Cibber – the most reviled man in the history of the laureateship – was appointed because, unlike any other writer of the day, he had every possible recommendation for the job. His backers were potentially legion.

At one point during his tenure, when he feared himself to be dying, Cibber wrote to Grafton (whose time as lord chamberlain was almost entirely coeval with Cibber’s as laureate) requesting that his successor be Henry Jones, an Irish poet. However, Cibber recovered. By the time that he sank into an illness from which he could not recover (1757), Jones had become obscurer, and less dear to Cibber, than he had been at the time of Cibber’s sickly, but not mortally sickly, endorsement. Nonetheless, he did appear in an early and ill-informed newspaper report on the contest to become laureate, in Lloyd’s Evening Post: ‘The following Gentlemen are talked of as Candidates … Mr. Mason, Mr. Henry Jones, Mr. Lockman, Mr. Boyce, and Mr. Hackett.’42 For the most part, these names do not show up elsewhere. ‘Mr. Boyce’ may have been a reference to a writer named Thomas Boyce, but the candidacy of a ‘Boyce’ for the laureateship was more likely a misunderstanding: the musician and composer William Boyce had been appointed master of the king’s music in December 1755, and was not officially sworn in until June 1757, a few months before Cibber’s death.43 Since the master of the king’s music was responsible for composing the music for the laureates’ annual odes, it would have been easy to assume he was involved with the laureateship. The most that can be said for ‘Mr. Hackett’ is that he was very obscure.44 John Lockman, like many of the writers mentioned so far, had a wide-ranging, miscellaneous body of work to his name, and his greatest successes were in prose; he had also been appointed secretary to the council of the Free British Fishery in 1750, inspiring him to publish prose and verse works about fish.45 None of these men seem to have been particularly known for their politics.

William Mason, poet, clergyman, polymath and busybody, regarded himself as a fervent ‘old Whig’.46 This designation meant different things at different times, and even to different people, but Mason believed his principles to have been ‘in fashion’ in the latter years of George II’s reign, and ‘out of fashion’ thereafter.47 Yet political works were never very prominent in Mason’s sprawling, interdisciplinary oeuvre, and, when his politics fell ‘out of fashion’, he turned to pseudonyms and anonymity as a vehicle for his political publications.48 He was one of the most well-connected men of his day, and an assiduous seeker of patronage (for himself and for others).49 He was the private tutor, and afterwards lifelong friend, of Lord John Cavendish, whose older brother William, duke of Devonshire, served as lord chamberlain between 1757 and 1762. Through this connection with the Cavendishes, Mason was made a royal chaplain in 1757, and held the post until 1772, most of his tenure thus coming under George III and the kinds of ministries that Mason disliked.

The year of his appointment to the royal chaplaincy – a year when Mason’s politics were still ‘in fashion’ – was also the year of Cibber’s death. In the event, Mason did play a part in the appointment process, though he was not (as Horace Walpole believed) offered the laureateship himself.50 As he later explained in his memoirs of Thomas Gray (1775) and Whitehead (1788), the lord chamberlain, Devonshire, told his brother, Lord John Cavendish, to offer the laureateship to Gray, whereupon Lord John, being busy elsewhere, passed on the commission to Mason.51 Gray was a lifelong Cambridge Fellow, and had few contacts among writers, nobles or statesmen; nor had he ever publicly expressed or been identified with any political persuasion. But he was close friends with Mason and with Lord John, and, as well as having published his massively popular Elegy several years before, had recently published his two Odes, provoking widespread fascination. The laurel came to him unsolicited, and he rejected it.

It was then offered to Whitehead, another non-political and somewhat reclusive figure who was best known for The Roman Father, a repertory play of the second half of the eighteenth century. Along with Gray, Mason and ‘Warton’ (and also Young, Armstrong and Akenside), Whitehead had recently been commended by the Critical Review as one of the great poets of the age, ‘not inferior to Pope himself, and who might have vied with him in reputation, had they been as properly introduced into the temple of Fame’.52 Whitehead did not know the Cavendishes, but he was the tutor of the scions of the aristocratic Jersey and Harcourt families. Their intercessions had already procured him the position of secretary and registrar to the Order of the Bath, and Earl Harcourt had once been governor of the prince of Wales (the future George III).53 It is generally thought that this connection was what determined the appointment in Whitehead’s favour.54

However, there is some reason to doubt this. When Whitehead had been appointed secretary and registrar, he had profusely thanked Lord and Lady Jersey for their endeavours on his behalf. Evidently, he had therefore known who was responsible for the favour, despite having been in Germany at the time.55 Yet the laureateship, he later claimed, came to him ‘Unask’d … and from a friend unknown’: a comment which Mason endorsed.56 The Jerseys had been seeking places for Whitehead for several years by this point; in one letter of 1753, Lord Jersey pointed out to Newcastle that a place in the Wardrobe had just become vacant, and said, ‘I need not repeat to your Grace how much it is incumbent on us to serve Mr Whitehead; or how greatly we should think ourselves obliged if you could obtain it.’57 It is possible, therefore, that Devonshire or someone close to him remembered Whitehead’s needfulness and decided to have the laureateship given to him without any direct prompting by the Jersey family (or by the Harcourts). Yet if this were so, the unknown agent would probably still have informed the Jerseys or Harcourts of the favour that they had done them, and on what remembrance they had done it. Another relevant consideration is that since the Jersey family had previously been assiduous in seeking positions for Whitehead, it seems unlikely that they would have been completely inactive when such an obviously applicable post as that of poet laureate became available (unless they believed his position as secretary and registrar sufficient).58

Perhaps, then, it was the case that the Jersey family (or perhaps the Harcourts) did intercede on Whitehead’s behalf, and successfully, but either they did not inform Whitehead on this occasion, or he feigned ignorance in public as to who had interceded for him. Perhaps it was the Jerseys’ wont to be silent about their favours to him, and he had only heard of their intercession in the case of the Bath position through another channel. But it is an equally likely scenario that on the occasion of Cibber’s death, the Jersey family was too predisposed or unaware to intercede in time, and the laureateship was offered to Whitehead of Devonshire’s own volition, or on the prompting of another, mysterious agent. As for Mason, he was apparently told by Lord John that he had been considered for the office, but that it had been thought improper to bestow it upon someone in holy orders: which, Mason told his readers, was a reason ‘I was glad to hear assigned; and if I had thought it a weak one, they who know me, will readily believe that I am the last man in the world who would have attempted to controvert it’.59 One biographer of Gray has asserted that Mason had ‘wished for’ the office, and ‘raged with disappointment’ not to get it.60 A more recent biographer, Robert Mack, mentions this assertion doubtfully, but with no outright disagreement, and further suggests that Gray’s letter to Mason explaining why he turned the post down may entail a ‘thinly veiled attack on Mason’s own vanity’.61 But there are no grounds for either suggestion. The most pertinent questions are whether Mason was given this explanation by Lord John before or after Gray’s refusal (the chronology is unclear in Mason’s account), and whether Lord John’s stated reason for rejecting Mason was sincere, or was merely a sop to Mason’s rageful, thinly veiled vanity.

The laureateship, then, had been offered to two rather reclusive men, neither of whom had any apparent connection with political affairs, but who were both friends with Mason and who were each on intimate terms with a couple of (different) well-placed peers. They were both respectable poets who had not dabbled much in prose. However, when the office became vacant in 1785, it was passed on to Thomas Warton, who was in most respects a different kind of figure. He was an Oxford Fellow, and, like Gray and Whitehead, had not exerted himself for the laureateship; but he was far more closely connected with the London-based world of arts and literature than either of those men, and was known more for his work as a literary historian than for his lyric poetry. He seems to have inspired a fairly disinterested zeal of intercessory generosity in those who knew him; his campaign for the Oxford Regius Professor of History post in 1768–71 had, for example, been taken to heart by William Warburton (then bishop of Gloucester).62 Likewise in 1785, Warton was informed by Edmond Malone, ‘Some of your friends here have spoken of you for the Laureat, and wish you to think of it for yourself.’63

At least one of those friends had spoken very much to the point. Already, the previous day, Warton had written to Joshua Reynolds, offering ‘Many, many thanks for your most friendly exertions in my favour. How can I refuse what you have so kindly procured? The laurel was never more honourably obtained.’64 Reynolds was at this time president of the Royal Academy, and enjoyed a testy, sporadic communication with George III, in addition to being close to many other well-placed politicians, peers, artists and writers.65 However, the newspapers of the time also mentioned rumours that the king himself had intervened to have Warton made laureate, and Joseph Warton wrote to his and Thomas’s sister, ‘the King has sent to offer it Him in the Handsomest manner’.66 Around this time, the antiquary Michael Lort wrote to a correspondent that there was disagreement as to whether Reynolds or George III had been responsible.67 Newspaper evidence from the next several years suggests that George III’s preference and intervention became the generally accepted reason for Warton’s appointment.68

A few decades later, John O’Keeffe mentioned in his Recollections (1826) that he had gone to see Lord Salisbury (lord chamberlain, 1783–1804) upon Whitehead’s death and asked to be made poet laureate, to which Salisbury had replied that ‘he had not the smallest objection; but that he had previously given his promise to another’.69 Yet there is no indication of whether, on this occasion, Salisbury’s ‘promise’ represented a rubber-stamping of someone else’s decision, or whether it had been motivated by either Reynolds or George III. Despite the titles and positions that Reynolds accrued under George, and the intermittent communications between the two men, their relationship was not a smooth one, so it is unlikely that Reynolds gained Warton the office by interceding with George himself. Perhaps Reynolds suggested Warton to Salisbury, who passed on the suggestion to George; perhaps Reynolds and George both decided upon Warton independently. Reynolds did not know Salisbury well, but was in occasional, distant interaction with him.70 Whatever Reynolds’s involvement, it therefore seems likely that George had the decisive say on this occasion.

Other than O’Keeffe, the only identifiable competitor to Warton was Robert Potter, who was described by the newspaper that mentioned him as ‘the Translator, of Aeschylus’.71 However, there is no further evidence of his candidacy, and he was not as prominent a public figure as Warton. In any case, the translator of ancient Greek literature lost out to the redeemer of England’s own literary past. Rumours connected Mason with the post on this occasion and again in 1790; for example, one newspaper in 1788 referred to Hayley and Mason as ‘disappointed candidates for the Laureatship’.72 But that newspaper was almost certainly wrong about Hayley, and Mason’s twentieth-century biographer has expressed doubt as to the truth of these rumours. Mason himself always insisted that he had no such wish.73

In 1790, it was stated that ‘Many persons have been spoken of as being intended to fill the vacant place of Laureate.’74 However, the only genuine candidates now identifiable are William Hayley, Henry James Pye and (perhaps) Robert Merry. The former was a popular, fashionable poet, primarily on account of his didactic poem to women, The Triumphs of Temper (1781), which was perhaps the most popular English poem of George III’s reign until the emergence of Scott and Byron. He had many prominent acquaintances, including a crew of fellow Williams: Pitt the Younger, Cowper and Blake. Indeed, he was later to acquire a government pension for Cowper from Pitt, whom he had met and befriended when Pitt was only fourteen.75 Upon Warton’s death, Pitt, who was then prime minister, apparently offered the laureateship to Hayley, who turned it down, thanking him in verse for the offer.76 The post was then offered to Pye, who accepted. Pye and Hayley were both prolific poets, and Pye had been a loyal Pittite MP from 1784 until just before Warton’s death; his initial election campaign had been supported by a large grant from the government’s secret service fund.77 He and Hayley also had a great mutual respect for each other’s work, with commendatory verses to each other published in Pye’s 1787 Poems on Various Subjects.78 When Pye complimented Cowper in a prose work, Hayley wrote to Cowper to draw his attention to it, and Cowper expressed gratification at receiving praise from such a source.79 Perhaps, then, Hayley put a word in for Pye to Pitt in 1790.

In any case, Pye exploited his own connection to Pitt as rigorously as possible, continually courting him, both in person and by letters, in search of places. It was probably primarily by these means that he gained the office (as shall be investigated in the third case study, below). Meanwhile, the candidacy of Robert Merry is known only by a single newspaper report: ‘Mr. Merry, who was a Cambridge Man, should he be chosen Laureat, will, in turn, vindicate the honours of that University.’80 It is not clear how much weight should be placed on this testimony, since the paper in question, The World, enjoyed a friendly working relationship with Merry, and had been regularly publishing his Della Cruscan poetry for several years by this time. Moreover, in 1790, Merry’s sympathies were already turning in favour of the French Revolution, which would not have endeared him to the government.

Last of all was the 1813 appointment.81 Although various poets hoped for the office, the only men who could ever have been offered it were Walter Scott (who had first refusal) and Robert Southey. In this decision, both the prince regent (the future George IV) and the prime minister, Lord Liverpool, were in agreement. The lord chamberlain was then the marquess of Hertford, who was seventy years old. He favoured Scott, and was cagey about Southey due to the latter’s former reputation as a radical. Throughout the decision process, though, Hertford was keenly solicitous of Liverpool’s opinion, and set his compass primarily by this reference point. Scott did not make any request for the office, but the historiographer and royal librarian James Stanier Clarke probably agitated on his behalf, whereas Southey’s claim was pushed by, among others, John Wilson Croker (secretary to the Admiralty) and certain members of Hertford’s own family. Liverpool seems to have been the prime decision-maker, but with the prince regent greatly important too, and the lord chamberlain was not much more than a rubber-stamper on this occasion. As for the reasons behind Scott and then Southey’s selection, all of the men involved in the selection process avowed a desire to appoint the best poet in the kingdom. It was also significant that both poets were strongly associated with the Quarterly Review. This journal, which enjoyed a huge readership, was pro-ministerial, and a belligerent advocate for the war that Lord Liverpool’s government was prosecuting.

Now that the individual laureateship appointments for the Hanoverian period have been examined in turn, it is time to cast a critical look over the evidence as a whole, so as to answer the questions raised in the introduction to this chapter.

Patterns and consistencies

The first question is what wider trends can be identified across these appointments, especially with regard to who made the decision, what kind of people were considered for the post and the reasons for a laureate’s appointment.

On at least one occasion (1757), the lord chamberlain (Devonshire) can be seen to have chosen the laureate, probably in discussion with his brother, possibly in response to intercessions from elsewhere, but with no evidence of his being directed from above. Similarly, in 1718, it cannot seriously be doubted that the lord chamberlain (Newcastle) selected the laureate. There are suggestions that certain people interceded with him: the literary men, Tonson, Addison, Garth and certain ‘Illustrious Persons’ speculated on by Oldmixon. However, for the reasons already given, it seems likely that Newcastle’s personal preference was strong from the beginning and that he determined the choice himself. In 1730, the lord chamberlain (Grafton) appointed the laureate in a formal sense, but contemporaries believed that his decision had been influenced by others, or that others could have contravened it, had they so wished. It should also be remembered that Grafton was notoriously boorish and illiterate. For the later appointments, the lord chamberlain Salisbury was involved in 1785 but not attributed any agency by contemporaries, and was then overshadowed (if not ignored) by the prime minister, Pitt, in 1790, while in 1813 the lord chamberlain simply ratified the decisions of others. Given that the laureateship remained, throughout this period, an office that was technically in the lord chamberlain’s gift, the evidence as a whole would point to the conclusion that the lord chamberlains could and did select the laureates in the reigns of George I and George II, and that, even under George III, the default procedure was that the lord chamberlain should select the laureate and offer that person the post without recourse to anyone else. However, there was always room for other powerful voices to exert themselves on the matter, if they so chose; and, in George III’s reign, the selection of the laureate became seen as a matter which went beyond the lord chamberlain’s remit. It became a valid object of concern for kings, prince regents and, especially, prime ministers, any of whom would expect their opinion to be carried if they put it forward.

A comprehensive view of the appointments would therefore suggest that in 1715 – when Rowe was appointed, but by an unknown agency – it was probably the lord chamberlain, the duke of Bolton, who made the decision, but that he probably acted on advice and intercession rather than according to any great personal preference. Likewise, in 1730, a comparison with other appointments encourages an emphasis on Grafton’s role in the decision, but also flags up the importance of the lord chamberlain’s personality, as this particular one showed little interest in posts such as the laureateship. As for 1785, when Pitt was not yet established in power or as assertive as he was in 1790, it seems valid to suggest that Salisbury, while fairly indifferent as to who should be poet laureate, was the person with whom Reynolds interceded to have Warton made laureate (if Reynolds’s contribution was key), and that he either passed on this suggestion to George III, or was the initial and major recipient of George’s own suggestion as to Warton being made laureate. Therefore, it was probably only in 1790 and 1813 that the lord chamberlain was not much involved in the decision-making process and that an assertive prime minister took the laureate selection mostly upon himself.

However, this pattern also indicates the importance of royalty in the decision-making. In 1785, George III clearly had some role in the appointment. If he played no part in the 1790 appointment, then it should be remembered that he had only recently recovered from his first bout of madness, and was now beginning to leave the direction of national affairs securely in the hands of Pitt. By 1813, he was fully incapacitated; but, in his absence, Southey’s appointment did see heavy involvement from the prince regent.

As for the appointments under George I and II, there is no hint of those kings having had any involvement. This too is what would be expected on the basis of their personalities. George I did not speak English and George II’s first language was German, and, while their general attitude to matters of high culture has been debated by historians, they undoubtedly had no interest in English-language literature.82 It is highly instructive that, across their two reigns, the only appointment to have been connected by contemporaries with the royal family was that of 1730. This was the only appointment between George I and George III’s accessions to occur when England had a queen, and the queen in question was George II’s wife Caroline. Recent decades have seen an increasing appreciation for Caroline, who is now regarded as having turned the court into a vibrant, flourishing social venue and having had a highly significant role as a patron of artistic and intellectual matters.83 Whereas the courts of George I and George II are supposed to have been relatively dull and philistine, Caroline, during her period on the throne (1727–37), brought splendour and vitality to the court, as well as colouring it with her own particular personality.84 It is therefore no coincidence that her pet poet, Duck, was Cibber’s main competitor for the laureateship in 1730, or that Pope and others then believed her influence to have been paramount in the selection of Cibber.

In fact, then, the Hanoverian period sees the laureate appointments matching the history of the royal family and of court life exactly.85 In the reigns of George I and II, the kings had nothing to do with the laureateship because it was not among their interests. However, in that decade in which Caroline presided over the court, she had a significant, perhaps even overwhelming, influence on who was made laureate. When George III became king, the situation changed. George III was more assertive in English affairs than either of his predecessors had been; he was a lover and connoisseur of English literature, and he was eager to become a significant patron of the arts. Thus, for the one appointment predating George III’s descent into illness and retreat from public affairs, he became the first reigning monarch since Charles II to exert himself in the appointment of a laureate. In 1813, still in alignment with the wider history of English royalty, the appointment saw the involvement of a cultured and well-read prince regent. As for whether any of these observations can help shed light on the individual laureateship appointments, the answer is probably negative. Where there is evidence of royal involvement, royalty was indeed involved, and probably with significant influence; where there is no such evidence, it is because royalty had no interest in being involved at that time, except perhaps in 1790.

Finally, on the subject of decision-makers, there are the littler interceders to be considered. Not too many of these are now visible, although the evidence from both the laureateship appointments in particular and the workings of patronage in general suggest that they potentially would have been numerous and influential. As well as the peers and government figures involved in, for example, Southey’s appointment, various cultural figures appear to have exerted themselves across the period. Given the nature of the office, they probably could have had significant influence. Clearly, the likes of Tonson, Reynolds and Hayley could not have decided on the appointee themselves, as a lord chamberlain, monarch or prime minister could; but they could have had a powerful voice in articulating a poet’s claim and merits for the office.

Who were those poets, though, and what were their merits? Were the criteria for a laureate as arbitrary and inconsistent as they seem on the surface, and was the poet’s selection merely a result of having the right backers? The laureates and their competitors were patently a mixed bunch, some of them (like Rowe) being seasoned place-hunters, others (like Gray) being college recluses; some of them were primarily known as playwrights, some of them as lyric poets, some of them for their prose. But certain patterns can nonetheless be identified. Firstly, the obvious and cynical qualities do hold true: it helped to have connections and to be politically well disposed towards the government. Most of those who became or almost became laureate were well connected, and those who were not – Gray and Whitehead – nonetheless had one or two key connections, Gray being close friends with Lord John Cavendish and on reasonably good terms with Devonshire (who hosted Gray in his own box on George III’s coronation), Whitehead being intimately bound up with the Harcourt and Jersey families.86 Rowe was a bastion of Whiggism, Eusden was a willing Whig and Cibber was associated with both the general Whig defence of the Hanoverian succession and the particular ruling band of Whigs. Dennis and Oldmixon, laureate candidates in the early years of George I’s reign, were also firmly Whiggish.

It is tempting to suggest that politics became less important in the reign of George III. Contemporaries were certainly less inclined to see the appointments as political appointments during his reign, and it is generally the case that historians and literary scholars find slightly less political matter to study in the later eighteenth century than they do in the early eighteenth. In addition, as the thrones and successions of Georges I and II were under greater threat than those of George III, it would make sense that there was a greater need for a politically reliable laureate in the early than in the late eighteenth century. Nonetheless, George III’s laureates did tend to be politically amenable. Warton may not have partaken of much in the way of overtly political activity, but he was a firm supporter of the king; Pye was a loyal Pittite MP; and Southey, although his politics were idiosyncratic, was writing for the Quarterly Review in favour of government policies by 1813. Scott was known to be Tory, pro-Pitt and pro-government, while Hayley was friendly with Pitt but not much involved in political activities. The only laureate-elects who had no association with a party or government were Gray and Whitehead, in 1757 (towards the end of George II’s reign); but even they were dealt with through Mason, a staunch ‘Old’ Whig.

The laureateship appointments also show some correlation with another broader trend: the lessening dominance of plays over other forms of imaginative writing, and the increasing prominence of non-dramatic poetry. Broadly speaking, the earlier laureates (going back to the later Stuart period, too) were primarily known as playwrights, while the later laureates were not. General men of letters, some of whom were primarily known for their non-dramatic prose – for example, Dennis, Duck, Theobald and Concanen – were always present as candidates, but in the first half of the eighteenth century they tended to lose out, whereas under George III they were more successful. Southey represents the culmination of this trend, being ‘the only existing entire man of letters’ in Britain.87 1757 marks the turning point: Gray was a lyric poet who never produced a play in his life, while Whitehead had had his greatest and most enduring success with a tragedy (The Roman Father) and remained involved with theatrical affairs thereafter, but mostly published non-dramatic poetry, and was well known for both.

However, it is somewhat misleading to distinguish dramatists from non-dramatists. The dramatists – even Cibber – also published in other forms, while the non-dramatists had usually written a play or two over the course of their career, and probably would have focused more of their energies on the stage if only the stage had accepted them, given how lucrative a successful play could be. It is therefore perhaps better to say – at least for the later Stuart and early Hanoverian periods – that successful writers were favoured for the laureateship, and writerly success lay principally in the theatre. Under George III, the pattern continued, but with the measures of writerly success becoming different and more diverse. The men chosen for the laureateship enjoyed more success in their field than anyone else: Gray in lyric poetry, Warton in the rediscovery of the English lyric, Hayley in gentle didactic poetry, Scott in metrical romances, Southey as an ‘entire man of letters’ and poetic genius. Whitehead, meanwhile, straddled a transitional period with a sort of calm mastery, leaving only Eusden and Pye as the exceptions to the pattern. But at the time of their appointments, even Eusden ‘was a Person of great hopes’ (as Gray later stated), and even Pye was fairly well respected for his numerous publications (as seen in Hayley’s and Cowper’s attitude towards him).88

As for the failed candidates, they were generally successful in some particular field, but were not as successful as the men who were chosen ahead of them, or had not found such a defining prominence in one particular field; on this count, it should be remembered that Whitehead was second choice after Gray, and Pye after Hayley. This flags up two features of the appointments: first, as was mentioned already, the history of the appointments represents a microcosm of wider literary developments; second, those writers offered the laureateship had almost invariably found great critical and commercial success in their careers to date. In short, the writers chosen for the laureateship were among the leading few writers of their time.

This analysis of the kind of men considered and favoured for the laureateship has already suggested some reasons for why each laureate was appointed: they deserved the office on account of their literary success, they had proven themselves politically agreeable or even politically serviceable and they enjoyed the connections to be able to advance these powerful claims. However, these are all speculations; whether any patterns can be found in the identifiable reasons given for the appointing of laureates is another matter, and is hampered by lack of evidence. Party-political considerations appear, but only obliquely, in 1715 and 1730, and still more obliquely in 1790 and 1813; but they were almost certainly of no importance in 1757 and 1785. In 1718, Eusden was clearly appointed for having written a poem celebrating the lord chamberlain’s marriage, but on no other occasion did the laureateship become so overt an embodiment of an individual patron–client relationship (as it had done under Dorset), except, in a very different manner, in 1790. The reasoning and processes behind each appointment therefore appear inconsistent.

However, the inconsistency that appears on an appointment-by-appointment basis was nonetheless productive of the more consistent patterns regarding the kind of people appointed laureate (as outlined above). This in itself is instructive. It suggests that underlying the successive laureateship appointments, there may have been some consistent sense of the qualifications and characteristics necessary for a laureate, or some notion of precedent – a suggestion for which there is otherwise no evidence, since no contemporary can be found avowing that such-and-such a laureate was appointed because they were similar to their predecessors. On the other hand, perhaps no one ever did have any such sense, or appeal to any such reasoning; perhaps the broader patterns identified above are not ascribable to the conscious reasoning of any of the agents involved in the appointments, but rather reflect the deeper institutional facts of the office itself, and its positioning with regard to the court and literature.

Indeed, one factor that supports this somewhat abstract conclusion is that the patterns identified above were all susceptible to an oscillating alternation. To state it plainly: Shadwell was very political; Tate was not; Rowe was very political; Eusden was not; Cibber was political; Gray and Whitehead were not; Hayley was not, but Pye was; Scott was political, but Southey was more complicated. Shadwell was a pre-eminent playwright; Tate was comparatively undistinguished; Rowe was a pre-eminent playwright; Eusden was comparatively undistinguished; Cibber was a pre-eminent playwright; Gray and Whitehead were pre-eminent in different fields; Warton was pre-eminently Wartonish; Hayley was a pre-eminent non-dramatic poet, but Pye was not massively distinguished for anything in particular; Southey and Scott were pre-eminent in their own fields. It is a similar story in terms of the distinction between university men and non-university men, and in any other identifiable pattern.89 Admittedly, there is not a very large sample size to be working with here, and the oscillation reduces under George III, as well as being mitigated throughout by the inclusion of people who were selected but not appointed (Gray, Hayley and Scott). It would be mitigated even further by some sort of weighted inclusion of the other candidates. In fact, the true alternation only exists for the time period between Shadwell and Cibber, a period comprising five names (and also including the later Stuart period, which is not even the subject of this chapter, due to the laureateship being something different at that time).

Nonetheless, it is clearly the case that few, if any, laureates were succeeded by someone who was similar to themselves (in terms of the features discussed above), and that it was more normal for a new laureate to have similarities with their laureate-grandfather than with their immediate predecessor. This observation supports the argument that those who selected the laureates were not doing so with a job specification in mind, and that the processes by which a laureate was appointed were not much dictated by a consciousness of precedent. In turn, this argument suggests that the patterns identifiable in the history of laureate appointments are ascribable to the nature of the office itself rather than to anyone’s conscious decision-making.

Case study: Oldmixon

Now that this investigation of the appointments has been carried out, it is time to ask what the foregoing information and conclusions can reveal about the nature of the laureateship and about the society it was part of. This shall be done by looking at three case studies, the first two of which will focus on the networks that were coming into play in each appointment process, and how they were physically and conceptually situated.90 These first two will also investigate how such networks produced ideas of value or merit, and the third will build on this by showing the practicalities of patronage. Those ideas entailed a claim on the meaning of literature, and the appointment of a laureate constituted both a result of and a reinforcement of such a claim.

As was discussed above, many different agents were potentially involved in the appointing of a laureate, pertaining to a number of different spheres of activity and identity. At the time of the 1813 selection, the prime minister, the prince regent, the lord chamberlain, the lord chamberlain’s aristocratic relatives, the historiographer and royal librarian, and several figures associated with the government (some of whom held pronounced literary interests) were all involved in determining Pye’s successor. It may be that, were there as much surviving evidence for previous appointments as there is for Southey’s, a similar story could be told throughout the Hanoverian period. In any case, the laureateship selection process clearly had the potential to draw in the activities of a wide and diverse cast of characters. By considering the interrelations of these characters, and the overlapping spheres that the appointment processes touched upon, this chapter will now show how the laureateship functioned with regard to the networks that comprised Hanoverian society. It will make the argument that the laureateship demonstrates something of the nature of these networks, and had an important role to play in constituting them, partly through the binding agency of patronage (as well as through other means that are explored in other chapters). The laureateship stands out as an important element in the networks of Hanoverian society – networks that show some similarities across the period, but that also changed in significant ways.

The first case study is Oldmixon’s letter to Tonson, relating to the 1718 appointment.91 The letter began:

If you ever had Compassion for a man most unjustly Suffering for his Zeal for a Cause you always espoused which I shall most amply make appear when I come to London/If my particular Attachment to yr Interest & the Pleasure I took in Serving you If the Desire I have to return to Town & Evidence by Deeds what I can only now by Words can prevail upon a Generous Mind I flatter my self you will be so kind, as to speak to my Lord the Duke of Newcastle that I may succeed Mr Rowe in the Laureats Place which I was to have had before had it not been for him as Sir Samuell Garth knows. My Lord will be spoken to by severall Illustrious Persons. But I know, Sir, yr Opinion & Recommendation in this case will have as much Weight as any Bodies.

There are several obvious points to make about this plaintive appeal. Firstly, it is a testament to the importance and workings of the Kit-Cat Club and of the Whiggish writers, politicians and peers who were not part of that Club but who had dealings with its members and shared its ethos. Oldmixon conjured up an image of Newcastle – the lord chamberlain at court, a prominent literary patron, a rich young nobleman and a Whig politician – being approached by Tonson and ‘by severall Illustrious Persons’ (that is, peers) to advance the claims of their favoured writers. Newcastle the patron, whose patronage to some extent operated through the medium of the Kit-Cat Club, was here imagined to be susceptible to the implorations from that Club and its associated members in terms of how he bestowed that (court) patronage. But Oldmixon believed that Tonson’s ‘Opinion & Recommendation’ would be as powerful as any of those peers’. Tonson, as the great publisher, ex-secretary of the Kit-Cat Club and personal friend of Newcastle, was credited with an influence over Newcastle that was the equal of anyone’s in the matter of the laureateship. Through this influence, Oldmixon – a small, suffering writer who lived far distant from London – imagined that he could gain Newcastle’s patronage and be made laureate. He was highly aware of his competitors and of other associated writers who may have been able to speak well or ill of him; he insisted that he would have been laureate already if not for Rowe, and that Garth could vouch for this fact; then, as the letter went on, he discussed various other Whig writers, explaining why their claims were worse than his and alluding to their own connections and to the patronage that some of them had already enjoyed.

The network that Oldmixon thus articulated was one in which ‘Illustrious Persons’ – peers, and especially politically active and court-based Whig magnates like Newcastle – stood in leading positions, with a hierarchy of lesser peers and then literary figures beneath them, rendering them service in exchange for intercessions and patronage. Those lesser figures, as well as serving the same overall masters and working on the same page, were also competitors with each other, their loyalties more vertical than horizontal. This chimes well with Field’s observation that patronage was ‘the single most important constant in the Club’s story – the mechanism that made it tick’.92 Oldmixon also suggested that the system functioned according to a sense of fairness and noblesse oblige. The figures at the top of the hierarchy were defined by their lustre and lucre, those at the bottom by their hard work and neediness. Material rewards were therefore expected to flow downwards, puddling in the laps of those people who had worked the hardest and whose needs were the greatest. When explaining why he should be preferred to his competitors, Oldmixon pointed out that he was ‘the Oldest Claimer’, and that ‘Mr Hughes has a 500l a Year Place, So they all have, I think.’ Oldmixon’s long-standing need, and the fact that his competitors had already been supplied with rewards, rendered him the most appropriate recipient of the laureateship. The system had to contain an ideal of fairness, or else the vertical transactions it consisted of would break down; it was this logic to which Oldmixon appealed.

Yet there was also a sense in which the hierarchy was blurred. Tonson, a low-born literary figure, not connected with the court or government, appeared at Newcastle’s elbow, equally influential with any of the ‘Illustrious Persons’. Oldmixon also ended the letter with the supposition that ‘if Friends will be Friends I see no Reason to despair of carrying it’: a comment that seems to suggest the existence of other interceders who, from the word ‘Friends’ and from Oldmixon’s other known relationships, were probably not ‘Illustrious Persons’. He probably meant such people as Addison and Steele, neither of whom were mentioned in the letter but whose influence is well known, or people who were neither writers nor aristocrats. Whatever the case, Oldmixon was suggesting a nexus centred on Newcastle in which figures from distinctly different backgrounds, deriving their position and influence from distinctly different sources (rank, money, sociability; success in writing, or publishing, or politics, or organization) jostled about with each other, both competing and cooperating.

Moreover, Oldmixon clearly articulated the rationale that had brought this particular network into being and given it its powers of patronage; at the same time, he indicated his knowledge of the values that were important to that network, and that therefore had to be appealed to by someone who wished to profit by it, whether by gaining a leading position within it (as Newcastle had done) or by pulling the right levers to make money fall out of it (as Oldmixon wished to do). The first line of his letter was, ‘If you ever had Compassion for a man most unjustly Suffering for his Zeal for a Cause you always espoused ...’. This was a highly sympathetic appeal – ‘Compassion’, ‘Suffering’ – but it was a sympathy that was activated by ‘a Cause you always espoused’, namely, the Whig cause (and, in some sense, the cause of the Hanoverian succession). Throughout the letter, Oldmixon maintained this mixture of personal pitifulness (designed to play upon Tonson’s heartstrings) and political zeal. He turned himself into a Whig martyr, for whom personal, emotive sympathy was conflated with the great motivating cause of Whiggism. ‘Hard will be my Case’, he said, ‘if while I am banishd in a Corner of ye Kingdom surrounded with Jacobites vilifyd insulted & having not a Minutes Ease my Friends will not endeavour that this fatal Absence of mine may not be my Ruin.’ His ‘Friends’ had to save him from his tragic situation in the midst of Jacobites, which had been brought about by his selfless work for the cause; it was as much of an emotional necessity as a political one. What this indicates is that the network being invoked here – a network centring on Newcastle and the Kit-Cat Club – was one in which a set of personal relationships was actuated and fostered by a transcendent ideological cause, which cause, in turn, became the cause of those persons and their relationships. Oldmixon did not call it ‘the Whig cause’; he called it ‘a Cause you always espoused’. The nature and importance of this cause allowed it to draw together people from different walks of life who would be well suited to aid, serve and reward each other, and who, by working in unison, would be able to take hold of the means by which to benefit themselves and each other. This meant that there was an explicit and complex interplay between working for the abstract cause and working for the individuals who made up that cause – an interplay that Oldmixon appealed to, and sought to take advantage of, in his letter to Tonson.

Obviously, this is making the discussion reminiscent of the ideas of Lewis Namier. His arguments have been refuted from a number of angles, and Walcott’s interpretation – which, having applied Namier’s arguments to the reign of Queen Anne, impinges still more closely on 1718 – has been comprehensively discredited by the work of Geoffrey Holmes.93 But a somewhat more recent definition of party by Frank O’Gorman does apply here. For O’Gorman,

a party is an organized group which pursues political power and thus political office. It endeavours to cultivate popular support for its beliefs and focuses its activities upon Parliament … such a definition is sufficiently flexible to allow parties to be treated (at the same or different times) as vehicles of ideology, agencies for securing popular support, dispensers of patronage or instruments of government.94

Party is here defined by its pursuit of a power located in the metropole and gained by the cultivation of popular support, where ideology, patronage and government can all serve as both means to and ends of that power. O’Gorman emphasized that these different constituent elements can come into play ‘at the same or different times’, suggesting that different persons, interest groups or relationships might demonstrate various combinations of these elements which differ in the way that they conceptualize the party cause or in their conduct with regard to it.

Moreover, it may be argued that the ideological element is sometimes emphasized too strongly in scholarship on parties. Somewhat contrary to the tenets of the Geoffrey Holmes consensus, debate in the early eighteenth century seems to have focused on personalities more often than on abstract ideological matters;95 and there are clear continuities between the behaviour of the old-fashioned, much-maligned political cliques of the early modern kingdoms, and the political parties of the early eighteenth century. Newcastle himself later became a stalwart of the Walpolean regime and the Old Corps Whig party that followed it, both of which groups had to fend off constant accusations that they had betrayed the principles of Whiggism, and both of which emphasized their Whig identity primarily by recourse to warnings about Jacobites. Newcastle spent his entire political career worrying about the actions of his fellow politicians, wondering about the fidelity of his ‘friends’ and seeking to reward his followers. His primary role and expertise was in managing court and government patronage on a nationwide scale.96 He seems to have spent a great deal less time fretting about the niceties of Whiggism, or constructing justifications of his creed. Of course, he did not need to construct any such justifications, since that was the job of men like Oldmixon; but Oldmixon had to be paid for those services, and it was services like those that kept Newcastle in the power and the money. Politics was personal. Oldmixon’s letter to Tonson did not make any appeal to specifically Whig ideas or values. Instead, it offered the pitiful image of an old man, dying and miserable, having spent his life in the service of ‘a Cause you [Tonson, personally] always espoused’, now surrounded by a hideous band of Jacobites. The Whigs were outnumbered and oppressed; they had to stick together, and help out their own; Oldmixon had to be given the laureateship.

But they were more outnumbered in some areas than others. Oldmixon was on his own in Somerset, whereas Tonson was amid a strong core of Whigs in London. Hence the final suggestion that Oldmixon’s letter provides on the subject of the Kit-Cat Club network: the importance of London, and of physical proximity. Again, Oldmixon emphasized this point at the very start of his letter: ‘If you ever had Compassion for a man most unjustly Suffering … which I shall most amply make appear when I come to London.’ Here, he appeared like the risen Jesus, thrusting himself before a doubting Tonson and showing him his wounds; those wounds would only gain credit if they were touched; and Oldmixon needed credit to pay for the laureateship. Immediately he carried on in this vein: ‘If the Desire I have to return to Town & Evidence by Deeds what I can only now by Words can prevail upon a Generous Mind …’ The Whig network to which Oldmixon made appeal was explicitly London-based. Its leading members and operations were in London – especially the town part – and, if a Whig was to function within it and derive benefit from it properly, he had to be present in the metropole. As well as emphasizing the importance of location to this network, and how centrally clustered it was, this rhetoric also reiterates the importance of the personal. Of course, Whiggism and Toryism were nationwide ideologies, uniting people across a vast geographical span; Oldmixon and his struggles with his Jacobite neighbours in Somerset were proof of that. Moreover, the contemporary Tory caricature of Whigs as un-English metropolitans, associated with mobile capital rather than a fixed stake in the land, was belied by Newcastle himself, an aristocrat whose power base lay in his huge landed estates outside of London. But as Oldmixon’s letter demonstrates, it was nonetheless the case that Whiggism was centred on the activities and relationships of a relatively small, factional clique of men who were at their most active and powerful as a clique when in London, and who (especially in the person of Newcastle) were intimate with the (London-situated) court. Oldmixon knew this, and knew that he had to be present in London at least some of the time if he was to prove his service in the Whig cause and gain the benefits that he deserved. His sufferings would not have become real until he had shown the personal evidence of them to Tonson; his ‘Words’ would have only become ‘Deeds’ once he had set foot in London.

The fact that Oldmixon lived so far and so continuously away from London was therefore a severe handicap to him, and rendered him only a peripheral member of the network to which he was making appeal. But what is noteworthy is the way in which he tried to circumvent this handicap, and even extract advantage from it. Just as his physical absence from London curtailed his practical ability to forward his claims, so that absence was used to demonstrate his zeal for the Whig cause, which zeal had come at the cost of his own person. Again, the importance of personal relationships becomes evident, but here constructed in an alternative, imagined form. In the absence of his actual person, Oldmixon created a surrogate: an affective, ideal version of himself, placed before the Londoners so as to trigger a personal reaction in them. If he could not be in London, then his bleeding wounds could be, reminding Tonson and Newcastle of the valiant work he has been doing for them among the Jacobite hordes of Somerset. Thus he made his claim to be considered as an intimate part of a London that was Whig, Hanoverian and comprised the court and the town, even when he was physically distant.

Ultimately, this attempt to make capital from his disability was not enough; he lost out to Eusden. Whether Eusden was living more often in Cambridge or London at this time is not clear, but, whatever the case, Eusden had been much more successful over the previous couple of years in making friends and patrons among London Whigs, and had played a bigger part among them (for example, with his contributions to Steele’s and Addison’s productions).97 Whether physically or imaginatively, he had done a better job of rendering himself present to the London Whigs, and to Newcastle and the Kit-Cat Club, and the court around which they were centred.

Nonetheless, Oldmixon’s attempt is very telling. It reveals that this network to which he was appealing was a sort of imagined, nationwide community, bound by the abstract ideal of a Whig cause, but that it was centred on a real clique, spending significant amounts of time in London, operating according to their personal relationships and their proximity to the Hanoverian court. Again, it must be emphasized that neither Namier’s, Walcott’s nor contemporary Tories’ depictions of the Whigs were correct; ideology mattered hugely in politics, Whiggism was a nationwide ideological cause and the differences between Whigs and Tories were not merely (or even largely) social or geographical. Yet Oldmixon’s letter does testify strongly to the geographical and personal network that was inextricably bound up with the ideological cause, and which rendered the Whigs a party rather than just an abstract set of ideas. The laureateship, as a piece of court patronage designed for writers, was one of the prizes that held this network together. Indeed, being designed for writers, and having a nationwide prominence, it was uniquely important in reifying this interdisciplinary network. But although it could thus function as a symbol and lubricant of the overall triumph of Whiggism, in practice its fate would be determined by a small band of metropolitan Whigs – peers, politicians, courtiers, literary figures – who would use it as a personal reward for whoever was most evidently serviceable before their eyes.

Case study: Fashion

By 1718, that London-based Whig world was already splitting, and the Kit-Cat Club was collapsing as a result. Newcastle would enter into a protracted conflict with Steele over Drury Lane theatre, Steele holding a patent to perform drama, Newcastle holding the lord chamberlain’s vague powers over all matters theatrical. Newcastle eventually triumphed, and proved the authority of court and government over an independent, commercial playhouse, an authority that would eventually be confirmed and strengthened by the Licensing Act (1737).98 By the time of Eusden’s death in 1730, the Whigs were irrevocably fractured between the ruling Walpoleans (sometimes referred to by contemporaries as ‘the court Whigs’) and the opposition Whigs; Grafton was the lord chamberlain, and George II and Caroline were on the thrones.

To some extent, however, a similar case to 1718 is in evidence. Cibber was one of the managers of Drury Lane theatre (over which the lord chamberlain’s authority had been proven during his time there). He was intimate with various Whig magnates. Both as a highly successful playwright and as one of the men who chose what plays to perform, he had great influence in London’s theatrical affairs. Contemporaries often associated him with the ruling Whigs, and his massively successful Non-Juror had gained him the patronage of George I due to its rebuttal of Jacobitism. He can therefore be viewed as having succeeded by the same criteria as those which Oldmixon unsuccessfully made appeal to. Although there was no longer any Kit-Cat Club, his success would seem to indicate the operations of a similar network to that which had existed in 1718.

However, there is another angle on the 1730 appointment worth following, and it is relevant to subsequent appointments too. Henry Power has argued that a ‘central feature of Scriblerian literature’ was ‘the contrast it draws between durable classical literature, capable of communicating its message across generations, and ephemeral modern works, written to tickle the palates of fickle consumers’.99 In the years around 1730, it was according to this contrast that Pope, Swift and their correspondents made sense of the laureateship, its holders and the prime contenders for it. It has already been touched upon that they felt the laureateship to have been primarily contested between two men, Duck and Cibber, who enjoyed favour from the women at court, chiefly the queen. But a more thorough examination of their letters reveals a wider tendency to contrast themselves with those two favoured authors, and to articulate the contrast by reference to the idea of an ephemeral fashion that was not only commercial, but equally (and connectedly) courtly and commercial. On the one hand, Pope et al. were ‘unfashionable’, and were isolated from court; on the other, Duck and Cibber were ‘fashionable’, and their fashionableness derived from a courtly, female preference.

Pope set the tone in 1728, writing to Swift (as was quoted above): ‘I am told the Gynocracy are of opinion, that they want no better writers than Cibber and the British Journalist; so that we [himself and Swift, the unfashionable writers] may live at quiet, and apply ourselves to more abstruse studies.’100 A couple of years later he wrote to John Gay, just before Eusden’s death became widely known, that the ‘bad taste’ of the times was indicated by the fact that Eusden had the laurel, and that Duck enjoyed popularity. He went on, ‘I hope this Phaenomenon of Wiltshire [Duck] has appear’d at Amesbury, or the Duchess [of Queensbury, whose seat was at Amesbury] will be thought insensible to all bright qualities and exalted genius’s, in Court and country alike.’101

The duchess of Queensbury was a close friend of Gay, and a correspondent of Pope and Swift. She had recently been banned from court due to having argued with Grafton and George II over Gay’s Polly, the sequel to the Beggar’s Opera, and she thus served as a kind of anti-court patroness, contrasted with the women of court by her superior taste and disregard for ‘fashion’. Indeed, the same note was then rung in a letter from Gay and the duchess to Swift, in November 1730. Gay, describing how happily isolated he was at Amesbury, wrote, ‘I do not Envy either Sir Robert, or Stephen Duck, who is the favorite Poet of the Court. I hear sometimes from Mr Pope, & scarce from any body else; Were I to live here never so long I believe I should never think of London, but I cannot help thinking of you.’102 Again, the contrast was between the isolated band of unfashionable poets, keeping up only their communications with each other – ‘I hear sometimes from Mr Pope, & scarce from any body else’ – and the favourites of London and the court, Walpole in politics, Duck in poetry.

However, this contrast did not tend to be phrased in terms of politics. The one exception was Gay’s passing reference to Walpole, and even here the prime minister was used only as a shorthand for someone enjoying court favour and London bustle. Instead, the emphasis was on ‘taste’ and ‘fashion’, with the bad taste of the court, and especially of the court women, contrasted with the good sense and good taste of the duchess of Queensbury. Admittedly, Swift and Pope had reasons to avoid explicit political discussion in their letters;103 but it is nonetheless significant that Pope, Swift and their correspondents wrote consistently in this way, and portrayed the matter of the laureateship through this lens. Indeed, when Swift first reported the news about the appointment to Gay and the duchess, he wrote, ‘But the vogue of our few honest folks here [in Dublin] is that Duck is absolutely to Succeed Eusden in the Lawrell, the contention being between Concannan or Theobald, or some other Hero of the Dunciad.’104 Even here, Swift could not help framing the news in such a way as to place the laureateship in opposition to Pope’s satirical epic; even here, Swift could not resist using a phrase like ‘the vogue’ when mentioning the news of Duck’s impending success.

It has already been noted that Lady Elizabeth Germain, when writing to Swift shortly after Cibber’s appointment, mentioned the possibility that it was the queen who had chosen the laureate in the same sentence as she mentioned her want of acquaintance with Pope.105 Whether or not this shows her to have been repeating news that originated with Pope, it is notable that Pope should again have been presented in immediate contrast with the laureate: Lady Elizabeth was ‘sorry’ for her lack of acquaintance with Pope, while the queen ‘deserves’ the poetry of such a laureate as Cibber. A month later came Swift’s letter to Pope in which he suggested that ‘the Court’ either selected the laureate, or could have interceded with Grafton to have had someone else chosen, had it so desired. Just before this speculation came an apology from Swift; he wrote that Pope had been ‘hard on me for saying you were a Poet in favour at Court: I profess it was writ to me either by Lord Bol. or the Doctor. You know favor is got by two very contrary qualitys, one is fear, the other by ill taste; as to Cibber ...’.106 Yet again, the mention of Cibber’s appointment was framed in a wider discussion about ‘ill taste’ and ‘favour at Court’; yet again, the contrast was between Pope and Cibber, even if Swift had let the contrast lapse in a previous letter, and been reprimanded for it by Pope. Presumably, the letter in which Pope reprimanded Swift also grouped together the matters of ‘ill taste’ and ‘favour at Court’ with that of Cibber’s appointment. This is the sense given by Swift’s formulation: ‘… ill taste; as to Cibber …’.

Lastly, in 1732, Swift wrote a letter to the duchess in which he expounded on what a bad courtier she was. Indeed, she was not even qualified to be a ‘maid of honour’; there was no place for her in Pope’s ‘Gynocracy’ of sycophantic court women spreading the fashions set by their queen. Swift, enumerating the ways in which she failed as a courtier, went on:

you are neither a free-thinker, nor can sell bargains … you pretend to be respected for qualityes which have been out of fashion ever since you were almost in your cradle … your contempt for a fine petticoat is an infalible mark of disaffection, which if further confirmed by your ill tast for wit, in preferring two old fashioned Poets before Duck or Cibber; besides you spell in such a manner as no Court Lady can read, & write in such an old fashioned Style, as none of them can understand.107

Here, Swift presented a comprehensive depiction of the fashionable court woman and her debased taste. He thrice bantered the duchess for being ‘out of fashion’, in terms of her serious ‘qualityes’, her taste in ‘wit’ and, more trivially, her handwriting, and he demonstrated her ‘disaffection’ for the court by her taste in clothes and her taste in poets.

Thus Swift portrayed a court in which vice, irreligion and corruption were jumbled together with the ruling fashions in clothing, wit and handwriting, and where a debased female taste was characteristic of a degraded courtly ethos.108 Again, Swift stressed the contrast between Lady Queensbury’s preference for the unfashionable poets and the courtly preference for Duck and Cibber (who both, by now, enjoyed remunerative marks of court favour). His close linking of ‘petticoats’ with ‘wit’, as well as his reference to ‘Court Ladies’ in the same line, indicates that he was thinking particularly in terms of a female court preference. To Pope, Swift and their friends, then, the matter was clear. While the court politicians destroyed the country with their underhand practices and misrule, the women of the court, led by the benign patroness Queen Caroline, set a fashion for (among other things) bad poets, principally Duck and Cibber. These poets were frivolous, vapid and lacking in integrity. Indeed, it was necessary and inevitable that they be so, since they were the mere trinkets of a gynocratic court fashion. As a fashion, though, they would be swept away in time, leaving serious writers like Pope and Swift to stand proud before posterity. It was as a mocking inversion of this theme that Pope, in one of the earliest letters quoted here, stated that Duck and the laureate (at that time, Eusden) would stand as monuments to ‘our ancestors’ of the present ‘bad taste’.109

In this interpretation, then, the appointment of Cibber and Duck’s nearness to being appointed were the result not so much of the workings of a political faction, as of a courtly fashion set by the patronage and favour of Queen Caroline, and by the spatial dynamics of cultural production and consumption. As with the Kit-Cat Club, this fashion was centred on a small nucleus of Londoners, based in and around the court. The court ladies and the lord chamberlain were at the head of it, and it was associated with London-based readers, theatregoers and politicians. By contrast, Swift was in Ireland, Gay and Lady Queensbury were in Amesbury and Pope was legally disbarred from living in London due to his Catholicism. As with Oldmixon’s attempt to bridge the gap between London and Somerset in a conceptual way, and to fight for a nationwide Whiggism, the court fashion was not confined to London: Pope’s usage of the term ‘Court and country’, quoted above, was to denote a fashion spanning both, in which Caroline and Duck were leading figures. But the fashion was based in the court and town of London – which formed a single unit – and diffused across the nation from there.

Of course, Pope and Swift’s interpretation was based on a solipsistic sense of contrast in which their own independence of mind and greatness of talents were highlighted by reference to the lesser poets who enjoyed a gaudy, transitory favour in the present day but whom posterity would treat with ignominy. Yet it is nonetheless significant that Pope and his correspondents should have settled on Cibber and Duck to provide this antithetical role, or that they should have insisted on viewing Cibber, Duck and the laureateship within this framework. Although the Scriblerian contrast identified by Power, between durable classical literature and ephemeral modern works, usually and most evidently played out by reference to a commercial, consumerist public, it was here being consistently cast with reference to court favour. As in The Dunciad, the modern, dull, degraded culture was presided over by a queen.

Moreover, their interpretation can be shown to be accurate in at least some particulars. Helped along by Caroline’s favour for him, Duck did indeed become a ‘Phaenomenon’ with the reading public. It has already been noted that she gave him various material rewards; and there were perhaps ten pirate editions of his poems between 1730 and 1733. His most productive and rewarding time as a poet came between the start of Caroline’s patronage of him and her death in 1737.110 Cibber’s success as a writer had different and older foundations, and his appointment to the laureateship demonstrates the overlap between commercial popularity and courtly fashion in a different way to the case of Duck. Pope, like everyone else in the eighteenth century, thought highly of Cibber’s The Careless Husband; but otherwise he found Cibber to be a great debaucher of public taste, overseeing a theatrical diet of pantomime, farce, dross and mutilations. He was outraged at the popular, commercial success that Cibber enjoyed, finding it indicative of the bad taste of the times.111 This success owed nothing to Caroline’s patronage, but it helped carry him into the favour of the royal family. By 1730, his work would have been well known and much enjoyed by the court; he had been entertaining the royal household for years, and it had been in 1728 that Pope had claimed the ‘Gynocracy’ to ‘want no better writers than Cibber and the British Journalist’. Cibber’s final comedy, The Provok’d Husband (1728), was dedicated to Caroline, and began with the words, ‘The English Theatre throws itself, with This Play, at Your MAJESTY’s Feet, for Favour and Support.’112 Here, Cibber explicitly brought the commercial theatre of the town together with courtly, queenly favour. Indeed, the royal family had attended the play for one of its first performances.113

Whatever Caroline’s feelings of indulgence for Duck, she and the members of her household were far more familiar with Cibber, and recognized him as one of the leading figures of literary and London-based entertainment. Like Duck, he was fashionable, and it was a fashion that encompassed Caroline and her court, as well as readers and theatregoers outside the court. In his case, the role of the ‘Gynocracy’ with regard to the fashion was different than in Duck’s, but Cibber’s dedication of The Provok’d Husband emphasizes the fact that it did indeed have a role, and so too does his appointment as laureate. If Pope, Swift and their correspondents are to be believed, Cibber’s appointment and Duck’s almost-appointment came at the hands of Caroline and her court ladies, who presided over a literary ‘fashion’ that originated in London and spread out across the nation. It was this fashion that Duck and Cibber were benefitting from. By bestowing the laureateship on Cibber, Caroline confirmed both the fashion itself, and the role of her court as one of its central forums.

Case study: Pye

These two case studies have shown how certain networks might carry a poet to the laureateship, and to an extent they have provided a pseudo-Namierite proof as to the importance of connections, personalities and geography. Yet they have also shown that ideals or even ideologies were bound up with the functional workings of the relevant networks. If Oldmixon was attempting to make himself appear present and serviceable to his superiors, then he was also appealing to the qualities that were important to those superiors and that gave the network its coherence and rationale: the Whig cause. Likewise, Cibber was fashionable not just because he was liked by the right people, but because his work had those qualities that made the right people like it. In the final case study – Pye’s letters to Pitt – the relationship between ideal merit and the practicalities of patronage will be more specifically explored.

This chapter has already shown that there were various rationales and criteria that a poet could appeal to, or profit by, in the contest to become laureate, and that different networks operated in different ways. Throughout the period, there was generally some sense that the laureate should ‘deserve’ the laurel, and that it should be handed to someone who ‘deserved’ it. Oldmixon protested, ‘Long have I been in the Service of the Muse and the Press without any Reward’; a century later, the laureateship was decided on the basis that ‘Scott was the greatest poet of the day, & to Scott therefore they had written to offer it.’114 Yet the sense in which a poet ‘deserved’ the laurel was neither simple nor straightforward. The notion of merit did not necessarily refer to some pure ideal of poetic merit, but it usually at least overlapped with some such ideal.

A good starting point in this consideration is provided by John Beattie, in his 1967 study of George I’s court. Exploring the reasons behind court appointments, he observed that while a candidate’s ‘ability’ was sometimes referred to in support of their claim for a post, it was never unmixed with patronage. He gave as an example Thomas Burnet, a loyal Whig writer, who spent several years soliciting and attending on great men in the early years of George I’s reign, fruitlessly hoping for a place, and eventually receiving an unsought office that had no relation to his qualities or expertise.115 Likewise, when Theobald was unsuccessful in his bid for the laureateship in 1730, he asked Warburton whether he ought to stay on at court, continuing to solicit great men in the hope of a place; the attempt upon the laureateship was thus potentially not the end, but the beginning of the search for court patronage, despite the fact that no other position would have suited Theobald’s activities as well as the laureateship. Something similar can be seen in Pye’s interactions with Pitt. The two logics – ‘Merit’ and ‘Interest’, in Cibber’s terms116 – sometimes appear in distinct, as well as in elided, operation.

The Chatham Papers in the National Archives have several letters from Pye to Pitt, and they show him constantly wheedling and badgering his political master with all the adroitness of a seasoned veteran.117 In 1784 he wrote to Pitt, ‘I am really both ashamed & hurt to trespass so often on that time which I know is so fully employed.’ He went on to discuss the expenses that had been incurred in his election campaign, which he submitted ‘to your own consideration’.118 The next surviving letter is from July 1790, just after Pye’s appointment as laureate. Pye wrote to inform Pitt of Salisbury’s offer to him, ‘which I have accepted, but as that office is by no means one of profit, I flatter myself it will not interfere with the kind intentions you had the goodness to express concerning me in regard to an application I made respecting another appointment at the close of the last session of Parliament’.119 Here, Pye barely seemed interested in the laureateship. Pitt, having evidently been pestered for a position, decided to have Pye made laureate as a means of fulfilling the patronal obligation that was being demanded of him; and Pye, whose financial difficulties required a more substantial remedy, was keen to ensure that the laureateship would not be thought a sufficient recompense for the place-hunting capital that he had built up, therefore reminding Pitt of his earlier claims as quickly as possible. His claim was couched in such unassuming terms as ‘I flatter myself’, and was presented as evidence of Pitt’s ‘kind intentions’ and ‘goodness’, rather than of Pye’s neediness; but it was a fairly blunt reminder.

In subsequent letters, Pye became more obsequious and wheedling still, and gave further evidence of how assiduously he could pester Pitt in hope of patronage. He explained in 1791:

I did myself the honor of waiting on you yesterday. But as I am fully sensible how precious your time always is … I would by no means wish to intrude on your leisure by requesting the favour of a personal interview, but as you Sir had the goodness to think of me for a situation in the County of Berks, where I believe there is now no probability of a vacancy … I hope you will pardon the liberty I take in requesting your remembrance of me on some other occasion.

He then explained that he had come to London due to a vacancy appearing in the tax office, but he wrote ‘rather from the desire of offering myself to your recollection than the presumption of pointing out any particular mode for the exercise of the kind intentions you have had the goodness to express towards me’.120 Again, Pye’s rhetoric cast the proposed transaction in terms of Pitt’s goodness and superiority, and portrayed Pye himself as a supplicant worm, so wormy as to be horrified at himself for even daring to pop his head above the soil. But behind the rhetoric was another fairly blunt estimation of Pye’s place-hunting capital and of what he wished to spend it on. Since he had earlier been able to acquire a promise from Pitt – that he should have a situation in Berkshire – he now wished to trade that promise in for a position of equivalent value in the tax office. A couple of weeks later, Pye, writing from a coffeehouse in London, explained that the aforementioned Berkshire situation (now identified as that of receiver of the land tax) was vacant after all.121 Clearly, although a place-hunter was not too fussy about what places he ended up with, it helped to have a hawkish appreciation for where vacancies did or did not exist, and to be able to deal in specificities, rather than vagaries, with one’s patron, even if those specificities would then be traded in for different specificities at a later date.

Pye went on to explain that he had applied to Pitt and no one else, even though some of his friends in the government had suggested that he apply elsewhere. He expressed his confidence that there was no need to apply elsewhere anyway, since Mr Steele had assured him of Pitt’s good intentions towards him.122 Thus Pye managed to express his loyalty to Pitt even as he hinted at its lapsing, and he made clear which quality made the difference between loyalty and its absence: Pitt’s intentions. This was an almost absurd articulation of the nature of the patronal relationship, in which the client was a paragon of loyalty, but only to the patron who secured him his just deserts. Pye’s letter then continued in a stream of obsequiousness and diffidence, in the course of which he finally mentioned some personal quality of his own – namely, that he would be utterly incorrupt in the role of receiver of the land tax, and ‘indeed shall be rather anxious to get the public money out of my possession’. Finally, in 1795, Pye wrote to Pitt again, telling him, ‘Mr Neville having communicated to me your good wishes to assist me in general, tho’ it was not possible in the particular mode which he was so obliging as to mention, I take the liberty of mentioning a small thing now vacant in the Excise.’ (The previous holder had died. Pye, having been both a worm and a hawk, now became a vulture.)123 The salary of this office was small; as with the laureateship, Pye made sure to play down the office’s value. But he stated that it would be useful in accumulation with his other salaries. Of course, Pye did not want to seem to be ‘grasping at any unreasonable accumulation of favours’, but salaries in public office were irregularly paid, and Pye was reliant on his income from them. Further downplaying the value of the offices he had already been given, he added that the expense of living in London rendered public office more an injury than a benefit to him.124 This was the first and last time that Pye discovered his inner Oldmixon, presenting himself as an object of pity.

Again, as with Theobald, the bestowal of the laureateship was not the end, but almost the beginning, of the quest for patronage. Although most of the letters date from after Pye’s appointment, it is evident how Pye went about achieving the laurel (and his other positions too). Only once in the course of these letters did Pye appeal to his own personal qualities; only once did he appeal to his own neediness; rarely did he say anything positive about the positions he had already been granted. For the most part, Pye’s emphases lay elsewhere. The key was to be persistent and rigorous, but to attribute that persistence and rigour to the bounteousness of the patron. Pye, like Oldmixon, knew that he had to be continually before Pitt’s eyes in London, ideally in person, but when that was not possible, through writing. And he knew that he could not trust to vagaries or to chance; he had to construct a continuous narrative, or even a sort of balance account, of all his former dealings with Pitt, continually building up capital and then cashing it in when a worthwhile reward materialized. Like any good accountant, Pye needed to be able to cook the books, turning everything into more capital for himself; and he needed to be able to leap upon any irregularity of Pitt’s, proving that Pitt had not kept up his side of the bargain properly and was still obliged to pay up. Pye lauded Pitt as a great man, a great statesman, a great benefactor and a generous mind, and he showed himself to be unendingly grateful and devoted. But he also did enough to indicate that this valuation of Pitt, and of their relationship, was bound up with the balance sheet.

It was to such a man, and for such activities, that Pitt allocated the laureateship. As with Rowe and Theobald, the appointing of a laureate here appears to have been little more than the distribution of a vacant position to a place-hunter who had been agitating for a salary. On each occasion, some great person, having been courted for some time by various importunate suitors, learned that, due to the death of the previous laureate, there was now an open, salaried position, and therefore gave it to whichever suitor had been most importunate and had built up the strongest claim to favour. The laureateship was but one more bauble in the endless round of patronage.

This, however, is only one aspect of the matter. It does not cover, or sit well with, all the various motives described throughout this chapter, or all the various people concerned with the laureateship. It certainly does not sit well with the fact that, as mentioned above, the laureates tended to be among the leading few literary figures of their day. Gray, Warton and Hayley were all selected for the laurel without making any effort to seek it for themselves, and at least two of them seem to have been offered it for little reason other than their stature as poets. Even in the case of Pye, his letter of 1790 suggests that he had not actively sought the laurel. Pitt may have offered it to him as a sop to his incessant importunities, but the offer also seems to have stood somewhat apart from the regular game of patronage transactions. Beattie’s observation remains sound: it is not easy to disentangle ability/merit from patronage/interest. Generally speaking, it is not even relevant to make the attempt; and in the case of the laureateship, whenever the cause of an appointment seems to err more one way than the other, it is rather towards the ideal of pure merit than away from it.

Conclusion

To some extent, this distinction between ‘Merit’ and ‘Interest’ can be mapped onto the distinction between the commercial and the courtly, explored in the last chapter. Merit was often established away from court – in the playhouses or in publication – as with Cibber’s plays and Gray’s poetry. It then required interest – solicitations, attendance, friends in high places – to have the writer installed at court as laureate. The nature of the merit was a matter of variability, and depended on the particular network that was coming into play. In 1718, merit could refer to service for a Whig party cause; in 1730, it could refer to fashionableness among (apparently) the women of court. The network concerned would then use this merit as one of the raw materials of patronage, using it to acquire the office of poet laureate for whichever writer had a sufficiently convincing stock of that merit and was personally best placed with the other people who made up that network. The workings of that equation were different each time, as were the types of network and person coming into play; however, the end result was that the poets selected for the laurel tended to be among the most popular and esteemed writers of their day. Ultimately, some notion that the laurel ought to go to a worthy poet, or even (as was said explicitly in 1813) to ‘the greatest poet of the day’, factored strongly throughout the period. The laurel was used to strengthen and legitimize various networks, to link them more firmly to the court and to establish the court’s importance to them. As a result, the court’s cultural role was reinforced: the ultimate validation of a celebrated poet came in the form of courtly office.

Moreover, the foregoing analysis has shown the importance of physical and conceptual spaces more generally in bestowing value on cultural products. In fact, it can be argued that cultural products’ meaning was only latent until they were positioned in a certain space. Oldmixon, Duck, Cibber and Pye all had the merit of their cultural products to refer to, but they could only use that merit by coming to the right location, and by demonstrating how that merit related to the values of the location in question. Oldmixon had to place himself conceptually in London, and explain how his writings and travails in Somerset related to the cause of the Whigs based in court and town; Duck had to travel from Wiltshire to court to become popular in London and nationwide as a poet, then lost out on the laureateship partly because he had been away from court; Cibber was more successful, having always been based in the town, and enjoying strong connections to certain courtly figures; and Pye hovered constantly around the metropolis, intermittently swooping down towards Pitt so as to collapse in the soil at his feet. Again, the importance of London, and especially that of court and town, is evident. Nor is it surprising that court and town formed a unit in this way, given that they were physically proximate to each other. It would have taken Oldmixon longer to travel from Somerset to London than it now takes us to travel from London to Australia.

In the Introduction to this book, the randomness and contingency of the laureate succession appeared to be evident. This chapter has now traced certain patterns, and it has shown that the history of the laureate appointments follows (among other things) the contours of literary history and the history of the royal family. There remained a large degree of variability in terms of who was appointed laureate, why and by whose agency. Yet even in this respect, the laureateship was representative of Hanoverian society. Poetry was not some discrete notion or institution; it did not pertain exclusively to the marketplace, the nation, the public or any such thing. It was positioned where different conceptual spaces overlapped, handled by a variety of different agents, each valuing it in different ways. Political parties, lordly families, royals, court officials, artists, publishers and writers themselves all had their own claims on its meaning, and sought to utilize and legitimate it in their own ways. Such being the case, it is unsurprising that the history of the laureateship should appear, in some ways, random and inconsistent, as if no one really knew what to do with the office, or had any fixed notion of its purpose. In fact, there were too many people who knew what to do with it, and too many purposes for it. Throughout it all, though, there remained an ideal of poetic merit, and a sense that its proper recognition came in the form of a courtly office designed specifically for poets.