4. Parnassus reported: The public laureate, 1757–1813

Throughout the long eighteenth century, the laureateship was a prominent feature of the English literary landscape. John Dryden, the most highly regarded writer of the late seventeenth century, was routinely referred to as ‘the laureate’, and the office played a significant part in how he and his works were perceived by others. Colley Cibber likewise became known as ‘the laureate’, and in this capacity was mentioned innumerable times in print. Even when held by less famous writers, the office always attracted interest and commentary. The laureateship was not forgotten about during either Tate’s or Eusden’s tenure; at their deaths, as at the death of every other laureate, there was a buzz of activity among the literary community, with even those writers who were not hopeful for the office themselves showing an interest in who should receive it.

The reigns of George II and George III, however, were to see the laureate become a public figure in an unprecedented manner. As the volume and sophistication of print culture developed – particularly with the flourishing of periodicals – the relationship between laureate and readers became newly familiar.1 When the laureate had become responsible for the birthday and New Year’s odes, those odes had started to appear as individual publications and in newspapers, but their circulation had been relatively limited. By the accession of George III, and over the course of his reign, it became standard for the odes to be printed prominently in newspapers, and for a lively discussion of the laureate and his odes to be carried on in this same medium. The odes also appeared in various magazines, as did other, semi-official poems by the laureates;2 and the popular Annual Register series (launched by Robert Dodsley in 1759) would usually publish both laureate odes in its ‘Poetry’ section, moving them to the start of that section from the 1775 volume onwards.3 Meanwhile, the two leading review magazines, the Monthly and Critical, would generally give extended reviews of the laureates’ more substantial works.4 Under George III, the laureate held a unique and important place in print culture.

This chapter will provide something of a corrective to those which have preceded it. Previous chapters have looked mostly at behind-the-scenes matters, and at how the laureateship was treated and conceived of by those people who were directly involved with it. By contrast, this chapter will try to establish how the laureateship was understood by everyone else: what role the laureate was perceived to have, how much or how little the office was held in esteem and where the laureateship was situated in terms of the conceptual geography of culture. Broadly speaking, then, this chapter is concerned with the public reception of the office. It will include some discussion of private letters, but the bulk of its evidence will be published periodicals, and especially newspapers. There are two main reasons for this focus. One is that periodicals provide a copious and easily searchable body of relevant material; the office, its holders and their odes featured countless times in periodicals over the course of George III’s reign. By comparison, other forms of evidence are less copious and less conveniently mineable. The second main reason is the unique nature of periodicals, and especially newspapers. More than any other body of material, the newspaper press can be claimed as the forum of the public.

As discussed previously, ‘the public(k)’ was a term not much used in later Stuart cultural matters. Although it started gaining ground around the turn of the eighteenth century, and became the standard term to denote the audience for cultural products by 1730, the older concepts of the world and the town were generally preferred before the Hanoverian succession, and even, by many writers, up to and beyond 1730. The town in particular remained a key concept throughout the eighteenth century, even in discussions of non-dramatic works. However, the concept of the public will come to the fore in this chapter. It will be treated in two ways: as a concept (sometimes specified as ‘the conceptual public’) and as an entity (sometimes specified as ‘the reading public’). Thus, on the one hand, this chapter will explore how periodical writers made sense of the laureateship using the concept of the public, and where they situated laureateship and court vis-à-vis that public. But, on the other hand, this chapter will seek to assess how the laureateship was viewed by the mass of people who were conceived of and conceived of themselves as the public: hence its additional concern with the historical entity of the reading public.

Also important to this chapter’s analysis will be the themes of literature, national identity and partisan politics, the relations of which to print culture in general and newspapers in particular are often evident in scholarship on the later eighteenth century. This period is generally seen as a crucial one for the establishment of literature as a concept, the development of Britishness and the creation of a patriotic literary canon. The public that came to maturity in this period, both as a concept and as an assertive, self-conscious entity constituted by print culture, was patriotic, middle-class and based as much in the provinces as in London. It was the prime mover of the period’s political disputes, as the theoretical justification and practical support behind Wilkes, the Association movement and other demands for reform, as well as behind the status quo.5 Literature, national identity and partisan politics all therefore played a part in the attitudes shown towards the laureateship in periodicals, sometimes explicitly. National identity will be especially important here. The Introduction has already argued that over the course of the long eighteenth century, Britons came to prefer larger, abstract, metaphorical spaces to smaller, specific, physical spaces as the concepts by which to frame cultural production and consumption. In this chapter, it will be seen that one of the most important spaces in the late eighteenth-century conceptual geography of culture was the nation. It was the largest and one of the most appropriate forums for the public, and it was primarily articulated by means of print culture. Yet at the same time – and arguably of greater practical significance – print culture also constituted a metaphorical London that could be entered into by individual readers everywhere. This London was not simply oppositional, or defined only by parliamentary politics and town culture; the court and loyalism were key to it.

First, this chapter will explore the nature of newspapers as evidence, and as constituents of the conceptual and the reading public. Second, it will give a wide overview of how newspapers treated the laureateship. It will then explore newspapers’ treatment of three individual laureates: Whitehead, Warton and Pye. Their tenures correlated roughly with George III’s reign, and hence form this chapter’s timeframe. Lastly, evidence from the Monthly and Critical reviews will be brought in to supplement the evidence from the newspaper press. These investigations will give rise to further conclusions about how George III’s subjects conceived of the relationship between the court and the public.

Periodicals and the public

This book has argued the laureateship to be a key institution in the way that contemporaries conceptualized the court and its relationship to other spaces and audiences. The public was one such audience. Prior to the Hanoverian succession, the spaces most often referred to in relation to culture had been: court, town and city (neighbouring and permeating each other, with the court and town being especially tightknit); the playhouses (key sites within, and microcosms of, this tripartite London); and the world (only vaguely conceptualized, and generally denoting publication and the experience of reading). The public had been a concept important to late seventeenth-century political discussion, but had not been much used in terms of culture. However, over the course of the early eighteenth century, the public became reconceptualized in cultural terms, in a way that built upon the older concepts of the town and the world but did not replace them. It was used in a variety of ways, sometimes interchangeably with the town, sometimes interchangeably with the world, but generally bridging the two: it denoted a body of opinionated persons consuming cultural products, especially in print. However, its connection with print culture was not invariable or straightforward. Sometimes, the term explicitly denoted a body of people located in, centred on or looking towards London.

The public’s position straddling print culture and the capital is especially evident in newspapers. Contemporaries and historians alike have identified print culture in general, and newspapers in particular, as key to the existence of the public.6 The newspaper press created a nationwide forum for understanding and debating all manner of affairs, including literary; the second half of the eighteenth century even saw poetry sections becoming established in many newspapers.7 Meanwhile, newspapers assiduously made reference to ‘(the) public (opinion)’, ‘the (sense of the) people’ and similar terms. They sought to report on this public, keep it informed, appeal to it and be its mouthpiece. By the middle of the eighteenth century at the latest, newspapers conceived of this public as a nationwide and increasingly middle-class body. Rather than inhering in a London coffeehouse, it was to be found in the vast mass of sturdy, respectable, patriotic Britons who lived and worked all over the country, their opinions formed by nothing other than their own good sense and good values.

Nonetheless, the newspaper press was London-centric. Even by the end of the eighteenth century, it was more highly developed in London than anywhere else. Newspapers published in London, often bearing the name ‘London’ in their title, were distributed throughout the rest of the country. Provincial newspapers were dependent on London newspapers for much if not most of their news, and generally contained little in the way of local news or distinctively local opinion; Jeremy Black has drawn attention to the role of the provincial press as ‘an intermediary between London and the localities’.8 The events that newspaper consumers read about had mostly taken place either in London or abroad, and the political disputes that they followed were primarily being acted out in the metropolis. Even John Wilkes’s disputed election was for the county of Middlesex. The conceptual public that features in this chapter, and the conceptual nation that it inhabited – the public and nation being used to make sense of the laureateship – were abstract and constituted by print; but they were centred on, and sometimes took as their main conceptual forum, London.

This emphasis served two important purposes. The physical space of London, containing the court, parliament and much else besides, had traditionally been, and continued to be, the most important site in Britain for events and processes that had some bearing on the country as a whole, and the most important source of practices and ideologies that encouraged people to see themselves as English and British. The London-centricity of the newspaper press therefore served the purpose of keeping people in touch with a location that it made sense to be in touch with. But the second purpose concerned print culture itself: print culture formed a transcendent space, which nonetheless needed some physical reference points to be able to function. As a concept, London made print culture navigable. Moreover, these two purposes worked in tandem: print culture in general, and the newspapers in particular, gained their structure from the physical, traditional importance of London, and in turn promulgated that importance to readers across Britain.

Within the London that was thus packaged for the reading public, the court held a central importance. As Matthew Kilburn has shown, news of goings-on at court usually featured at least once a week in newspapers produced in eighteenth-century London, covering various topics; major royal occasions, such as the birthday and New Year celebrations during which the laureate odes were performed, would receive particularly extensive coverage.9 In political news, though some newspapers endorsed opposition politicians within and without parliament, others endorsed the court and government, including ministers who were termed or conceptualized as being in some way ‘court’ politicians: this was used for such individuals as Walpole, Bute and North, or simply as a way of referring to all government ministers, Walpolean Whigs or supporters of George III. Culturally, the court would feature by way of the poet laureate, or institutions that held royal backing or identification, such as the Royal Academy. The London of print culture was court and town together; it was a dynamic of political and cultural activity that readers everywhere entered into, and took up positions within. They thereby validated the dynamic, and its physical referents, on a nationwide level.

However, newspapers are of course not a source material that can be read uncritically. Their position vis-à-vis the reading public is enigmatic. Contemporaries often accused eighteenth-century newspapers of articulating dishonest, distorted opinions, either because of some supposed personal animosity or predilection, or because of supposed bribery; and this view has endured into historical accounts.10 Recent studies have provided a more nuanced picture: that, although there were political hirelings writing articles and letters for newspapers, and although politicians did give subsidies to and launch certain newspapers, the scale of political involvement was not sufficient to dictate newspaper content. Newspapers were commercial entities, whose survival and success were dependent on sales and advertising.11 Yet it remains imperative to handle newspapers with care. The authorship of most newspaper entries is unknown; moreover, it is impossible to determine how readers interacted with newspapers, or what proportions of supply, demand and propaganda determined what was printed.12

Another issue is that when studying newspapers, historians have shown most interest in their politically minded invocations of the public; indeed, these were probably the most frequent and emphatic sorts of invocations made. Therefore, whereas this monograph has previously stressed the divergence between the political and cultural concepts of the public, it is now basing its arguments on a form of evidence where the two stand side by side, possibly distinct from each other, possibly conjoined, but certainly with the political standing taller than the cultural. However, this is a problem to be embraced rather than shunned. This book has already admitted the usage of the concepts under consideration to have been fluid and undogmatic, and seeks to understand them in whatever breadth is relevant to the laureateship. Although it is evident that newspaper commentary on the office was sometimes politically motivated, that does not make the commentary any less sincere, authentic or informative. In fact, the presence of political motivations is consistent with the previous chapter’s arguments: that the meaning of poetry in general, and of the laureateship in particular, was laid claim to by a number of different agents, rather than by any pure tribunal or objective audience; and that the value of cultural products was only latent until it had been activated within some particular context. Moreover, the end of this chapter will discuss the more specifically literary views provided by the Monthly and Critical reviews, and compare them to the newspaper evidence.

Nonetheless, given the issues mentioned above, it would not be possible to simply read what the newspapers say about the laureates, and determine on that basis how the reading public viewed the laureates. Instead, this chapter will analyse the overall contours of the discourse on the poets laureate that existed in the newspaper press, in full awareness that this discourse was created, cultivated and consumed by a number of different agents for a number of different purposes. Six factors allow arguments to be extrapolated from an analysis of this discourse: the indubitably significant place that newspapers had in constituting the public; their geographical spread; their reliance on correspondents and other newspapers, even of differing political inclinations, for their material; the evidence that print culture and spoken dialogue existed in something of a continuum in this period; the sheer amount of poet laureate material in newspapers; and the fact that this material often showed at least an implicit awareness of other material that had been printed on the laureates. On the basis of these factors, it can be stated that the newspaper discourse would have furnished at least part of the framework within which the reading public viewed the poets laureate. More optimistically, that discourse may be considered as a partial representation of public opinion on the laureateship.

Public opinions

From Whitehead’s accession to Southey’s, it is not hard to find comment on the laureateship in the newspaper press. Some of the most significant trends will be discussed in due course; but first, a simple question needs to be asked: does this varied body of commentary suggest a positive or a negative estimation of the office? On balance, it is probably about even, or – if the routine, prominent printing of the biannual odes is considered as an acknowledgement of the laureate’s importance – tending more towards a positive estimation. The odes would even be printed in radical and opposition newspapers at times of political crisis, without any adverse commentary.13 Admittedly, when the office of laureate was specifically addressed as a subject in its own right, the attitude was more often negative, and would not uncommonly entail a call for some alteration or abolition of the office; but this is only to be expected of any institution, except those which are under threat. While the continuing existence of the office was being taken for granted, there would have been no real point in great vindications and endorsements of it appearing in print.

These negative judgements on the office took several main forms. One was the argument that the office was outdated and absurd, and akin to the old court office of fool or jester. The manifestation of this antiquated foolery was usually identified as the biannual odes.14 Thus in 1785 the Morning Herald mocked the odes as repetitive nonsense, and stated that they would remain the same ‘to the end of time – if the office like that of the Fool is not exiled from Court’.15 Criticisms of the laureateship would usually at least imply that the most disgraceful thing about the office was the requirement of writing odes, but there was nonetheless a significant, continuous body of opinion that held that the office ought to be abolished irrespective of that requirement. The Morning Chronicle asked, upon Whitehead’s death, ‘Why appoint any successor …? Why not finish at nothing, and leave the place unsupplied, and its functions abolished. Or if the functions are continued, let the odes be written by the Deans and Chapters of the different dioceses.’16 But this notion of the odes continuing without the office was rare. Normally, critics of the office either wished for the odes to be dispensed with so as to (at least partially) redeem it, or for the entire thing to be done away with, the odes and the office being inseparable or the office having no purpose without the odes.

The complicating factor in attacks on the laureateship was that it was hard to detach the office from the poet currently holding it, or from the list of poets, recent and not so recent, who had held it previously. This difficulty was particularly acute in the period 1730–1813, which saw a succession of three long-reigning laureates – Cibber, Whitehead and Pye – with Warton’s five-year tenure the sole exception. From the standpoint of 1757, it must almost have seemed that there had only ever been one modern laureate, Cibber; his distant predecessor, Eusden, had been a more obscure and sheltered laureate. Half a century later, in 1813, Pye and Whitehead between them must likewise have loomed very large in understandings of the office.

On the other hand, the pseudo-history of the laureateship was widely known, and was often printed in newspapers, especially when a laureate died. Current laureates were almost invariably referred to as ‘(the) (poet) laureat’ when mentioned in newspapers, whatever capacity they were being mentioned in, and sometimes without their actual name being given;17 but so too were past laureates, including, most significantly, Cibber and Dryden. Especially during Whitehead’s time, when the memory of celebrity laureate Cibber was still fresh, and newspapers still delighted in reporting minor anecdotes of his life or quips that he had made, it was normal to find him named simply ‘the late Laureat’, or some such thing.18 Dryden was likewise so heavily identified with his office that, in one report, he was referred to as ‘Erasmus Dryden, Poet Laureat to Charles II.’, suggesting his official status and royal connection to have been even more identifiable than his own first name (‘Erasmus’ was in fact the name of Dryden’s grandfather, father and one of his sons).19

Because of this heavy identification of office with office-holders, there were many variants and subtleties in the ways in which the office might be viewed. For example, it was a fairly common line of complaint that the office had become degraded in recent times, or even, especially after Cibber’s tenure, that it was ‘blasted’. Few commentators linked this idea of degradation to the idea of its being outdated; instead, the degradation was located in the quality of the office-holders. This related principally to Eusden and Cibber (whose contemporary critics had initiated the ‘degradation’ idea) and then, in a more complicated way, to Whitehead and Pye, whose critics did not tend to see them as culpable in their own right for the degradation, but rather as mediocre poets who had taken on a degraded office and were happy to fulfil its disgraceful duties for money.20 Those duties were heavily associated with Cibber, because his time in office had seen the odes printed more widely and recurrently than ever before, and because they had drawn such opprobrium from his enemies, meaning that there was some sense in which the degradation was associated with a particular practice as well as with (a) particular person(s). Equally, though, no one in the late eighteenth century was actually aware of when the laureates had begun writing the odes. Cibber’s Egotist (1743) stated that even Dryden had written them.21

Hence the variation and gradation in manners of scorn for the laureateship. For some observers, its degraded state was directly attributable to the poets who held or had recently held it, or to the odes (which were themselves uncertainly but indelibly associated with Cibber), and it could therefore be redeemed, and brought back into line with the office it had supposedly been in the seventeenth century (even if no one really knew what that office had been, other than by reference to Spenser, Samuel Daniel, Jonson, Davenant and Dryden). Once a great poet took the office again, or once the odes were dispensed with – which dispensation would probably encourage or follow on from the appointment of a great poet – the laureateship would shine forth again in all its native splendour.

However, other observers felt the degradation to be fatal; the modern laureates had disgraced the office too far, and it ought to be abolished. Even to clear away the odes would not clear away the taint of Cibber (or, perhaps, of Whitehead or Pye). Lastly, there were those observers who thought the office discredited those with whom it was associated: not just Whitehead, Warton and Pye, but even the king. Because the odes were such a silly and laborious task, and because the office-holder’s prominence subjected them to constant mockery and envy from other poets, no laureate could keep hold of his dignity while in office, and it was not fair or fitting to inflict a twice-yearly blast of tedious panegyric on so perspicacious a prince as George.22

The newspapers reveal, then, that there was certainly a significant trend of disrespect for the office running throughout the late eighteenth century. The office’s reputation was tarnished; in some people’s eyes it was a garish institution, standing as a disgrace to the nation, or to literature or even to the laureates and king themselves. But what the newspapers also reveal is a pervasive and almost a complacent trend of exactly the opposite opinion. It has already been mentioned that the space afforded to printings of the odes, and the sheer volume of reportage on the laureates, suggest a certain respectability of standing for the office. Clearly, people were interested in it, and thought it an important aspect of literary life.

However, there is also a great deal of more explicit evidence as to the laureateship’s positive reputation, and even the positive reputation of the laureate odes. The newspapers would often give such reports as the following (1762): ‘Same day the Ode for the New Year, composed by William Whitehead, Esq: Poet Laureat, and set to music by Dr. Boyce, was rehearsed at the Turk’s Head Tavern, in Greek-street, Soho, to a crowded audience.’23 As early as 1765, the fare was being expanded upon: ‘This day the Ode for the New Year, composed by William Whitehead, Esq; Poet Laureat … will be rehearsed at the Turk’s Head Tavern in Gerrard-street, Soho, and to-morrow the same will be again rehearsed at Hickford’s room in Brewer-street.’24 The nature of these rehearsals seems to have varied a little over time; a 1766 newspaper described a ‘private’ performance at the Turk’s Head, followed by ‘a publick Rehearsal at Hickford’s Great Room’,25 and in 1769 the Middlesex Journal (a radical paper) advertised the two rehearsals without distinguishing whether they were private or public. It then added that ‘on Monday [the ode] will be publickly performed in the Great Council Chamber at St. James’s’; the royal performance was thus designated as ‘publick’ and situated as the third performance in a sequence, rather than as something distinct from the non-court performances.26

Throughout the tenures of Whitehead, Warton and Pye, these rehearsals were advertised beforehand and reported on afterwards. In their evident popularity (which reached a height in the 1790s, as will be discussed below), they exemplify one of this book’s major themes: the court’s intimacy with the town, and its appeal to a London-centric public. Londoners were so interested in these courtly odes, which were composed specifically by the king’s laureate for the king, that even the printing of the words in the newspapers was not enough; they had also to have their own public renditions of them, thus experiencing courtly culture for themselves. Some people may even have watched them both in town and in court; according to the Middlesex Journal, both locations were ‘publick’. Evidently, not everyone in George III’s Britain thought the laureate and his odes to be either outdated or disgraceful.

Furthermore, rather than there existing a simple distinction between hostility to the odes and more positive interest in them, there was actually a powerful strand of critical interest in which each ode was read and commented upon as an individual effort within a valid literary genre, and in which many of those odes were commended as successful poems. Whitehead was the first laureate for whom this was consistently the case, and it will become most apparent in the discussion of Warton below, but it is worth briefly quoting a specifically negative (and even quite mocking) comment on Warton’s first ode, so as to stress the fact that a negative critical judgement on some aspect of the laureateship could exist within a wider framework of more positive engagement. The Morning Herald remarked in 1785 that ‘A variety of comments on Warton’s Ode have appeared in the different prints.’ Then, after jovially criticizing the ode, it advised ‘Master Laureat’ that ‘the best mode of defence is to write a better next year’.27 This is not the best example of the odes being taken seriously – far better will come below – but its negativity is instructive, in that it shows how even such negative judgements could partake of a wider literary interest in the odes, in which individual responses were made in accordance with a genuine appraisal of each ode’s literary merits. The odes, then, aroused a great measure of interest, both as written poems and as musical performances, and even elicited literary critical engagement in newspapers.

As explained above, there are not so many explicitly positive appraisals of the office in general as there are negative. For example, upon Whitehead’s death, no one bothered to suggest that the office should be continued, because the suggestion would have been redundant. But there are more obliquely positive comments, such as this one following Warton’s death: ‘Many persons have been spoken of as being intended to fill the vacant place of Laureate, among whom it is surprizing that Mr. Warton’s brother has not been mentioned. This gentleman’s talents are well known, and his genius for poetical composition is equal to that of the late Laureate.’28 Not only does this report indicate widespread discussion about the office, but its suggestion was clearly founded on the assumption that the laureate should have a strong talent for poetry. The phrase ‘poetical composition’ even called to mind the compositional requirements of the office, which were thus assumed to require, and presumably not to disgrace or corrupt, a distinguished poetic ‘genius’.

Obviously, since the office was so heavily identified with whoever happened to be holding it at the time, and, to a diminishing extent, with its previous holders stretching back through the centuries, any attempt at establishing how contemporaries judged and understood the office must also consider the reputations of the individual laureates themselves. This has partly been done in the previous chapter, but only for the laureates’ reputations prior to their appointment. Now, their reputations while in office will be described. The supposed pre-eighteenth-century laureates were essentially thought of as great poets – Chaucer, Spenser, Jonson and Dryden – or at least eminently talented ones – Skelton, Daniel and Davenant – and their association with the laureateship factored strongly in its favour. But the early eighteenth-century laureates served the opposite function. Presumably due to his short tenure, it was sometimes forgotten that Rowe had even been a laureate;29 the eighteenth-century laureateship was therefore defined, from the standpoint of 1757 or 1760, by Tate and Eusden, two poets who had been mostly forgotten about, and Cibber, who was considered a good dramatist, and was thought of fondly as a celebrity laureate, but who had never been much respected for his laureate compositions.

The rest of this chapter will consist of more in-depth explorations of how Whitehead, Warton and Pye were perceived and responded to as individual laureates, with each poet revealing a different set of circumstances. It therefore makes sense, before continuing with the exploration of individual laureates, to pause and offer some intermediate conclusions on what has been seen so far. Clearly, the standing of the laureateship in the late eighteenth century was neither resoundingly negative, nor resoundingly positive. There was a strong, and probably well-known, trend of mockery and disapproval towards the office, which in some ways had begun during the Exclusion Crisis as part of Dryden’s public battles with his literary and political enemies, but which had reached maturity during Cibber’s time in office, and had then progressively hardened over the late eighteenth century. It centred on the old idea that laureates (and indeed poets in general) were paid flatterers;30 on the related idea of the laureateship as an outdated office, no longer suited to a commercial society, a new conceptualization of literature and a proud and free British nation; and on the idea that the office had been made contemptible by the low quality of its recent occupants.

On the other hand, there was an entirely opposite point of view which was equally viable and widespread, and perhaps more so: that the laureateship and its odes were respectable and interesting, and formed an important part of the literary landscape and the interface between court and public. Certainly the office might have been held by some subpar versifiers, and the requirement for biannual panegyric odes would sometimes lead to risible results. But the office itself was still one of value and honour, its previous holders including many of the great names of English literature; and the odes, like any form of poetry, could be good as well as bad. Between these two poles of opinion, there was a spectrum of vagaries and variations, partly because of the difficulty of detaching office from office-holder, but more so for the simple reason that the office was a prominent institution, and thus gave rise to a variety of responses and interpretations. In any case, it was clearly a much bigger feature of print culture, and of public consciousness, than scholars of the late eighteenth century, or even of the laureateship itself, have realized. Newspaper and poetry readers knew about it, cared about it and subscribed to the biannual ritual of reading the odes that it produced (perhaps also going to see them performed). It is not clear whether George III himself would have viewed the laureateship as the cornerstone of court culture, but that is how it appeared to the reading public; in a sense, it was the cornerstone of a public court culture. It demonstrates that the court was not conceived as a separate cultural space from the nation, and that it was an appropriate cultural space for the public to inhabit. The public was too large and too abstract an audience to fit inside the physical space of the court; but in terms of the conceptual court, there were many ways that the public could enter it and enjoy the cultural products that it housed.

Whitehead’s reception

Having sketched out this general picture, it is time to look at the public lives of Whitehead, Warton and Pye. The attempt will be made to establish their individual reputations as laureate, to investigate their experiences at the hands of the newspaper press and to assess where newspapers conceptually situated them.

Whitehead’s reputation as a lyric poet was generally far better than Cibber’s. Following his appointment, he did not publish a great deal of new work (other than the odes), and even some of these few publications were anonymous; but he was known and respected on account of that which he had published before. His most prominent and lasting works were his three full-length plays, and especially The Roman Father, which was revived periodically throughout his tenure as laureate, sometimes with certain alterations provided either by the company or by Whitehead himself, and with renewed notices, reviews and approbation each time. It was considered his magnum opus, and remained a repertory work beyond his death.31 He was also well regarded as a laureate, especially at the start and end of his tenure. Richard Berenger wrote to Robert Dodsley on Whitehead’s appointment, ‘The Laurel has at last been properly bestow’d, and Parnassus should make bonefires and rejoicings.’32 Likewise, Malone wrote after Whitehead’s death, ‘Whitehead redeem’d the fame of the place, and the crown may now be worn with honour.’33 In 1764, one correspondent to a newspaper voiced the fairly standard distinction between Cibber and Whitehead, saying that Whitehead’s odes ‘are as much above Criticism, as those of his immediate Predecessor were below it’.34 A few years earlier, another correspondent dubbed Whitehead ‘the respectable Laureat’.35 Another discussed ‘one of the finest Odes that ever appeared in any language, written by the present ingenious Poet Laureat’.36

However, the most extended example of praise for Whitehead’s laureate work came in a letter of 1758 from ‘Zeno’ to Owen’s Weekly Chronicle.37 ‘I have frequently perceived a judicious selection of some pieces of poetry inserted in your paper,’ Zeno began, ‘which makes me expect to find Mr. Whitehead’s Birth-day Ode in your next, with the following remarks.’ Less than a year after Cibber’s death, Zeno was thus taking it for granted that Whitehead’s laureate ode would naturally be placed among ‘a judicious selection’ of poetry in the newspaper. Zeno then went on to contrast Whitehead and Cibber, much to the former’s advantage, and opined that Whitehead’s ode ‘is founded upon a pretty historical event, which is delicately heightened by the graces of poetical fiction, and the whole is truly classical’. However, he had noticed that a couple of Whitehead’s phrases were not ideally suited to a musical setting, and he therefore gave Whitehead a couple of pointers as to how best to write for music. This last point suggests, again, the sense that the laureate ode form was a valid artistic genre with its own special formal requirements, and that a certain bent of poetic talent and artifice was necessary to succeed most highly in it.

However, ‘if [Whitehead’s mistakes] are blemishes, they are immaterial, and last [i.e. lost?] among the beauties of this Ode’. Zeno, it appears, felt that true poetic talent was more important than the stricter formal requirements he had just pointed out. Going into detail on Whitehead’s ode, Zeno observed that, in the fifth stanza, ‘The Laureat … has happily imitated what we have always admired in Virgil, Milton, and Shakespear.’ Without any sense of incongruity, Zeno was comparing Whitehead to perhaps the three greatest figures in the literary canon, and the two titans of English literature. The laureate’s ode was a valid and even a commendable work of poetry within a framework of value and meaning set by Virgil, Milton and Shakespeare. Zeno continued:

The address to the King breaths that simplicity which is one of the greatest ornaments among the ancient classics; and here again the author seems to have Virgil in his eye … The conclusive stanza bears a fine poetical compliment to the monarch, without the glare of adulation from the Laureat; without making the King more than a god; and even without noticing that his majesty is lineally descended from Julia the sister of Caius Julius Caesar, which is historical fact, and I hope will be regarded as such by Mr. Whitehead at another time.

Zeno then gave a paragraph illustrating this lineal descent, before signing off; his letter was followed by the printing of the ode in question.

Here, then, is found a sense of literary quality and national pride that, rather than being held in contradistinction to laureates and royal panegyrics, actually was felt as going hand in hand with such things. Whitehead’s address to George was classical and Virgilian, and his panegyric was not venal flattery, but ‘a fine poetical compliment’. Clearly, Zeno would not have wished to see anything too fulsome in its praise; he noticed approvingly that Whitehead had not succumbed to ‘the glare of adulation’, and had not deified George. Equally, though, Zeno was happy to see George complimented within the bounds of plausibility, and even felt that Whitehead could have gone further in this respect. Hence his long detailing of the lineal connection between Caesar and George, which comprised an oblique manifesto for panegyric in and of itself, supporting, as it did, the idea that laureate poetry would derive power from an appropriate, historically grounded rhetoric of praise. As long as the poet did not make George ‘more than a god’, panegyric could be great poetry, as determined by the standards of classical literature and the British literary heritage. As long as a poet like Whitehead, rather than Cibber, was laureate, the odes could amount to such great poetry, presenting a subject of great interest and even of pride to readers.

Of course, Zeno may not have been a disinterested observer. He may have been a political hireling, or a personal friend of Whitehead’s. But the significant fact is that these points were being made at all: that a newspaper was publishing a long, effusive letter on a laureate ode, analysing that ode according to widely recognized metrics of literary quality. The letter would have been read by at least some of that paper’s readers, and it would have aimed for at least a partial resonance with those readers’ assumptions; otherwise, it could not have been plausible or intelligible. Wherever it came from, the letter thus played into the continuing discourse on the laureates that existed across the newspaper press, and which bore some (though undefinable) connection to the conceptual framework by which the reading public viewed the laureates. Moreover, Zeno’s opinion was the extended articulation of an opinion that is seen in other newspapers, and also in other sources. For example, even Gray, in various private letters, was to express admiration for Whitehead’s first ode, and for other, subsequent poems by him.38

As the years passed, though, Whitehead was to find himself less and less well received. Criticism of Cibber had received much of its motivation from his association with Walpole’s regime; but although Whitehead was not personally as much associated with any regime as his predecessor had been, his time in office was to see the development of a furious new phase in oppositional writing, which was to identify Whitehead as one of its most promising targets. John Wilkes entered parliament in the same year as Whitehead’s appointment (1757); the accession of George III was soon followed by the controversies over Bute, and Wilkes’s North Briton; the disputed Middlesex election came in 1769; and the 1770s and 1780s witnessed a perpetual frenzy of Wilkesite agitation, the American crisis and the Association movement, with a variegated clamour of invective against the government and the king. In tandem with these events, the newspaper press was continuing to proliferate, and was perhaps becoming increasingly polarized in its views.39 Whitehead, as a poet paid by the court and tasked with writing two public odes a year, naturally found himself encompassed in the storm, despite his personal and political mildness. From about the late 1760s, a series of scathing attacks and passing mockeries began appearing in the opposition press, taking a variety of forms.

On the most basic level, Whitehead was criticized as a bad poet, holding a ridiculous office and producing contemptible odes. In 1772 the Middlesex Journal published this squib: ‘On reading the Laureat’s Ode: ‘For two such meals of fulsome lies,/–––– [i.e. George] Pays an hundred pounds a year; /–––– For an OEconomist, he buys/Wretched provisions very dear!’40 Not only was Whitehead false and venal as a poet, writing overpriced ‘lies’, but his badness as a poet, and the badness of his poetic role, was here being characterized by reference to the court that sponsored it. Another, longer squib, sent into the same paper by ‘Paul Pinchwell’, expanded on some of these themes:

Sweet Willy Whitehead who with medium stile,
Can never force a tear, or win a smile:
Most simply chaste – most delicately dull,
Nearly o’erflowing, and yet never full.
Sweet Willy Whitehead, first in rhiming sphere,
Who smoothly balladizes twice a year,
Teaching his laurell’d pension’d muse to sing
The milkwarm praises of a milk-warm King;
Welcomes the instant year, as custom claims,
And hails in creeping measure royal names.41

In these lines, the laureate was being set directly at variance with standards of literary quality, and of the literary heritage that underlay those standards.42 For one thing, Pinchwell was emphasizing the lack of emotive force and resonance in Whitehead’s verse. For another, he was casting Whitehead on the wrong side of literary history; in the couplet ‘Most simply chaste … never full’, he was imitating The Dunciad, in which Pope had adapted a famous couplet of John Denham’s for an attack on Leonard Welsted.43 Pinchwell then ironically highlighted Whitehead’s status as the ‘first in rhiming sphere’, with a ‘laurell’d pension’d muse’, to contrast his official position among writers with his substandard literary talent. With the phrase ‘smoothly balladizes’, he further emphasized the idea of Whitehead as someone who could happily fulfil the formal act of versifying, but whose verse was empty of meaning or effect. The references to Whitehead’s regularity of output were intended to further distinguish him from the sincerity and spontaneity of literary production; and the end of the poem relocated the insipidity of Whitehead’s verse to its subject matter, ‘a milk-warm King’ and ‘royal names’. The laurel was not in fact a mark of poetic achievement; it was merely a ‘pension’, and, because it was granted by and focused on the king, was necessarily associated with bad poetry. The court was therefore posited as forming a separate sphere and set of standards from that which the laureate was pretending to: literature.

This rhetoric of criticism was nothing new, but it was being developed in accordance with new circumstances. A picture was created in which the laureate was seen crawling off to court, and hiding there from the patriotic public that inhabited the rest of the nation. With this rhetoric, opposition writers effected a separation between the courtly on the one hand, and the public, the literary and the patriotic on the other. They portrayed the court (here elided with the government) as a kind of self-contained echo chamber, with no awareness of the people, no literary standards and no patriotism. One of the main ways in which Whitehead was attacked was as an apologist for the government’s despotic policies, its disregard of national sentiment and its hostility to reform. Because he was a pensioned writer, tasked with writing biannual odes that would be promulgated to the nation through the newspapers, he was supposed to be pedalling the court line on all national affairs, including, most critically, the American War. He took his cue from court and government figures, and was therefore a kind of propagandist hireling.44

One variant of this line came from a correspondent for the Morning Chronicle, calling himself ‘An Englishman’.45 This correspondent painted Whitehead as someone who had fallen from his former principles and had taken the government’s side against the country. Addressing Whitehead directly, he told him that his most recent ode ‘breaths a spirit of the most contemptible servility, and is unworthy of your name and character’; flattery was to be expected of a laureate, but it could be accomplished ‘without insulting the people. In some of your former odes, the friends of their country have seemed pleased, that you, though a poet-laureat, appeared still to retain some principles not wholly unworthy of an Englishman.’ But the last ode had proven otherwise. The Englishman quoted one of Whitehead’s former, supposedly more patriotic odes against him, observing that it had been written under George II, and that the times had now changed. He further emphasized Whitehead’s newfound antagonism towards ‘the people’, claiming that Whitehead’s ode insinuated ‘that the people now begin to repent of their opposition’. But ‘you have too much sense to believe this yourself, and should not endeavour to propagate so ridiculous a sentiment against others’. Whitehead was here posited as a government propagandist, peddling arguments that he knew to be untrue.

The Englishman’s letter went on in this vein, complaining about the ‘shameful disregard’ paid to the ‘interests’ and ‘sentiments’ of ‘the people’, and claiming that it was the government which was in need of ‘repentance and reformation’. His observation that Whitehead’s ‘courtly muse would not chuse to recommend’ such repentance and reformation was a further suggestion that Whitehead knew the truth of the situation, but was choosing to follow the government line due to his muse having been compromised by the court. The Englishman ended with a reminder ‘that it is beneath the character of a man of genius, however he may be situated, to employ his talents in gross flattery and adulation; and … he should at least be cautious not to add insult to the distresses of his country.’

This letter is noteworthy, in that it allowed Whitehead a great deal more patriotic sentiment, freedom of choice and poetic talent – even ‘genius’ – than most of his critics were willing to allow him. With such comments as ‘however he may be situated’, it even suggested that poets laureate could write in line with patriotism, public opinion and literary genius if they only wanted to. Here, there was no necessity for the laureate to side with the government against the people. At the same time, though, the Englishman was emphatically clear on the division that currently existed, between a government on the one hand, and ‘the people’ on the other. The government was corrupt, tyrannous and closed off; ‘the people’ were patriotic, and represented all the historic qualities of Englishmen, primarily a love of liberty. ‘The people’ were the nation; even literature was to be assessed and valued by reference to the sentiments, interests and values of this English people. Whitehead, formerly an admirable poet by reference to these criteria, had now chosen wrongly. He had thrown his lot in with the government, and had therefore become a poor poet, operating in opposition to the patriotic people and to national feeling.

Most criticisms of Whitehead were less sophisticated. One favoured line of attack was to point out the laureate’s reticence or wrongness in points of fact and prediction.46 In 1776, for example, came some short ‘Extempore Verses’ on the New Year’s ode, sneering at Whitehead’s recent change in tone from bragging and belligerent to fearful and pacific, a change that was ascribed to the poor fortunes of the war.47 Another repeated tactic was to address the odes more directly, either by interlacing them with rebarbative commentary, printing parodies of them or suggesting that the praise in the odes was actually more suited to the American colonists than it was to the king.48 In addition to these repeated tactics, the opposition press printed various other one-off angles of criticism and mockery, using the laureateship as a prominent, adaptable subject by which to express discontent with the government.49

Fairly consistent throughout, however, was the idea that the laureateship was a disgraceful post, used by the executive to glorify the regime and defend its policies, and necessarily filled by some bad poet who would take on any such mean, unpoetical job for money; but that there was something futile and ridiculous about the whole business, because the laureate could only ever operate in contradistinction to the true currents of public opinion, national sentiment and literary quality. At its bluntest, the opposition argued that ‘the ode is that species of poetry which has commonly been found least consonant to the taste of the English nation (and indeed the very name prostituted, as it annually is, by the soporific Laureat, carries disgust along with it)’.50 Whitehead-the-laureate was both an example and exponent of a system that was self-evidently wrong, and antithetical to national sentiment, yet which was institutionally entrenched. It required a barrage of righteous and witty criticism to dislodge it.

Whitehead’s reputation as laureate, then, was generally a reasonably good one. But it became thoroughly tarnished, according to opposition newspapers, during the middle of his tenure. The growth of the newspaper press, and the various political crises of these years, had engendered a more extremely polarized newspaper discourse than had existed at the time of his appointment, meaning that this widely acceptable and even laudable laureate became a punching bag for many newspaper writers and correspondents. He never ceased to be a ‘respectable laureate’, as such. Malone’s comment about his having redeemed the office came at his death, and was the endorsement of a reputation that had been established over the previous thirty years. This reputation rested on the assumption that the court had a natural, important relationship with national identity, the public and literature; it even served to bolster that assumption. But for those who considered the laureateship and the system of which it formed a part to be unrespectable, Whitehead came to seem like one more bad laureate, promulgating government lies in bad verse in exchange for a court pension, and proving the discrepancy, or even the incompatibility, between court on the one hand, and the nation, the public and literature on the other.

Warton’s reception

Although the laureateship was most often characterized by reference to the odes, there had always been another understanding of the office: that it was not so much a functional position, as a mark of honour (and disinterested remuneration) for the nation’s greatest poet. This had been the understanding on which Dryden, and his immediate pseudo-laureate predecessors, had received their pensions. As Chapter Three suggested, the honorific ideal persisted even after the ode function became established, playing an important part in each laureate appointment process. By the time of George III’s accession, the production of odes was dominant in the way that the office appeared in print culture, but there was still a feeling that the office could be, or should be, or in fact was, a mark and reward for the greatest living poet.

Over the years, increasing numbers of observers started to notice a discrepancy between the functional requirement and the honorific ideal, or to stress these two different aspects of the office. More extremely, they expressed the desire that the ode function be dispensed with specifically so as to render the office into a purely honorific position. Thus the Morning Chronicle approved of Warton’s appointment as laureate in terms of it being ‘a reward of genius’.51 In 1788, a correspondent named ‘Candidus’ gave the most suitably candid articulation of the argument for separating the function from the honour: ‘For such a King does not want a Panegyrist, and such a Poet may be better employed … surely, if it is justifiable to convert any Office at Court into a Sinecure, it is in this Instance. Let the Poet Laureat be excused from rendering his annual Service of two Odes; but let the Salary be continued, as a Mark of royal Distinction conferred on Superiority of Talents.’52 In this formulation, the court certainly had a role to play with regard to literature, and ‘Superior’ merit would justifiably be brought into the sphere of royal patronage. But the connection ought to be a more abstract, honorific one, divested of any specific functional manifestation.53

This consciousness of a distinction between the office as functional and as honorific, and the opinion that sometimes followed – that the odes should be stripped away so as to let the honour shine forth – was to endure down to 1813, when Robert Southey accepted the office on the understanding that he could hold it as an ‘honour’, without being tasked with biannual odes.54 However, a consciousness of the distinction between function and honour did not necessarily entail the abolition of the odes. With both Whitehead and Pye, there can also be identified some sense that the function and the honour were natural partners. Zeno’s commentary on Whitehead’s ode, quoted above, suggested that the odes ought to be written by a great poet, and that the biannual ode format gave a great poet the opportunity to write great poems.

This sense of union between function and honour reached its highest pitch with Thomas Warton. During his tenure, the office and the odes attracted new heights of attention, interest, admiration and respect, and the diligence and talent with which he fulfilled his duties meant that (according to most newspaper writers and correspondents) he was able to unite the functional and honorific aspects of the office into a seamless whole, becoming a sort of genuine national voice. (He was also helped by the relative mildness of the political climate.) Mockery did not cease, of course; but Warton’s achievement was nonetheless resounding. Between 1785 and 1790, the laureateship was one of the most important aspects of the literary landscape, and each new ode was consumed avidly by newspaper writers and readers.

It helped that Warton already had an impressive reputation, and that he continued his scholarly works throughout his tenure. Indeed, those scholarly works were followed with great interest by the newspapers, and were even associated with his position as laureate. Several newspapers reported that Warton had kept up his work on Milton directly at the king’s request, or ‘was honoured by a Royal injunction to complete his annotations upon this mighty Bard’.55 But what brought Warton and his office the greatest renown was the odes themselves. After his first, poorly received offering, he managed to produce a sequence of odes that, even when they did not command universal admiration, generated widespread critical engagement and discussion. Newspaper readers seem to have looked forward to them. In December 1788, the Morning Post read, ‘If the Laureat’s New Year Ode, said to have been prepared before his Majesty’s illness, is not to be performed at St. James’s [because of the illness], the lovers of true poetry flatter themselves, that it will at least be given to the Public by the usual channel.’56 Likewise the General Advertiser : ‘The subject of the New Year Ode has excited the curiosity of the Literati; the Laureat’s annual tribute to Majesty, will, we hear, at this melancholy period, be dispensed with.’57 Warton’s odes, although here described as ‘tribute[s] to Majesty’, their performance or non-performance determined by the king’s disposition, were nonetheless being identified and valued in terms of their distribution to ‘the Public’ and ‘the Literati’. The king’s illness thus served to deprive readers of the ‘true poetry’ it had come to look forward to twice a year. Warton’s laureate odes were important literary business, and their fixed regularity of appearance only enhanced their status as literary events.

There was a continuous welter of positive remarks on the laureate’s odes and talents in these years. ‘The Laureat has undoubtedly added much to his fame by his second Ode,’ said the Morning Chronicle.58 ‘The Laureat’s Ode, the best publication of the New Year, was reviewed in the World, and with repeated approbation on the 3d of Jan,’ stated the megalomaniac, self-obsessed World.59 It then reviewed the ode again the next day, this time pointing out some of its flaws, but stating, ‘Wharton’s Ode, which though already much praised, may here meet with further panegyric, without our justly incurring the censure of adulation, is undoubtedly the happiest Lyrick, the happiest Laureate Lyrick at least, that ever flowed from his pen.’60 More unequivocal was the praise of the St. James’s Chronicle:

The Odes of the late Laureate, Mr. Whitehead, are confessedly superior to any of the Odes of his Predecessors: And among these predecessors, are the conspicuous Names of Dryden and Rowe. But what official Ode of Whitehead comprehends so much Variety and Vigour of Imagery, as Mr. Warton’s last Ode?

It then gave an extended sequence of praise for the various beauties and ingenuities of the ode in question.61 By the end of Warton’s tenure, newspapers were able to make casual remarks about ‘the sublime flights and stateliness of Birth Day Odes’, or to group Warton’s productions with ‘the best Odes in our language’, comparable to ‘the Odes of Gray’.62

There was also a tendency for deeper literary debate. The General Evening Post observed, ‘It is a matter of no small entertainment and curiosity, to compare the different criticisms in the newspapers on the Laureat’s late Ode.’ It then gave a list of all the contradictory things, positive and negative, that had been said on this single ode, before concluding that, ‘as the Ode is so much the object of public attention, and as abuse is too commonly excited by excellence, we may easily perceive what is its real character’.63 Clearly, there was vigorous discussion about Warton’s laureate offerings, within and beyond the newspaper press. One of the best examples came in the Gazetteer of 1786, precisely because it started out on a negative note, and evinced the sort of oppositional attitude that Whitehead had suffered so much from. ‘Warton’s Ode – with all its imperfections on its head – claims applause; but applause only as a party poem.’ It was, the paper insisted, an unwarranted ‘panegyrick upon the present Administration’; its ‘execution’ was ‘well’, and certain parts were ‘extremely poetical’ and ‘extremely spirited’; however, there was a general lack of originality throughout. Following this ambivalent scrutiny, though, the Gazetteer concluded by saying, ‘our present Laureat … is certainly superior in poetical abilities to his predecessor; and Whitehead excelled Colley Cibber. Whatever the splenetic may assert to the contrary, literature was never more encouraged, nor ever flourished as she does at present.’64 Thus, even when an individual ode came in for some negative criticism, it was part of a wider climate of debate and approval which can leave no doubt as to the high regard in which Warton-as-laureate was held by his contemporaries.

Warton’s reception is also notable in terms of what criteria he was being judged by and for what factors he was being celebrated. One correspondent in 1785, defending Warton’s ode from a charge made by a critic in another newspaper – that its opening lines were ambiguous – argued instead that the lines in question led ‘naturally’ to Warton’s ‘main argument’, which argument was ‘exemplified in a general display of two distinguished parts of the King’s character, his patronage of the arts, and the decorum of his domestic life. And surely, in this display, elegance and imagery are united with perspicuity. Through the whole composition, one subject is uniformly pursued, judiciously conducted, and happily illustrated.’65 Warton’s ode was being subjected to critical literary analysis, and was found entirely successful. Moreover, it achieved literary success as an illustration of the king’s qualities, and particularly of his role as a patron and as a father (in which latter capacity he was both a father to the nation, and an exemplar of a middle-class domestic ideal). There was no sense here, as there had been in some of the attacks on Whitehead, that praise of the king was inherently unliterary, or that a laureate ode could only ever have been vacuous. Instead, this exemplary prince and patron of the arts formed perfect subject matter for an admirable piece of poetry.

Still more emphatic in praising Warton’s ode by reference to notions of literary greatness and national character was the St. James’s Chronicle :

As the situation of a Poet Laureate is very similar to that of Pindar … might not our Birth-Day Odes be rendered more interesting, by interweaving agreeable Digressions [as Pindar did], and striking Parts of English History with the usual Compliments of the Day? Most of Mr. Warton’s Odes have been written on this Plan; and such a Plan alone is calculated to render those periodical Productions, not only a classical Entertainment for the present Time, but a permanent and valuable Acquisition to Posterity. We are happy to hear, that Mr. Warton has very successfully pursued this Idea in his next Ode.66

Here, the newspaper showed awareness of the potential transience and quotidian nature of laureate odes, and yet expressed the belief that they could transcend this fate and enter the literary canon, if they were written according to Pindar’s example and if they engaged with English history. Warton, the newspaper emphasized, was doing just this. His odes were being praised not just as successful examples within a limited genre, or for their courtly nature; they were being praised by reference to those public, national and literary qualities that Whitehead’s enemies had claimed to be incompatible with the laureateship.

One final, interesting variation to note came in 1788, when the same newspaper stated that Warton had been ‘accused of treating the transcendent and numerous Virtues of his Royal Master with a Parsimony of Panegyrick’. For some observers, the laureate was not being sycophantic enough. But the Chronicle defended him, insisting, ‘the Composition turns on a very seasonable and well-chosen Topick, the singular Happiness enjoyed by the People of England, under a King, who promotes and preserves the original and constitutional Compacts of his Kingdom’, which, the Chronicle noted, was in contrast to the despotic behaviour of Louis XVI.67 The patriotism of the laureate could not be doubted. Nor could the unison between ‘People’ and ‘King’, which was celebrated, and in some sense enacted, in his odes.

Alongside these particular comments on his odes, Warton’s tenure also saw a pronounced step-up in the amount of petty reportage to which the laureate was subjected. ‘We hear that Mr. Stanley, the Royal Composer, is impatient to begin the music for the next Birth-day Ode; and at the same time we are informed, that the Laureat has not yet written a single line!’ remarked the Public Advertiser.68 ‘The Poet Laureat yesterday presented [the manuscript of] his Ode for the New Year to their Majesties, at the Queen’s House, Buckingham-Gate.’69 As well as becoming a figure of public interest in his own right, he also served as a symbol for a wider loyalist poetic culture, invoked and looked to by those other writers who wished to celebrate the king in verse. A ‘Cottage Mouse’ sent in an ‘Impromptu’ poem in response to Warton’s first birthday ode, exulting, ‘O! thou, the Friend of Milton’s lay,/Well chosen to record the day,/The Monarch we esteem;/Thy claim the Muse would not debar,/Content to be the evening star,/And thou the morning beam.’70 This anonymous mousy woman, who had published panegyrics on King George and Queen Charlotte before,71 here celebrated Warton and George in conjunction with each other, looking to the laureate as the ‘morning beam’ of loyalist culture, and stressing his connection with the great national bard, Milton, as the quality which rendered him suitable to ‘record’ the royal birthday. Others echoed the sentiment, sending their own eulogistic responses to Warton’s odes into the newspapers, using the opportunity of the royal birthday to show their admiration for both laureate and king and further elaborating a public courtly culture with the laureate odes at its centre.72

Warton-as-laureate, then, was one of the most important figures in the literary landscape from 1785 to 1790. He stood prominently before the reading public, and his courtly odes were regarded as highly significant events, as well as highly accomplished poems, deserving of critical engagement. Mockery and negativity did not disappear; but it seems unarguable that under Warton, the laureateship occupied a position of importance and respectability that would not have been expected before the detailing of this evidence. More unexpectedly still, the odes were central to this; Warton’s achievement was to render the functional and the honorific notions of the office seamlessly compatible, and thus to turn the laureateship into a sort of national voice, widely regarded as speaking equally for king and people. Whitehead’s role in doing something similar, and in preparing the way for Warton, should not be neglected; but he was never quite as highly regarded, and had to deal with the more factional reception provided by a more violently factional readership. It was Warton who succeeded most emphatically in setting courtly culture in harmony with ideas of literature, patriotism and public opinion. When Bishop Richard Mant came to publish Warton’s Poetical Works in 1802, he introduced them as ‘the poems of the late Laureate’, and he placed the laureate odes as the culmination of Warton’s lyric poetry. In the ‘Memoirs’ that opened the volume, Mant waxed lyrical about these laureate lyrics, which he discussed lengthily after having first surveyed the rest of Warton’s English-language poetry. ‘The Laureate Odes’, he claimed, ‘are the most striking testimony of the strength of Warton’s poetical genius.’73 It would not have been a controversial opinion.

Pye’s reception

The last of the eighteenth-century laureates was Henry James Pye, whose reputation is usually thought to have been particularly poor, but whose newspaper reception was actually a mixture of Whitehead’s and Warton’s. Undoubtedly, there were a large number of readers who considered him a meagre poet, including the circles of William Godwin, Southey and Byron.74 Equally, the sorts of negative press that Whitehead came in for during the crises over Wilkes, America and reform were repeated for Pye during the crisis years of the 1790s, when the French Revolutionary Wars were raging, the Jacobin scare was at its height and Pitt’s government was attempting to suppress sedition. This aspect of Pye’s public reception can be found in abundant evidence and diversity in the opposition press, but its tone and trends were sufficiently similar to Whitehead’s for it to warrant nothing more here than a hefty footnote.75 The only major difference was that the king and court were no longer being much targeted as part of these attacks, their place taken by Pitt’s ministry. During Pye’s twenty-three years as laureate, he and his office clearly had a bad reputation in some quarters. And yet, the most striking thing about Pye’s tenure is that, unlike Whitehead, he embraced the potentials of his position. Rather than sitting there meekly while opposition newspapers castigated him, he made himself into a champion of loyalism, proudly placing himself at the head of loyalist culture and being celebrated as such by the loyalist press. He became a voice of the nation, as Warton had been, but within the context of a more partisan politics.

Partly, this was because he joined his role as laureate with a range of other loyalist activities. He became a Westminster magistrate in 1792, and seems to have been a tenacious official in the battle against crime and Jacobinism; in 1808, he published a Summary of the Duties of a Justice of the Peace out of Sessions.76 He also wrote two anti-Jacobin novels, The Democrat (1795) and The Aristocrat (1799); plays and epic poems on patriotic, belligerent and loyalist themes; and various pieces of conservative non-fiction, including a translation of Xenophon’s Defence of the Athenian Democracy … with Notes, and an Appendix (1794), over half of which consisted of Pye’s commentary in defence of the existing British system of government. Alongside these various conservative, loyalist and Pittite endeavours there were, of course, the biannual odes.

Pye’s newspaper reception was exactly as he would have wished. Due to his institutional position and spirited publications, he was accepted by the loyalist press, especially in the 1790s, as a champion of the cause, and was held up as a national bard of paramount importance. His every non-official publication was commented upon, praised for its fine loyalist tendencies and predicted to make some practical contribution to the anti-Jacobin cause.77 The laureate was fulfilling a new role through his publications: ‘To excite the military and patriotic ardour of his countrymen’.78 Apparently, one line in Pye’s tragedy The Siege of Meaux – ‘Think not your private meetings are concealed from our enquiring eye,’ which was an allegorical reference to the government’s crackdown on Jacobin activities – produced ‘one of the most marked plaudits we ever heard in a Theatre’.79 At least one newspaper printed Pye’s verses on ‘the late Glorious Victory obtained by the British Fleet’ of June 1794, which (it explained) had been sent by Pye to Drury Lane theatre for a public recitation there.80

Meanwhile, Pye made appearances at various gatherings in London, some of a courtly character, others of a broader cultural interest, successfully enacting the role of a bard of public importance and a central figure in loyalist culture. His attendance at royal Levees was reported on,81 and so too his appointment as a Justice for the Westminster Police in 1792;82 he was numbered among various other ‘lovers and patrons of the Arts’ at the Royal Academy’s annual dinner;83 he gave a recitation at the 1799 anniversary dinner of the Literary Fund;84 and at the same event the following year, ‘A poem by Mr. Pye, the laureat, was recited by another Gentleman’, before a rendition of ‘God Save the King’.85 Pye even became a sort of celebrity, with papers reporting on his movements, whereabouts and appearances in public.86 Several newspapers even reported on a minor accident suffered by ‘Mr. Pye, brother to the Poet-Laureat’, who fell into a cellar and lay stuck there for two hours.87

The odes attracted clamorous attention in a somewhat similar way to Warton’s, but with a more partisan bent. As the Sun put it, ‘The learning, the talents, and the respectable character of Mr. Pye, the Poet Laureat, cannot exempt him from the abuse of the Seditious Prints, because his Muse is devoted to Loyalty, and because his heart feels upon that subject all that is suggested by his imagination. But the abuse is as dull as it is malignant.’88 The products of this loyalist muse seem to have been received eagerly by many readers. In January 1792, when there was no New Year’s ode, at least two newspapers filled the gap by presenting one of Pye’s earlier, non-official odes, ‘Written at Eaglehurst, which commands a View of Spithead, October 10, 1790’, in which Pye celebrated the British fleet; the Oracle proclaimed in preface to the ode, ‘The People shall not be disappointed of an Ode from the Laureate – We present them with the following; much of which is very Poetical, in the Whitehead way, and very pleasing.’89

The partisan bent to Pye’s public reception was not much to his cost. If anything, the necessities of partisan debate seem to have elevated the standing of the laureateship to greater heights than ever before. For example, the public rehearsals of the odes became increasingly popular and prominent events. ‘The annual poetic tribute of the Laureat … yesterday was rehearsed at the Music Rooms, in Tottenham-street, to a polite and numerous audience,’ reported the Morning Herald in 1793.90 By 1795, the rehearsals were being witnessed by ‘a crouded attendance of Musical Cognoscenti and Ladies’, and being ‘received with great applause, and though a gratuitous performance, some parts were unanimously encored ’.91 Apparently, the conductor had transitioned this ode’s conclusion into ‘the popular air of Rule Britannia with peculiar felicity and effect’, further establishing the odes’ position among a booming loyalist culture.92 In 1799, ‘fifteen hundred persons’ attended.93 ‘The Room was, indeed, more crouded than ever we remember on any similar occasion … The whole was received with warm applause – an applause that was the due tribute to Taste, to Science, and to Genius.’94

Pye’s odes also started cropping up in other contexts. At the 1794 annual dinner of the Royal Academy, ‘Some of the chief attendants’ read out ‘the first two Stanzas of the Laureate’s coming Ode’.95 In 1795, numerous adverts started appearing for public, commercial vocal concerts that included a ‘Selection from the Ode for the New Year (by permission of the Poet Laureat and the Master of His Majesty’s Band)’, alongside works by such composers as Handel and (an unspecified) Bach.96 Likewise, in 1799, Ranelagh Gardens advertised the following: ‘The Manager respectfully informs the Public, that by particular desire of many Persons of Distinction’, he had brought in a four-year-old ‘Phoenomenon’ to perform ‘a Concerto of Haydn’s on the Grand Piano Forte; recite Collins’s Ode on the Passions; and the Birth-Day Ode by the Poet-Laureat’. George III’s birthday would also be honoured (the advert continued) with a fireworks display, and a ‘RURAL MASQUERADE’ would be put on under the patronage of the prince of Wales.97 The same four-year-old musical prodigy popped up again in other adverts, performing Pye’s ode and the two other pieces at Covent Garden theatre, as part of a performance of Lover’s Vows put on under ‘the Patronage of Her Majesty’.98

Nor did Pye and his supporters allow the opposition to separate the court from the spheres of public opinion, patriotism and literature, as they wished to do. Instead, for the loyalist newspapers, notions of patriotism and literature were more closely bound up with the court than ever before; they attained their highest and most natural expression in the context of courtly culture. One birthday ode was commended, as poetry, by reference to its anti-Jacobin politics: ‘The Laureat’s poetical description of the turbulent and dreadful situation of affairs upon the Continent, compared with the happy and harmonious agreement of all ranks to support the Constitution of Great Britain, is described in the most beautiful and impressive language.’99 Pye’s partisan, patriotic subject matter made the perfect content for fine poetry. A few years later, another ode received an even more rapturous response:

The Poet-Laureat’s address, in converting the attack on his Majesty into a compliment, has been noticed; but a Correspondent wonders that the beautiful conclusion of the Ode, which sings the birth of the young Princess, should have gone without some publick tribute of praise. Mr. Pye has narrated this joyful event in the true style of Poetry. To repeat his verse, will be to invite our readers to a repetition of pleasure.100

Here, Pye’s courtly verse was found to be truly poetic and emphatically pleasurable to readers, on account of its treatment of royal persons and events.

The response to Pye’s special Carmen Seculare – an ode for the new century – was, in some quarters, even more emphatic regarding his literary accomplishments. ‘The whole of the work is written with true lyric enthusiasm. Gray is the model whom the Laureat has evidently studied on the present occasion, and there are many passages in this Secular Ode which would not suffer even in comparison with some of that admirable Poet’s happiest flights.’101 This courtly, patriotic ode could stand proudly alongside the great works of Gray. Meanwhile, when opposition newspapers tried to distinguish between courtly interests and literary quality, loyalist newspapers reacted with sovereign complacency: ‘A Party Scribbler says, that the Laureat’s Ode smells of the oil of influence – This can only mean the soft influence of the Muses, a compliment of which the Laureat has some reason to be proud.’102 It was the opposition, not Pye, whose literary discernment was corrupted by factional feeling; they served a ‘Party’, he served ‘the Muses’.

This sort of evidence has not been much noticed by scholars. Even where Pye has been enlisted as an exemplar of loyalist sentiment, his role and reputation have been dealt with dismissively. Simon Bainbridge ended a brief discussion of him by deeming him a ‘failure’ in his attempts to inspire the national war effort.103 Kevin Gilmartin, in his monograph on literary conservatism during this period, barely mentioned Pye. Where he did, he called Pye ‘the much-maligned Poet Laureate and occasional Anti-Jacobin reviewer’, and only discussed him as a representative writer of anti-Jacobin novels.104 M. O. Grenby’s treatment of Pye was more considerate. Surveying the reception of anti-Jacobin novels in the major review periodicals, he gave a nuanced, sensitive discussion of how political principles factored into matters of aesthetic criticism. However, after noting the positive reviews that Pye’s anti-Jacobin novels garnered, he expressed surprise. ‘Could it really be the so much maligned and notoriously dreary Henry James Pye … whose Aristocrat (1799) was called “agreeable”, “remarkably well-written”, “pleasing”, “the elegant amusements of a well-informed and accomplished writer”[?]’.105 But the answer to Grenby’s question is straightforward: yes. There was no widespread negative opinion of Pye’s quality as a writer, except among those of opposition political tendencies. Even at the start of the 1790s, Hayley and Cowper had had a high opinion of Pye;106 Isaac Disraeli had published a poetical address to him in which he had extolled him above the majority of his poetic contemporaries and identified him as a tutelary figure;107 and the Public Advertiser had said upon his appointment, ‘No man in Great-Britain, perhaps, could have accepted the post of Poet Laureat with so much propriety as Mr. Pye. His merits, as a Bard, are universally allowed to be striking … The Monthly Critics … have always spoken highly of his works.’108 As the 1790s progressed, the tendencies of Pye’s work and his position as laureate then caused him to become a champion of loyalist culture. Any positive reviews that his work might have attracted in these years should not be seen through the lens of Romantic scorn; they should be taken as evidence of Pye’s complicated but prominent standing.

During the French Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars, then, the previous trends of newspaper discussion of the laureateship reached their head. For many people, the laureateship was execrable; as a courtly office that only hireling poetasters would accept, it could only ever be so. But for many others, the laureate Pye was a loyalist champion, and his odes formed the centrepiece of loyalist culture. They were not at odds with ideas of national identity or literature, but in fact were entirely compatible with such ideas, because the court, and a spirit of loyalty to the court, were central to public opinion and national identity, and even, perhaps, to the arts. When Pye recovered from an illness in 1798, one newspaper was able to report, without a hint of irony, that ‘Many of the Literati were wishing for his distinguished office.’109 Thus the laureateship became, during Pye’s tenure, subject to a polarization of public opinion, its reputation divided and extreme. But there can be no doubt that the office was a highly significant feature of the cultural landscape and of public consciousness. It played a key part in focusing and articulating loyalist sentiment, and it cemented the role of the court with regard to the public, national identity and literature. The reception of Pye and his odes demonstrates that eighteenth-century Britain had not in fact transitioned from a courtly culture to a post-courtly, commercial or public culture. Instead, the court remained a key location in the conceptual geography of culture, including as a forum for literary production, commercial practices, public performances and patriotism. The logistical and ideological challenges of the French Revolutionary Wars caused the court’s role to become clearer and all the more important, energizing a loyalist sentiment that looked to the court, and to its poet laureate, for its voice in matters of national identity and literature.

The reviews

However, it may be objected that evidence from newspapers is insufficient to support the claims being made in this chapter, due to the problematic nature of newspapers as sources (detailed above). Therefore, this chapter will finish with a brief survey of another kind of source, which scholars generally hold to be a more representative, authoritative and accurate body of material when seeking to understand the opinions held by eighteenth-century writers and readers: the Monthly and Critical reviews. The concurrence between this evidence and the foregoing evidence will therefore not only bolster this chapter’s arguments, but also emphasize just how extensive the laureateship’s presence was within print culture.

The Monthly and Critical, having generally praised Whitehead’s pre-laureate works, continued in this vein after his appointment.110 The Monthly approved of his quasi-official Verses to the People of England. 1758 in sentiment and, for the most part, in versification;111 and it described Dodsley’s popular A Collection of Poems, by Several Hands volumes as ‘perhaps’ the most ‘excellent Miscellany … in any language’, while rightly numbering Whitehead among the chief contributors to them.112 When Whitehead was attacked in satirical works, the reviews defended him, stating that his poetic abilities and personality ‘exempt[ed]’ him from satire, or proved the satirist misguided.113 When reviewing his 1774 collected works, both reviews praised him highly, and explicitly referenced his popularity with the public and his position as laureate:

the public will receive pleasure at being furnished with a complete edition of the performances of this ingenious author, the greatest part of which, at different times, has already met with their approbation … posterity will consider the author as not undeservedly advanced to the honourable distinction which he holds; and be of opinion that he has a claim to the palm of poetical genius, independent of the rank of Laureat.114

However, over the course of his tenure, the opinions of both reviews crystallized on a certain estimation of him: that Whitehead was a skilled, intelligent and admirable poet, among the best in the country, but that he did not evince a profuse genius. This opinion owed much to the fact that, other than in his odes, his characteristics were those of Pope, rather than of Gray and Warton. Thus his 1762 play, The School for Lovers, was deemed a fine ‘Genteel Comedy’, but lacking in the busyness and variety demanded by English audiences.115 The quasi-official A Charge to the Poets (1762) was praised for ‘good sense, refined taste’ and ‘agreeable verses’;116 Variety (1776) was ‘pleasing, elegant’;117 The Goat’s Beard (1777) had ‘a considerable degree of merit. It is easy and spirited.’118 By the time of his posthumous biography and collection (1788), written and edited by Mason, both reviews reiterated that Whitehead’s reputation was

already decided upon … In poetic fire, he was not deficient; and, if he had not corrected with much coolness he might have been admired for the occasional splendour, as well as the more steady illumination. His Odes, these tedious repetitions of courtly compliment, were often spirited and poetical; and, if his successor [Warton] shines with a brighter fire, or more varied imagery, he does not excel Mr. Whitehead in precision, or the gloss, which is the effect of the limae labor et mora.119

This particular reviewer indicated the wider principles at stake, and one of the reasons why Whitehead slid into neglect following his death, by drawing attention to Whitehead’s indebtedness to Pope and stating: ‘The bolder energy, and the more varied structure of the verses of our elder poets were, for a time, forgotten in the admiration of more polished versification, of more luxuriant description, and a more elegant selection of imagery.’120

As this last point suggests, Warton was generally viewed differently to Whitehead. The reviews’ praise of Warton was more fulsome, and often focused on his Gothic inclinations: ‘If we had many such poets as Mr. Warton, mankind would return to their caves and their rocks; and honest Orpheus must do all his work over again.’121 Prior to his appointment, his History received particularly extended and numerous reviews; after he was appointed, so too did his work on Milton.122 When rebutting satirical attacks on Warton, the reviews placed more emphasis on the quality of his laureate odes than they had done with Whitehead: the Critical mentioned ‘the strength, the spirit, and the true poetical ardour in Mr. Warton’s last production’, the 1786 New Year ode, and (correctly) pointed out in response to Peter Pindar’s Ode upon Ode (1787) that ‘Mr. Warton’s late excellent Ode is only the vehicle for Peter’s invective, and not the subject of his attack’.123

Thus the reviews bear out the impression given by the newspaper press: Warton as a poet and as a laureate was celebrated yet more highly than Whitehead, and this praise centred on his laureate odes. The best example comes in a 1793 review, which struck a similar note to Mant’s:

We have had frequent occasion to celebrate the genius and abilities of our late worthy, learned, and ingenious Laureat, as a poet, a critic, and an historian; and the chief part of the present publication has already passed our ordeal with safety and honour … We have formerly observed … that our bard was ‘particularly happy in descriptive poetry;’ and he has since, in his official odes, as Poet Laureat, rendered it just and necessary to extend this praise to his felicity in Gothic painting … The odes for 1787 and 1788, while the bard had no splendid foreign nor domestic events to celebrate, nor any calamities to deplore, abound with Gothic pictures and embellishments, which give that kind of mellowness to these poems, that time confers on medals and productions of the pencil.124

Not just in the quotidian medium of the newspapers, but in the reviews’ more ruminative pages, Warton’s laureate odes crowned his achievements as a poet.

For Pye, the reviews displayed less frequent interest in his role as a champion of loyalist culture than newspapers did, but were similar to them in tracing his energies across a varied range of outputs. Moreover, they reinforce the argument that it was entirely viable, and reasonably common, to view Pye-as-laureate as a major writer, but that his skill as a poet was generally ranked nearer to Whitehead’s than to Warton’s. Three years prior to his appointment, the Critical expressed ‘approbation’ for Pye’s Poems on Various Subjects, and stated its judgement ‘that he possesses an eminent share of classical taste, that his diction is correct and elegant, and his numbers harmonious. His invention is not equal to his judgment; whatever he adopts he embellishes, and almost makes his own, by the propriety of its application, and felicity of his expression.’125 The Monthly gave a similar review.126 In the years immediately before and after his appointment, though, his work translating, commentating on and applying the principles of Aristotle’s Poetics gained him extended attention and praise in both reviews, and permitted him an enduring and rarefied form of positive reputation in their pages.127 Thereafter, most if not all of his publications were reviewed in both the Monthly and Critical; even when they were criticized, his Aristotelian work was not forgotten. Moreover, as with Warton, there was at least a superficial recognition of the connection between his position as laureate and his work as a literary historian.128

While he was laureate, Pye’s plays, novels and non-dramatic poems were sometimes criticized, and sometimes given the sort of firm but not extravagant praise bestowed on his Poems on Various Subjects.129 Sometimes the reviews would indicate sentiments akin to those found in positive newspaper discussion of his odes, blending praise of his poetic talents with praise of his principles, and thus portraying him as a suitable national bard. For example, the Monthly referred to his long 1798 poem, Naucratica, as ‘a performance of such superior merit’, and celebrated it as a work of both British poetry and British pride:130

The subject of this poem, of which the design and the execution are both highly creditable to the acknowledged abilities of Mr. Pye, is equally the rise and progress of the art of navigation, and of naval dominion … We cannot conclude without expressing our hearty approbation of the author’s sentiments on the importance to this country of a powerful navy: they have great merit not only as poetry, but as sound patriotism.131

This strain reached its highest pitch in the Monthly’s review of the long, semi-official Carmen Seculare: ‘It is flattering to think that, varied as the picture [of the century] has been, the eighteenth century has afforded so much real matter for eulogy; and that the Carmen Seculare of the year 1800 by the Poet Laureat surpasses that of 1700 by Prior, as much in the grandeur of events recorded, as in the beauty and majesty of its versification.’132 It is again clear that, no matter what criticism Pye may have received in some quarters, it was not unusual among contemporaries to respect him as a poet and laureate. ‘The performance before us is truly poetical: while it displays both judgment and taste, it abounds with grand and suitable imagery; and the verse flows with graceful dignity. The picture of the century is pourtrayed with the skill of a master. The figures are well grouped, and, to produce effect, they are aided by a richness of colouring.’133 Here, in the pages of the Monthly, laureate Pye was ‘a master’: as a poet, as a patriot and as an indistinguishable blend of the two.

Conclusion

The laureateship, it is evident, was of much greater prominence, much greater respectability and much greater diversity of reception than scholars have previously realized. There was certainly a powerful strain of mockery against the office, included in which were genuine appeals for its abolition; yet most of the criticism was against the manner in which the office was currently being occupied and the way in which the biannual odes were being written, or constituted that sort of gentle mockery that continues to gather about the British royal family without involving any serious opposition to it. The office attracted comments of all sorts, positive and negative, because it was an important institution in British public life.

In terms of this book’s wider themes, the evidence is resounding. The periodical reception of the laureates shows that the court remained key to understandings of cultural production and consumption. Conceptually, it was nestled not just at the centre of the town, but at the centre of the nation. It was a space to which the public would gather, in order to stand as the audience to such cultural products as the odes; it was a space which writers and artists would enter to receive the patronage that their merit had warranted. There certainly were people who saw the court as existing separately from the currents of national identity, public opinion and literature that were continually gaining ground in terms of their cultural valence and economic agency, and there certainly were people whose oppositional political position made them as keen to stress that separation as possible. But for much of the reading public, the court was a public, national space of critical importance in the production and consumption of culture. The office of poet laureate was perhaps the prime operative of this cultural space.