5. ‘But odes of S—— almost choakt the way’: Laureate writings of the long eighteenth century

The most prominent aspect of the eighteenth-century laureateship was the biannual odes. This had not been the case during Dryden’s tenure; he had not written any, and only in a loose sense had he written any ex cathedra poetry at all. His immediate successors, Shadwell and Tate, had written some of these odes, without yet being considered solely or even usually responsible for them. But from the start of Rowe’s tenure to the end of Pye’s, the odes constituted the laureate’s exclusive and comprehensive duty. Year after year, the laureate provided texts that, set to music by the master of the king’s music, would be performed at court as part of the festivities of New Year’s Day and the royal birthday. As a matter of course (increasingly so as the century wore on), they would also be printed for public consumption in their textual form. The odes only came to an end with George III’s final incapacity and the heel-dragging of Robert Southey, who disliked the idea of writing odes to order.

In this chapter, the odes themselves will be examined. There are a great number of them: two a year for almost a century, preceded by the initial, patchy spate produced between 1689 and 1715. On a few occasions across the eighteenth century, a New Year or a birthday ode was not produced, due to some inobservance of the customary festivities; and the odes were not always published prior to 1730, meaning that there are gaps in, particularly, the surviving outputs of Tate and Eusden. But the body of surviving pre-1730 material is nonetheless large, while the post-1730 material provides an essentially unbroken run of between seventy and eighty odes.

In studying this mass of material, certain decisions of focus must therefore be made. The first is a simple one: all odes written by non-laureates have been left out. This means not only those courtly odes written before the laureates were given exclusive responsibility for the task, but also the more anomalous, voluntary odes that are found published in periodicals for New Year’s Day and the royal birthdays throughout the long eighteenth century, sometimes published alongside the laureates’ own official productions, and none of them ever set to music. These voluntary efforts make up a noteworthy body of material in their own right and testify to the popularity of the form, but any discussion of them would provide more of a distraction than a foil. The focus of this chapter will be entirely on the biannual courtly odes written by the laureates.

The next issue is what sort of focus to apply. In part, this chapter will have the simple intention of describing the form, content and developments of the odes. This is in keeping with a recent trend in eighteenth-century literary scholarship to analyse the form, genre and context of literary productions.1 On this basis, more far-reaching arguments will be offered. The laureate odes have never attracted much attention from historians or literary scholars; they have generally been dismissed as poor, repetitive productions.2 Historians of the court, individual monarchs, politics, national identity, war, culture, class, the public, or any other subject that the odes touch upon, have seldom investigated this body of material for what it might have to say; and literary scholars have likewise tended to pass over the laureate odes.

On the rare occasions that a laureate ode is made use of, it is generally lumped together with writings by other poets as a brief example of typical tendencies in loyalist or conservative verses. Kevin Sharpe and James A. Winn referred to works by Shadwell and Tate several times as part of their broader discussions of how poets celebrated later Stuart regimes; Simon Bainbridge glanced dismissively at Pye’s work while giving an overview of patriotic rhetoric in 1790s poetry; and Marilyn Morris quoted one of Pye’s odes as an example of a poetic celebration of Prince George’s marriage to Caroline.3 Griffin went further, arguing the laureate odes to ‘constitute [a] form of patriotic verse’, some of which ‘had considerable reputations in their own day and are worth a critical look’. But he only gave a brief discussion of Whitehead’s odes, noted Mason’s dislike of the laureate ode format and stated that the wider genre of ‘the panegyrical ode had by 1750 become a genre to be used cautiously. Of the major poets, only Gray and Smart attempt it.’4 In all these works, the poets’ laureate status is usually mentioned in passing, but not explored or given significance. This chapter will explore and give significance. While it will not be able to demonstrate the entire potentials of the laureate corpus in all the respects just mentioned, it will hopefully do something to suggest them. In particular, it will aim to show the potentials of taking an interdisciplinary approach, and of using material that lends itself particularly well to such an approach, in answering the questions that interest both historians and literary scholars.

Primarily, this chapter will discuss the odes in terms of their situation between court and public. It will ask how the laureates conceptualized the relationship between prince and people in their odes, and how they mediated that relationship to their readers. Its major argument is that the laureate odes underwent certain fundamental changes over the course of their existence, the overall tenor of which was guided by a reconceptualization of that relationship between prince and people. Initially, the main rationale of the odes had been their performance within the physical confines of the court, for an audience of royals and courtiers. The published texts of the odes enacted this performance; they gave readers a vicarious entrance into the court to witness the ceremony, to appreciate their superhuman prince and to endorse the laureate’s praises. The context of the physical court was what determined the nature of the odes’ production and consumption, and their meaning and value. By the time of Pye’s death, the odes were doing something very different. They were eliding the court with the nation, and were portraying the king as a man among his subjects: human, sympathetic and patriotic. Where the earlier odes had sought to show the dominance of the court and its physical, ceremonial practices over the nation, the later odes sought to show that the court had a public face, a patriotic character and an active appreciation of British literature.

These developments are significant for the monograph’s overall arguments. They prove that the laureate was sensitive to the concept of the public, to national identity and to standards of literature, and successfully stayed abreast of these phenomena. Coupled with the evidence from Chapter Four, this further proves the importance of the laureateship and the court in the conceptual geography of culture. The court’s role as a forum for culture, and thus as a determinant of cultural meaning, did not lapse, but was adapted. Conceptually, it evolved from a specific, physical location, to a metaphorical location that the public could enter by way of reading the published odes, to a still more abstract space that was coexistent with the nation as a whole.

First, this chapter will survey the relevant scholarship. Then, at greater length, it will explore the history of the odes, proving that they represent deliberate attempts to portray the prince, the people and the relationship between them. It will explain the various factors that rendered the laureate ode a format that was highly sensitive to the relationship between prince and people, and increasingly responsible for mediating that relationship to the reading public. At the same time, it will show that the odes were a constantly evolving format, the demands upon which became more numerous and complex over time; and it will explain what this means for a reading of the odes. Once this has been done, most of the chapter will examine the odes themselves, adopting a somewhat chronological, somewhat thematic structure. The odes will be divided into two main phases, pre-1757 and post-1757, with special attention given in sequence to Cibber, Whitehead, Warton and Pye, each of whose odes represent important developments.

The progress of poetry

As well as the scholarship discussed in the Introduction, this chapter will engage with two strands of poetry scholarship. The first is that which seeks to understand the changes in poetic taste and trends over the course of the long eighteenth century, and which plots certain changes in the sorts of poetry that were being written and valued, from panegyric and harsh satire in the late seventeenth century, through the didacticism, refined wit and polished couplets of the early eighteenth century, to the metrical experiments, lyricism and increased emphasis on passions and sentiment after the mid century, and at last to Romanticism. The mid-century fulcrum will prove especially significant here. It has been variously characterized by such terms and ideas as ‘preromantic’, ‘Gothic’, ‘graveyard poetry’, ‘passions’, ‘sentimental’, ‘genius’, ‘originality’, ‘inspiration’, ‘retreat’, ‘introspection’ and ‘a reaction against Pope’. Whatever the case, it is seen as a time of new practices and ideas, justified by reference to notions of an original spirit of poetry, uncorrupted by modern refinements.5

In 1984, Roger Lonsdale presented a challenge to this narrative with his anthology, The New Oxford Book of Eighteenth-Century Verse. He argued that scholars still know very little about the overall terrain of eighteenth-century poetry, and that the standard narrative belies the true diversity of poetic output at the time. However, he also admitted that the poetry that challenges modern notions of eighteenth-century verse tended to fall into obscurity soon after publication, and that the modern narrative is founded on the popular anthologies and compilations of the middle to late eighteenth century: the narrative was created by eighteenth-century poets, critics, publishers and readers themselves.6 Partly for this reason, while Lonsdale’s anthology has influenced subsequent attitudes to this period, the broad outlines of eighteenth-century poetics have remained mostly unchanged, and scholars’ energies have been focused rather on filling out those outlines with new materials and new perspectives. David Fairer, writing one of the more recent and insightful works on eighteenth-century poetry as a whole, observed that Lonsdale ushered in exciting new approaches to the subject which circumvented the familiar stereotypes, and Fairer situated his own book in relation to such scholarship. He duly offered highly original arguments and observations for, in particular, the early eighteenth century.7 Yet as Fairer approached the middle and later eighteenth century, he too explored the same sorts of poetic trends that formed the backbone of earlier works: experiments in form, new ideas about the essence of poetry and a reconnection with the poetry of the past.8

This chapter will follow Lonsdale’s and Fairer’s lead in using new angles and long-neglected poetry to better understand the nature of the major trends and developments in eighteenth-century poetry. The odes, it will demonstrate, were abreast of the developments that concerned eighteenth-century readers and writers, and can therefore better illuminate those developments. Whereas the nature of the mid-century developments (in particular) has generally been sought in new forms of writing, imbued with ideas of independence and patriotism, this chapter will reveal that newly articulated and newly popular ideals of poetry were in fact fully evidenced in the official, courtly framework of the biannual odes. An understanding of mid-century poetic developments is therefore not complete without due consideration of how it manifested there.9 The idea that mid-century poetry (including the non-laureate ode form itself) turned away from public declamation towards personal feeling, for example, will be proven a partial truth at best.10 The post-1757 laureate odes embody a new aesthetic of poetry that harked back to both the ‘Gothic’ English past and ancient Greece, and an ideology that sought to use heavily pictorial means to activate a sympathetic, emotive response in readers. The appointment of Warton as laureate, and the great acclaim that his odes received, was no accident; 1785–90 was arguably the capstone of this new aesthetic. The odes thus suggest a reconsideration of the motives behind the mid-century developments and, in particular, question the idea of these developments as being bound up with reclusiveness, introspection, disengagement from society and the unbridled spontaneity of genius.11 If the middle to late eighteenth century was preromantic, then it was as much the Romantic apostasy of Southey, Coleridge and Wordsworth as anything else.

The second relevant strand of poetry scholarship is that on conservative and loyalist poetics. Recent years have seen scholars become increasingly interested in those tendencies of thought and action that support that status quo, and this interest has borne fruit in several significant works on eighteenth-century literature. At one end of the period is Abigail Williams’s study of Whig poetics in the reigns of William and Anne; at the other is Matthew Grenby’s monograph on anti-Jacobin novels and Kevin Gilmartin’s on literary conservatism during the Romantic period.12 All three books reconstitute the powerful currents of conservative literature, documenting its forms and tropes and emphasizing the practical networks, motives and energies by which such literature was produced. This chapter will follow on from such work, but with a slight difference; it will seek to integrate such writing more firmly into the wider narratives of poetical change described above. Scholars of conservative literature often study it as a body of work somewhat apart from the more canonical and avant-garde work that had occupied scholarly attention before them.13 By contrast, this chapter will argue that conservative writing should not be understood as existing separately or antagonistically from the wider currents of literary production of the time. For example, there was far more overlap between the laureate odes and the works of Thomas Gray than there was between the laureate odes and the Anti-Jacobin Review. In the end, perhaps even the idea of conservative literature is misleading.

The onus on the odes

There were several main factors that determined the character of the odes as negotiations of the relationship between prince and people.14 The first is that they were a form of panegyric verse. The panegyric genre was not simply concerned with giving exorbitant praise; in fact, it centred on the idea of a public engagement between prince and people, in which the poet mediated between the two so as to effect national harmony. The best study of the panegyric tradition and its manifestation in the later Stuart period comes in James D. Garrison’s monograph, Dryden and the Tradition of Panegyric.15 Garrison showed that the idea of panegyric originated in the ancient world, as a public address given to a prince on a festive occasion, in which, though the prince would be praised and the loyalty of his people promised, the praise and promise would also remind him of how he was expected to rule. He would be shown a princely ideal to live up to; if he failed, he would lose his people’s obedience. At the same time, the panegyrist would be setting out that princely ideal to the rest of the people in attendance, reminding them of their duty to obey that ideal prince. The panegyric would thus constitute an idealized contract between prince and people. Over time, individual panegyrics became less likely to be genuinely performed on a festive occasion, and the genre, or discourse, became increasingly text-based. But it nonetheless retained the idea of being a public address, performed to the prince on behalf of his subjects.

By the late seventeenth century, the form had become heavily associated with verse (rather than with non-metrical oratory or prose), and it was becoming more diluted as a genre. It was no longer reserved for princes, or even for statesmen and military men; the sense of its being a public address was less frequently visible; and its standard tropes were falling out of fashion. The strict identity of panegyric as a form of discourse was being lost, and the idea of ‘panegyric’ as merely the hyperbole of ‘praise’ was gaining ground. Nonetheless, the traditional panegyric discourse was still visible in at least some of the late seventeenth-century poems that were called or intended as ‘panegyrics’. The laureate odes, being genuine public addresses to the prince, were on this account (at least) more firmly linked to the traditional discourse than were other contemporary panegyrics. The laureate odes were thus rooted in a tradition of articulating an ideal relationship between prince and people.

Perhaps of greater importance than this tradition, though, was the nature of the laureates’ position. As established in earlier chapters, the prestige and material substance of the laureates’ position was based on their success both in the system of court-centred patronage and in that of commercial publication. The most obvious signal of this was the title pages to their commercially produced, non-laureate works, where their status as poet laureate would feature heavily;16 their stature as published writers was in no small part determined by their official position as king or queen’s poet. The laureates therefore had a clear incentive to make much of their prince, and of the prince’s relationship with the people. Thus they could appeal to their paymasters both within and outside of the institutional court; thus they could emphasize the importance of their own position as a midpoint between prince and people.

The reception of the odes further demonstrates the onus on the laureates to try to mediate between prince and people in their official productions. Chapter Four has already shown that the reading public of the late eighteenth century did have a strong, enduring interest in the odes; but there is also evidence for something similar at the start of the century, before the publication of the odes had become routine. One newspaper printed Tate’s 1715 birthday ode with the following introductory note from a correspondent: ‘Since Mr. Tate, the Poet Laureat, is so modest as not to publish the Song which he compos’d on Occasion of His Majesty’s Birth-Day, ’tis hop’d you will oblige the Publick, by inserting it in your Paper.’17 Eusden’s 1729 birthday ode was printed in one newspaper as part of a similar letter: ‘Please to insert in your Paper the following ODE … and you’ll oblige, with many others of your Readers, Sir, Your very humble Servant, A. B.’18 Such sentiments were less common under George I than under George III, but there were clearly at least some readers who felt the publication of a laureate ode to be ‘oblig[ing to] the Publick’. Indeed, it was not until Whitehead’s tenure that copies of the odes were specifically handed out to the newspapers; prior to that, their increasingly widespread publication in periodicals came by the agency of non-official sources and the periodical publishers themselves.19 There were always readers in wait for the laureate odes. In the early eighteenth century, demand was greater than supply.

The reading public, then, had an interest in the odes even when they had not been specifically designed for publication. They must therefore have been interested in them as odes addressed to the prince and sung before him at court. Chapter Four has noted that Warton’s odes were criticized in some quarters for not being sufficiently warm in their praises of George III. Moreover, especially in George III’s reign, the odes were often printed in the newspapers as part of long descriptions of the courtly festivities that had taken place on the day in question. Clearly, there was a strong desire among readers to stand witness to the praises being sung to the prince. Part of the odes’ appeal was that they were panegyrics to the prince. The laureates would thus have been conscious that they were writing for an audience that, at least in part, wanted the odes to articulate some particular ideal of the prince, and wanted the odes to bring the prince and people closer together, allowing the people to partake of the courtly festivities. The laureates were selling the idea of ‘a panegyric to the prince’ as much as they were effecting it.

For various reasons, then, there was an onus on the laureate odes to sing the prince’s praises, pay attention to the reading public and engage with the relationship between prince and people. The laureate was rendered an interface between the two by his audiences and his genre.

However, the laureate was not negotiating between two static interest groups. Rather, he was dealing with a constantly evolving, expanding set of expectations, imposed upon him by an increasing diversity of interest groups. Because the odes became so prominent, they elicited a series of new demands for which the form was not originally designed, and yet which it was now the laureate’s duty, in many people’s eyes, to cater for. They succeeded to such an extent in their original context that they transcended that context, and their position in the conceptual geography of culture changed; hence the criteria of value by which they were judged changed also. This is partly why the odes came to be mocked and criticized in certain quarters: their original form and purpose were not immediately suited to the new criteria.

In a sense, this transformation was evident from the very start of the odes’ history. The provenance of these biannual courtly entertainments is obscure, but they may have originated as part of the masques that were produced at Charles I’s court for special occasions. At least one of the more popular songs from a masque by Ben Jonson is known to have become a festive courtly entertainment in its own right, being performed on one of the occasions that was later dedicated to the performance of the odes; and Jonson also wrote a series of poems on royal occasions between 1629 and 1637, two of which seem to have been performed at court.20 Following the Restoration, the first two decades of Charles II’s reign have left behind intermittent evidence of the performance of songs at court on the royal birthday and on New Year’s Day (none of which had any involvement from either Davenant or Dryden), and from 1681 onwards the practice apparently became standard. Musically, these post-Restoration songs were similar to sacred music, and especially to anthems, but were generally intended as one-off performances.21 The poets who wrote the words for them were a varying bunch, with no one poet writing many of them until Tate. There is only one, uncertain piece of evidence that any poet before Rowe was specifically commissioned.22

In the later Stuart period, then, the laureate odes were neither related to the laureateship, nor very often called ‘odes’. They were more often entitled ‘songs’. Though the term ‘song’ was linked to the term ‘ode’ in contemporary parlance, it was only in the sense that ‘ode’ was sometimes used to refer to any kind of lyrical, loose or non-couplet form of verse.23 In the mid eighteenth century, Samuel Johnson’s definition was to indicate this slippage. An ode was, ‘A poem written to be sung to musick; a lyrick poem.’24 Although the name ‘ode’ was starting to be used for the laureate odes by Shadwell’s time, it was still not uncommon for them to be entitled ‘songs’ even as late as Eusden’s tenure. Only with Cibber’s appointment did the laureate productions become fixedly identified as ‘odes’. However, it was also the case that, from at least Shadwell’s time onwards, the texts to these productions were heavily associated with (or influenced by) the fashion for pseudo-Pindaric odes that had been brought about by Abraham Cowley’s Pindarique Odes (1656) and by Boileau’s translation of Longinus (1674). These ‘Pindarics’ were characterized by an exultant, effusive tone, digressive and suddenly shifting content, praise of some great figure and an irregularity of metre that went far beyond anything found in Pindar’s work. The eighteenth century proper was to see increasing efforts to bring the ode form more into line with Pindar’s actual practice (although there were other viable ode forms too, such as those of Anacreon and Horace); but the origins of the laureate odes were in the wild, ‘sublime’ pseudo-Pindaric tradition of the late seventeenth century, as well as in the older tradition of panegyric verse discussed above.25

Thus the later Stuart courtly ‘odes’ started out in a motley manner. Under Tate, the laureate odes settled down into the form that was to endure to the time of Cibber’s death, and that was especially consistent in its themes, tone and language between 1692 and 1730. This was the time when the odes were most fixedly designed as one-off courtly entertainments, performed on the two major festive occasions of the year to gratify the prince and their courtiers and to emphasize the prince’s glory. Sometimes they were published, sometimes not. Most of Shadwell’s laureate odes appeared as independent, commercial publications. Tate, Rowe and Eusden saw their own odes intermittently put into print, either as individual publications or in periodicals, or both. Cibber’s odes were almost all published in periodicals. Some of Tate’s odes were published in the Gentleman’s Journal by Peter Motteux, who had a close working relationship with Tate. This suggests that, in Tate’s case at least, publication came with the laureate’s own approval or instigation.26

Yet it was the fact of publication that generated new criteria of judgement for the odes. Although they were published as documents of one-off musical performance – their success or failure determined by reference to this function – their appearance as text-based poetry rendered them liable to the same sorts of reading experience and judgement to which other text-based poetry was subject. The laureates were aware of this, and sometimes seemed anxious to ensure that their odes were understood in the correct way. In a prefatory note ‘To the Reader’, opening a publication containing two of his odes, Tate explained:

The Glorious Occasion upon which these Odes were written, viz. His Majesty’s Birth-Day, and the New Year, accompanied with the Consummation of an Honourable Peace, requir’d the utmost Liberties of Poetry; but I was Confin’d (for the Present) to such Measures and Compass as the Musical Performance would admit; upon which Consideration the Reader’s favourable allowance is requested.27

Tate was evidently impressed with the potential for writing royal panegyric poetry in response to designated occasions, and he imagined readers casting a critical eye over what he had produced, judging him on how well he had communicated such promising subject matter into textual, non-musical verse. But he also felt that the demands of musical performance restricted the ‘Liberties of Poetry’, and he made sure to establish the proper expectations among his readers. Although these odes were being published purely as texts, they had to be read as documents of performance. The title to this particular publication ended on the phrase ‘Both Set to Musick, and Perform’d At Kensington’. It was commonplace for all ode publications pre-1757 to include notes and instructions on the manner of performance, setting out such things as which voices sang which verses, or when a passage was a ‘Recitativo’ or an ‘Air’.

Several decades after Tate’s address ‘To the Reader’, Cibber was to write something similar. In his prose publication, The Egotist, he defended his odes from some of the attacks on them, making clear that he did not hold his own odes in contempt (as has sometimes been claimed by others), but that he believed that they needed to be understood in relation to their musical performance: ‘without the Musick to them, they had but an Adjective Merit’.28 Cibber did not push this argument any further; just as he took a blasé attitude to the reception of his plays, he did not want to seem too concerned about his odes. Yet Cibber put great effort and consideration into composing those odes, working on them for months and showing them to friends for feedback, as Johnson and certain newspaper reports later attested.29 This indicates another facet to the picture. Tate and Cibber wanted to ensure that their odes were read as the texts to courtly, musical performances, and they were keen to fend off the wrong expectations. But this emphasis on performance was also, potentially, something that recommended the textual poetry to readers. Fairer has emphasized the efforts of (non-laureate) ode writers in the period 1660–1750 to incorporate musical, performative elements into their odes, so as to create ‘the idea of lyric eloquence without thought of any musical setting’ and trigger an ‘audience response’.30 The texts of the laureate odes were doing something similar, but starting from a very different proposition: that the odes had been given their one, definitive performance already, at court in the prince’s presence. To bring attention to their performative aspect was not only to defend them from judgements based on the wrong criteria; it was also to exalt them as texts by reference to the context of their creation and performance. The important thing was that everyone should remain aware of what the odes were, and what they were not.

Everyone did not remain aware. With print publication continuing to expand in extent and variety, and with the court’s position in the cultural landscape evolving, the publication of the laureate odes became more regular. The reading public was understandably interested in the productions of that poet who held the only official claim to be the monarch of Parnassus, and in the chance to pry vicariously into the courtly festivities. When a high-profile figure such as Cibber took the baton, the demand for the odes became irresistible; from 1730 onwards, it was established as an expectation that the odes should be published. But the attendant expectation also became irresistible: these odes, being engaged with as texts, and as the poetic productions of Parnassus’ king, should function not merely as texts for one-off musical performances, but as poems, and as poems worthy to have been published by Parnassian royalty. This was the decisive shift mentioned above: the point at which the odes became so successful that they found themselves attracting that expectation to be something other than what they were, and thence the accompanying criticism. The odes transcended their context of origin, not necessarily due to the poetic ambitions of the laureate, but because they were dragged out of that context by a thousand eager pairs of hands.

Over the course of the early eighteenth century, the laureate’s problems in this respect continued to intensify. Partly, this was because notions of literary quality – against which the odes were increasingly being judged – became more complicated, and developed a strain of suspicion for all forms of occasional verse. Pope led the Scriblerian effort to define good poetry both positively and negatively; Shadwell, Tate, Eusden and Cibber all fell foul of his pen.31 After Pope’s death, other writers started advancing standards of judgement that were conceived in opposition to Pope’s style, seeking a greater play of fancy, imagination and passion than was permitted in the narrow compass of Pope’s couplets, and finding it in various works of older English poetry. These developments were especially important for the ode form. Having been intensely discussed since the start of the century, it now became adopted by poets like Joseph Warton and William Collins as the ideal vehicle for fancy, imagination and passion.32

At the same time, there was developing a comparatively understudied trend in favour of a newly rigorous engagement with the forms and techniques of ancient Greek poetry, distinct from the neoclassicism of the early eighteenth century.33 Whitehead and Mason were two of the leading figures of this trend, especially in their plays;34 but its most famous manifestation was Gray’s two odes of 1757. Gray’s odes united a formal Pindaric rigour – the odes divided into metrically identical sections, each with a strophe, antistrophe and epode – with the sorts of themes and concerns shared by Joseph Warton, Collins and certain other young poets of the time.35 The ode form was being used and scrutinized in different ways from those that had prevailed in the seventeenth century, when the laureate odes had come into being. Meanwhile, notions of the British poetic canon were becoming more precise and more sophisticated. Whitehead socialized with at least some of the writers who were most prominently involved in these endeavours, and Thomas Warton was himself one of the most significant of them.36

The sorts of expectation against which the laureate odes were to be judged were therefore becoming more numerous, more complex and more demanding. Cibber, fifty-nine years old when appointed and having never published much lyric poetry, somewhat disregarded these new expectations, writing the same, traditional sort of laureate odes throughout his tenure. However, Whitehead brought a different attitude to the office. He wrote in sympathy with the new expectations to which the odes had become subject, sharing the sorts of principles and ambitions that underlay those expectations. Whitehead’s appointment therefore marks the second main phase in the history of the odes: he, Warton and Pye would all produce odes that were intended to meet the new expectations that had been created by widespread publication, and which were, in particular, written on the understanding of the ode form as established by the poets and critics of the mid century. They were attempting to write poetry that situated itself consciously between the poetic heritage and posterity, that would impress the reading public and that would espouse an appropriately patriotic spirit.

With Pye, the case was the most complicated, as the demands of the anti-Jacobin struggle encouraged him to position his odes as patriotic, popular songs. But it was also Pye who had written the following, in a preface to his own translation of some of Pindar’s odes (1787):

As the situation of a Poet Laureat is something similar to that of our ancient Lyric Poet, might not our Birth Day Odes be rendered more interesting to the Public, by interweaving some of the popular stories which may be found in our annals, with the usual compliments of the Day? I think something of this kind was attempted by Mr. Whitehead. An idea of this nature in the hands of our present Laureat [Warton], might render those periodical productions not only a classical entertainment for the present time, but a permanent and valuable acquisition to posterity.37

Notwithstanding the slight unfairness here against Warton, Pye’s argument demonstrated a clear sense that the odes were to be pitched as much (if not more) to ‘the Public’ as to the prince. He felt that if the odes were written with the classical heritage (Pindar) and British national history (‘popular stories’ from ‘our annals’) in mind, then they could become not just ‘a classical entertainment’ (a significant phrase in itself), but poems for ‘posterity’.

By the turn of the nineteenth century, there were potent new strains of radical and Romantic thought that, on the whole, did not grant much allowance to the idea of biannual laureate odes. Following Southey’s appointment, these strains contributed to the death of the odes. Up to and including Southey’s tenure, though, the laureates needed to remain sensitive to a host of evolving issues, or else see their work rendered ridiculous. The form had not been brought about for any purpose other than as a one-off performance at court; even its association with the laurel-crowned poet was a subsequent, accidental development. Nonetheless, over the course of the long eighteenth century, the odes became increasingly required to justify themselves without reference to their one-off performance, and to succeed by way of new criteria. Throughout it all, it remained incumbent upon the odes to negotiate the relationship between prince and people, and to mediate that relationship to the reading public. But the way in which the laureates did so underwent huge changes, which are highly instructive in terms of the position of the laureate and the role of the court in British society.

Tate’s copy-text

It is now time to look at the odes themselves. This and the next two sections will survey the first phase of odes (pre-1757), showing how they presented the relationship between prince and people. It will be argued that this presentation revealed a coherent notion of the court’s significance in national life, but that this notion was different from that which prevailed after 1757. Fundamentally, the earlier notion was that the court was a distinct, physical place, which directed affairs from above, and to which the eyes of the people should be turned; its ceremonial and cultural life was at the heart of the nation’s culture, just as its social and political primacy was unquestioned. When published, the odes allowed the people to come to court, to witness their glorious prince and to articulate their joy in his rule. After 1757, although the odes continued to express the court’s importance, they did so according to a different conceptualization.

Some of the main characteristics of the first phase of odes can be seen in the following offering from Tate, which marked New Year’s Day 1693. On this occasion it was entitled an ‘Ode’ rather than a ‘Song’, and it was headed as being ‘Performed Before their Majesties. Set to MUSICK by Dr. Blow. The Words by N. Tate, Servant to their Majesties.’

The Happy, happy Year is Born,
That wonders shall disclose;
That Conquest with fix’d Lawrels shall adorn,
And give our Lab’ring HERCULES Repose.
Ye Graces that resort
To Virtue’s Temple blest MARIA’S Court,
With Incense and with Songs as Sweet,
The Long-Expected Season meet,
The Long-expected Season gently Greet.

MARIA (thus devoutly say)
MARIA - ---Oh appear! appear!
Thy Softest Charms Display,
Smile and Bless the Infant Year;
Smile on its Birth in Kindness to our Isle,
For if this Genial Day
You Cheerfully Survey,
Succeeding Years in just Return, on You and Us shall Smile.

Thus, let Departing WINTER Sing,
Approach, Advance, Thou promis’d SPRING;
And if for Action not design’d,
Together soon Together bring
Confederate Troops in Europe’s Cause combin’d.
A Busier Prospect SUMMER yields,
Floating Navies, harrass’d Fields.
From far the Gallick Genius Spying
(Of Unjust War the Just Disgrace.)
Their Broken Squadrons Flying,
And Britain’s Caesar Lightning in the Chase.

But AUTUMN does Impatient grow
To Crown the Victor’s Brow;
To Wait him Home Triumphant from Alarms
To Albion and MARIA’S Arms.
Then, to conclude the Glorious Scene,
To Europe’s Joy let Me Return,
When Britain’s Senate shall Convene,
To Thank their Monarch, and no more, no more his Absence mourn.
Their kind Supplies our fainting Hopes restor’d,
Their Inspir’d Counsels shall sure means afford,
To fix the Gen’ral Peace won by our Monarch’s Sword.

CHORUS.
While Tyrants their Neighbours and Subjects Oppress,
All Nations the Pious Restorer Caress.
Securely our Hero prepares for the Field,
His Valour his Sword, his Virtue his Shield:
He Arms in Compassion for Europe’s Release.
He Conquers to Save, and he Warr’s to give Peace.38

The text was typical of the pre-1757 odes in a number of ways. Firstly, the form was a Cowleyan Pindaric, exultant and eulogistic in tone, with verses and lines of varying length, and with an irregular rhyme scheme. But it was also patently designed for musical performance, with the performative elements being emphasized for the reader’s benefit (although not so much here as in some other odes). The reiterations of certain words and phrases (‘Happy, happy’, ‘The long-Expected Season’, ‘MARIA … MARIA’) were intended to create an air of overflowing joy and harmonious musicality.

As for the content of the ode, the emphasis on the year and on the passing of time were likewise typical, with generic references to seasons and allusions to great contemporary events. It was rare for those allusions to be any more specific than here; in fact, especially after Tate’s tenure, it was rare to find references even as specific as these, at least until 1757. Next, it was typical to have the prince celebrated as a superhuman figure (‘HERCULES ’, ‘our Hero’), and to be portrayed as something between an abstraction and a real human figure (as seen in William’s peculiar ability to embrace both ‘Albion’ and ‘MARIA’). Classical references were particularly favoured by Tate and Eusden (‘Britain’s Caesar’), but Cibber, despite being notorious for the frequency with which he dubbed George II ‘Caesar’, did not much employ them.

Numerous abstract qualities were usually assigned to the prince, varying according to the writer and the prince in question.39 Here, Tate’s keen eye for ‘Virtue’ was gratified by both Mary and William. The royal family would often be celebrated in terms of ideal gender and family roles (William’s virtue being found on his ‘Shield ’, Mary’s in a ‘Temple’ thronged with graces, incense and sweet songs). The accession of the fertile Hanoverians allowed particularly large scope for this theme. While William, Mary and Anne were on the throne(s), it was typical to emphasize the great European cause that they were fighting for, and the peace, freedom and happiness that was being brought to Europe (as in this ode). But this emphasis disappeared after the Hanoverian succession, resurfacing only vaguely during times of war. Whereas William and (in a more complicated way) Anne were celebrated by reference to their actions and deeds, the Hanoverians tended to be celebrated on account of their passivity and stasis (although the word ‘repose’, which became one of the key words in this tendency, does appear in Tate’s 1693 ode). In summary, the pre-1757 odes tended to hail their princes in exultant, musical, baroque effusions, and to paint them as glorious, semi-divine figures, sailing serenely through the skies, consorting with various allegorical figures, exemplifying various significant qualities and generally resembling the portrait of William and Mary on the ceiling of the Royal Naval College’s Painted Hall.

Here Tate also demonstrated some of the more direct characteristics of the laureates’ negotiation of the prince–people relationship. One was the idea that the prince was a sort of tutelary deity, guardian angel or intercessory saint on Britain’s behalf, using the divine favour that was given to them personally as a way of bringing blessings upon Britain. Thus the invocation to Mary, ‘Smile and Bless the Infant Year … in Kindness to our Isle’, because ‘Succeeding Years in just Return, on You and Us shall Smile’. Another, associated idea was that the prince’s actions would effect great results for Britain. In this instance, Tate’s concerns were more for the effects of William’s actions on Europe (‘the Gen’ral Peace won by our Monarch’s Sword’), but this too was part of a wider, recurrent theme, in which it was suggested that the prince was someone for the people to take pride in as their champion, whose personal greatness reflected well on Britain and granted the nation an international pre-eminence. A related theme, not too overt in this particular ode, was that the qualities embodied by the prince were particularly British qualities, such as a love of freedom and a hatred of France (‘the Gallick Genius’).

The laureates would also give more explicit descriptions of the prince–people relationship, partly in the manner of a historian, partly in the manner of a prophet. Tate’s lines, ‘When Britain’s Senate shall Convene … Their kind Supplies our fainting Hopes restor’d,/Their Inspir’d Counsels shall sure means afford,/To fix the Gen’ral Peace won by our Monarch’s Sword’, suggested, again in idealized form (Britain’s ‘Senate’), a harmonious relationship in which both sides had their own particular roles and worked in mutual contract towards some nationally desirable end. Parliament would fund the prince, the prince would win peace and parliament would fix it in place. But the prince’s interactions with the nation were cast on multiple different levels. As well as ‘Britain’s Senate’, William had intimate, pseudo-amorous dealings with an abstract ‘Albion’, while Tate’s mention of ‘Us’, earlier in the poem, indicated still another conception of the British people, namely, the populace of which Tate himself formed a part. This latter idea, of the poet himself as representative of the people, expressing their sentiments towards the prince and experiencing that prince’s presence in some way, was also typical. In this context, it was especially common for the laureate to phrase the relationship in terms of emotion, and to express the gratitude that the people had towards their prince (the British people having ‘mourn[ed]’ William’s ‘Absence’, and wanting desperately ‘To Thank their Monarch’).

In short, there were a range of ways that the laureates could approach the relationship between prince and people, and render it for their readers. A spirit of idealization lay behind much of this, but so too did a more personal sense of emotion. It could even be said that the rhetoric and form of the odes allowed for an affective symbiosis between (on the one hand) ideals and abstractions and (on the other) the personal and the emotive. This sense would prove highly significant in the later history of the odes, coming to occupy a more central place in them after 1757. Now, departing from this ode of Tate’s, which has been used as a kind of copy-text of the quintessential early ode, the various ways in which the prince–people relationship was envisioned in the early odes will be looked at in more detail.

The early odes

The major vision of the relationship between people and prince presented in the early odes was that the two parties were joined in perfect harmony, the prince fulfilling his ideal role in terms of his qualities, actions and care for his people, the people fulfilling their ideal role in terms of their obedience and their recognition of the happiness granted to them by their prince. This unity was emphasized as right and proper, and as the source of all good things; as long as it was maintained, the nation would prosper. Yet the conditional sense was generally not explicit. Instead, the odes tended to present the relationship in a vague, idealized manner, expressing it as a sort of divine fait accompli, existing outside of temporality and causality. The poet expressed this relationship as a partaker of it, recorded it as a bard and witnessed its future continuation as a prophet. As will be seen below, Cibber was particularly important in developing these ideas, and in basing them around the theme of mutuality.

In this ideal form of the relationship, the prince brought good rule and the people brought due obedience. The prince cared for his people: he ‘make[s] the Publick Good [his] Care’.40 One recurrent idea was that the prince had saved Britain from recent distress, and protected it from future pain. ‘Britannia, late oppress’d with dread,/Hung her declining drooping head:/A better visage now she wears … Safe beneath her mighty master,/In security she sits.’41 Rowe’s final ode included a hypnotic succession of swift, repetitive lines on this theme: ‘More sweet than all, the praise/Of Caesar’s golden days:/Caesar’s praise is sweeter;/Britain’s pleasure greater;/Still may Caesar’s reign excel;/Sweet the praise of reigning well.’42 George’s praiseworthiness was bound up with his good governance of Britain, and his ‘praise’ corresponded vaguely but inexorably with Britain’s ‘pleasure’. The shortness of the lines here, and the repetition of words and noises, served to blur the two strands together, removing any hint of causation and any hint that the praise was conditional upon the pleasure, while nonetheless making clear that the two were symbiotic.

However, what the people owed to their prince in return was not onerous. Most often, the laureate stated that the people owed obedience, joy and gratitude; and, because of the nature of the laureate odes, these debts were not so much demanded, as enacted. The laureate stood in between people and prince; the tone that the ode form inclined towards was exultant, rather than argumentative; and the laureate odes were sung at court by many different voices. The laureates therefore employed the odes to express the universal, joyous gratitude of the people towards the prince. ‘’Tis ANNA’s Day, and all around/Only Mirth and Musick sound … Shouts and Songs, and Laughing Joys.’43

In one ode, Tate included a chorus part reading, ‘What then should Happy Britain do?/Blest with the Gift and Giver too.’44 Apparently, there was nothing for Britain to do at all; its prince had given it such perfect happiness, that Tate found himself at a loss. However, after some more praise, he rallied with this final ‘Grand CHORUS’: ‘Happy, Happy, past Expressing,/Britain, if thou know’st thy Blessing;/Home-bred Discord ne’er Alarm Thee,/Other Mischief cannot Harm Thee./Happy, if you know’st thy Blessing./Happy, Happy, past Expressing.’45 Again, there was nothing much for Britain to do: even words could not match up to Britain’s happiness, since it was ‘past Expressing’. Yet Tate was nonetheless suggesting one obligation that the people must pay, and which, the word ‘if ’ suggested, they might fall short of. Britain was required to ‘know’ its blessing. This was the people’s one active requirement in the relationship: they had to acknowledge the greatness of the prince and the happiness that the prince was giving them. Again, the issue of causality was sidestepped. The happiness was ever present, yet only became true if it was acknowledged; the people were inexpressibly happy, yet would only experience their happiness if they joined Tate in his efforts to express it. It was not a hard task, Tate promised them. All they had to do was repeat after him: ‘Happy, Happy … Happy, Happy …’

The conditional clause (‘If ’) was only mildly stated by Tate on this occasion, and it was never pushed hard by the laureates. In line with the odes’ general inclination towards glorious assertion rather than argumentation, the norm was for joy and gratitude to be expressed, rather than demanded. A good example came in Rowe’s longest and most ambitious ode (his first). ‘I hear the mirth, I hear the land rejoice,/Like many waters swells the pleasing noise,/While to their monarch, thus, they raise the public voice./Father of thy country, hail! … Joy abounds in ev’ry breast,/For thee thy people all, for thee the year is blest.’46 In this passage, Rowe initially portrayed himself as someone catching the sound of the nation’s happiness from afar, and used this conceit to build up towards a crescendo of joy. He then switched role, becoming the mouthpiece of that joyous ‘public voice’. It was as if the joy from ‘ev’ry breast’ was pouring irresistibly into the court, confirming not just the people’s grateful happiness, but that the happiness originated with the prince himself: ‘For thee’ the people were ‘blest’. This was a typical effect used by the laureates. By choosing to enact the people’s emotional gratitude rather than trying to convince the people that they ought to be grateful, the laureates made that gratitude seem like something natural. They invited their readers to share in the great celebratory gratitude that had always been there, and always would be. The people’s gratitude was not conditional, but was always forthcoming; it found its articulation in the people’s representative, the laureate.

As well as establishing this ideal form of the prince–people relationship, the odes also illustrated the good things that resulted from its successful functioning: peace, glory and prosperity. ‘Britannia shall be shown/Still yearly with new Glories crown’d,/As Brunswick’s Years roul on.’47 Goodness would flow across the land. This goodness was usually presented in abstract, traditional terms, drawing upon the classical ideas of a golden age or halcyon days. ‘And under Thee, our most Indulgent King,/Shall Industry and Arts increase;/Quiet we shall possess, but not Inglorious Ease.//Then shall each fertile Mead, and grateful Field,/Amply reward our Care and Toil … Free from Invading force, and Intestine broil’, was one typical illustration.48 Rowe evoked the idea of halcyon days by speaking of ‘the billows of the ocean’ being laid to rest.49 Tate was more explicit, hailing ‘Halcyon Days of Peace’.50 All laureates spoke of ‘blessings’.51

The next major way in which the early odes envisioned the prince–people relationship was by relating the prince to British national identity. The sorts of qualities and frames of reference by which the prince was praised in the odes were diverse, some going back to the roots of the panegyric tradition. In terms of whether the relationship being posited was one between a prince and a people, or a prince and a British nation, it became more typical for the odes to lean towards the latter after 1757 than it had been before. Nonetheless, even from the time of Tate, and especially in Shadwell’s odes, a significant trend was to praise the prince in ways that linked him to British characteristics and British history. Eusden described George I as being formed from ‘the mix’d Ideas’ of ‘Edward, Henry, and the Lov’d Nassau’ [William III]’.52 Later, he stated that ‘the rich Source of Freedom is the King’.53 Shadwell claimed that Mary’s rule eclipsed that of ‘our Eliza’.54 More blandly, Tate wrote on one occasion, ‘Fame and Fortune ever smile/On Britain’s Queen, and Britain’s Isle’.55

The prince thus became a sort of tutelary figure to the nation: a classical ‘genius’, or a patron saint. He symbolized and embodied the nation. In some sense, he interceded for it with Heaven. Eusden concluded one ode by telling Britain’s previous, allegorical ‘Genius’ that it was now no longer needed: ‘thy Guardianship may’st spare,/Britain is a Brunswick’s care’.56 The use of the word ‘Brunswick’ to denote George I (the Hanoverians stemming from the House of Brunswick) alliteratively emphasized the idea that the prince had become the new genius of the nation. This idea reached its height with Cibber, and with the completion of the transition from an active king like William III to a passive symbol like George II.

In many ways, then, the odes gave an explicit depiction of the prince–people relationship. Yet they also negotiated that relationship in subtler ways. The laureate was himself a prime instrument of the relationship, and the relationship was textured throughout his odes. For one thing, the laureate’s praise of the prince was not simply about gratifying him personally; it was about selling him, and selling obedience, to the reading public. The laureate’s odes were attempting to encourage a loyal awe and reverence for the prince (and in some ways for the prince’s government of the day) and to define the manner in which that prince should be understood and responded to by his people. In so doing, he sometimes brought himself to the forefront as a prime intermediary between prince and people: leading, hearing and voicing the praise.

Some forms of praise appeared in odes from all the laureates. The prince was often portrayed as some great classical figure, with ‘Caesar’ and ‘Augustus’ being particularly favoured.57 As mentioned above, Tate and Eusden were especially fond of classical references.58 Other forms of praise were still more characteristic of individual laureates, with Shadwell emphasizing William and Mary’s Whig qualities and Tate celebrating his princes’ devotion to the cause of virtue.59 Under the Hanoverians, the praise often focused on aspects of family, fertility and lineage.60 One of the most noteworthy treatments of the theme came in Rowe’s first ode. After hailing George I, ‘Thou great Plantagenet! immortal be thy race!’, the ode continued, ‘See! see the sacred scyon springs,/See the glad promise of a line of kings!/Royal youth! what bard divine,/Equal to a praise like thine,/Shall in some exalted measure,/Sing thee, Britain’s dearest treasure? … Still pour the blessing forth, and give thy great increase.’61 In the previous line, Rowe had been addressing George I directly, but here the phrase ‘See! see … see’ suggested that he was turning away to address a wider audience at this point, calling their attention to the prince’s flourishing line of succession as a way of telling them how grateful and invested they should be in a prince who (for the first time since Charles I) had a straightforward heir. He then pivoted once again to address the future George II; having confirmed the people’s approval, and thus his own role as an intermediary between prince and people, he was able to dub the heir ‘Britain’s dearest treasure’, while also expressing the conventional idea of the poet’s unworthiness even to sing about so great a ‘thee’. In these lines, the Hanoverians’ fecundity was being praised not so much for their own gratification, but more so as to sell the idea of a uniquely stable monarchy to readers. The lines also showed the subtle footwork that was necessary to render such praise effective: Rowe allowed himself a brief explicit appeal to his audience, before twisting back around to face his royal patrons, and wrapped that appeal back up in the guise of an extravagant, supposedly consensual compliment. By such means, the voice of praise could come to seem like the voice of the people, even as it was being used to persuade the people as to the prince’s glories (in this case, those of stability).

Moreover, the odes were rendered effective as texts by the fact of their having been performed at court. As mentioned above, the publications tended to emphasize that they had been so performed, with notations marking out things like ‘CHORUS’ and ‘First Voice’,62 and with little explanatory paragraphs setting out things like, ‘On Monday the 6th of this Month, the Queen was graciously pleas’d to come from Kensington to St. James’s; where the foregoing Ode, set to Mr. John Eccles, Master of Her Majesty’s Musick, was Perform’d, to the Satisfaction of the whole Court, by Her Majesty’s Servants.’63 Sometimes the publications would even name the singers.64 Thus the meaning of the odes was partly conditioned by the ability of the reader to reconstruct the performance and imagine the prince hearing it. In the case quoted above, even ‘the Satisfaction of the whole Court’ was deemed worthy of note. The odes allowed readers to be present at a joyous, musical celebration of the prince’s benign rule, and to participate in the enacting of an idealized prince–people relationship. Readers who were so transported were not expected to bring scepticism, criticism or dispute. They were there to bathe in the golden splendour. They were there to add their voices to the shouts of grateful joy.

The early odes thus constituted an aesthetic that was unashamedly court-centred. It was a feature of court ceremony, it emanated from the court and it transported its readers into the court so that they might partake of the court festivities and be introduced into the appropriate relationship with their prince. Having endorsed the performance, those readers would shuffle off back to their homes, duly impressed with a sense of majesty. This was a poetry that was fully in line with some of the major currents of poetry identified by scholars as pertaining to this time: it was extravagantly panegyric, pseudo-Pindaric and avowedly occasional, even seeking to recreate the occasion of its inception for its readers. In terms of the social and situational aspects of poetry, it also reflected the importance of the court, and court-based coteries of literary production, with which scholars continue to characterize the later Stuart period.65 As such, it was attuned to the contemporary poetry landscape, and it proved the court to be attuned to national life. Yet if the relationship between prince and people revealed in these odes situated the court as having a central and continuingly relevant role in society, politics and culture, then it did so with a sense that society, politics and culture looked to the court for their lead, rather than vice versa. As it had been for centuries, the court of the laureate odes was a physical space, occupied by a prince, and it dictated the nation’s affairs. The court presided over the nation.

Cibber’s odes

The laureate who arguably took these themes the furthest was Cibber.66 However, his odes also signalled some of the developments to come. In his hands, the pre-1757 odes reached their culmination, but with certain changes of emphasis, tending rather to dissolve the physical presence of the court and the practical agency of the prince into a hazier, more metaphorical presence. Where the previous odes had invited their readers to court, Cibber’s odes elevated that court into the clouds, and invited readers merely to look up towards it from wherever they happened to be sitting. Where the previous odes had articulated a relationship between prince and people in which the prince actively directed affairs, Cibber’s prince became a more symbolic guarantee, or rubber-stamp, to affairs which were being conducted by the people themselves. His forms, tropes and techniques followed on from those of his predecessors, albeit with a narrowed range and some idiosyncratic preferences on display; but the ideas began to shift towards those which would be characteristic of his successors.

The most significant characteristic feature of Cibber’s odes was that they posited a rhetoric of equilibrium, in which the court became more abstracted and the people’s happiness became more heavily emphasized. This was the structuring ideology of Cibber’s odes. Where the previous odes had sublimated the sense of argument, and had dampened the causal and conditional elements of the prince–people relationship, there had still been a (sometimes significant) tendency to show the prince as having achieved something through action – for example, William bringing liberty to Britain – and an implication that the people’s gratitude and obedience flowed from the prince’s qualities of rulership. With Cibber’s odes, this tendency, and its attendant implications, were further negated. Cibber’s rhetoric posited a prince and people in eternal, transcendental concord, where action was not only unnecessary, but even malign. Cibber thus turned his prince into a symbolic guarantee of the nation’s happiness, and suggested that, so long as his readers endorsed his recognition of that happiness, all would continue to be well.

Cibber routinely mentioned such things as ‘George’s gentle sway’.67 George’s rule was mild, tender and soft; there was no sense of activity to his ‘sway[ing]’. Although he was ‘Born to protect and bless the land!’, it was only in the following manner: ‘And while the laws his people form,/His scepter glories to confirm,/Their wishes are his sole command.’68 His people made the laws, and he followed their wishes; the diction of these lines even made it sound as if the laws in turn were ‘form[ing]’ the people, and that they were ‘command[ing]’ their prince. This rhetoric continued until Cibber’s final ode: ‘Our Rights, our Laws, our Liberty,/His Lenity so well maintains … So gently Caesar holds his Sway,/That Subjects with Delight Obey’. George’s ‘Lenity’ meant that his rule was scarcely more than the confirmation of Britain’s signal characteristics: rights, laws and liberty. His subjects’ ‘Delight’ was because they had essentially nothing to obey, and were left to their own native freedoms.

Thus Cibber’s George became more of a symbolic tutelary figure than his predecessors’ princes had been. He guarded his people’s happiness by doing nothing to tamper with it, and his people responded with a grateful but cursory obedience. In another ode, Cibber wrote, ‘Now shall commerce, sailing free,/Long the boast of Britain be;/While our Caesar guards the sea,/Can our beaten foes molest us?’69 This was not a William, guarding Britain through his martial actions. Nor was it akin to Anne’s husband Prince George, who had sometimes been hailed as a guardian of the seas on account of his genuine naval rank. Instead, it was George being invoked as a sort of guardian deity, and being used to give human form and a guiding spirit to such abstract British characteristics as ‘commerce’ and ‘the sea’. The same ode ended, ‘Io Britannia, Io Caesar sound’. George II was as allegorical a figure as Britannia, to be celebrated in the same breath.

Cibber depicted a king who sat happily on his throne while these verses were sung to him, smiling in vague benignity. The king thus served as Cibber’s focal point for, and embodiment of, an ideal of national equilibrium. Meanwhile, the people were happy, grateful and obedient. ‘Ye Grateful Britons’ and ‘happy Britons’ were typical phrases.70 Although the people’s obligation to the prince was infinite, it was never very active; Cibber continuously invoked it, but also continuously discharged it in the same breath. He positioned himself as a Levite priest, making regular offerings on behalf of the nation, while the nation nodded its head in recognition of its involvement. The nation also had to be happy; but happiness went hand in hand with gratitude, and, as in the Tate ode quoted above, also required nothing other than the people’s acknowledgement. ‘Awake the grateful song’, Cibber called on one occasion, ‘Sing, sing to George’s gentle sway,/And joy for joys receiv’d repay.’71 The people owed their joys to their prince; but repayment was effected simply by being joyous, and Cibber’s ‘grateful song’ was the means by which such repayment would be made. ‘Augustus’ sway demands our song,/And calls for universal cheer,’ Cibber insisted at the start of another ode, before continuing,

What thanks, ye Britons, can repay
So mild, so just, so tender sway?
Air.
Your annual aid when he desires,
Less the King than land requires;
All the dues to him that flow
Are still but Royal wants to you:
So the seasons lend the earth
Their kindly rains to raise her birth;
And well the mutual labours suit,
His the glory, yours the fruit.72

Here, the obligation was impossible to discharge – ‘What thanks … can repay …?’ – but the debt was a light one, being composed of mildness, justice and tenderness. Moreover, the payment of the debt was not simply a payment to George, but a payment to the people themselves, from which they would reap the harvest. George’s only benefit was ‘glory’: again, an entirely abstract quality. The vague natural metaphors, and the refusal to be precise on the nature of an obligation which was being so insistently invoked, further created the sense that this transaction was abstract and mysterious. Thus the king became little more than a symbol of the flourishing state of the realm. The same note was struck time and time again: ‘Here what you owe to Caesar’s sway,/In grateful song to Caesar pay … The grateful theme demands our lays.’73 If ‘Caesar’ was so immaterial a taxman as to deal only in song, and if the songs themselves were spontaneous expressions of joy, then his function was little more than a reminder of national well-being. He was an abstract quality, inspiring the proper workings of the nation: a barometer of obligation which proved to the people how happy they were based on the level of their debt.

Moreover, it was the odes themselves that enacted this immaterial transaction (or that, to continue the metaphor, took the reading of the barometer). ‘Here what you owe’ would be paid; the ‘grateful theme’ demanded ‘our lyre’, but it was Cibber who held that lyre, however wide was the ‘our’ of its ownership. Because the main substance of the transaction was joy, Cibber’s odes thus became the site at which a nation’s emotions would be enacted. ‘The Date of Caesar’s Sway … calls for universal Cheer’ was the sort of sentiment with which Cibber often started his odes;74 and he would often proceed by articulating great reams of joy, before climaxing in a thankful, joyous chorus.75 The people were so happy that they had nothing else to do than to recognize the source of their happiness by way of Cibber’s odes.

Thus Cibber continued to portray the prince–people relationship in the ways laid down by his predecessors, but with variations and new emphases that pointed the way ahead. As poetry, the odes remained somewhat responsive to the aesthetic climate in which they were being produced, but increasingly less so as the years passed, with Cibber’s last efforts being very similar to his earliest. Cibber maintained a poetics of courtliness, ceremony and panegyric, and articulated the continuing importance of the court in national life both by the way in which he portrayed the relationship between prince and people and by the manner of his writing. Yet the prevailing notion of that relationship began to evolve in his odes. His predecessors had granted the court a more active, tangible leadership over society, politics and culture; they had served as a kind of a maitre d’ to the court, beckoning readers inside and overseeing the relevant ceremonies; and they had at least suggested some sense of causality and practical consequence in the manner of the people’s joy and obedience. Cibber turned the court into something less tangible, trading in causality for equilibrium. He dampened the prince’s agency, and argued that such dampness rendered his reign happier than any other prince’s. The court’s role was not diminished, but it was changing.

The later odes: Whitehead

With Whitehead’s appointment, the odes reached their second major phase, and the changes took full effect. The court’s role in society was no longer as a distinct, physical entity towards which the nation looked for a lead; instead, it became more equably in tune with the nation, opening itself out to the public. Courtliness became diffused and inherent throughout society; the laureate of the court was the laureate of the nation, and to celebrate either was to celebrate both. The aesthetic of the odes changed accordingly, bringing itself in line with the most recent developments in poetry and employing those developments so as to enact the celebration of court and nation.76 Whitehead’s first birthday ode for George III (1761) ran thus:

STROPHE.
’Twas at the nectar’d feast of Jove,
When fair Alcmena’s son
His destin’d course on earth had run,
And claim’d the thrones above;
Around their King, in deep debate,
Conveen’d, the heav’nly synod sate,
And meditated boons refin’d
To grace the friend of humankind:
When, to mark th’ advancing God,
Propitious Hermes stretch’d his rod,
The roofs with music rung!
‘What boon divine would heav’n bestow?
‘Ye gods, unbend the studious brow,
‘The fruitless search give o’er,
‘Whilst we the just reward assign:
‘Let Hercules with Hebe join,
‘And Youth unite with Power!
ANTISTROPHE.
O sacred truth in emblem drest! –
Again the muses sing,
Again in Britain’s blooming King
Alcides stands confest,
By temp’rance nurs’d, and early taught
To shun the smooth fallacious draught
Which sparkles high in Circe’s bowl;
To tame each hydra of the soul,
Each lurking pest, which mocks its birth,
And ties the spirit down to earth
Immers’d in mortal coil;
His choice was that severer road
Which leads to Virtue’s calm abode,
And well repays the toil.
In vain ye tempt, ye specious harms,
Ye flow’ry wiles, ye flatt’ring charms,
That breathe from yonder bower;
And heav’n the just reward assigns,
For Hercules with Hebe joins,
And Youth unites with Power.
EPODE.
O call’d by heav’n to fill that awful throne
Where Edward, Henry, William, George, have shone,
(Where love with rev’rence, law with pow’r agree,
And ’tis each subject’s birthright to be free),
The fairest wreaths already won
Are but a prelude to the whole:
Thy arduous race is now begun,
And, starting from a nobler goal,
Heroes and Kings of ages past
Are Thy compeers: extended high
The trump of Fame expects the blast,
The radiant lists before Thee lie,
The field is Time, the prize Eternity!
Beyond example’s bounded light
’Tis Thine to urge thy daring flight,
And heights untried explore:
O think what Thou alone canst give,
What blessings Britain may receive
When Youth unites with Power!77

This was the style and manner of the late eighteenth-century odes. Evidently, there were still features in common with the previous odes: this particular example included a reference to music ringing out, and ended each section on a refrain; it compared George III to various classical figures, including Hercules, and to Britain’s previous great kings; it was extravagant in its praise; it celebrated the prince for mild qualities like ‘temp’rance’; it emphasized the freedoms of the British subject, and the balance between ‘love with rev’rence, law with pow’r’; and it even included a Tate-like passage in which the prince was shown fighting ‘each hydra of the soul’ as part of his zeal for ‘Virtue’.

However, the entire cast of the ode was different. It was an ambitious, carefully written poem, following the structure of a genuine Pindaric ode rather than suiting itself for musical performance. ‘Strophe’, ‘Antistrophe’ and ‘Epode’, for example, were the three sections that Pindar had used to divide his own odes, each governed by a strict set of rules. Earlier Pindaric writers, from Cowley onwards, had ignored them in favour of wildness, but they had been rigorously reapplied by Gray and other mid-century poets. Whitehead’s eagerness to use them as the governing principles of his laureate odes (rather than the old, performative divisions appropriate for music) indicated his desire to recapture the forms and methods of Greek lyricism and the supposed original spirit of poetry that certain writers were associating with it, and his attendant desire to place the emphasis on the readable text (accessible across the nation) rather than on the musical performance (a one-off event at court). Likewise, the ideas and imagery in the 1761 birthday ode were more strikingly rendered, and more elaborately figured, than previously. Whitehead’s image of Hercules labouring against ‘each hydra of the soul’ showed more concern to draw out the evocative potentials of the metaphor than had Tate’s cursory allusion. There was also a clear narrative to the poem, similar to Gray’s ‘Progress of poetry’: it started off with the original Olympian deities, then proceeded to Hercules, thence to English kings and lastly to the future glories of George III.

After the vague musical maunderings of Cibber, Whitehead was bringing the laureate odes in line with the work of his most ambitious contemporaries. He was followed in this respect by Warton (especially) and Pye. Once in office, both Whitehead and Warton put most of their poetic efforts into the odes. Whitehead published virtually no other work throughout his long tenure; his most significant publications (other than the odes) were his Verses to the People of England (1758) and Charge to the Poets (1762), both of which had a semi-official character (as made clear in the latter’s title page, reading ‘Quasi ex Cathedrâ loquitur’). Warton worked diligently on his laureate odes, as shown by his correspondence and notebooks, and the only other work that he carried out during his laureate tenure was his edition of Milton’s minor poems (apparently with George III’s encouragement, as seen in the previous chapter).78 The laureates channelled their poetic energies unreservedly into the odes.

The change in poetics had important ramifications for the prince–people relationship. For one thing, the laureate was now asserting himself qua laureate as an important, respectable poet. The court poet did not simply furnish tinkling lines to be sung on festive occasions, but produced powerful poetry to which the public should pay heed. As will become more evident in some of the following quotations, the later laureates conceived their official poetry as great national addresses; they were the poets of the nation as much as of the court. Such being the case, the odes carried with them a sense that the prince had a central patronal role in his nation, not only anointing its national poet but contributing to the way in which the nation should conceive of itself and of contemporary affairs, and doing so responsively, in harmony with national feeling.

The change in the style of the odes was also important for the way in which it portrayed the prince to the people. The previous odes, as documents of courtly performances, had suggested that readers could be vicariously present at those performances, paying their devotions and witnessing the splendour of the court. The later odes did something different. They removed the idea of courtly performance from the text itself, thus decentring the prince: the physical space of his court was replaced with a more diffuse sense of the prince’s presence. Instead of transporting the reader to the court, the odes rendered the prince to his people using a variety of newly sophisticated pictorial and emotive methods, in the manner that scholars have generally linked with new poetic forms and tendencies, rather than with patronal, courtly odes. In the advertisement to his Odes on Various Subjects (1746), Joseph Warton, brother to the future laureate, had presented his work as a challenge to prevailing tastes, suggesting that his odes would be found ‘too fanciful and descriptive’. Yet he was unrepentant: he ‘looks upon Invention and Imagination to be the chief faculties of a Poet’.79 These ideas would later be articulated more fully in An Essay on the Genius and Writings of Pope (1782), where Joseph Warton also made more explicit the need for a poet to cast his ideas into fully developed imagery, powerful and comprehensive enough to transport the reader to another place. ‘The use, the force and the excellence of language, certainly consists in raising clear, complete, and circumstantial images, and in turning readers into spectators.’80 By doing so, exponents of this rationale of poetry believed that the poet could trigger an emotional response in the reader that correlated with the poet’s own ideas and emotions.81

The later laureate odes worked upon this rationale. They laboured to create elaborate, potent images by which their readers could envisage and understand the prince and his place in the nation. Instead of simply enacting the joyous gratitude of the prince’s subjects, they used poetry’s ability to communicate passions in a more deliberate way, to create a more intimate emotional relationship between prince and people. Bainbridge has noted this function of poetry to have been especially important during the French Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars, with poets and critics conceiving poetry’s chief, unique function to be its ability to mediate war to the public: it could transport readers onto the battlefield by the use of ‘fancy’ or ‘imagination’.82 But this function had already been present for several decades in the laureate odes, and it is therefore no wonder that, as shown in Chapter Four, laureate Pye became so central a figure to wartime loyalist culture.

Important to the later odes, then, was that the laureate was a kind of visionary, British bard, writing as much for his nation as for his prince. As seen above, the earlier odes had undoubtedly invoked British national identity and characteristics fairly regularly; but, in general, ‘the people’ had been figured as the prince’s anonymous subjects, expressing generic praise and gratitude. The later odes contained a firmer, more sophisticated sense of ‘the people’ as the British nation, and of the laureate as their British poet. Whitehead’s 1759 birthday ode began, ‘The bard whom liberty inspires/Wakes into willing voice th’ accordant lays.’83 He was not merely celebrating liberty, or thanking George II for his benign maintenance of it; liberty was his inspiration as a poet, and what gave him the bardic power to rouse voices into accordant music. Several years later, Whitehead described his laureate odes as proceeding from ‘the British lyre’.84 Sometimes, he would almost entirely forget about his prince in his fervour to sing for Britain; the 1760 New Year’s ode, directly addressing Britain, gave only one passing mention to ‘thy monarch’, and concluded on the bombastic strain, ‘The land of freedom with the land of slaves [France],/As nature’s friend, must wage illustrious war,/ … ’Till not on Albion’s shores alone,/The voice of freedom shall resound,/But every realm shall equal blessings find,/And man enjoy the birthright of his kind.’85 Here, the old idea of freedom being spread to Europe had been resurrected; but whereas the early odes had identified this as the work of the prince, Whitehead was here attributing it to the British nation itself, its prince not even functioning as an instrument of that glorious national mission.

However, if Whitehead’s emphasis was more on Britain than its prince, the prince was nonetheless central to his idea of the British nation. Especially in the birthday odes, the prince could sometimes loom overwhelmingly large. On three separate occasions, Whitehead used his birthday ode as an attempt to establish the nature of the relationship between prince and people in a more systematic, explicit manner than his predecessors had attempted.86 Thus the 1763 birthday ode proclaimed, ‘Common births, like common things,/Pass unheeded, or unknown’; but ‘Born for millions monarchs rise/Heirs of Infamy or Fame … ’Tis not our King’s alone, ’tis Britain’s natal morn.’ The ode went on to elaborate on how ‘Bright examples plac’d on high,/Shine with more distinguish’d blaze,’ and ‘Public is the monarch’s pleasure,/Public is the monarch’s care.’ It ended on a description of the ideal prince, and a powerful climax which explicitly referenced Pindar with an asterisk: ‘Such may Britain find her kings!–/Such the Muse* of rapid wings/Wafts to some sublimer sphere:/Gods and heroes mingle there./ … O such may Britain ever find her kings!’87

In line with the sorts of theory espoused by Joseph Warton, Whitehead also brought to the odes a new sense of the emotive power of poetry. When Whitehead’s predecessors had defined the prince–people relationship by reference to an emotional transaction, they had done so in a one-dimensional manner, focusing on the grateful joy of the people. Whitehead, in his more self-consciously poetic and modern odes, sought a deeper emotional response from his readers. He rendered the prince a more accessible and sympathetic figure, to whom readers could respond as a fellow man. Whitehead’s George was the ‘Father’ and the ‘Friend’ of the British people.88

A good example came in 1765. After George III had recovered from an illness, Whitehead painted a touching scene of the emotional bonds between prince and people. George was still the object of gratitude, but also of tenderer cares. ‘To HIM we pour the grateful lay/Who makes the season doubly gay;/For whom, so late, our lifted eyes/With tears besought the pitying skies,/And won the cherub health to crown/A nation’s prayer, and ease that breast/Which feels all sorrows but its own,/And seeks by blessing to be blest.’89 Much of this echoed Cibber, but now the prince was being characterized as someone vulnerable and sympathetic – even ‘pit[iable]’ – and as someone who, in turn, was racked with the sorrows being felt by his subjects. Not long after, Whitehead was hailing George as ‘Friend to the poor! … Friend to the poor’, and, in celebration of a recent act of royal charity, telling of how ‘His feeling heart/Inspir’d the nation’s better part/With virtues like its own.’90 Whitehead’s George was a sentimental prince, not sitting airily in a court, but going about among his people, humbling himself to do them good and inspiring them with the example of charity. Thus, he gave his readers a subject to whom they could have a deeper, more sincere emotional response than had previously been the case. They were not to be bound to their prince simply by reverence, gratitude or even joy, but by the most tender and humane sentiment. He was a father and a friend to his people.

The last thing to note is the manner in which Whitehead used his position as laureate to interpret the great events through which the nation was passing, often interpreting them by reference to his prince. In an ode towards the end of the Seven Years’ War, for example, he voiced his desire for peace, but also the need for all Britons to pull together against France, by reference to the marriage of George and Charlotte: ‘Love commands, and beauty’s queen/Rules the power who rules the sky … /Let the war-torn legions own/Your gentler sway, and from the throne/Receive the laws of love.’ But, he went on (now addressing ‘ye British dames’), ‘Should Gallia, obstinately vain,/To her own ruin urge despair’, then the British womenfolk must follow the example of ‘the ladies of Mecklenburg [Charlotte’s homeland]’, who, in 1395, had sold their jewels for the public good. Whitehead was confident that, inspired by their new ‘fair instructress’, Charlotte, Britons would ‘unite [their] flame/To save the land of Liberty and Laws’.91

Whitehead’s task became harder during the American Revolutionary War, but he persisted in interpreting events for the nation by reference to George III, and seeking to rally British hearts against France. Whitehead recurrently presented the American rebels as a prodigal son who had cast off his filial loyalty, but who could perhaps be won back again by depictions of the love, sorrow and affection of his parent. The parent in question could variably be presented as Britannia or as George.92 When France entered the fray, Whitehead changed his tone, harking back to the old anti-France tropes and banging the drum for conquest.93 Then when Spain and the Netherlands joined in against Britain, Whitehead became the poet of a distinct Britain-against-the-world sentiment, which Stephen Conway has identified as having seized the national mood at this time.94 ‘Still o’er the deep does Britain reign,/Her Monarch still the Trident bears:/Vain-glorious France, deluded Spain,/Have found their boasted efforts vain,/ … The warring world is leagu’d in vain/To conquer those who know not fear!’95 Through the years of great international event and crisis, Whitehead-as-laureate guided his nation, telling it how to understand what was going on and voicing its valiant belligerence during its darkest moments; and he used the prince as a flexible point of reference by which to carry out his task.

Thus he continued the transformation of the prince–people relationship, from one in which the court was a distinct, physical location within which the prince was sitting and towards which the nation looked for its lead, to one in which the court was diffused and elided with Britain as a whole, the human, patriotic figure of the prince walking freely throughout the land. Whitehead and his prince were still, at this point, standing in a position of eminence over the nation, guiding its sentiments, but the overall weight and tendency of those sentiments was that of the British nation as a whole. Whitehead and his prince had power over those sentiments because they shared them too.

The later odes: Warton

Warton continued Whitehead’s efforts to render the odes as both ‘classical entertainment[s] for the present time’ and ‘permanent and valuable acquisition[s] to posterity’ (as Pye had phrased it). However, whereas Whitehead had only intermittently structured his odes upon a distinct historical or pictorial conceit, and had not indulged too flamboyantly in the famous Pindaric digressions, Warton was more thoroughgoing. His odes thus resembled great poetic pageants of Britain, spreading their vision across time and space, centring on George III.96 His first ode, which he had been rushed in writing, was the most directly focused on the prince, being an exalted description of George III’s work as a patron: ‘’Tis his to bid neglected genius glow,/And teach the regal bounty how to flow./His tutelary scepter’s sway/The vindicated Arts obey.’97 Thereafter, he had time to paint on a broader canvas. The 1786 New Year’s ode consisted of a glorious British pageant, looking back to the past, forward to the future, and across the world; and George was situated thus within this vision: ‘For our’s the King, who boasts a parent’s praise,/Whose hand the people’s sceptre sways.’98 The following ode presented a pictorial history of freedom, bards and ‘virtuous kings’, as seen in ancient Greece, climaxing on a celebration of George: ‘Who, thron’d in the magnificence of peace,/Rivals [the Greek poets’] richest regal theme:/Who rules a people like their own,/In arms, in polish’d arts supreme;/Who bids his Britain vie with Greece.’99 As in Whitehead’s odes, the George being presented here was a patriot, a patron and a sympathetic human being. But Warton was more deliberate in using vast, pictorial backdrops to highlight these qualities, and to create a sense of George’s importance to the nation.

The best example came in the 1787 New Year’s ode, which told the history of one of Warton’s favourite subjects: ‘ancient Chivalry’. After surveying the ‘Minstrel’ and ‘Bard of elder days’ who had once sung to ‘the Gothic Throne’, Warton, becoming the bard himself, ‘now … tunes his plausive lay/To Kings, who plant the civic bay;/Who choose the patriot sovereign’s part,/Diffusing commerce, peace, and art;/Who spread the virtuous pattern wide,/And triumph in a nation’s pride … To Kings, who rule a filial land,/Who claim a People’s vows and pray’rs’.100 Warton here summoned up a romantic vision of the British past, and thus created a sense that George’s rule was rooted in this past, even as, by a poetic sleight of hand, he presented George’s qualities as distinctly modern ones, which were best revealed against the contrast of ‘the Gothic Throne’. George was a ‘civic’, ‘patriot[ic]’, parental prince, loved and cared for by his filial subjects. But he also possessed all the romance of his ‘ancient’ British predecessors.

A notable variant was provided by the 1789 birthday ode, which followed George III’s recovery from his first major incapacity. Here, Warton gave a humbler, darker pageant, surveying a nation in worry and mourning, and then showing the nation’s celebration at George’s recovery. The image of a poor peasant lighting a candle in thanks to Heaven – ‘Meek Poverty her scanty cottage grac’d,/And flung her gleam across the lonely waste’ – was found especially touching by readers, according to the Public Advertiser.101 Indeed, the ode created a powerful sense of a nation all going through the same emotional journey, passing from worry to exultancy, all concerned for the same subject. That subject was George: ‘its Father, Friend, and Lord,/To life’s career, to patriot sway, restor’d’.102 Here was a sympathetic, sentimental prince, who animated the visionary pageant in a more emotive manner than ever before. He was a man known intimately to his subjects, and cared deeply about: not just the head, but the beating heart of the nation.

Like Whitehead, Warton had lofty ideas of the role of a poet laureate. But if Whitehead had devoted special attention to working out the relationship between prince and people, then Warton’s special care was to work out where the panegyrist himself stood in this relationship. This theme was struck early on, when he insisted, ‘The Muse a blameless homage pays;/To George, of Kings like these supreme,/She wishes honour’d length of days,/Nor prostitutes the tribute of her lays.’103 But its most detailed treatment was in his 1787 birthday ode, which consisted of a survey of the laureateship itself. ‘The noblest Bards of Albion’s choir/Have struck of old this festal lyre,’ Warton began, leaving no doubt as to the high opinion he had of his office. He then gave a stanza each to Chaucer, Spenser and Dryden, considering the ways in which they had paid tribute to their princes, and how each prince had inspired their poetry.

However, each poet presented problems. Chaucer’s martial, chivalric poetry had ‘moulder’d to the touch of time’. Spenser’s ‘visionary trappings’ had been ‘flung’ over Elizabeth, hiding the truth with fantasy. Dryden had been worst of all: ‘Does the mean incense of promiscuous praise,/Does servile fear disgrace his regal bays?/I spurn his panegyric strings,/His martial homage, turn’d to kings!/Be mine, to catch his manlier chord.’ The final stanza answered all these problems by granting panegyric its most fitting subject: George III. If they had been his laureate, Chaucer would have been able to write of peace and patriotism, rather than of so archaic a subject as war; Spenser would have been able to trade ‘Fiction’ for ‘truth’; and Dryden’s flattery would have been no flattery, but ‘his tribute all sincere!’104 Thus, for all the fancy exhibited in his own laureate odes, Warton was keen to position himself as a painter of simple truth. George III did not repudiate panegyric; instead, like Jesus with the Old Testament law, he fulfilled it. Warton’s role was to mediate faithfully between prince and people, using sincere panegyric to show them how their prince really was. Thus, again, Warton was able to infuse his subject with all the romance and splendour of the past, while also characterizing George as someone distinct from the downsides of that past. He was both a monarch to be revered and a man to be loved. Warton was his faithful interpreter to the nation.

The later odes: Pye

Pye, having set out his vision for the odes in preface to his earlier Pindar translations, duly followed on from Whitehead and Warton in his approach. His first ode was a typical Wartonian pageant, celebrating British expansion, commerce and peace, employing conceits, digressions and a narrative structure.105 But his odes also saw significant developments, spurred on by the political situation of the 1790s, with Britain facing the French threat abroad and the radical threat at home. Pye’s odes thus re-embraced the musical potentials of the form, but without returning to the earlier emphasis on courtly performance; rather, Pye’s odes became patriotic, popular musical pageants, with George III usually, but not invariably, figuring in some form or other. In style and language, Pye’s odes were direct. In content, they mixed an earnest desire for peace with a tub-thumping jingoism. In their musical form, they were sometimes set to existing patriotic melodies, thus enabling them to occupy the important part in patriotic culture that Chapter Four showed them occupying.

As early as 1792, Pye was beginning to dispense with the labour of elaborate conceits, and to favour simpler, more direct versification than had been normal for Whitehead and Warton. The 1792 birthday ode included a few ABAB lines, but was mostly written in couplets:

Freedom on this congenial shore
Her holy temple rear’d of yore.
… To welcome George’s natal hour
No vain display of empty power,
In flattery steep’d, no soothing lay,
Shall strains of adulation pay;
But Commerce, rolling deep and wide
To Albion’s shores her swelling tide,
But Themis’ olive-cinctur’d head,
And white-rob’d Peace by Vict’ry led,
Shall fill his breast with virtuous pride,
Shall give him power to truth allied;
Joys, which alone a Patriot King can prove,
A nation’s strength his power, his pride a people’s love.106

Patriotic tropes came rolling along one after the other, with the prince’s identity as ‘a Patriot King’ a commonplace by this point. It was as if Pye’s predecessors had done all the hard work of establishing a set of ideas, and now Pye’s job was simply to bash them out as merrily and as straightforwardly as possible.

As the 1790s wore on, Pye brought his odes more explicitly into line with the existing culture of patriotic songs. William Parsons, the master of the king’s music, began setting the odes to pre-existing tunes, and the texts of the odes began making this clear to readers. The final stanza of the 1797 New Year’s ode, after alluding to such things as Edward III, Agincourt and Elizabeth, climaxed with the chorus to ‘Britons, Strike Home’, with a footnote explaining that: ‘These last lines were inserted at the desire of the King.’107 The ode itself did not actually mention George III, because by this point there was no need; the laureate’s patriotic songs were being sponsored and even directed by his patriotic prince. The 1797 New Year’s ode was the first in many years to be printed in sections marked ‘Air’, ‘Treble, Recitative’ and suchlike. It ended on a section marked, ‘Air and Chorus; Tune, Rule, Britannia’, which duly closed on a quotation of that song’s refrain. The 1800 birthday ode was not so explicit, but clearly ended on Pye’s own version of ‘God Save the King’, given in three stanzas of different metre from the rest of the ode.108

For the most part, though, Pye’s odes read as simple roll calls of loyalist rhetoric, in which patriotism and the prince had become one and the same thing. ‘The notes of Triumph swell again!/Lo, Windsor boasts as high a train/Of Royal Youths, as brave as those/Who frown’d defeat on Edward’s foes;/Of Royal Nymphs, as fair a race/As crown’d Philippa’s chaste embrace;/Around their King, their sire, they stand,/A valiant and a beauteous band …’109 The crown had become the most potent, but also the most natural of patriotic symbols. Its identity was seamlessly bound up with the identity of the British nation, and it was the perfect material for Pye to use in his rolling, straightforward couplets.

There is a sense with Pye’s odes, then, that the relationship between prince and people was finally settled. He was ‘the royal Patriot’; ‘a Patriot King’.110 Pye’s role accordingly became settled as the official British bard, and as a national cheerleader. Because he was the poet of a patriot king, who shared a mutual love with his subjects, Pye’s role was to celebrate the nation, and to stir its martial spirit. There was still praise due to George III, but it was invariably a sort of national praise, channelling the nation’s love and celebrating George by reference to his patriotism. ‘Then let the Muse, with duteous hand,/Strike the bold lyre’s responsive strings,/While ev’ry tongue through Albion’s land/Joins in the hymn of praise she sings,/ … A nation’s votive breath by truth consign’d/To bless a Patriot King – the friend of human kind.’111 The prince as he appeared in this formulation also represented the sympathetic, human figure, but perfectly united with the symbolic, allegorical function that Cibber had wished upon George II. He was the genius of Britain, precisely because he was every Briton’s most intimate friend. ‘Faithful to him their hearts approve,/The Monarch they revere, the man they love;/Britannia’s sons shall arm with patriot zeal,/Their Prince’s cause their own, his rights the general weal.’112

As laureate, Pye held ‘the British muse’.113 Although his poetic efforts were not as much focused upon the odes as Whitehead’s and Warton’s had been, he conceived of all of his productions as forming a united, patriotic programme. In one ode, he referred to his long poem, Naucratica, with a footnote making the reference explicit, and also reminding the reader that Naucratica had been ‘dedicated, by permission, to his Majesty’.114 That poem had ‘Sung of the wreaths that Albion’s warriors bore’ and of ‘The naval triumphs of her George’s reign’. But now, Pye observed, ‘Still higher deeds the lay recording claim,/Still rise Britannia’s Sons to more exalted fame.’115 The laureate was the chronicler of British glory.

He duly commented on the great ongoing events: the first horrors of the French Revolution, the Battle of the Nile, union with Ireland, the Battle of Copenhagen and others.116 He commonly expressed wishes for peace. Bainbridge’s suggestion that there was something cursory, or insincere, about these wishes seems unfair; but it is true that Pye’s pacifist imprecations were often mixed with such comments as ‘Yet, if the stern vindictive foe,/Insulting, arm the hostile blow,/Britain, in martial terrors dight,/Lifts high th’ avenging sword, and courts the fight.’117 However, his most passionate commentary came after the Battle of Trafalgar. ‘Nelson!’, Pye exclaimed; ‘while a people’s paeans raise/To thee the choral hymn of praise,/And while a patriot Monarch’s tear/Bedews and sanctifies thy bier,/Each youth of martial hope shall feel/True Valour’s animating zeal;/With emulative wish thy trophies see;/And Heroes yet unborn shall Britain owe to thee.’118 These lines came at the end of the ode in which Pye had highlighted his own role as chronicler. As laureate, Pye led the people’s ‘paeans’, weaving their emotions together into a ‘choral hymn of praise’; as laureate, he cast Nelson’s fame forward to future generations, that they might be inspired to patriotic zeal. Fittingly, at the centre of the image was the ‘patriot Monarch’. He was not sitting imperiously on the throne, or exacting a debt of gratitude from his people; he was crying alongside his people, his tears falling upon Nelson’s bier.

Thus under Whitehead, Warton and Pye, the odes were transformed from what they had been prior to 1757. Employing a new aesthetic of poetry, which was concerned with recapturing a supposed original spirit of poetry and stimulating the passions, these laureates continued to articulate the central role of the court in matters of national importance, but conceptualized that role in a new way. In their version of the relationship between prince and people, the prince was an intimate, human figure, caring for his people and being cared for by them on a person-to-person level, even as he occupied a position of majesty that was imbued with all the weight of British history, literary expressiveness and prophecy. The new aesthetic was particularly in tune with this conceptualization, because it reached back explicitly to the past and because it carried with it an ambitious sense of the poet’s powers to paint pictures, evoke passions, create sympathy and predict the future. The poet could create pageants that spanned time and space, and would place the court at the heart of them. Thus the prince was envisioned as being at one with his people, and the court as being the symbolic, patriotic heart of national life, essential both to ideas of national identity and to literary production.

Conclusion

The laureate odes showed great changes over the course of the long eighteenth century. There was a continuing sense of the need to articulate the relationship between prince and people, and a continuing conviction as to the centrality of the court to national life; but conceptualizations of these matters evolved in line with wider changes in British society. The odes moved from courtly splendour and ritual, and an aesthetic appropriate for these themes, to a conscious effort to bring the prince before the people, employing a new aesthetic that was appropriate for this new emphasis. After 1757, the odes responded to modern literary demands, and were moulded into a form that elided the courtly panegyric of the prince with the patriotic panegyric of the British nation.

A study of the odes therefore reveals the increasing pressures on the laureateship, the changes to which it was required to subject itself, and the manner of its resultant adaptation. The laureate’s position as cultural representative of the court and as published poet rendered him highly sensitive to the relevant developments, and ensured that the odes generally remained abreast of them. According to those odes, the court remained a vital space for cultural production and consumption, and central to public affairs and national identity; and the odes’ prominence and success suggest that much of the reading public shared this interpretation. The court was viewed not as something that was marginalized by new developments, but as something that endured in the midst of them, adapting as need be.

Likewise, the developments that scholars have recognized in the fields of poetry, national identity and the public sphere cannot be completely understood without reference to the laureate odes. Those odes were regularly produced and widely read, and they entailed a continual effort to navigate these very issues, concerned particularly with understanding how they related to the court. The laureate odes show that although the middle decades of the eighteenth century were indeed of huge importance in the types of poetry being produced and the ideals of poetry being conceptualized, these developments were not exclusively associated with experimental new forms, or with notions of poetic independence and the spontaneity of inspiration. Instead, one of the most prominent ways in which these ideas were developed was through the laureate odes, produced on set occasions, twice a year, by a courtly poet. The new aesthetic of poetry was sponsored by the institutional court and it celebrated the conceptual court. It culminated in Warton’s representations of a prince who somehow embodied the most admirable qualities of ancient Greece, the ‘Gothic’ national past and the modern world at the same time, and in Pye’s depictions of a sympathetic patriot king. This was a form of conservative, loyalist poetry that was coterminous with non-courtly and non-conservative forms.

The history of the relationship between prince and people, as articulated by the odes, developed in tandem with the manner and aesthetic of articulation. At the start of the eighteenth century, the odes had been centred on the physical space of the court, forming a one-off musical performance to which the printed texts served as an imagined, carefully controlled invitation. The reading experience itself was only viable because the court’s importance as a physical space was taken for granted, and because it was self-evident that a reader would wish to partake of courtly festivities and prostrate themselves before the throne. By the end of the eighteenth century, the case was otherwise; the reading experience had to stand up on its own terms, affecting the reader through the poet’s imagination, imagery and emotional resonance, rather than by notes and directions pertaining to musical performance. The physical space of the court was no longer of such importance. Instead, the reader wished to be shown the glories of British history, British literature and the British people. Yet this transformation did not mean that the court or the king had been rendered irrelevant; instead, it followed wider developments in the conceptual geography of culture. Britons were increasingly favouring metaphorical spaces as the forums in which to situate cultural products and by which to determine their value. The court had evolved into one such metaphorical space. It existed throughout the nation, constituted by print culture. The court was a public court. Within it stood the king, the prime object and exemplar of patriotism; his laureate, producing panegyric odes; and the public, judging and approving.