1. Patronage asserted: The formation of the laureateship, 1668–1715

The eighteenth-century laureateship was very different from that which was conferred on John Dryden in 1668. Dryden’s laurel was akin to the unofficial laurels of Ben Jonson and William Davenant, being a mark of nothing more than a pension and poetic honour, both stemming from the person who was supposedly best placed to judge of such matters, the king. The eighteenth-century laureateship, on the other hand – the office that formed under William III and Anne, and was formalized at the accession of George I – was an office that could be located in a distinct place within the court establishment, and which was defined by its function: the writing of biannual odes for performance at court. This chapter will investigate how and why such a transformation occurred. It will consider a range of different evidence: archival material generated by the court, and particularly by the lord chamberlain’s office; the private papers and accounts of Charles Sackville, sixth earl of Dorset, who was lord chamberlain in the crucial transformative years of 1689–95; contemporary printed material on the court; and the laureates’ own writings.

These issues have important ramifications for the wider themes of this monograph: the court’s place in the conceptual geography of culture, and in British society as a whole. The laureateship’s formation was a highly significant aspect of the court’s position, but the process was necessarily uncertain. During a half-century of continual ruptures between one monarchical regime and the next, with each successive monarch burdened by rival claimants rather than legitimate heirs, and with the putative Golden Age of Charles I’s court separated from touching distance by the interregnum, there was a constant need for monarchs and their court officials to work out their ceremonial role afresh, and to try to create a compelling representation of the ideal of courtly rule. This heightened awareness of the importance of ceremony, and the ruptures in courtly practice, manifested strongly in the realm of high culture. Contemporaries portrayed the court as occupying a patronal role in literary, artistic and musical production, characteristic of the past and of successful foreign monarchies. But they also looked to alternative forms of financial and ideological stimulus for such production, or cast doubt on the court’s patronal role. Due to the increasing extent of print and the continuing development of non-court institutions, the conceptual rubrics of the town, the world and the public became increasingly important in cultural production and consumption. Thus for those who had some form of attachment to the institutional court, or who sought to benefit from it in some way, it became increasingly necessary to define the court’s position towards the town and the world, and eventually towards the public.

Hence the formalization of a pension into an office of poet laureate; hence the office eventually taking on the fixed form that it would keep for the next hundred years; but hence also the continual uncertainties of the process. The laureateship went from a vague position to a fixed position with set duties specifically because the court’s cultural role was being worked out and defined. The settling of the laureateship’s position was symptomatic of this: by bringing the laureate securely into a position related to the court, paying him more regularly and giving him a set role, the court was given a clear manifestation of its cultural role, and of its relationship to the town, the world and the public. That role also allowed for court ceremonial to co-opt the poetic talents of an esteemed writer. In all these respects the process was highly successful. The laureateship that was fixed into place in 1715 was to endure for a century, and, as will be seen in the following chapters, was to play an increasingly important part in literary affairs.

This chapter will begin its investigation of these matters with a short survey of the relevant scholarship, which will also serve to flesh out the situation summarized above. It will then proceed to a discussion of the uncertainties of the laureate’s initial position, especially during Dryden’s tenure, by reference to the works and correspondence of the later Stuart laureates (Dryden, Shadwell and Tate). The next section will explore archival evidence relating to the lord chamberlain’s department to show how and when the laureate’s position became defined. The earl of Dorset’s records will be brought in to complete the picture, and lastly the printed works of Shadwell and Tate will be used to demonstrate their own instrumentality in these processes.

Settings of the scene

The later Stuart period was a time of constant reinvention for the institutional court.1 From the outbreak of the Civil Wars in 1641 to the Restoration in 1660, there had existed only various thin semblances of Charles I’s monarchical court: his wartime court at Oxford, Oliver Cromwell’s regime and Charles II’s court in exile. When Charles II was restored to the throne in 1660, he was therefore seeking to re-establish his court upon a model from which it was disconnected by twenty years of abeyance. He (and the officials and associates concerned in the endeavour) did so with the memories of the Civil Wars, regicide and interregnum still fresh. He needed to assert a legitimacy that was based on immemorial tradition but responsive to recent developments.

Charles II’s successor, his brother James II, came to the throne in 1685 having survived an attempt to have him excluded from the line of succession only a few years earlier, and immediately had to defeat an armed attempt upon the throne by Charles II’s illegitimate son, the duke of Monmouth. In 1688–9 he fled to the continent in the face of the Glorious Revolution, which installed his daughter Mary II and her Dutch husband William III as joint monarchs, but in circumstances that were controversial at the time and continued to be so thereafter. They were not the legal successors under any law that had existed prior to that point, especially given that James II remained alive until after Mary’s death and just before William’s. The issue of how to justify (or deny) their legitimacy therefore came to the fore of British political debate. Their court was distinguished from recent courts by centring on two monarchs rather than one, and by William’s foreignness in nationality and religion. William and Mary’s accession also saw the later Stuart period’s greatest purge in terms of court personnel, effecting a huge loss of experience and continuity, and filling court positions with Whigs who perhaps felt little loyalty to the institutional court.

Mary’s death came several years before William’s, and it was her sister, Anne, who acceded to the throne in 1702. But Anne had lost her only living child, the duke of Gloucester, shortly beforehand. Her court differed from William’s in that, for the first time in a century, the sole monarch was a woman, and also in that she was an Englishwoman and a devout Anglican. Her reign was overshadowed by the issue of the succession, which had been settled upon her distant relative, the dowager Electress Sophia of Hanover, but which was still claimed by James II’s son. Sophia’s and Anne’s deaths in 1714 saw the relatively untroubled accession of George I, another foreign, non-Anglican male. Unlike William, he brought with him neither armed soldiers, nor a wife, nor even competence in the English language. But he did bring a solid brood of legitimate children and grandchildren, meaning that, after seventy-five years of discontinuities and ersatz successions, the British court was able to take on a relatively settled form.

Among the issues that have most interested recent scholars of the later Stuart period, the court has loomed increasingly large, especially for the reign of Charles II. The issue of the court’s relationship to culture has become especially important, and has been treated in various insightful ways, revealing the issue’s wider implications for the court’s place in society and the role of the monarchy.2 The related themes of formality, ceremony and representation are critical here; historians have often been concerned to plot their material with relation to one or more of these themes, and to suggest whether the court’s formality, ceremonial role and representative efforts were growing or diminishing over their chosen period of study. Historians have also sought to work out how the court’s cultural role changed in response to the wider societal changes of the time, from the impact of the Civil Wars, to the emergence of a public sphere; and literary scholars have explored how those changes manifested in literature.3

There remains much to explore in terms of how successive monarchs and court officials responded to the uncertainties of their courts’ inceptions, how they responded to the public and what cultural role they played. However, some of the works cited above have indicated a line of argument that will prove significant for this chapter’s argument. R. O. Bucholz believed that Charles II’s ‘real cultural achievement’ was to resurrect the court’s ‘traditional leadership as an artistic patron’, making widespread again the assumption ‘that cultural innovation and patronage depended on the court’. Charles achieved this, despite financial difficulties and the emergence of the public sphere, by a wide yet discriminating patronage, by making his court attractive on a personal level and by encouraging innovation. For William III’s reign, Tony Claydon’s work stressed the manner in which the court of William and Mary developed a coherent ideology that legitimized their unusual rule and distinguished them from their predecessors’ courts. Both historians presented these activities as occurring in deliberate, targeted interaction with the public.4 Similarly, Kevin Sharpe showed successive courts structuring and enacting their authority by reference to traditional conceptions of monarchy and to somewhat mythical notions of how the court operated prior to the Civil Wars, but using those ideological resources in a manner that was appropriate for a new context in which the public not only exerted its own social, political and cultural authority, but was increasingly vocal in asking questions of both the institution and the occupants of monarchy.5

This idea of a court responding to the challenges and pressures of its situation, and doing so by defining its cultural role and enacting that role in engagement with audiences outside of the court, is something that fits well with the history of the laureateship. In turn, the history of the laureateship will prove greatly illuminating as to how the various parties interested in the court as a concept went about this. This chapter will argue that the laureateship was created, and progressively defined, due to the need for those parties to present successive courts as legitimate and pre-eminent, which need was enacted in between a traditional, ideal conception of the monarchical court on the one hand, and an increasingly sophisticated cultural apparatus outside the court on the other. This required the court to be presented as exerting patronal and ceremonial leadership over cultural production, but doing so in interaction with audiences outside of the court. The laureateship was the result.

The birth pangs of the office

Prior to Dryden’s appointment, the office of poet laureate did not exist. Contemporaries with any interest in the matter assumed that there was such an office, and that William Davenant had been its most recent holder. But Davenant – the poet, playwright and stage manager whose death in April 1668 precipitated Dryden’s appointment – had never occupied any such office.6 Instead, he had held a pension from Charles I. Having written a number of masques for the entertainment of Charles’s court, and a number of poems in praise of the royal family, Davenant had become the beneficiary of Charles’s patronage, receiving £100 a year from 1638 onwards. During the Civil Wars, Davenant fought for the king, and endured both exile and imprisonment under the interregnum regime. But his pension lapsed, and was not renewed by Charles II. The idea that he had been poet laureate – an idea apparently cultivated to some degree by Davenant himself – was not based on any official appointment.7

In a similar way, it was widely thought that Ben Jonson had preceded Davenant as poet laureate. He too had written masques and poems for and in honour of Charles I; he too had been rewarded with a pension; he too had sometimes been informally thought of, by others and by himself, as a ‘poet laureate’ or as ‘the king’s poet’.8 Jonson had once requested his friend John Selden, a scholar, to investigate the tradition of crowning poets with laurel, which went back to ancient Greece and Rome. Selden had duly done so, and published the results in the second edition (1631) of his Titles of Honor. The practice of crowning poets, he found, appeared sporadically across European history, and had honoured such great poets as Petrarch and Tasso. Laurel leaves were the standard and hoariest material used for this crown.9

The laurel wreath had been a mark of glory in ancient Greece, and the association of laurel with greatness had persisted in European iconography ever since. The actual practice of crowning with laurel therefore found a metaphorical analogue in poetry itself. Poets would regularly depict other poets, and also generals and statesmen, as being crowned with laurel in recognition of their greatness. This iconographical trope, combined with the research of Selden and the pensioning of Jonson and Davenant, made for a muddled understanding as to what a poet laureate actually was and who had officially been designated thus. By the time of Davenant’s death, it was generally thought that not only he and Jonson, but also Spenser, Chaucer and certain others, had been appointed and paid as official poets laureate.10

However, if the institution of the laureateship in 1668 involved a reconceptualization of certain past poets’ relationships with the court, in practical terms this meant that the laureate was little more than a court pensioner in the manner of Jonson and Davenant. He did not have any duties, and there was no explicit definition of his role. He was a poet whom the king had favoured with a regular stipend to be paid from the treasury, and the dignity of his appointment was signalled by the formal letters patent with which the king appointed him. According to the letters patent appointing Dryden laureate,

wee [Charles II], for and in consideration of the many good and acceptable services by John Dryden … to us heretofore done and performed, and taking notice of the learning and eminent abilities of him the said John Dryden, and of his great skill and elegant style both in verse and prose, and for diverse other good causes and considerations us thereunto especially moving, having nominated, constituted, declared, and appointed … him the said John Dryden, our Poet Laureat and Historiographer Royal; giving and granting unto him the said John Dryden all the singular rights, privileges, benefits, and advantages, thereunto belonging, as fully and amply as Sir Geoffrey Chaucer, Knight, Sir John Gower, Knight, John Leland, Esquire, William Camden, Esquire, Benjamin Johnson, Esquire, James Howell, Esquire, Sir William D’Avenant, Knight, or any other person or persons having or exercising the place or employment of Poet Laureat or Historiographer, or either of them, in the time of any of our royal progenitors, had or received, or might lawfully claim or demand, as incident or belonging unto the said places or employments, or either of them. And for the further and better encouragement of him the said John Dryden, diligently to attend the said employment, we are graciously pleased to give and grant [a pension of £200 and a butt of canary wine].11

There are several things of note in this patent. The first is that all power and responsibility for the appointment was assigned to Charles II personally, who had ‘nominated, constituted, declared, and appointed’ Dryden. The second is the vague but comprehensive message as to why Dryden was appointed, with the only specific reasons stated being his talent for verse and prose, but with a general assertion that Dryden had in some way served the king already (presumably in his writings). Lastly, the office was not defined at all except by vague reference to the past. Dryden’s ‘employment’, which he was encouraged to attend to ‘diligently’, was not described, and must be presumed to be merely a continuation of the sorts of ‘services’ he had already been providing. His office allowed him certain ‘rights, privileges, benefits, and advantages’, but, instead of describing what these might be, the patent simply referred to a spurious list of honourable predecessors, and to other unnamed ‘person or persons’ who may have held the office under Charles’s ‘royal progenitors’. It then granted a £200 pension and butt of canary wine as additions to these undefined historical ‘rights, privileges, benefits, and advantages’.

Essentially, then, the office of poet laureate (as it appeared in this patent) was created as an attempt to connect Charles II with his ‘royal progenitors’, Dryden with the great poets of the past and the patronage between Charles and Dryden with the patronage that was believed to have existed in past ages of great kings and great poets. This conceptualization of the past, and this conceptual link between Charles II’s court and the courts from which it was separated by the interregnum, was more important than the logistics of the new office. The definition of the office was provided by the idea that there was a natural link between the king of a nation and that nation’s greatest poet. Chaucer, Jonson and (although passed over in the patent) Spenser all proved this link. They were kings of verse, whom their monarchs had acknowledged as such and supported. In turn, they had celebrated their monarchs: not simply out of gratitude, but because it was a poet’s duty and privilege to celebrate great men.

However, the connection being expressed here went beyond the laureateship and its spurious line of succession. It was a connection that had been inherent to the poetic vocation, or at least to certain ideas of the poetic vocation, since ancient times, and likewise inherent to certain conceptualizations of what good rulers and good courts ought to be. Poets in general (it was often posited) were ideally situated under the patronage of a monarch, from whence they would transmit the glories of that monarch’s reign through their writings. But the patronal relationship was nonetheless often phrased, or at least felt to exist in its most important form, in terms of a one-to-one relationship between one great monarch and one great poet. The prime model for this ideal relationship was that of Augustus and Virgil. This was a relatively distant relationship, but one of symbiotic necessity, whereby Augustus was known to favour his poet (sometimes financially), grant him the political and intellectual conditions needed to flourish, and set an example of greatness and heroism by his own princely actions. In turn, the poet would glorify the monarch by producing great works, some of which would specifically acknowledge and praise that monarch. Dryden and William Soames gave one of the clearest expressions of these notions in their Art of Poetry (1683), a translation of Boileau’s recent L’Art poétique (1674), which was itself based heavily on Horace’s Ars Poetica. The Dryden–Soames poem celebrated the patronage of ‘a sharp-sighted Prince’, who ‘by early Grants/Rewards [poets’] Merits, and prevents [their] Wants’. It exhorted poets to ‘Sing then his Glory, Celebrate his Fame;/Your noblest Theme is his immortal Name … But where’s a Second Virgil, to Rehearse/Our Hero’s Glories in his Epic Verse?’12

These ideas had become newly significant upon Charles II’s accession. This was partly due to the example of France under Louis XIII and Louis XIV, where a programme of court patronage had been developed and where poets routinely sang the king’s praises.13 Charles II had spent part of his time in exile in Paris, and had witnessed the magnificence of Louis XIV’s patronage;14 and English poets of the Restoration were highly aware of their French counterparts’ work.15 The Restoration itself was also important in emphasizing the connection between court and poets. Many post-1660 writers, including Dryden, portrayed the interregnum as a time of cultural catastrophe, and, accordingly, celebrated the Restoration as a renaissance. Public theatre, which had been suppressed under Oliver Cromwell, quickly became the major proof and emblem of this change. The London stage was legally duopolized by two theatre companies, one of which was run by Davenant, each owing their existence to a royal patent. Charles was a regular theatregoer and, in addition, frequently had his favourite plays acted at court. He was known to have given ideas for original and translated plays to certain playwrights, and even allowed Dryden (prior to his appointment as laureate) to publish Secret-Love as ‘His [Charles’s] Play’ on account of his favour for it.16

Partly due to the money in drama, and partly due to its cultural prestige, the stage attracted men and women of literary ambition to an unprecedented extent.17 The word ‘poet’ became virtually synonymous with, yet more common than, the word ‘playwright’.18 Most plays were published in book form after performance, and these publications were usually prefaced with a dedicatory epistle to the playwright’s patron. Generally, this patron would be a nobleman – perhaps a prominent figure at court, like Rochester or Buckingham – who would in turn reward the playwright financially and in certain more miscellaneous ways.19 It was not atypical for the dedicatory epistles to note the patron’s loyalty or service to the crown, to praise the king as well as the patron himself or to emphasize the fact that all plays ultimately rested under the king’s patronage.20 Thus most literary figures of the time – including Dryden, Tate and (until the Exclusion Crisis) Shadwell – were bound up in networks of patronage and systems of literary production that reached their apex with the court. This was because, as stated previously, contemporaries were not overly concerned with the public as an audience for cultural products at this time; instead, they were concerned with those persons and activities who operated within, and constituted, what was conceived as the town, the physical identity and conceptual existence of which were bound up with the court.

When Davenant died in 1668, it was therefore fitting and logical for all involved that Dryden should be appointed poet laureate. By that point, he was England’s leading playwright, and his plays were known to have pleased the king. He was already patronized by certain prominent courtiers.21 With his publications, he had also achieved success with the world: the audience of readers that went beyond, and could be conceived as standing at one remove from, the court and town. This audience was not as physically immediate, socially prestigious or financially lucrative as that of the court and town, but neither was it entirely distinct from them or negligible in its own right. Moreover, the apparatus of Dryden’s publications (title pages, dedicatory epistles, prologues, epilogues) sought favour with the world by advertising their positioning in, and success with, the court and town. Thus the laureateship definitively consolidated the relationship between court and poetry. It proved the pre-eminence of the court in cultural matters by extending a symbolic and financial patronage over the poet who was most highly esteemed by a court-centric nobility, by the town and by the world. At the same time, it cast into a more well-defined form the links between Charles II’s court and that of his ‘royal progenitors’.

For over a decade following his appointment, Dryden continued with his literary career in the same manner as he had before, unburdened by any official demands. Sporadically receiving his official salary, he focused mainly on writing plays, many of which were premiered or subsequently performed at court, and he enjoyed the recognition of being ‘the Kings Poet Laureat’.22 No court official or minister made any apparent effort to direct Dryden’s activities. This state of affairs changed slightly with the Exclusion Crisis, during and after which Charles II entered into fierce political disputes and attempts to propagate his political message. Dryden did then write certain disputational writings that seem to have received some official instigation, and his writings became more broadly identified with his position as laureate; it became increasingly commonplace for him to be attacked as a mercenary hireling of the court.23 Dryden’s laureateship came to be defined – at the time and subsequently – by his occasional, partisan, pro-court writings.

However, looking at the more direct evidence of Dryden’s relationship with the institutional court, it becomes apparent that it was neither very close nor very active, even after he started writing his disputational works. Throughout his tenure, he had great difficulty in securing the courtly favour that he was supposedly entitled to. Dryden’s salary was perpetually in arrears, and he often had to solicit high-placed courtiers and ministers to help him have just a portion of those arrears paid.24 In 1677 he wrote a letter to the twenty-two-year-old Lord Latimer, son of Lord Chancellor Danby, pleading for the former to plead to the latter to have ‘My Sallary from Christmasse to Midsummer, last’ paid. The letter went on to mention one of Dryden’s more attentive patrons, ‘My Lord Mulgrave’, who, the letter suggested, had also been interceding on Dryden’s behalf, presumably with mixed results.25 A similar letter of 1683, this time addressed to the lord of the treasury, Lawrence Hyde, told a similar story. It began, ‘I know not whether my Lord Sunderland has interceded with your Lordship, for half a yeare of my salary,’ and went on to justify his request by reference to his work on behalf of both the king and Hyde’s late father.26 Dryden reminded Hyde, ‘The King is not unsatisfyed of me, the Duke [of York, the future James II] has often promisd me his assistance; & Your Lordship is the Conduit through which their favours passe.’27 He ended the letter on the pitiful note, ‘You have many petitions of this nature, & cannot satisfy all, but I hope from your goodness to be made an Exception to your generall rules.’28

It would therefore seem that Dryden’s role as laureate gave him no particularly direct channel to the king. The evidence of the letters (and also of the dedicatory epistles) shows Dryden as being scarcely any different, in terms of royal attention, from any other professional poet. He was still bound up in the lower strands of the patronage network that culminated in the crown. He still had to cast about for any and every patron he could find, hoping that they would pay him on their own account and present his petitions to the king’s government. And he still had to accept that his petition was one among many, and would often go ignored. Charles, he said, was ‘not unsatisfyed’ with him. It was a cautious and negative phrase, but justified. Likewise his reference to James’s frequent promises of favour, which, he implied, had not borne fruit. His royal masters showed him little positive attention. Even as laureate, he was still just a struggling poet, making his own way in the world of letters, and using his laureateship as just one more lever in the common system of patronage.

It is even possible that he was not the only poet to have been granted some form of courtly position. In 1674, Dryden joined forces with Shadwell and another playwright, John Crowne, to publish Notes and Observations on The Empress of Morocco, attacking a young newcomer, Elkanah Settle. Settle’s tragedies Cambyses (1671) and The Empress of Morocco (1673) had been hugely successful with audiences both in the town theatres and at court; the latter had in fact received its first performance at court, and Rochester and Mulgrave (prominent aristocratic courtiers) had each contributed prologues to it. In 1672, Settle had been made ‘Sewer in ordinary to His Matie being one of the poettes in His Mats Theatre Royall’, and Samuel Holt Monk has speculated that although the position was probably a sinecure, ‘Settle may have had some part in the staging of plays at court’.29 The title page to The Empress of Morocco certainly designated Settle as ‘Servant to his Majesty’, a designation usually confined to Dryden, provoking Shadwell to grumble in the preface to The Libertine, ‘he is no more a Poet than Servant to his Majesty, as he presumes to write himself’.30 It clearly rankled with Settle’s rivals that he should claim to have a special, official relationship with Charles II, and they were keen to weaken the validity of this relationship; and Dryden may have been provoked to co-author the Observations because he felt that his own special, official position in the patronage network was being compromised by Settle’s pretensions. But again, the main point to make here is the uncertainty of Dryden’s position. The laureate had no fixed pre-eminence in the network of courtly patronage, and no official recourse by which to assert his pre-eminence. If another poet pleased the king and his courtiers sufficiently, that poet might well be appointed to a courtly position that would place him above Dryden in the nebulous hierarchy, at least until that poet’s fortunes waned too.

Shadwell’s surviving letters are fewer than Dryden’s, and Tate’s are non-existent. But it appears that under William, Mary and Anne, the laureates faced similar struggles to Dryden’s. Shadwell received nothing for the first two years of his tenure, and his salary was still in arrears when he died.31 The lord chamberlain who had appointed him laureate – Charles Sackville, earl of Dorset – had been a friend and patron of Shadwell’s long before that appointment, and (as will be explored in more detail below) had even paid him a private pension.32 In 1691, Shadwell attempted to have a friend’s play performed, and was scorned and rebuffed by the theatre company concerned, despite his laureate status. He wrote to Dorset – whose position as lord chamberlain gave him authority over the London stage – requesting intervention. Nothing happened; Shadwell wrote once more. This time, Dorset intervened and had the play performed.33 Like Dryden before him, Shadwell’s office seems to have given him no special privileges in literary affairs. He was frustrated in his attempts to exert theatrical influence; he wrote to Dorset because Dorset was a long-time friend and patron; and Dorset, on that account, rendered Shadwell assistance. Shadwell’s laurel crown granted him neither authority of his own, nor any special connection to royal or governmental authority.

The case of Tate is even more unfortunate. Unlike Dryden and Shadwell, he did not receive the office of historiographer along with that of laureate, meaning his salary was only £100.34 It is unclear how reliably this was paid over the course of the 1690s. Samuel Golden noted that Thomas Rymer, who had been made historiographer, had to petition regularly for the money that was due to him, whereas Tate did not seem to petition at all; and Golden extrapolated from this that Tate was paid.35 Yet it is more likely, in view of Dryden and Shadwell’s difficulties, that Tate’s payments were as unreliable as Rymer’s, and that Tate was either too modest to make a fuss (which would have been in keeping with his character), or made his petitions in some way that has left no evidence.

From 1700 onwards, however, certain evidence of Tate’s penury begins to appear. In February of that year he petitioned the king, complaining that he needed to print a new edition of his translation of the psalms, but was too poor to supply the advance required by the printer. He ascribed this poverty to the fact that he had ‘already been at much expense, and his salary of poet laureate [was] £100 per ann., of £300 which his predecessors enjoyed’. (He was mistaken as to the value of his predecessors’ salaries.) He therefore requested an addition to his salary or a one-off payment.36 In 1703, his privations led him to have his yearly butt of wine (which had been a perk of the office since Dryden’s appointment) commuted into an extra £30 per year.37 He requested more money in 1704 to meet the printer’s advance for a supplement to his psalms, and in 1712 the Treasury Minutes reveal a discussion on Tate’s arrears.38 Like Dryden and Shadwell, Tate found it more worthwhile to cultivate alternative or subsidiary patrons than to rely directly on the monarch. Dorset had been the one to appoint Tate, having been a patron of his for some time already, and he continued to patronize Tate thereafter.39 Robert Harley was also an important patron.40 Beneath these two eminences were a brood of lesser noblemen and statesmen to whom Tate dedicated works and who presumably paid him some subsistence in return.41

For all of his efforts, the final years of Tate’s life were wretched. He was forced to take refuge in the Mint on at least two occasions – apparently hiding from his creditors – and died there in 1715.42 The poetry and prefatory material he wrote over the course of Anne’s reign tells of his collapse into dearth and desperation. He felt that he had spent his life serving the court, the church and the cause of virtue, but that it had only been to his cost.43 Golden observed that Tate was no longer petitioning the crown by this point, and suggested that he ‘must have been out of favour’.44 Again, it may be that Tate was appealing for money, but in a way that left no record. Or it may just be that Tate had learned how little he could expect from the court. He was not ‘out of favour’, as such. He had simply never been in favour.

However, the case for courtly negligence towards the laureateship can be overstated. Arrears of payment were standard for all court officials and pensioners, with payments becoming more reliable under Anne but never catching up with the deficit.45 Moreover, some of Tate’s appeals did result in aid. The request for an addition to his salary or a one-off payment, made in 1700, received the latter response to the sum of £200.46 In 1705, a royal warrant paid him £50 for his psalms supplement;47 and in 1712 Harley (as lord treasurer) and Robert Benson (as chancellor of the exchequer) directed the exchequer to pay Tate’s deficit ‘from time to time’.48 Tate convinced William to make a proclamation in favour of his psalms translation, and he set up his short-lived periodical, The Monitor, with the approval or even the express command of Anne.49 Finally, as will be detailed below, Shadwell and Tate as laureates were becoming increasingly responsible for the biannual odes that were set to music by the master of the king’s or queen’s music and performed at court on the monarch’s birthday and on New Year’s Day.

Moreover, when attention is turned from the plight of the individual laureates to other forms of evidence, it becomes clear that the reigns of William III and Anne marked not a continuation of Dryden’s laureateship, but a time of transition. Dryden’s laureateship had been an anomalous, ill-defined position: an attempt to formalize certain vaguer, pseudo-mythological ideas about the poetic vocation and to elevate the traditional practice of bestowing court pensions on worthy poets, but an attempt that was lacking in formal definition. The laureate was therefore left adrift with regard to the court – the body from which his ideological prestige and remunerative recognition was supposed to flow – and unable to fulfil the ideals that underpinned his office. Shadwell and Tate, following on from Dryden, were still to suffer somewhat from these issues. But at the same time, their tenures saw the office adapting, and moving from a position of unsatisfactory anomalousness to one of functional and institutional definition. The need for successive courts to be presented as legitimate, and proven as viable courts in accordance with the traditional model by increasingly formalized ceremonial and cultural activities, doing so in interaction with the town and the world, was recurrent and growing. As a result, the laureateship was becoming better defined and being given greater prominence and purpose. Tate may never have quite grasped the courtly acknowledgement that his financial straits necessitated, but he bequeathed to his successors an office that now had a fixed place vis-à-vis both the institution and the concept of the court.

The lord chamberlain’s department

The best place to start an investigation of the way in which the laureateship transformed over the later Stuart period, and solidified in its new position under the early Hanoverians, is in the documents produced by the court at the time, and particularly by the lord chamberlain’s department. The first three laureates – Dryden, Shadwell and Tate – were all appointed by formal letters patent, indicating the original idea behind the office: that it represented the king’s choosing of a certain great poet to be his laureate. Yet when Tate’s office was reconfirmed at Anne’s accession, it was by warrant from the lord chamberlain’s department. From George I’s accession onwards, all new appointments followed this process.50 However, although this alteration in the appointment process highlights the transference of the office into the lord chamberlain’s care, it is somewhat misleading about how and when that transference occurred. Other records from the lord chamberlain’s department tell a more exact story.

The lord chamberlain’s department was the largest and most diffuse in the royal household, concerned with court ceremonial in its widest sense. It included the household above stairs, and a more anomalous grouping of courtly officers and temporary employees concerned with revels, artisanship and such matters. If the laureate was to be found in any court department, it would have most logically been this one.51 However, the earliest records of the staff falling under the lord chamberlain’s remit – of which the most useful are the comprehensive establishment books – do not include the laureateship. An establishment book for 1671 (three years after Dryden’s appointment) contains no trace of either the poet laureate or the historiographer.52 The next existing establishment book, running from 1674 to 1685, is similarly lacking.53 A precedent book from about the same period, containing 499 pages and several lists of places within the lord chamberlain’s disposal, finds no place for the laureateship either. Although the information in the book generally dates to between 1660 and 1689, there is even a note from May 1693 written by the then lord chamberlain, Dorset, solemnly setting out that none of the above positions are to be given without his consent or warrant; and the list of positions in question, titled ‘places in ye Lord Chamberlains disposall’, finds place for an ‘Embroider’ and a ‘Drum Major and Drummers’, but none for a poet laureate.54

The sequence of establishment books, which is somewhat patchy, resumes in 1695. Here the poet laureate is finally accounted for, but is not treated with much attention. The contents page directs the reader to almost the back of the book, where is to be found, after the ‘Kettle Drum[m]er for Ireland’ and before a tacked-on scrawl about the ‘Maker & Repairer of the water engines at Kensington’ and a section for ‘Vocall Musick’, a poet laureate going by the name of ‘Nathaniel Tate’. Since Tate’s forename was actually ‘Nahum’, he was clearly not being treated as an important part of the court establishment. However, he did at last belong to the lord chamberlain’s jurisdiction. A couple of pages after Tate comes a closing, reiterative list of ‘Places in the Disposall of the L[ord] Chamberlain of His Ma[jestie]s Household’, registering the poet laureate and the historiographer.55

The next establishment book, 1700–2, is even more telling. Here the laureate and the historiographer are placed on the final page of the establishment list, and Tate is again re-christened as ‘Nathaniel’. He and the historiographer precede only the Kensington water engineer and ‘Vocall Musick’ staff, which latter positions are appended with dates but no salaries, indicating them to have been occasional positions, recorded at some point after the establishment list had first been compiled. As for the laureate’s and historiographer’s salaries, they are included in the ‘Treasury Chamb[e]r’ column – this particular establishment book specifying whether each salary came from that source or from the ‘Cofferer’ – but then, in a different, hastier hand, a note has been made underneath the salaries: ‘Excheq[ue]r’.56 This note is found in many other places throughout the establishment book, and is part of more far-reaching organizations of court finances and payments. But its appearance next to the laureate’s name reinforces the impression that his exact place in the department was uncertain.

According to the establishment books, it was in Anne’s reign that the poet laureate’s situation began improving. The 1702–13 establishment book included him (with the historiographer) on a much earlier page than usual, among more estimable company: the page begins with ‘Master of ye Revels’, then reads ‘Yeomen of ye Revels’, then laureate and historiographer.57 This was the beginning of an association between the laureate and the revels staff, and is especially notable in the light of the office’s changing function (detailed below). However, while the contents pages of this and following establishment books clearly group together the revels staff, they just as clearly leave the laureate out of that grouping; and the books in general, while tending to place the laureate near to the revellers, do not indicate the master of revels’s authority to extend to the laureateship.58 The association was based on similarity of function, rather than on any official relationship.

It was also in the 1702–13 establishment book that Tate’s name was finally treated with due courtesy, ‘Nahum Tate Esqr’, and his payment was listed in the treasury chamber column, rather than in the new ‘Exchequer’ column. A precedent book for 1697–1739 gives further evidence of the financial reorganizations affecting the laureateship, with an establishment account dated to June 1702 attributing all expenses to ‘the Office of Treasurer of our Chamber’, and a note next to Tate specifying his payments to be ‘in lieu of the like Salary or allowance which was also payable to him at Our said Exchequer’.59 But by the end of Anne’s reign, these financial reorganizations were winding up, and the laureate’s position had almost been worked out. The next two establishment books (for 1714 and 1714–27) are, in respect of the laureateship, almost identical to that of 1702–13.60 The sole remaining development, witnessed in the various (and overlapping) establishment books of the 1720s and 1730s, was for the laureate, historiographer and revellers to start being more closely grouped with the master of ceremonies. They sometimes even appeared on a dedicated ‘Ceremonies’ page or section.61 But this was just a cosmetic neatening of a situation that had been developed over the course of William’s and Anne’s reigns and fixed at the accession of George I. The revels staff had generally been understood as pertaining to ceremonial matters anyway, even before they became friends with the laureate.

Before analysing these developments, it is worth taking a look at some different evidence that concerns itself with the same subject matter: publications on the court establishment. The most useful and prominent is Edward Chamberlayne’s Angliae Notitia, Or The Present State of England, in which Chamberlayne attempted to give a general picture of contemporary England. His work included a section on the court, comprising various catalogues enumerating every single member of the court establishment. Twenty-two separate editions of the work were printed between 1669 and 1707, each with various alterations, at which point the work passed to Chamberlayne’s son, John, and became Magnae Britanniae Notitia, continuing until 1755. Its successive editions therefore can be used to explore the changes in the laureateship’s position.

The first edition did not record the laureate at all, either in the list of places at the lord chamberlain’s disposal or anywhere else. However, the second edition (also 1669) complicates matters. Here, the poet laureate appeared in a long section on ‘His Majesties Servants in Ordinary above Stairs’. He appeared towards the end, and in miscellaneous company, coming after ‘Messengers of the Chamber in Ordinary’, ‘One Library Keeper’ and ‘One Publick Notary’, and just before ‘Musitians in Ordinary’ and such figures as ‘Apothecaries’, ‘Chirugeons’, ‘Printers’ and a ‘Hydrographer’. This time, the historiographer was nowhere in sight (though the position, of course, was at this point held jointly with the laureateship. The fact that the hydrographer’s position remained one below the laureate’s in all future editions suggests that Chamberlayne may have mixed up ‘historiographer’ with ‘hydrographer’).62 The holders of neither the laureateship nor the other surrounding positions were named. Earlier in the book, the lord chamberlain’s office was described as bearing jurisdiction over ‘all Officers belonging to the Kings Chamber, except the Precincts of the Kings Bed-Chamber, which is wholly under the Groom of the Stole; and all above Stairs; who are all sworn by him (or his Warrant to the Gentleman Ushers) to the King. He hath also the over-sight of … [various positions, including] Apothecaries, Surgeons, Barbers, &c.’63 The laureate was not specifically named as coming under his authority, and the section on offices above stairs included the bedchamber staff, who had earlier been specified not to be part of that authority, but instead to answer to the Groom of the Stole. Moreover, the above-stairs section was long, sprawling and often subdivided, and the laureate only appeared towards the end of it.

Nonetheless, it cannot be ignored that Chamberlayne (the author) had suggested that the laureateship formed part of the lord chamberlain’s remit, in contrast to the contemporary establishment records emanating from the chamberlain’s office. Chamberlayne’s remark that all positions above stairs were sworn by the chamberlain or his warrant, and his listing of the poet laureate in the above-stairs section, is also contradicted by the fact that Dryden, Shadwell and Tate were all appointed by formal letters patent, without reference to the lord chamberlain’s office. Perhaps Chamberlayne was simply uncertain of where to place the laureate in his account of the state of England, and, judging him to pertain to the court in some capacity, decided that he must be some form of above-stairs official, since he could certainly not be located below stairs, and since other artistic and artisanal officials tended to answer to the lord chamberlain.

The seventeenth edition (1692) was the first to be published after the Glorious Revolution. The material on the court had been gradually reorganized over the years, but the position of the laureate, while being given slightly more clarity, had not been much changed. Here, it appeared towards the end of ‘A List of their Majesties Officers and Servants in Ordinary above-stairs’, in a small, miscellaneous grouping headed, ‘Also among his Majesties Servants in Ordinary are reckon’d’. This group – which was separated from the master of revels by several pages and subsections – comprised a ‘Principal Painter’, ‘One Poet Laureat’, ‘One Hydrographer’, ‘One Library-keeper’ and then a few other positions.64 There was no historiographer, despite the position having parted from the laureateship by this time. All the positions were named and had their salaries given; the laureateship was correctly identified as ‘Thomas Shadwell Esq; 200l. per An.’ However, in the following, eighteenth edition (1694), Chamberlayne mistook both the name and the salary, ‘Mr. Nathanel Tate. 200 l. per An.’65 Clearly, Chamberlayne still did not know where to locate the poet laureate. He was not basing his understanding of the laureateship on a very sure grasp of the facts; but then, there were not many facts to be grasped. After all, even Tate and his paymasters had never known how large a poet laureate’s salary ought to be.

The nineteenth edition (1700) boasted on its title page that it was issued ‘with great Additions and Improvements’. However, Chamberlayne’s treatment of the laureateship witnessed neither. It was lumped at the end of the above-stairs officers again, in between the principal painter and the hydrographer, and its salary was once again listed wrongly as ‘200 l. per An.’66 Chamberlayne actually retracted his earlier innovation of naming the holders of the laureateship and its neighbouring offices. The mistake was repeated in the twentieth edition (1702), and then with the twenty-first edition (1704) came a further diminution, the laureate’s salary being erased entirely.67 The final edition (1707) repeated this very cursory notice of the laureateship, and, as testament to the care with which Angliae Notitia was being revised by this stage, it even repeated the designation of the relevant chapter as pertaining to the ‘Government of the King’s Houshold ’.68 By this point, Anne had been on the throne for five years.

With the 1707 Act of Union came the new title Magnae Britanniae Notitia, and John Chamberlayne, the new author, finally began to get things right (although the book still remained inconsistent as to whether Britain was now ruled by a king or queen). At the end of a cramped, grubby, generally uninformative list of ‘The Queen’s Officers and Servants in Ordinary above Stairs, under the Lord Chamberlain’ appeared ‘Poet Laureat, Nahum Tate, Esq; Sal. 100 l. per Ann.’, followed by the Hydrographer and the Historiographer (‘T. Rimer, Esq; Sal. 200 l. per Ann.’).69 The 1718 edition then had ‘Poet Laureat, Nicholas Rowe, Esq; Sal. 100 l. per Ann.’ in a list of ‘Other Servants to the King’ at the end of the section on the lord chamberlain’s department.70 In these successive editions, often apparently compiled in a rush and with the materials being continually rearranged, it would therefore appear that the Chamberlaynes were gradually, uncertainly finding an appropriate place for the laureate as a semi-unique servant in ordinary above stairs, answering to the lord chamberlain and being paid £100 a year. There were also other sources of information for readers interested in the staffing of the court, and they generally treated the laureateship in a similar way.71 The compilers of these sorts of publication were evidently unreliable in their treatment of the laureateship. But they did recognize that the laureateship pertained to the lord chamberlain’s jurisdiction, even, in Edward Chamberlayne’s case, expressing this recognition before it was accurate.

Taking the foregoing evidence as a whole, then, the picture that emerges is one of confusion, but nonetheless of significant developments in the positioning and definition of the office over time. The Hanoverian succession set these developments in stone. For the next hundred years, the only major change in the courtly positioning of the laureateship was the cosmetic one of emphasizing the closeness of the laureateship (and the revellers) to the ceremonies staff. The reason, nature and implications of these developments will be explained in due course, when the changing function of the laureateship is discussed below. But before then, the transition of the office into the lord chamberlain’s keeping must be investigated in more detail. The lord chamberlain at the time was the earl of Dorset. It is on his private accounts that the investigation will be founded.

Dorset’s accounts

Dorset was famous in his own day and subsequently for his literary patronage, which was variously (and sometimes conjointly) described as discerning and universal.72 The first three poets laureate all benefitted from his patronage over significant stretches of time, and duly dedicated some of their works to him. Although he was personally close to Charles II, he opposed James II’s policies and fell from favour, and then supported William and Mary’s accession to the crown. For this support he was rewarded at the Glorious Revolution, including by being made lord chamberlain. He held the post from 1689 until 1695, overseeing the dismissal of Dryden from the laureateship (due to Dryden’s refusal to renounce Catholicism) and the appointment of Shadwell in his place. As lord chamberlain, he was known for his greedy and aggressive practices, exhibiting a general desire to expand and solidify the powers of his department and an attendant desire that he and his favoured underlings should reap all the financial benefits that they could. The late 1680s and 1690s were in some ways an ideal time for such practices, with constant shifts and squabbles over the jurisdictions of the various court departments.73 In one of the precedent books referred to above, there is a detailed description of a dispute that the lord chamberlain’s department was involved in over who had the right to appoint the court’s Lenten preachers.74 All these points are significant in considering what happened to the laureateship around this time.

As has been discussed above, when Dorset became lord chamberlain, it was by no means the case that the laureateship should have had anything to do with him. Dryden had not been appointed by a lord chamberlain, nor did he answer to one; and the establishment records of the lord chamberlain’s office took no notice of any poets laureate before Tate. Yet when Dorset became lord chamberlain, he busied himself with the laureateship and made decisions regarding its occupant. It was Dorset who dealt with Dryden, trying to convince him to change religion and stay on as laureate, and who was responsible for Shadwell’s and Tate’s appointments, both men thanking him for this in dedicatory epistles.75 Looking further ahead, Dorset’s successors as lord chamberlain enjoyed the formal prerogative of choosing a laureate; and the first establishment book of the lord chamberlain’s department to have been written during Tate’s tenure, although coming a couple of years after Tate’s appointment, includes the laureateship as one of the offices in the lord chamberlain’s disposal. Evidently, Dorset was fixing the laureateship in the lord chamberlain’s firmament. Given his keenness to make the most of his position, and the fact that he was acknowledged as a great patron and a man of eminent literary taste, it would not have been unnatural for him to act in such a way; and given that the king who had installed him as lord chamberlain had no knowledge of English literature, and had more pressing business on his hands, it would not have been difficult. A consideration of Dorset’s personal accounts provides further evidence of his instrumentality in the repositioning of the laureateship. It also reveals why Dorset acted towards the laureateship as he did.

In the accounts, Dryden, Shadwell and Tate all appear recurrently as beneficiaries of Dorset’s financial patronage. Although Dryden had had to be ejected from the laureateship for his religious and political unsuitability, it was well known by the end of the seventeenth century that Dorset had personally recompensed him for this loss.76 Dryden seems to have viewed Dorset as his greatest patron until the end of his life despite their political differences, and he duly shows up in Dorset’s account books (which begin in 1671) a number of times, for (usually large) one-off payments.77 Shadwell, meanwhile, was first paid in July 1684 (£10), and, after several more such payments over the years, was last paid on 23 December 1689.78 There is no appearance of regularity to the payments; they come at fairly random intervals and are described in differing ways. But the final payment is (uniquely) described as being ‘for a quart[er]’, indicating that Shadwell was in receipt of a £40 pension paid in quarterly sums by the end of 1689, and flagging up the deficiencies of the account books: it seems that they do not cover all the payments that Dorset was making to poets.79 Dorset was known for giving out money in spontaneous and irregular ways that would have escaped even the most diligent of accountants, and his accounts must therefore be considered as an incomplete record of his financial patronage. On the other hand, there is evidence that his private pension payments were sometimes in arrears, suggesting that there may be more omissions of payments than of records in the account books.80

Tate’s recorded payments are more numerous than Shadwell’s, and are more routinely identified as constituting the quarterly payments of a £40 annuity.81 His first recorded payment came in July 1689, and his last in May 1694. But his last £10 annuity payment came in October 1692, and the only payment after that – the May 1694 payment – had nothing to do with the annuity, being a gift of £5 10s, paid by specific order and probably relating to a poem that Tate dedicated to Dorset around this time.82 Again, the recorded annuity payments do not add up to the four per year that would be expected, suggesting negligence in either the payments or the account keeping. The account books continue until Dorset’s death in January 1706, but with no more appearances from Dryden, Shadwell or Tate, other than a subscription payment for Dryden’s Virgil translation in July 1694.83 It is also worthwhile noting that after Shadwell’s death, Dorset paid Shadwell’s son £20 by specific order (in December 1692).84

Of course, it is unsurprising to find Dorset granting payments to Dryden, Shadwell and Tate, given his reputation as a general benefactor of poets. But these payments are noteworthy in two respects. The first is that, in spite of his reputation, Dorset actually seems to have been concentrating his favour on these specific three poets, and especially Shadwell and Tate. Nathaniel Lee’s widow was also in receipt of a fairly long-running annuity, but there is otherwise not much trace of Dorset’s much-vaunted literary patronage.85 As mentioned above, the accounts do not give a complete picture of Dorset’s largesse; but it is nonetheless hard to escape the conclusion that Dryden, Shadwell and Tate were his three favoured poets.

More striking still is the dating of Dorset’s payments. As mentioned above, Shadwell can be identified as having been paid from July 1684 to December 1689, and Tate from July 1689 until May 1694. Dorset’s patronage of (and friendship with) Shadwell had started well before 1684, but it was around this time that Shadwell started suffering financially due to his political opposition to the court; Shadwell was later to thank Dorset for saving him in these barren years. Still more significant is the year that Shadwell was appointed poet laureate: 1689. It was in this same year that, according to the accounts, he ceased to receive a private pension from Dorset. Tate, who seems to have first started receiving his own pension in the same year, succeeded Shadwell as laureate at the end of 1692; there are no more recorded annuity payments for him after this appointment, with the only subsequent gift being the £5 10s of May 1694. The pattern is unmistakable. Dorset stopped paying out annuities to Shadwell and Tate at about the time that they were each made laureate. Moreover, his payments generally seem to have been motivated by the desperation of the recipients: Dryden was given a financial safety blanket after being jettisoned from the laureateship; Shadwell’s payments began when his Whig partisanship had reduced him to penury; and Tate’s constant financial problems have been documented above. Even in the case of Nathaniel Lee, Dorset seems to have been more concerned with supporting his widow with an annuity than paying Lee himself while he was still alive, and the Lees’ case was especially piteous, given Lee’s descent into madness and poverty in the latter years of his life.

Dorset’s payments to this small band of poets, then, correlate firmly with two things: their desperation, and the laureateship. He paid them when they needed it, and he stopped paying them when they were appointed laureate. Dorset’s approach to the laureateship thus becomes clear. He was not bestowing it as Charles II had bestowed it on Dryden, only as a mark of royal distinction and as proof that the court did indeed patronize great poetry (although Dorset, as a great patron himself and as a key member of the Williamite regime, would presumably have recognized the continuing importance of establishing the cultural patronage of the court, too). More immediately, he was using it to support a couple of poets, Shadwell and Tate, whom he liked or pitied above all others. By so doing, he transferred the financial burden of his patronage from his personal coffers to the court. This was entirely in keeping with his attitude to the lord chamberlain’s department as a whole, and with the more general disregard that office-holders tended to have for the borderline between their own private means of patronage and the patronage opportunities attached to their office.

It would therefore appear that Dorset’s time as lord chamberlain was crucial in the development of the office of poet laureate. Widely known and respected for his taste in literature and for his patronage, he was appointed lord chamberlain by a king and queen who had little interest in the laureateship; therefore, armed with an expansionist zeal and a small troupe of starving poets, he decided to annex that office to his own department and to bestow it in the same manner as he had previously been bestowing his private funds. He was encouraged in this endeavour by the general disorganization that existed in the court at this time, and by the particular state of the laureateship, which, while being an anomalous office, also seemed to have just the sort of character that – as Edward Chamberlayne had felt in 1669 – could justify its coming under the lord chamberlain’s jurisdiction. He was so successful that, by the time of Tate’s death in 1715, the laureateship had become naturally regarded as an office in the lord chamberlain’s gift, disposed by his department’s warrant. Officially speaking, it no longer had anything to do with the crown, which had previously been used to appoint ‘the king’s poet laureate’ according to formal letters patent. The heir to Virgil would no longer float about in vague communion with his latter-day Augustus. He had been redefined as a court functionary, and fitted into a niche under the remit of the lord chamberlain.

Finding a role

However, these developments were not purely organizational. They were bound up with the functional transformation that the office was undergoing. The eighteenth-century poet laureate was not to be a Drydenic figure, either in the early sense of enjoying an honour that conferred no responsibilities, or in the later sense of writing disputational works on the king’s behalf. Instead, he was to be a panegyric functionary. The job of the eighteenth-century laureates was to centre on the writing of biannual odes, scheduled for the monarch’s birthday and for New Year’s Day. The odes would be set to music – usually, and with increasing exclusivity, by the master of the king’s or queen’s music – and performed at court on the set date. The texts would often be published soon after. By the mid century, a large and growing number of periodicals were making it their habit to print the words of the odes immediately after their performances at court, and this widespread practice was to persist until the odes were discontinued.86

The odes and their history will be explored in Chapter Five, but there are a couple of things worth drawing attention to here. Firstly, they were highly suited to the manner in which the regimes of William, Mary and Anne presented themselves and were presented to the public.87 Whereas Charles II’s regime had entered into a furious debate over monarchical power and legitimacy, post-1688 regimes attempted to make their case without appearing to make any case at all, and to avoid being associated with the disputes between Whigs and Tories. Instead, the ideology of rule that emanated from and focused on the courts of William, Mary and Anne was that they (and especially William) had been providentially ordained to rescue England from Catholicism and sin. These monarchs would overturn the popish oppression beneath which England had laboured; they would then reform the nation’s morals and manners, through both example and action.88 In line with this, Sharpe showed how pro-court poetry in these years tended to favour emotive assertion over argument, thus making the court’s case by appealing to the emotions and suggesting all matters of dispute to have been already settled.89 What Sharpe did not observe is that the characteristics of the ode format were particularly amenable to such a tendency, being ecstatic, sublime, emotive and celebratory in tone, whereas rhyming couplets (the most common form of verse) had a more logical and argumentative bent.

The second thing to note is that it was during the tenures of Shadwell and especially Tate that the existence of the biannual courtly odes became firmly established and the association of the poet laureateship with those odes took shape. Some form of song or ode had tended to be performed at court on festive occasions prior to 1681, and performances became increasingly routine thereafter, with a host of different poets supplying texts for the performances up to 1715. But Shadwell and Tate, when laureates, were increasingly responsible for their production; and when Tate died a year after the Hanoverian succession, this informal practice hardened into a formal demand. It was actively expected of Rowe that he would provide two odes a year for the designated occasions, and it was expected of him purely because he had been laureated. Rowe occasionally subcontracted the odes out to friends and associates.90 During Tate’s laureateship, if another person had written an ode, then that ode would have been ascribed to that other person. But for Rowe, the arrangement was different; even if he was not to write the odes himself, he was responsible for sourcing them, and they would be formally ascribed to his pen. By the reign of George I, the laureates had thus been exclusively identified with the function of providing the biannual odes. This identification was to remain into the early nineteenth century.91

As to why this identification came about, part of the answer lies with Shadwell and Tate themselves. Upon the arrival of William and Mary, Shadwell immediately published several works of panegyric celebration, seemingly of his own volition, which predated his appointment as laureate.92 Once appointed, he produced a batch of seven further panegyrics, some of which were avowed as odes for specific occasions (such as William’s return from Ireland), and some of which were performed at court as part of the birthday and New Year festivities.93 Tate was to continue and expand this panegyric trend. Although his output had been relatively diverse in the early part of his career, he showed a marked trend in his later years – starting even before his appointment as laureate – towards writing panegyric poetry. His panegyrics were written in couplets as well as odes, and, although he regarded his reigning monarch as his prime and most glorious theme, he also wrote panegyrics for a wide group of other figures, from bishops, to beauties, to personal friends. None of this was accidental on Tate’s part; on several occasions he articulated his belief that a poet’s highest calling was to serve religion and virtue, and that the best manner of doing this was to set forth glorious instances of virtue which would serve as stimuli for emulation.94

Most tellingly in the context of the laureateship, he linked his role as laureate to his panegyric poetry. Writing a dedication to Dorset, he thanked him for:

placing me in His Majesty’s Service; a Favour which I had not the Presumption to seek. I was conscious how short I came of my Predecessors in Performances of Wit and Diversion; and therefore, as the best means I had of justifying Your Lordship’s Kindness, employ’d my Self in publishing such Poems as might be useful in promoting Religion and Morality. But how little I have consulted my immediate interest in so doing, I am severely sensible. I engaged in the Service of the Temple at my own Expence, while Others made their profitable Markets on the Stage.95

By way of spatial concepts, Tate here made several clear distinctions. One was between his activities before and after being appointed laureate. He claimed to have ‘employ’d my Self … in promoting Religion and Morality’ as a direct and considered response to being made ‘His Majesty’s’ laureate. The second distinction was between himself-as-laureate and his fellow, non-laureated poets. While Tate was ‘engaged in the Service of the Temple’, others were making money from the immoral stage. His location, ‘the Temple’, was abstract and transcendental, serving the good of the nation as a whole; their location, ‘the Stage’, was a specific, partial location, in which certain poets selfishly made money, and theatregoers gained transitory pleasure. Lastly, Tate distinguished between himself and his predecessors. Dryden and Shadwell had been celebrated writers, known for their ‘Performances of Wit and Diversion’. Tate claimed that he could not compete with them in this respect, and so intentionally took the laureateship in a different direction. If he could not ‘justify’ his appointment by literary greatness, he would do so by religious and moral utility.

It is likely, then, that the increasing identification between the laureates and the biannual odes was due in part to Shadwell’s and Tate’s volitions. Because of Shadwell’s political inclinations and his career as a Whig polemicist, and Tate’s belief in the importance of panegyric verse both for poetry in general and for his own personal distinction, it suited them to assume responsibility for the songs or odes that had already started to be performed on festive occasions at court. They thereby elevated the status of those odes and created an identification between them and the laureateship. Undoubtedly, this emergence of a function for the laureateship was also bound up with the contemporaneous formal developments in the office’s positioning. From Nicholas Rowe’s time onwards, the laureates would be more fixedly placed and more securely paid than had been the case in the later Stuart period, and would be tasked with a specific ceremonial function, which would often entail the publication of the laureate’s text.

The laureateship therefore became formalized in line with the urge to present successive courts as courtly and legitimate, an urge felt and acted upon by various figures who had some connection to the court as an institution or some interest in the court as a concept. After 1688, this meant the assertion of a particular, godly kind of courtliness, and after 1714 it meant the formal affirmation of practices that seemed, in retrospect, to have been commonplace prior to the Hanoverian succession. The identification of the laureates with the odes was part of this, because it bolstered the ceremonial activities associated with the court and gave the court and laureate a clearer role vis-à-vis those audiences comprised within the town/world/public concepts. Moreover, the odes proved useful for propagating to the town/world/public a certain image of the court that was in keeping with each regime’s wider ideology of legitimation. Yet the role of Shadwell and Tate in bringing this about flags up an issue that has not yet been explored in this chapter. So far, the pressures on successive regimes, and their court-centric responses to them, have mostly been discussed in macro terms, and not firmly related to the evidence under discussion. How those macro issues operated has been left unclear.

After all, though from a macro perspective it could be stated that the later Stuart court progressively defined its ceremonial life and cultural role, and that it did so by the formation and formalization of the laureateship, it is obviously the case that none of this was the result of a long-term plan. The institutional court was not a sentient being, and its history was marked by continual ruptures. It therefore remains to be explained how these macro changes operated, focusing on the pressures and opportunities that were presented to various individuals, and how those individuals’ actions in response to those pressures and opportunities constituted the process of macro cause and effect. This chapter’s argument is that monarchs and their court officials did play a part, but that developments in the court’s institutional and conceptual role in cultural affairs were not simply a matter of policy, or leadership, from those individuals. Instead, the court-as-patron was a concept towards which various individuals worked and which various individuals sought to tap into, in pursuit of their own objectives.96 The court’s cultural role was defined as much by those whose interest it was to create that role from the outside as by those within; it was created by the very acts that sought to benefit from its creation.

This can be seen in the activities of all the persons discussed in this chapter. Firstly, it can be seen in the laureates themselves. In different ways, Dryden, Shadwell and Tate all felt that it was incumbent upon them to foster a relationship with the court, and to present themselves to their readers in terms of their court-centric identity. Dryden did this before his appointment in his Astraea Redux and Annus Mirabilis (long, ambitious poems celebrating Charles II, published for general retail), and in publishing Secret-Love as ‘His [Charles’s] Play’. Then, as laureate, he portrayed himself as serving the court by way of his disputational writings. Shadwell greeted the arrival of William and Mary with panegyrics, and continued to write panegyrics when laureate, as well as advertising his status as poet laureate. Tate had written the follow-up to Dryden’s Absalom and Achitophel, and, like Shadwell, wrote panegyrics for monarchs; but when he was appointed laureate, he realized that he could not rival Dryden or Shadwell as a pre-eminently celebrated writer, and therefore defined his relationship with the court in a new way, presenting the court as a supremely moral and religious institution which he was serving through his moral, religious writings, and seeking to engross responsibility for the production of the biannual courtly odes. This self-presentation also identified him with the rhetoric of courtly reformation that was promulgated by William’s, Mary’s and Anne’s regimes, further reinforcing the commercially advantageous notion that he enjoyed a firm association with the court, while also allowing him to make a better claim on the favour and finances of the court establishment. All three men (or their printers) made sure to designate them(selves) as ‘servant to his majesty’ or ‘king’s poet laureat’ on their published title pages.97

Thus these writers found it advantageous to validate their own literary practice by reference to the court. In doing so, they validated the court’s own cultural role, while also necessitating that they define what that role was. The diverse profusion of their own writings, and the breadth of their audiences, meant that it would not have been immediately obvious how they stood in relation to the court, and what role the court played in their writings; but by defining their own positions as poets laureate, they made it more likely that their salaries would actually be paid, and they emphasized to their readers the nature and importance of their status as prime beneficiaries of court patronage. Thus the macro situation, of a court under pressure to define itself by reference to its traditional ceremonial and cultural role, and having to do so in engagement with the town/world/public, operated through the micro activities of individual agents. Each poet laureate sought to take advantage of the traditional ideal of the court’s ceremonial and cultural role, and to do so on the basis of his own former success with theatregoers and readers, while also attempting to use his position as court poet to increase that success. Collectively, they thereby affirmed the court’s cultural role and its relationship with the town/world/public, causing the macro pressures to translate into a macro response from the non-sentient court: the creation and the increasing formalization of the office of poet laureate at the interface of court and town/world/public.

Aristocratic patrons played their part too. Whether these patrons were closely associated with the court or not, they were part of a system that was bound up with the institutional and conceptual court, in social and political terms as much as in cultural; without due regard for the crown, there could have been no due regard for those persons placed just below the crown in the social hierarchy, whose authority and status derived from the crown. The court also held out the best opportunities for aristocrats’ own statuses and material benefits, encouraging them to have a strong presence there. It was therefore in their interests to bring ‘their’ writers to court, to argue their case at court and to encourage writers to work within the framework of courtly patronage, because by doing so they would increase their own prestige as patrons.98 This is seen, for example, in Dryden’s intercessions with various courtly and aristocratic figures to have his salary paid; and it is seen in the patronage activities of Dorset.

Indeed, Dorset provides the clearest evidence of what is being described here: the functioning of individual agency within macro developments. Dorset contributed massively to the definition of the court’s cultural role, and of the laureateship within it, by seeking to benefit himself, his favoured poets and his monarchs. Even his endeavours to benefit those poets and those monarchs were ultimately beneficial to him, since those poets gave him his reputation as a patron and those monarchs had appointed him lord chamberlain. To help his own finances, Dorset removed the patronal burden from himself to a higher sphere, the court. To burnish the idea of himself as a great patron, he brought the laureateship firmly within the lord chamberlain’s department and gave it to two poets with whom he had good relationships. To help out Shadwell and Tate, he made sure that their position within the royal household structure would be more robust than Dryden’s had been. And to buttress the Williamite regime against its enemies, he helped define the poet laureate as someone who would write on behalf of the court and contribute to its ceremonial life. Thus the wider changes of the time manifested in the pressures and opportunities that presented themselves to one individual, and, by responding to them, he contributed to those wider changes. Dorset, along with a number of individuals both within and without the court, thus created and defined the court’s role as a cultural patron, and fixed the laureateship as a critical element within it.

Conclusion

The laureateship had gone from being an honorific, informal position which was not firmly placed in the institutional court structure, to one firmly under the lord chamberlain’s auspices, grouped with the revels and ceremonies staff, and defined by its exclusive and comprehensive relationship with the writing of biannual odes. Looking onwards through the eighteenth century, this formalization of the laureateship into a functional manifestation of courtly patronage was to be advantageous, in that it gave the laureate a distinct role and prominence with the reading public and meant that his courtly position and payment of salary were fixed and regular, but was also to entail problems when competing ideas about the poetic vocation began gaining currency. As will be seen in the following chapters, the laureateship did not simply become obsolete or ridiculous, but certain observers would eventually describe it in this way.

The questions now are why these developments occurred and how they relate to the wider issues described at the start of this chapter. Essentially, they manifested the urge to formalize the cultural role and ceremonial life of successive courts, and to fix their position towards literature through the creation of a literary office. There was a pressure to do so even at the start of Charles II’s reign, because the Civil Wars had ruptured his court from that of his predecessors, and that pressure was renewed with the start of each new reign, due to the repeated turbulences that marked each succession and due to the new questions about monarchical rule and monarchical legitimacy that each succession created. Moreover, as will be explored further in the next chapter, new activities of cultural production and consumption were emerging, conceptualized under the rubrics of town, world and public. At the start of Charles II’s reign, a patronage network that centred on the court and reached its apex with the king still appeared to form the prevailing cultural framework. Poets pitched their work to well-placed patrons, and strove against each other for the attention of the royal family. Though it was the two town theatres of London that promised the best hopes of money, those two theatres were intimately connected with the court, and courtly patronage was a key factor in whether a playwright would succeed there, as well as offering occasional fixed pensions or employments to figures who initially made their name on the stage. Conceptually, the town overlapped with the world, and would come to be partially subsumed by the public, but its primary intimacy was with the court: it was ‘the court end of London’.

Even at this point, though, the court’s position needed to be determined more clearly and formally, as achieved through the institution of the laureateship; and the wider situation was changing, making such definition increasingly necessary. Just as audiences outside the court were becoming more willing and able to scrutinize the conduct of the monarch, so too were the finances and inclination necessary for cultural consumption burgeoning among them, tempting poets (and others) to seek fame and fortune with what would come to be conceived as the public. There was pressure on the court to respond to these developments. Its response ties in with the historiographical themes discussed above: formality, ceremony and representation. A laureateship was formed and formalized, held by a writer who had found success outside the court but who would now take a leading role in courtly ceremony, and who would represent the court to the town, the world and the public.

The last thing to stress is how important the laureateship was, and how successfully its position was fixed. The laureateship became important partly because it was so well defined and did have the potential for definition. If Elkanah Settle had occupied a rival courtly role to Dryden’s in the 1670s, that role did not make much of a mark beyond the court’s walls, and had no staying power in comparison to the laureateship; it faded away, while the laureateship became an ever more fixed and prominent part of the cultural landscape. Settle’s putative role had neither a present definition, nor past or future potential; the laureateship, on the other hand, had a name and an official salary as well as a heritage that stretched back to ancient Greece and Rome (encompassing Chaucer, Spenser and Jonson), and was found capable of being put to new uses in response to new circumstances (first in the Exclusion Crisis, then with the biannual odes). The laureateship was something that writers, nobles, court officials and monarchs could fix onto. It thus served an important function in defining or even proving the court’s cultural role, and it became more important and more fixed in this regard as the later Stuart period wore on. It was a distinct but flexible concept, hence its utility at the interface of the concepts of court and town/world/public. The office that had become fixed by 1715 was then to remain unchanged for a century, and was highly prominent and much discussed throughout that time.

Clearly, then, a successful position had been found for it. Acting inadvertently in concert, various individuals had defined the court’s role as a cultural patron, and had worked out answers to the issues of formality, ceremony and representation, in which the newly (trans)formed office of poet laureate played a central part. This had occurred not just because there existed a traditional courtly ideal in which cultural patronage was a crucial element, which could be asserted by anyone associated with the institutional court, but because of the political scrutiny and commercial practices of audiences outside the court. The next chapter will examine those audiences.