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In his introduction to this substantial volume of previously unpublished
poetry, Tom Cain raises the analogy of the discovery, one hundred years
ago this year, of the poems of Thomas Traherne. It is almost this rare,
he suggests, for such a large body of unexplored seventeenth-century poems
to be brought to light. Yet the comparison is also enlightening in other
ways, since each of the two poets seems to speak, in very different ways,
to the respective audiences which they have unwittingly found. At the
beginning of the twentieth century, Traherne's poetic craft and religious
mysticism accorded with many prevailing preconceptions not only about
the Renaissance, but about poetry itself. By contrast, at the beginning
of the twenty-first century the poetry of Mildmay Fane will appeal to
a readership perhaps more prepared to set aside questions of literary
quality in order to examine the politics of poetry. For here is a collection
of work, however quirky and patchy it may at times seem, which documents
with wonderful clarity a man quite simply thinking his way through the
upheavals of his age. It is not a poetry of polemic -- of a kind that
has received so much attention in recent scholarship -- but rather of
anxiety, uncertainty, and reflection.
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Cain presents some 500 poems, written mainly in the 1640s and 1650s.
Unlike the 137 poems that Fane published in Otia Sacra (1648),
those that remained only in manuscript form are typically more private,
apparently intended in many cases for audiences of no more than one. Unusually
for such a prolific poet, his work did not circulate widely; Margaret
Crum's First-Line Index of English Poetry 1500-1800 in Manuscripts
of the Bodleian Library Oxford, in fact, does not record a single
identified Fane poem in the rich holdings of the Bodleian. Rather, as
Cain notes, the manuscripts have something of the quality of a journal,
documenting immediate thoughts and experiences. In some instances this
approach produces occasional poetry in its purest form: poems about Fane's
fox-hunting and fishing, about a "sea voyage for pleasure,"
and about an experience of "phisick" in which he strives to
face bravely the "nautious" potion that will prompt his "gutts
[to] rumble and arse squirt" (105, 163, 211). And while we have become
accustomed to the epistolary poem as a quasi-public mode in the seventeenth
century, many of Fane's epistles are no more than personal notes. In some
cases -- such as the poems written in the course of his courtship of Grace
Thornhurst -- these retain a certain immediacy, as Fane brings literary
conventions into conjunction with personal circumstance. In other cases,
the results are somewhat more banal.
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If he had lived in times of peace, Fane might have written nothing more
significant than this sort of stuff; however, this was not a time -- and
his was not a life -- that allowed for complete disengagement and self-absorption.
Notably, he knew personally many of the principal combatants in the period's
conflicts, was connected by marriage to Thomas Fairfax, and was in contact
with politicized poets such as Andrew Marvell and John Cleveland. Though
he was not especially prominent in politics or the military, Fane nonetheless
led a troop in the royalist forces, before being captured in 1642. His
subsequent strategy of guarded accommodation to power is documented in
his signing of the Covenant in 1644, and is reflected in one poem, "Upon
a small occasion of 10000£s disburcementraptim," in which he
ruefully records: "Two Daughters' Portians gon, and spent, / Th'one
on the King T'other on the Parlement." In short, support of one side
has cost him one daughter's dowry, and support of the other has cost the
same again, leaving him to cling stoically to the hope that "whilst
Integrety 'thout shuffling's delt," the loss of "Douries and
Patrimonies" might be "less felt" (71).
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In his short prose autobiography, also reproduced in this edition, Fane
looks back on the "unspeakable wickedness" of the regicide (45).
But his representations of the parliamentary forces were at the time altogether
less stable than this retrospective statement might suggest. One poem
on Cromwell, written on the fourth anniversary of the regicide, expresses
an edgy admiration:
Brave Captain though thine honor gaind increase
By war let all concluded be in peace
'Tis commendable after Pallas spear
Had brandisht been Her Olive branch to wear
For being Protector and anoynted thence
All suppling lenatives He should dispence
Unto the People; make the sword to bend
Into a sickle, th'Helmet to defend
Hive like the laboring Bee; if this He'l doe
I'le say He shall be my Protector too. (272-3)
Elsewhere, though, he turns Cromwell's chosen discourse of "protection"
against him. Pointedly reviving the politicized pastoral of the Caroline
court, he speaks through a shepherd who is nostalgic for:
a time when our Great Pan
And Flocks Protector kept these plains
Making them like th'Arcadian
Wher all Securety stil reignes.
In a statement redolent of the author's own anxieties, the shepherd goes
on to claim that those "of Giants race" have simply "Chas't
all protection from this place" (275).
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Other poems, though less committed, provide evidence of a man sceptically
assessing competing claims to political and religious truth. In a 1643
poem titled "The Times Steerage," he writes:
Like Ships by th'same wind favourd, yet can stear
A severall Course; soe now the Cavillier
And the Bowle-Noddled-Crue pretend They fight
Both that Religion and the Lawes have right
For Liberty tis doubtless thats their own. (82)
In the following decade, he ponders the implications of republicanism.
One pithy epigram notes: "All's common now since Commonwealths bere
sway / And warr in Earnest's become Rebells play" (291). The irony
here pervades other poems, that dwell similarly on the nature of a state
in which "servants unto Kings" have been translated, at the
stroke of an axe, into "Cittizens" (273). In his mind, this
act created a mere parody of freedom. Responding to the arrest of a number
of royalists in 1658, he comments: "Traytor's a name soe common grown
of late / Since Kingdom is Transformd into a State" (337).
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Cain's edition, in accord with much recent editorial work in this period,
prioritizes his manuscript sources. Studies of Fane have been helped neither
by the way that he preserved his work in a number of different manuscripts,
some of which he appears to have maintained simultaneously, nor by the
fact that the family archive has been dispersed for many years. Cain simply
gathers the sources into one volume, and transcribes the poems from each
source in turn: noting differences in the handful of cases in which one
source duplicates a poem from another, and omitting only Fane's many Latin
poems (which are listed, by first-line, in an appendix). While these editorial
decisions are in most respects sound, they have the unfortunate effect
of jumbling any chronological progression, which might have represented
more clearly Fane's shifting attitudes throughout the 1640s and '50s.
In his textual presentation, Cain again aims to present the poems as they
stand in the sources, and thus makes no attempt to modernize spelling
or punctuation. His annotation, though at times lacking in detail, generally
provides excellent assistance for the contextualization of poems that
are often very specific in their references and allusions.
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Though it would be difficult to fault Cain's impeccable editorial work,
his decisions produce a volume unlikely to appeal to a wide audience.
(It is, therefore, difficult to see Fane gaining the readership that Traherne
has enjoyed.) Yet for scholars of seventeenth-century literature and politics,
this edition is certainly something of a landmark, which adds substance
to our appreciation of a turbulent period, and provides a valuable corrective
to simplistic perceptions of a nation divided into two implacable camps.
While historical studies might ultimately classify Fane as a "royalist,"
this volume does much to problematize that term. For Fane's royalism was
not that of the Earl of Strafford, nor that of John Cleveland: he was,
in other words, willing neither to die nor publish in the cause of monarchy.
Instead, as evidenced by his multiplicitous range of poems, throughout
this period he thought, and wrote, and generally did his best just to
get on with his life.
