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Drydens conversion to Rome has been a subject of comment since the

poet was seen going to mass in the company of his sons and Nell Gwyn

in January of. Speculation over the motive for Drydens conver-

sion was rife from the beginning, and The Hind and the Panthersuggests how sen-

sitive to the scandal of insincerity Dryden had become in the months following

the conversion as he mounted a defense of the integrity of his new faith. The re-

lentless attacks in the satires and broadsides that answe red The Hind and the

Pantherremind us that the poet had good reason to fear that the worst possible

gloss would be attached to his change of religion. One popular theme of con-

temporary response was the susceptibility of Drydens conscience to wifely wish

and female arthis fond uxorious vice. A typical anonymous pamphlet

scolded Dryden for falling prey To Midianitish Gods and Wives and associated

the soft bewitching Arts ofThe Hind and the Pantherwith the decadent wiles

of feminized Egypt, Babylon, and Balaam.

The numerous editions of Aesop and other fabulists in the period suggest

the popularity of these tales both plain and devious among a wide range of

I am grateful to Steven N. Zwicker, who suggested an investigation of Mary Frampton and carefully read and

improved several versions of this essay.

. This well-known rumor, reported in EvelynsDiary for January , is the first known reference to

Drydens conversion. See the satiric responses, for example, printed in Poems on Affairs of State: Augustan

Satirical Verse, , vol. , , ed. Galbraith M. Crump (New Haven, Conn., ), both to

Drydens reported conversion and to The Hind and the Panther. For a description of the pamphlets attack-

ing Dryden and his poem, from into the s, see the Drydeniana in Hugh MacDonaldsJohn

Dryden: A Bibliography of Early Editions and of Drydeniana (Oxford, ), esp. .

. The phrase appears on p. ofThe Weesils: A Satyrical Fable, Giving an Account of Some Argumental

Passages Happening in the Lions Court About Weesilions Taking Oaths (London, ), attributed by

Wing to Tom Brown.. The Murmurers (London, ), .

Rebekahs Heir:

Drydens Late Mystery of Genealogy

An n e C o t t e r i l l

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readers. When Montagu and Prior dashed offThe Hind and the Panther Trans-

versed() in response to Drydens poem, they knew exactly what a fable should

look like:

They were first begun and raised to the highest perfection in the

eastern countries, where they wrote in signs and spoke parables and

delivered the most useful precepts in delightful stories. . . . All their

fables carry a double meaning. . . . But this is his new way of telling

a story and confounding the moral and the fable together.

For a story to teach and delight while the characters devour each other, the moral

must be clear; but in Drydens Medley Offerings, who had won? The simul-

taneous appearance in of HobbessLeviathan and of the first of John Ogilbys

five Restoration editions of Aesop reflects the nervous politics of fable in an un-

stable age when the human beast appears to require firm control and when only

the simplest words and images can be trusted. But Drydens text refuses to close

on a preceptit refuses to close at all. The Hind and the Pantheracknowledgesfables ambiguity of pretended reticence and evasion coupled with aggression,

and it holds the reader suspended in that tension indefinitely.

Montagu and Prior mock Drydens long digressions and easy raptures in

obedience to his new mother Hind; and they gayly contrast his smooth pro-

fusion designed for the ladies with the rough, virile lines of Milton that a man

must sweat to read. By associating the tantalizing delays of digression with the

la dies and the W h ore of Ba bylon, they turn their own bewilderment with

. Jayne Lewis, The English Fable: Aesop and Literary Culture, (Cambridge, ), . Mark Kish-

lansky has noted that from the s not a decade passed without the publication of another English

edition of Aesop. It was one of the most popular books in early modern England. See Turning Fro gsinto Princes: Aesops Fablesand the Political Culture of Early Modern England, in Susan D. Amussen

and Mark A. Kishlansky, eds., Political Culture and Cultural Politics in Early Modern England: Essays

Presented to David Underdown (Manchester and New York, ), , .

. Charles Montagu and Matthew Prior, The Hind and the Panther Transversed to the Story of the Country

Mouse and the City Mouse, in Crump, ed., Poems on Affairs of State, , .

. Lewis characterizes the moral of fables as cynical and pragmatic (Aesop and Literary Culture, ); the

phrase Medley Offerings appears in The Revenger. A Trage-Comedy Acted Between the Hind and the

Panther and Religio Laici (London, ), .

. See Lewis,Aesop and Literary Culture, . She argues that fables were concrete and moralistic in a way

that circumvented the official hostility to figuration characteristic of the Interregnum government and

later of scientific and philosophic debate within the Royal Society. The popularity of fables in the late

seventeenth century might reflect the way that their complex materiality made them antidotes to a

figural crisis that was also political and cultural (p. ). On the historical relations between politics and

fable, see also Annabel Patterson, Fables of Power: Aesopian Writing and Political History (Durham, N.C.,

and London, ).

. Montagu and Prior, The Hind and the Panther Transversed, .

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the poem into a portrait of a weakened and wandering laureate and feminize

their prey. But unwittingly they describe his game. For after the Revol u ti on,

Dryden will assume this cover of the subordinate gender, as well as syntactic sub-

ordination and digression, to establish control over his own closurewhether

of censorship or of death.At least sinceAnnus Mirabilis (), Dryden had been practicing the con-

trol of narrative closure through his loose periods and digressionsthose syn-

tactic and narrative strategies of wandering and self-display to which he draws the

rea de rs attention. By the s Dryden is far more self-authorizing and fla-

grantly digressive; he boasts to the earl of Mulgrave in the Dedicatio to the

Aeneis about the difficulty of controlling his own epic plenty and observes, I

have taken up, laid down, and resumed as often as I pleased, the same subject;

. . . Yet all this while I have been sailing with some side-wind or other toward the

point I proposed in the beginning. After swimming rejuvenated with the tide

of inspiration in the preface to Eleanora and sailing by the winds breath in the

dedication to theAeneis, the poet comes to land in his house ofFables Ancientand Modern, whose inspired disorder he celebrates at the beginning of his most

discursive preface.

Susan Stewart describes digression as a movement that opens narrative and

personal closure from the inside out. Drydens late work appears to reflect a

. Morris Croll, in Style, Rhetoric, and Rhythm (Princeton, N.J., ), referred to the loose sentences

that are always periodic in the proper sense of Browne and Dryden (p. ). Others have observed

how Dryden draws attention to the wayward nature of his prose, beginning in the Preface to Annus

Mirabilis (But to return from this digression to a further account of my poem; see The Poems of John

Dryden, vols., ed. James Kinsley [Oxford, ], :). On the digressive nature of Drydens late work,

see Ann Cotterill, The Politics and Aesthetics of Digression: DrydensDiscourse of Satire, Studies in

Philology (): . In the words of one recent assessment, By the middle of his career, digres-sion had become one of the most telling marks of Drydens strongly purposeful style, behind which

the poet constructed superbly shaped literary instruments; Steven N. Zwicker, Dryden and the

Dissolution of Things,John Dryden: Tercentenary Essays, ed. Paul Hammond and D avid Hopkins

(Oxford, ).

. Here, my Lord, I must contract also; for, before I was aware, I was almost running into a long digre ssion

&. I have detained your Lordship longer than I intended. . . . but I write in a loose, epistolary way. . . . I

have taken up, laid down, and resumed as often as I pleased, the same subject; and this loose proceeding

I shall use thro all this prefatory Dedication. Yet all this while I have been sailing with some side-wind or

other toward the point I proposed in the beginning (To the Most Honourable John, Lord Ma rquess of

Normanby, Earl of Mulgrave, prefixed to theAeneis in The Works of Virgil [], in The Works of John

Dryden, vol. , ed. William Frost and Vinton A. Dearing [Berkeley, Los Angeles, and London, ],

). It is precisely this casual, privileged tone of literary authority and freedom that Swift attacks, ye t

mimics, as the chaotic modern habit of digression inA Tale of a Tub ().

. Susan Stewart proposes that digression stands in tension with narrative closure. It is narrative closureopened from the inside out. It holds the reader in suspension, or annoyance, for it presents the possibility

of never getting back, of remaining forever within the detour (On Longing: Narratives of the Miniature,

the Gigantic, the Souvenir, the Collection [Baltimore and London, ], ).

D r yd e n s L at e M y st e r y o f G e n e a l o g y !


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shift in the meaning of being on the insidefrom the world of court and gov-

ernment now firmly closed, to the fluid home and interiors of a mind become

infinitely expansive. Dryden becomes master of the mansion that opens the

Preface to Fables by replacing and removing the female, and this subtle but ag-

gressive move explains the curious competition between male and female, and theliving and the dead, that happens quietly in the three original verse portraits in

Fablesamid the louder and more colorful voices from the past.

This essay proposes that Drydens experience of Roman Catholicism as a

feminine domain of domestic patronage among his wifes recusant relations is at

the heart of his curious occupying (and then burial) of feminine figures, especially

after the loss of public office. In his final career as a lean son of the H ind, aban-

doned and disinherited, the domesticationeven the feminizationof the spirit

presses on the poets self-representation. He is able to use the spectacle of his exile

among soft Egyptian rites to turn a well-honed literary habit of excursion into the

pretense of senile distraction and into the practice of elaborate, aggressive visibility

and voyeurism, voluble authority and contestation.I want to suggest further that the indirection of the poets feminine inheri-

tance generates, and operates through, a number of oddly contrasting and com-

peting fabular shapes in the late work. I am thinking, for example, of the feminine

beast-churches of the Hind and the Panther and of the effeminate courtier Horace,

paired on the field of satire against the manly rage of exiled Juvenal (and Dryden)

in The Discourse of Satire. Finally, the duchess of Ormonde and cousin Driden

of Chesterton appear in Fables, a duet on the poetics of gender and genealogy:

young yet ancient noble beauty ill matched to a military, Protestant age; and older,

sturdier judgment and sprightly wit with a careful, chaste eye on lifes chase.

Rather than reminding us of a mythic or Chaucerian past as does the duchess,

Driden of Chesterton perfectly reflects the moment of poise, if also of stasis, be-tween centuries and between an old and new England. This second son and

mothers favorite, like the disenfranchised laureate, enjoys the gift of digressive,

speculative freedom and the peaceful, philosophical independence of a secondary

lineits strategic distance from the Ormondes biological, political, and military

fray. Having foregone earthly marriage, yet linked to Ceres and called Rebeccas

heir, he appears, as Judith Sloman notes, free to incorporate within himself a

feminine principleincluding his ailing popish relative. Similarly, in The

. In Parenthesis at the Center: The Complex Embrace ofThe Hind and the Panther,Eighteenth-Century

Studies (): , I consider the use of the feminine in Drydens beast fable; on theDiscourse

of Satire, see Cotterill, Politics and Aesthetics of Digression.

. The insistent repetition of chase and chased in lines suggests the pun and antonym.

. Judith Sloman,Dryden: The Poetics of Translation (Toronto, Buffalo, and London, ), .



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Monument of a Fair Maiden Lady, which is the penultimate verse and the last

poem originally by Dryden in the volume, the lady with a manly mind achieves

inward symmetry; within her, briefly suspended beyond sex, time and thought

become figures for each other.

In the section that follows, I approach my reading of the poems through asketch of late-seventeenth-century English recusancy and specifically of Drydens

relations through marriage, background that importantly bears on his manipu-

lation of gender in fable and miscellany. The feminine as saint and whore, as im-

mortal beauty and domestic mortality, becomes a convenient mask for the poet

accused of being henpecked to Rome. Dryden appeared to have wandered too far

and missed his blessing, but one project of the decade following his conversion

was to show that he had in fact wandered on course.

Gen ealo gy: D r yd ens D igr ession H ome

After the Revolution, the poet must have felt less like an eldest son with a guar-anteed patrimony than a second son or a daughter who would have to cultivate

distant relations and the mysteries of transubstantiation; and never does Dryden

more insistently display command over a labyrinth of lineage to defend both

his Jacobite sentiments and his poetic achievements than in his last decade. His

preoccupation with inheritance and home, banishment and wandering is un-

mistakable in the major translations and original prose and verse of his years as

a banished Je busite; such themes have been documented by others. But I

would like to add the dimension of gender to our vision of Drydens Roman

Catholicism and his self-presentation as an old man rejected in the public sphere

and confined to home, disarmed and curbed. Along with Virgil, Ovid, and

Chaucer, the feminine now offers the poet important material for translation.Between and , Dryden writes a flurry of epitaphs, elegies, and elegy-

like poems to saintly ladies, three of them relations through his wifes family. While

. See, for example, his letter of dedication to Eleanora (), theDiscourse of Satire(), his dedicatory

preface to theAeneis (), and the Preface to Fables (). Zwicker discusses Drydens political use of

lineage in the Dedication of theAeneis in Politics and Language in Drydens Poetry: The Arts of Disguise

(Princeton, N.J., ), , .

. On poetic families and inheritance, see Harold Weber, A double Portion of his Fathers Art: Congreve,

Dryden, Jonson, and the Drama of Theatrical Succession, Criticism (): . On wandering

self-reflection in the late work, see Candy B. K. Schille Self-Assessment in DrydensAmphitryon, Studies

in English Literature (): ; Robin Sowerby, The Freedom of Drydens Homer,Translation

and Literature (): ; Cotterill, Politics and Aesthetics of Digression; Earl Miner and JenniferBrady,Literary Transmission and Authority: Dryden and Other Writers (Cambridge, ); and David

Bywaters,Dryden in Revolutionary England(Berkeley and Los Angeles, ), esp. chap. .



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assuming the harmless aspect of disenfranchisement, the impotent bee is domes-

tically busy burying womenalmost laying to rest the duchess of Ormonde in his

enthusiasm for the mode. These paper monuments include the Epitaph on

Mrs. Margaret Paston, of Barningham, in Norf ol k (who died in ), the

Epilogue to The Widdow-Ranter; or the History of Bacon in Virginia by Catholicconvert Aphra Behn, who had died in April (the play was first performed

November ), An Epitaph on the Lady Whitmore (who died in ; the

epitaph was published in Examen Po etic um in ), Eleonora (), and

The Monument of a Fair Maiden Lady, Who D yd at Bath, and is There Interrd

(). While paying his respects to the fair temple vacated, and complaining

of his own illness and abandonment, Dryden swims increasingly with the tide.

This suspicious pattern, a match of deceased lady and buoyant male sur-

vivor, has not been observed before now; and it is suggestive for the curious pair

of late verse epistles that preside at the front ofFables Ancient and Modern.

Drydens collection of translations and of original verse belongs to a tradition

of literary anthologizing as old as Tottels Miscellany () and fashionably cur-rent in the last decades of the seventeenth century; indeed, Dryden and Tonson

were instrumental in promoting the fashion with a series of publishing ventures

that began with Miscellany Poems () and culminated in Fables. Like di-

gression, miscellany raises the question of ordering the pieces of experience; and

Fables, even more than The Hind and thePanther, has challenged readers to find

. Dryden also celebrates the Catholic marriage of a Howard family relation, On the Marriage of the Fair

and Vertuous Lady, Mrs. Anastasia Stafford, With That Truly Worthy and Pious Gent. George Holman,

Esq. A Pindarique Ode; see Earl Miner Drydens Ode on Mrs. Anastasia Stafford,Huntington Library

Quarterly (): .

. The epitaph first appeared inMiscellaneous Poems and Translations, published by Lintot in . Joshua

Scodel has examined the politics and poetics of Drydens epitaph to Margaret Paston in The English Poetic

Epitaph: Commemoration and Conflict from Jonson to Wordsworth (Ithaca, N.Y., ), .

. The women related to Dryden by marriage are Margaret Paston, Lady Whitmore, and the Fair Maiden

Lady. Lady Whitmore was the daughter of William Brooke (), whose father, George Brooke,

and great-uncle Henry, Lord Cobham were arrested and condemned for treason in . Her great-uncles

titles as Knight of the Garter and Cobham were forfeited, and he finished his life in the Tower. Her grand-

father was executed. Her grandmother was Frances, daughter of Charles Howard, first earl of Notting-

ham, in Elizabeth Howards pedigree. A great-aunt , Elizabeth Brooke, had married Robert Cecil, the first

earl of Salisbury and the great-uncle of Elizabeth Cecil (Drydens mother-in-law). The son of Robert Cecil

and Elizabeth Brooke, named William, married Catherine Howard, Elizabeth Howard Drydens paternal

aunt; see The Complete Peerage, s.v. Cobham, , and Salisbury, .

. On the early modern miscellany, see, for example, Barbara M. Benedict,Making the Modern Reader:

Cultural Mediation in Early Modern Literary Anthologies (Princeton, N.J., ); T. A. Birrell, The

Influence of Seventeenth-Century Publishers on the Presentation of English Literature, in Mary-Jo Arn,

Hanneke Wirtjes, and Hans Jensen, eds.,Historical and Editorial Studies in Medieval and Early Modern

English for Johan Gerritsen (Groningen, ), ; and Arthur E. Case,A Bibliography of English

Poetical Miscellanies, (Oxford, ).



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a moral in its mixture. The Preface to Fables describes a seamless web of asso-

ciation among the verses and a poetic genealogy among writers ancient and mod-

ern: Milton was the poetical son of Spenser, and Mr. Waller of Fairfax; for we

have our lineal descents and clans as well as other families. Spenser more than

once insinuates that the soul of Chaucer was transfused into his body, and thathe was begotten by him two hundred years after his decease. But Dryden as-

sembles the poems in another order altogether and out of their original sequence

in Homer, Ovid, Chaucer, or Boccaccio. He adds headnotes to his translations

from Ovid and consistently returns to Ovids digressive links, as Earl Miner has

observed; but the notes apply to connections within The Metamorphoses, not

to the parts ofFab l es. The duchess and Cousin Driden appear to be linked

with the translation, which separates them, of Chaucers The Knights Tale:

Dryden specifically associates the duchess with Emily, while Cousin Driden, a

peacemaker, recalls Theseus. Readers have noted that the couple seems to return

in saintly dress near the end of the volume as the Good Parson and the

Fair Maiden Lady, who like the the duchess has a faultless frame that none-theless sickens.

While Dryden encourages these associations and seems preoccupied with

connections, a sharp edge of competition between portraits and sexes continues

the combative, defensive mood of the Preface. For all of his raptures of retirement,

Drydens Preface is packed with contemporaries and his judgments on them

Hobbes, Rymer, Milton, Wall e r, Cowl e y, Roc h e s ter, Harrington, De n h am,

. Critics have noted the anti-heroic, anti-Williamite strains; for example, Michael West, Drydens

Ambivalence as a Translator of Heroic Themes,Huntington Library Quarterly (): . See also

Cedric Reverand,Drydens Final Poetic Mode (Philadelphia, ), chap. . And readers have agreed about

Drydens use ofFables to elevate his English poetic father, Chaucer. Sloman has argued for the works

narrative coherence, while Reverand despairs of a sequential reading and concludes, whatever Fables

gives, it also takes away; whatever values it offers, it also undercuts (p. ). On the problem of the unity

ofFables, see also Earl Miner, Ovid Reformed: Issues of Ovid, Fables, Morals, and the Second Epic in

Fables Ancient and Modern, in Miner and Brady,Literary Transmission, ; and James D. Garrison,

The Universe of Drydens Fables, Studies in English Literature (): . For a general discussion

of the ordering of poems in a collection, see Neil Fraistat, ed., Poems in Their Place: The Intertexuality and

Order of Poetic Collections (Chapel Hill, N.C., and London, ).

. Preface to Fables Ancient and Modern, in Poems of Dryden, ed. Kinsley, :. All further quotations of

Fables follow this edition; citations are given henceforward in the text.

. Miner, Ovid Reformed, . On the headnote to Meleager and Atalanta, Dryden comments, Ovid . . .

here makes a digression to the story of Meleager and Atalanta, which is one of the most inart ificial connec-

tions in all of the Metamorphoses. Entitled Connection to the former story, the note physically appears

between To My Honourd Kinsman and Meleager and Atalanta, but by the former, Dryden means

the former story in Ovid, not the poem to his cousin. In the note to The Twelfth Book of OvidsMeta-

morphoses, he again catches Ovid in the act of forging a link: By this transition, which is one of the fin est

in all Ovid, the poet naturally falls into the story of the Trojan War. And when Dryden introduces Of the

Pythagorean Philosophy, he emphasizes the room for learning and beauty within the impulse to digress.



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Ogilbyand he answers and dismisses his recent critics Jeremy Collier, Luke

Milbourne, and Sir Richard Blackmore. Moreover, Fables suspends or decon-

structs hierarchies and differences in time; the poet repeatedly forces the reader

to feel the disjunctions between fables and around gender. For example, the Fair

Maidens balance of masculine and feminine qualities in Christian tranquillity isfollowed by rape and murder, the brutal cynicism of Cymon and Iphgenia that

ends the volume by undoing, unravelling, taking apart possible progressions

even while the tale unravels itself.

In the two poems that concern me here, To her Grace the Duchess of

Ormonde and To My Honourd Kinsman John Driden, of Chesterton in the

County of Huntington, Esquire, the poet spins similar themes: illness and death,

marriage and children, the winding lifeline of genealogy that returns and restores,

and an island paradise. But how differently. The portraits match as mirror op-

posites and complementary points of view. The extravagance of fantasy and

emotion around the duchess, and that poems extremes of pitch, are balanced

by the bachelors poise between the high waters of contending extremes. T heverse epistles make a fanciful couple, young married female and older, cru sty

bachelorfeminine beauty and nobility sweeping grandly in, preceding the mea-

sured, cautious, yet not illiberal country squire. But the young woman is revealed

to be eclipsed, infirm, and compromised, while the elderly cousin Dr id en

stands alert and composed at the turn of the century, a solitary self-sufficient

Adam in an England only as close to Eden as the cursed world will allow.

Drydens epitaphs and elegies for women within his wifes family remind us

that his experience of Roman Catholicism involved not only spirit and intellect

but also domestic detail and domestic patronage. The operation of recusant

. See Reverand,Drydens Final Poetic Mode, .

. Sloman sees them together as heroic, joint political saviours of British culture and complementary

masculine and feminine ideals (The Poetics of Translation, ), the poets alternative vision of William

and Mary (the duchess was Mary Somerset). Reverand finds them both distinguished as peacemakers

and as chaste but also limited in their different ways, neither offering an image of a new order (Drydens

Final Poetic Mode, ). Both critics suggest parallels between Chaucers Emily and Theseus and

Drydens duchess and Cousin Driden.

. The familys move at some point after the spring of from their home of nineteen years in Longacre to

a lodging in the relatively new suburb of Soho might have reflected an anticipation of the doubled taxes

(James Anderson Winn,John Dryden and His World[New Haven, Conn., ], ). Between and

, there were forty-five peerages that were at one t ime or another held by Roman Catholics, using the

term to include those of Catholic sympathies (Brian Magee, The English Recusants[London, ], ).

By the end of the century, most of the Catholic nobility connecting Dryden to Mary FramptontheStourtons, the Pastons, the Cottingtons, and the Eyreswere overwhelmed by debt and would lose at

least one prominent residence during the eighteenth century.



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domain and refuge for Roman Catholicism, although the state had been

known to invade even the maternal sanctuary and forcibly remove a noble heir

to Protestant protection.

Considered together, the unlikely couple of the duchess of Ormonde and

cousin Driden of Chesterton suggests an internal symmetry of domestic oppo-sitions around male and female, ruler and server, including their contending

lines of inheritancethrough the firstborn and through the mothers favorite.

But why are we asked to think about genealogy, inheritance, and domestic order

at the opening ofFa bl es? Why does Dryden draw attention with Rebe cc as

heir to inheritance by feminine guile that burlesques the manly as beastlike (as

do Drydens translated Homeric heroes)? Smooth Jacob put on animal skins to

pass for a hunter; not unlike Dryden in , he became his own beast fable.

Drydens recusancy was practiced of course within a network of English Catholic

families, a feminine underground of bloodlines and marriages, and nowhere is

that network more apparent to the reader ofFables than in his brief epitaph to

Mary Frampton.The Monument of a Fair Maiden Lady, Who Dyd at Bath, and is There

In t e r rd has remained a small mystery, sealed like the tomb on which it is

engraved. We know almost nothing about the maiden lady of this epitapha

Roman Catholic named Mary Framptonor why Dryden should write his

longest verse epitaph for the Fram pton s. Barbara Lewalski has noted verbal

echoes of DonnesAnniversaries, but otherwise critics have paid little attention

to Mary. I want to entertain the idea that the mystery of Mary belongs to a

much larger story born in a distant familial connection to Dryden. Behind the

. As in Elizabeth Howard Drydens own family: Drydens wife appears to have adopted her mothers faith

and passed it to their three sons before Dryden had declared. Because of the numerous and powe rful

influences of Catholic Howards and Cecils, Drydens biographers have assumed that Elizabeth was a

Catholic well before Drydens conversion; Winn (Dryden and His World, ) and James M. Osborn

(John Dryden: Some Biographical Facts and Problems, rev. ed. [Gainesville, Fl., ], ) both cite the

same letter in the Bodleian from Cardinal Howard, written in . He recommends Drydens sons,

Charles and John Jr., who were presumably staying with him, for positions in the court of exiled James II,

theyr father being a Convert, and theyr mother a Cathc. Sister to ye. Lord Berkshire.

. For example, after his father drowned, James Butler, first duke of Ormonde and grandfather to the dedica-

tee ofFables, was placed by his mother under a Roman Catholic tutor; but through some legal subtlety

James I claimed him as a royal ward and conveyed him to Canterbury for Protestant instruction; Bossy,

The English Catholic Community, . See also Lady Burghclere, The Life of James, First Duke of Ormonde,

vols. (London, ), :f. Bossy emphasizes that the removal of children from recusant parents by

prerogative or legislative action was more common in the first half of the century.

. Scodel, inEnglish Poetic Epitaphs, treats several of Drydens late epitaphs on women, including the epitaphon Margaret Paston, Mary Framptons relation by marriage, but he does not discuss the poem to Mary.

. Barbara Kiefer Lewalski,DonnesAnniversaries and the Poetry of Praise: The Creation of a Symbolic Mode

(Princeton, N.J., ), .



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epitaph run intricate lines of familial and Catholic patronage but, as well, lines

of association between the feminine domains of genealogy and of Mo the r

Church and of Drydens final claim to mastery.

Through the intermarriage of his wifes Catholic Howard relations with the

Bedingfelds of Norfolk, Dryden would have known the Pastons of Norfolk and,subsequently, the Framptons of Wiltshire. Mary Frampton was related by mar-

riage to the Pastons, specifically to Margaret Eyre Paston, the subject of an epi-

taph by Dryden. Margaret Eyre Pastons mother was descended from a Beding-

feld father and a Paston mother (Margaret Eyre Paston had married her grand-

mothers second cousin). The Pastons, in turn, were related to Drydens wifes

family also through the Bedingfelds: three years before Margarets marriage to

Edward Paston in , her uncle and mothers brother, Sir Henry Bedingfeld,

second Baronet, had lost his first wife, Anne Howard, the only surviving child

and heiress of Charles Howard, Viscount Andover, Elizabeth Howard Drydens

recusant brother. That is, Margaret Eyre Pastons uncle had married the niece of

Drydens wife. Three years after Margaret Pastons death, her widowed husband,Edward Paston, married Mary Framptons eldest sister, Jane.

These lines of intermarriage and circumstance linking Ma ry Frampton

and Dryden suggest a labyrinth to which the woman holds the key: Elizabeth

. Rosamond Meredith, The Eyres of Hassop, and Some of Their Connections, from the Test Act to

EmancipationRecusant History (): . The connection between the Drydens and the Beding-

felds was still active in when Sir Henry Bedingfelds son, Henry Arundell Bedingfeld, was traveling

on the Continent with his tutor, whose diary records several visits with Father Thomas Dryden at

Bornhem; see Thomas Marwoods Diary. Clearly, relatives who went into orders did not disappear but

continued an active role within the family. The Dominican Clement Paston, of Barningham, for exam-

ple, is visited, along with two sisters, aunts Margaret and Anne Bedingfeld, of the English Carmelite

convent at Lierre, where grand-uncle Edmund Bedingfeld was afterward Canon. From the Diary,

those whom we glimpse abroad include the earl of Ailesbury with his second wife; Henry Stafford

Howard, brother of Anastasia Stafford and son of Viscount Stafford; and Thomas Eyre, either Margaret

Eyres father, of Hassop, or her brother.

. In the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, lines of the Paston family in Norfolk had become

established at Appleton and at Town Barningham, while Oxnead Hall in the east remained the seat of

the senior branch; see E. B. Burstall, The Pastons and Their Manor of Binham,Norfolk Archaeology

(): . Margaret Paston survived only to the age of twenty-three. We do not know when the

poet wrote her epitaph, although Rosamond Meredith has suggested that Dryden might have spent time

in in Norfolk with his wifes Bedingfeld connections and written the epitaph for Margaret as a

gesture of sympathy to his host (Meredith, The Eyres of Hassop, ). See also Meredith, A

Derbyshire Family in the Seventeenth Century: The Eyres of Hassop and Their Forfeited Estates,

Recusant History (): .

. Her grandmother, Margaret Paston, outlived Margaret Eyre Paston by over a decade.

. Jane was the heiress of the three surviving daughters of Richard Frampton, who is described as a promi-

nent papist of Biddestone, Wiltshire, in a list of for the House of Lords (Williams, Catholic

Recusancy in Wiltshire, , nn. , ). Richard Frampton had four daughters; the only son, William,

died before Mary was born. At least a decade before Marys death, one of the daughters, Elizabeth, died



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Howard Dryden and her Roman Catholic mother, Elizabeth Cecil; Margaret

Eyre Paston and her mother and grandmother; Anne Howard Bedingfeld; Jane

Frampton Paston; and Marys second sister Catharine Frampton Stourton, who

commissioned the marble commemorative tablet and Drydens inscription for

the wall of the Abbey Church of SS. Peter and Paul at Bath.

In the necessity toexpand and return alternatively, such a twisting feminine underground of lines

weaves tightly together counties and families and faith. Behind such a domestic

map of genealogyits fascination with patterns of connection and return, its

drama of property, titles, and heirsDryden may safely sound the depths of a

private, poetic genealogy. By the end of his life the poet has inhabited the writ-

ers he translates so long that they are his family; his wandering has been an in-

terior journey until he becomes them.

Th e D u c h e ss o f O r mo n d e : C o s t l y M o u l d a n d M il l e n n i u m

The verse epistles ofFables contain a debate about genealogy and inheritance,birthright and blessing. And the competing domestic voices are not only feminine

and masculine or wife and bachelor but also more subtly those of Esau and Jacob,

the firstborn and the second lineprimogeniture versus its subversion. When

we remember the vicious accusations of deceit and Eastern softness that Dryden

had been answering since his conversion to Roman Catholicism, and imagine as

well the burden of his own personal disappointment and misgivings, his reminder

in the portrait of cousin Driden that the descent of Israels chosen was not from

the hunter but from the shepherd begins to look more interesting. In fact, the

duchess and the country justice sound like the last contending voices in the de-

fense of another Jacob who has wrestled a long night for his blessing.

To Her Grace the Duchess of Ormonde begins and ends in genealogy, andit contemplates the failure of a male lineage. In the background hover family

tragedies: the duke and duchess of Ormonde never had another son after their

unmarried. A genealogical chart for the Framptons of Dorset appears in John Hutchins, The History and

Antiquities of the County of Dorset, d ed., ed. W. Shipp and J. W. Hudson, vol. (Wakefield, England,

), . Jane Frampton was named for their Catholic mother, Jane Cottington, of Fonthill-Gifford,

Wiltshire, whose great-uncle had been Francis Cottington, baron, Chancellor and Under Treasurer of the

Exchequer to Charles I. Francis Cottington had re converted for the third time to Roman Catholicism

before he died at the English seminary in Valladolid. See theDNB, s.v. Francis Cottington;A History of

Wiltshire: The Victoria History of the Counties of England, vol. (Oxford, ), ; and Williams, Catholic

Recusancy in Wiltshire, . The most recent biography is Martin J. Havran, Caroline Courtier: The Life of

Lord Cottington (London, ).

. For a discussion of Bath Abbey, those interred there, and the inscriptions, see John Britton, The History

and Antiquities of Bath Abbey Church (London, ).



13/26

first died in aged six months; and in July , while she was in Ireland,

Mary Somersets brother Charles, heir to the Beaufort title, was killed in a coach

accident in Wales, thirty-eight years old. Her father never recovered from the

shock and died in January .

Dryden is addressing his praises to a Plantagenet, of the race divine, thelongest-reigning royal house in English history. Marys father, Henry Somerset,

was created the first duke of Beaufort by Charles II in in part because of his

noble descent from King Edward III by John de Beaufort, eldest son of John of

Gaunt, duke of Lancaster, by Catherine Swinford, his third wife. Raised a

Catholic, he had conformed during the Interregnum but with the Restoration

proved a firm supporter of the court party. He voted against Exclusion, bore the

queens crown at the coronation of James II, was appointed a gentleman of

the bedchamber, and refused to swear the oath of allegiance to William. H ardly

a match for the Plantagenet origins in the twelfth century, Ormondes line ex-

tends back to his father and his grandsire known to fame. As the last line of the

poem insists, the hoped-for heir will wear the garter of his mothers race,

notOrmondes (who has a venerable name, not a race), but must fill his fathers

place, which in the poem the duke appears, in effect, to have vacated already.

It would not be true to say, however, that James But ler, second duke of

Ormonde, does not have kingly blood. His mother, the Dutch Emilia de Bever-

we e rt, claimed the same great-grandfather as William III. They were both

descended, each through at least one illegitimate child, from William I of Nassau

and Orange, William the Silent (). The second duke of Ormondes fa-

ther, Thomas, earl of Ossory, had been a great favorite of William, prince of

Orange; and the duke himself had been at Williams side from his arrival in

(and in communication with those who prepared the way for the Revolution) and,

in contrast to the duchesss father, was one of the first peers to take the oaths. Hecultivated the kings intimacy in court and especially on the battlefield in hopes for

prefermenthis fathers vice-royalty in Irelandwhich William strategically with-

held. This delicate matter was among the issues, along with Williams favoring

of Dutch officers, that lay behind public gestures of cooling between Ormonde and

. The Complete Peerage, s.v. Beaufort; and theDNB, s.v. Somerset.

. The patent as quoted in Collinss Peerage of England, ed. Sir Egerton Brydges, vols. (London, ),

:. John de Beaufort, however, was himself born a bastard and legitimated only by an act of Parlia-

ment; he was further sullied by being through yet another bastard (not so legitimated), viz., Sir Charles

Somerset. See The Complete Peerage, s.v. Beaufort, . The legitimate male issue of the Plantagenet

line became extinct in .

. Joan of Kent, daughter of Edmund of Woodstock, earl of Kent, and first cousin to Edward III, married

(her third husband) Edward IIIs son, Edward, the Black Prince. Their son was Richard II. She is believed

to have named the Order of the Ga rter, created by Edward III.

D r y d e n s L at e M y s t e r y o f G e n e a l o g y !


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the king in , and to which Dryden refers when he compares the duchess

and Emily, Ormonde and Palamon: And conquering Theseus from his side had

sent / Your generous lord, to guide the Theban government (lines ). But he

had not. Ormonde acquired the lord lieutenancy only after Williams death.

The duke of Ormonde belongs to that house which has helped to subduethe sturdy kerns of Ireland, whose Roman Catholicism deepens the resonance

of the vanquished isle. The Irish country bumpkins who have become accus-

tomed to commands stand in due subjection / Nor hear the reins in any foreign

handnot an ambiguous phrase from this old Jacobite. Ormonde, through his

grandfather and his own aspiration to the lord lieutenancy of Ireland, is implicated

in the Protestant domination of Irish Catholics. He was present at the final scat-

tering at Boyne () of James IIs drive to be acknowledged king, was sent to se-

cure Dublin for William, and afterward entertained William in his own castle at

Kilkenny, for which services he was made a member of the Irish Privy Council.

The second duke of Ormonde participates in what Dryden refers to in To

Sir Godfrey Kneller () as a stupid military state. The poets satiric associ-ation of dullness with a military figure has been noted by one critic ofThe Hind

and the Pantheras a rather careful suggestion in its ambiguous final portrait of

James II. In the Hinds fable, this Catholic lion famed as a naval hero must be de-

clawed and recast as the prince of Toleration; and accordingly he appears in

the guise of a mild-mannered poultry farmerbut one almost immobile and

deaf under a dead weight of blunt single-mindedness. A more aggressive dunce,

however, haunts the hyperbole of the letter dedicating the Fables to the duke,

who as a youth had worried his grandfather by proving a consistently mediocre

student, one whose only chance for distinction lay through exercises. In the

dedication, under cover of the high sounds of righteous indignation (Cursd be

the Poet), Dryden smoothly dive rts his celebration of Or mo n des scientificknowledge of warfare into a startling diatribe against Athletick Brutes:

Science distinguishes a Man of Honour from one of those Athletick

Brutes whom undeservedly we call Heroes. Cursd be the Poet, who

. In from Anne; Historical Manuscripts Commission, Calendar of the Manuscripts of the Marquess of

Ormonde, K. P., n.s., vol. (London, ), xxxviii. Winn is mistaken when he asserts that Ormonde was

lord lieutenant at the time Dryden sent an extravagantly complimentary letter to Mary Somerset, in late

December (Dryden and His World, ).

. For a discussion of the implications of this portrait for Drydens work in The Hind and the Panther, see

Steven N. Zwicker, The Paradoxes of Tender Conscience,ELH (): .

. Calendar of the Manuscripts of the Marquess of Ormonde, viixiv. At fourteen, he was established in Christ

Church, Oxford, where at the end of eighteen months residence . . . it was discovered that Ormonde was

in need of a plainer method of teaching than the University afforded. Probably whatever he learned there

was due less to Aldrich than to Drelincourt, who wrote a graphic description of the efforts to teach



15/26

first honourd with that Name a meer Ajax, a Man-killing Ideot.

The Ulysses of Ovid upbraids his Ignorance that he understood not

the Shield for which he pleaded: There was engraven on it, Plans of

Cities, and Maps of Countries, which Ajax could not comprehend,

but lookd on them as stupidly as his Fellow-Beast the Lion.

One poet in conscience cannot honor as hero a Man-killing Ideot. The royal

beast with and for whom Ormonde has been fighting has provoked the frenzy of

this digressionalthough why not the duke as well?

In the world of the poem, the duchesss lord is always absent but expected.

We know that for nine years from to Ormond spent every summer

in the field. After the duchess and their three daughters sailed to Ireland in the

summer of, he joined them briefly at Kilkenny in October, and left almost

immediately for Dublin to take his seat in the House of Lords whence, as ex-

citement was wanting, he set out again for London in November. He made

another trip to Ireland in , from August to November, where the duchess had

grown increasingly discontent during the spring, if the weary closing of her let-

ter of May to Ormondes secretary, Benjamin Portlock, is an indication:

Here are two packets come in to-night and on Sunday last, but not one letter

from my Lord. Pray desire him to do me the favour but to write two words once

in our posts, and I am satisfied. He makes an appearance, however, in one line

() as a mourner over her burning fever, like young Vespasian; but Titus, the

son of the Roman Empe ror Titus Flavius Vespasianus, mourned the burning

of the Temple while having commanded the siege of Jerusalem. Has he com-

manded the siege of the duchessor has Dryden?

The duke is not only a shadowy figure; he also casts a shadow. The poem sub-

tly suggests that the duchesss background and proper world is Chaucerian and

kingly, like that of the poet. She has the richer blood in this marriage, and her

family represents the oldest tradition of English monarc h y. Her marriage to

Ormonde has brought her into the distasteful business of keeping the kerns

hap p y. The duchesss beauty does not inspire deeds of arms but covers the

Blood, rapines, massacres of Protestant conquest. As soon as she sets foot on

Hibernia, the poet revives the memory of Roman Catholic Irelands recent

past, which the duchesss Angel-Face is claimed to cover or compensate for

Ormonde the Latin tongue, in which he improved so much as his love of it permitted, and arithmetic,

in which the multiplication table was a hindrance (p. x).

. Poems of Dryden, ed. Kinsley, :.

. Calendar of the Manuscripts of the Marquess of Ormonde, xxii.

. Ibid., xxx.

. Ibid., .



16/26

details of the tears of three campaigns, not all forgot. In fact, in a reversal,

Irelands conquered state uneasily reflects back her image. While allowing her

beauty to be used as palliation for past wars and present subjugation, Mary

Somerset serves as the precious mould for breeding all the future Ormondes.

The veiled threat of the command to produce an heir (line ), although readby some critics as that gentle injunction to human fertility, is the reason why

she cannot afford to get sick. Heaven has invested too much in her to let her

die (such over-cost bestowed, / As scarce it could afford to flesh and blood), just

as English nobility like the Ormondes, who have heavily invested as landowners

in Ireland, have their financial interests there to protect. Like the Holy Isle,

the duchess undergoes her own internal, civil warfare. The poem opens on the

high note of literary beauties and literary succession and rebirth but descends to

more urgent biological and medical perspectives. Under the pressure of these

concerns, Illustrious Ormond becomes soft, vulnerable to the invasive scrutiny

of learned enquiryincluding the poets.

Drydens word softness, difficult in tone, had always been a euphemismfor feminine graces and the domestic. As late as , in his letters to amateur

poet Elizabeth Thomas, he first praises her verses for being too good to be a

Womans. . . .Tis not gallant, I must confess, to say this of the fair sex; but most

certain it is, that they generally write with more Softness than Strength. In a

later, less indulgent and hastier note, to you, who write only for your Diversion,

he recommends Theocritus over Virgils pastorals as more appropriate both in

Softness of Thought, and Simplicity of Expression. Even more interesting for

our subject is the much earlier moment in the preface toAnnus Mirabilis()

when Dryden defends his poem to the duchess of York as requiring softness of

expression and smoothness of measure, rather than the height of thought,

. Winn,Dryden and His World, .

. The language of the wife as her husbands financial gamble or investment intrudes oddly in An Epitaph

on the Lady Whitmore:

Rest in this Tomb, raisd at thy Husbands cost,

Here, sadly summin what he had, & lost.

Come, Virgins, ere in equall bands you joine

Come first, and Offer at Her sacred shryne:

Pray but for halfe the Virtues of this Wife

Compound for all the rest with longer life

(Works of John Dryden, vol. , Poems , ed. Earl Miner

[Berkeley and Los Angeles, ], , lines )

. On the poets use of softness to express attitudes about gender, see Laura L. Runge, The Softness of

Expression, and the Smoothness of Measure: A Model of Gendered Decorum from Drydens Criticism,

Essays in Literature (): .

. The Letters of John Dryden, ed. Charles E. Ward (Durham, N.C., ), , .



17/26

because of its female subject. The feminine is soft and tender like a breast

and should only be a sanctuary for love: You lodged your countrys cares within

your breast; (The mansion where soft love should only rest:) / And ere our

foes abroad were overcome, / The noblest conquest you had gained at home

(lines ). The association of soft love with the feminine breast, with man-sion, the home and domestiche further encloses and thus protects soft love

and mansion in parenthesesas distinct from the manly mind, which serves,

and roams, abroad, recurs throughout the career and culminates in the duchess

of Or m on des fie ry breast. In To Her Grace the Duchess of Ormonde, the

poets sanctuary of softness has darkened, for it signifies illness and withdrawal.

From being the fair bearer of the message blessed, the duchess audibly merges

with the rustle of a sickroomso soft a messengerwhere hours become de-

pressions like the soft recesses in a cushion.

Yet Dryden regrets his own circumstances in this age as he mourns the de-

jection of female beauty. If the duchess absorbs some old, uncomfortable feelings

of disappointment, subjugation, and dependence, she is no less the representa-tive of divine poetry with its venerable lineage from an earlier age; of ancient

Roman Catholicism; of a royal race yet to be restored. Yet her nobility and beauty

have become spellbound in a bad age. Genealogy is used to suggest that a wife

of kingly ancestry, like a great poet required to serve a debased court, must beau-

tify a half-Dutch Williamite and a military fool. Dryden presses on those ele-

ments of his own career as the ductile So ul that have displayed consenting

softness and softening: after all, he has worked to smooth language to serve oth-

ers who are busied with destruction, performed as the grateful soil to anothers

tilling, and, once abandoned by the Stuarts, has been in danger of languishing.

. Poems of Dryden, ed. Kinsley, :. In this context, one recalls Drydens famous criticism of Donnes

Amorous Verses, where Nature only shoud reign; he perplexes the Minds of the Fair Sex with nice

Speculations of Philosophy, when he shoud ingage their hearts, and entertain them with the softnesses

of Love. See The Discourse of Satire, in The Works of John Dryden, vol. , Poems,

ed. A. B. Chambers and William Frost (Berkeley and Los Angeles, ), p. , lines .

. In the dedicatory epistle to the duchess of Ormonde prefacing The Comical History of Don Quixo t e

(London, ), Thomas DUrfey, like Dryden, dwells on the dukes absence from his wife and children.

The duke of Ormondes zealous fighting abroad for his king and country laves him Scarce leisure to dry

your Tears up for the last Parting, or pay his Paternal Blessing to his dear Children at home; the duchess

must pass troublesome Hours of waiting for his return. But there are other troubles: DUrfey speaks as

well of her need for heavenly protection against a threatening personal trial, the expected Hour of

Trouble. Presumably he is referring to a difficult pregnancy, but the ominous language is startling: And

now particularly, may the whole Hierarchy of Angels protect ye in the expected Hour of Trouble; and may

the Rejoycing Worthy Part oth World be Blest with another Noble, Loyal, and Valiant Ossory Great and

Admird as his Illustrious, and never to be forgotten Grandfather. I am grateful to Steven Zwicker for

directing my attent ion to this dedication.



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To Her Grace the Duchess of Ormonde, if a panegyric with all the sounds

of the poet on his best behavior, is finally also a dream-fantasy in which softness

rebels against itself. Her body becomes another embattled isle, a civil war in

Paradise where no Adam or Ormonde but rather a malignant atom lurks. The

softness of a breast becomes feverish: Dryden has set aflame that holy of holiesas the beseiged Temple of Jerusalem, an immolation he admits to, if shame-faced

(he shifts responsibility to the duke), along with his intention to eulogize the

lady (a most detested act of gratitude). The duchess lives, yet she suffers a de-

flation that is more than a sea-change. Whether pointing to a historical or per-

sonal moment, her curious enchantment awaits its correction. And the peculiarly

embalmed, unresolved vision of unfruitful remains and dimness of a shade

will be answered by the poised, healthy, and fruitful bachelordom of To My

Honourd Kinsman, who smoothes out, not over, differences. Chaste becomes,

after all, not waste (as lines suggest) but the peaceful abundance of one

unchased; manna rains its softness when victors and conquerors are undone.

Cousin Driden of Chesterton is a master of the prefix un-, and To MyHonourd Kinsman judiciously undoes the previous epistle.

Cou sin D r iden : O l d Test ament Myst e r y and Re t u r n

The whole bachelor paradise of To My Honourd Kinsman is a womans gift.

John Driden was a second son who inherited the estate of Chesterton through

his mother, Honor Beville; and there is a stalwart and determined feminine help-

meet in the poem from Genesis: Esau was a cunning hunter, a man of the

field; and Jacob was a plain man, dwelling in tents. And Isaac loved Esau, because

he did eat of his venison: but Rebekah loved Jacob (:). In this poem,

John Driden is the domestic Jacob; and behind the moderating justice ofthe peace is not an angel of soft purity but a strong-willed mother who has

complained to God and been answered with the knowledge of His plan for her

children: the elder shall serve the younger. Confidently, she takes advantage of

her older husbands blindness for the sake of her favorite and younger son, whom

she advises to lie. Her maternal voice has the quiet, unequivocal authority of the

Almighty: Obey my voice according to that which I command thee, says

Rebekah to Jacob after telling him what she has overheard. When Jacob protests

that Isaac will discover him by his smooth skin and will curse instead of bless

him, she reveals nothing of her plan but sends him out for two kids of the goats,

closing all argument, Upon me be thy curse, my son: only obey my voice and

go fetch me them (:). She orders her feminine son into masculine disguise;and Dryden obeys.



19/26

In a letter to Mrs. Steward, Dryden considers the verse epistles a pair of com-

peting poems. And his own preference is clear: I always thought my Verses to

my Cousin Driden were the best of the whole; and to my comfort the Town

thinks them so. He showed them for inspection to the earl of Dorset and

Charles Montagu and wrote to Mrs. Steward that these patrons

are of opinion that I never writt better. My other friends, are di-

vided in their Judgments which to prefer: but the greater part are

for those to my dear kinsman; which I have corrected with so much

care, that they will now be worthy of his Sight: & do neither of us

any dishonour after our death.

He admitted to Montagu that he had taken pains with the epistle to his cousin

and had used it as a forum and even a monument, a memorial of my own

Principles to all Posterity.

As the smooth-skinned Jacob who cooks and plants, the solitary peacemaker

John Driden (or John Dryden) is a contrast to the disruptive masculine figuresof the poem. Ambitious and warring, Alexander, Hannibal, and of course

William III wander too far. Like Esau who sought his game at a distance from

home, William and his military men may miss their blessing. Jacob, who first ob-

tained Esaus birthright by preparing food, similarly stole his fathers blessing by

staying close to domestic plenitude, the source of his mothers power. And our

poet, though a firstborn son himself and accused of wandering malcontent with

his rambling conscience all the way to Mohamet, is concerned to show the

ways in which he did not stray but has always been close to home with its culti-

vation of abundance. Hel Meccas Plenty change for Roman Want, one satirist

had taunted in . And Dryden has indeed turned the feminine Want of

Roman Egypt, the mansion that was a dangerous breast, into just the EasternPlenty he was accused of seeking. Only it is not the East of Mecca but the East

of Canaan; and rather than a pilgrim to the Shrines of Crowns and Dollers, he

is the one who never left home. He claims his rightful blessing as he blesses his

cousin. Together they reap the fruit of our blessed abode; but in this verse epis-

tle the blessed isle is not an apocalyptic Ireland but contemporary England, and

Ceres is not unemployed but has sown where eer her Chariot flew. The high-

pitched, ethereal strain of the New Testament surrounding the duchesss second

Coming and its imaginary paradise becomes domesticated here. Millenium takes

. Letters of Dryden, ed. Ward, .

. Ibid., .

. Ibid., .

. The Revolter. A Trage-Comedy Acted Between the Hind and the Panther, and Religio Laici, &c. (London, ).



20/26

on an Old Testament plenitude as John Driden promises blessings and food for

all (lines ).

The contrasts between the two epistles are quite clear. From the bright

heights and stately measures of a cosmic pavane that endlessly returns beauty

and poets to their rightful place, the epistle to the duchess descends into a darkfable of failed prophecy. The complicated tone and the ladys unspecified fever ex-

press the strain of covering yet revealing an imperfect world of civil wars and

mortality, of eclipsed virtue, and a marriage where one of the partners is absent.

The poem to John Driden begins by assuming vexation, physical illness, and

anxious cares, strife and civil rage. But the speaker soon shifts from civil to

domestic strife, and he regrets and dismisses marriage as the impossible fiction of

a union that defies physical laws. The couple eventually separate into themselves;

the poem notes physical evidence, believes physical laws. The bachelor patriot and

peacemaker, Adam, stands alone; but also the peacemaking duchess curiously

stands alone, while she stands in for her ambitious and expensive shadowy

lord, for whom she must be messenger, harbinger, pledge, and widow. The poemto the duchess begs the question of where Ormonde (or the duchess herself, for

that matter) exactly is: in England or Ireland? on the Continent? But even the

title alone of the poem to Cousin Driden plants him firmly in the English soil

of Chesterton in the county of Huntington; he is neither sailing to Ireland nor

dashing off to the Continent. He is clearly poised in place, even as he moves be-

tween country and court. His oscillation produces balance and stasis through its

constant, careful calibration of the point where one can stand between, and bal-

ance, extremes of baits, snares, costs, suits, doctors, and wars in order to compose

civic and personal harmony.

Dryden addresses not a patron of peerless pedigree, not even one of his wifes

extended family, but his own re la ti on. John Driden, who shares the poets

. Swift, describing the French ambassador to Stella, says that he is a fine gentleman, something like the

Duke of Ormonde, and just such an expensive man;DNB, s.v. James Butler, .

. Other instances of his writing to or for his own relatives include the early Lines in a Letter to his Lady

Cousin, Honor Driden (), the sister of John Driden of Chesterton, which were written when the

poet was at Cambridge; the ephemeral Impromptu Lines Addressed to his Cousin, Mrs. Creed, in a

Conversation After Dinner on the Origin of Names; and an undated epitaph to Erasmus Lawton, the

son of his sister, Rose, which is inscribed on a mural tablet in the church of Great Catworth, Huntingdon-

shire. The epitaphs last line muses on another occasion when, as with Isaac and Rebekah, the yo ungest

son is the mothers favoritein this poignant case, her only Son (Rose Dryden was John Lawtons

second wife):

Stay Stranger Stay and drop one Tear

She allways weeps that layd him Here

And will do, will her race is Run

His Fathers fifth, her only Son.

(Poems, ed. Kinsley, :)



21/26

name, shares as well his interest in politics. He, however, is a Protestant and a

Whig; and he will produce no heir. Instead, as justice of the peace and M.P. for

Huntington, and as a relation who represents the poets own network of past and

present family, he acknowledges and balances demands and re solves family

differences. In a letter to Mrs. Steward of March , Dryden notes with hisusual complex protestations of humility the receipt of a turkey hen with

Eggs, & a good young Goose from this noble Benefactour who remembers a

poor, & so undeserving a Kinsman, & one of another persuasion, in matters of

Religion. John Driden as patriot quietly ties the poet back to his Puritan

kin, despite and even because of Drydens conversion to Roman Catholicism.

The poet refers to their common patriot line of male relations who were pe-

nalized in the s for opposition to the government, as Catholics of Drydens

extended family would be in the s. When Dryden, recalling Patriots in

peace says, Such was your generous grandsire, he is saying, in effect, our gen-

e rous grandsire, for Sir Erasmus of Canons Asby was their common grand-

parent. Dryden may be recalling as well, indirectly, Erasmus Drydens son-in-law,Sir John Pickering, Drydens martyred uncle by marriage (and after whom the

poet possibly was named). These two family patriots refused to pay a forced loan

levied by Charles I and passed months in the Gatehouse, Sir John dying short ly

after his release from the ordeal. The phrase in a loathsome dungeon doomed

to die could refer to Sir John; it also recalls the contemporary fate of numerous

English Catholics, including such relations of Drydens wife as Bernard Howard

and James Cecil, fourth earl of Salisbury, and the in-laws of Mary Frampton,

Ed wa rd St ourton and William and Ro b e rt Pa sto n. By uniting his Puritan

. Letters of Dryden, ed. Ward, .

. While a supporter of William, John Driden had always maintained friendly relations with his Roman

Catholic kin, in contrast to Sir Robert Dryden, his eldest brother and heir to the Dryden family seat at

Canons Asby. At the end of the century, William III culminated an escalating series of laws and proclama-

tions against papists with a statute forbidding them to own property. In his will Sir Robert, who was

childless like all his brothers, made an effort to ensure that the poets Catholic sons would not inherit the

family seat; see Winn,Dryden and His World, , n. .

. Ibid., .

. Members of these related families were suspected of Jacobite conspiracy and shared political imprisonment:

Edward Stourton, brother-in-law of Catharine Frampton, had spent time in the Tower in with

William Paston, second earl of Yarmouth (cousin to Jane Framptons husband); with James Cecil, fourth

earl of Salisbury (Elizabeth Drydens relative, earlier incarcerated in and , and to whom Dryden

dedicated his final play); and with Bernard Howard, Elizabeths second cousin. Simultaneously, Robert

Paston, Williams brother, was confined in the Gatehouse on suspicion of treason; see The Complete

Peerage, s.v. Stourton, ; and also Saturday, May , in Narcissus Luttrell,A Brief Historical

Relation of State Affairs, from Septemberto April (Oxford, ), :. William and Robert

Paston had been arrested a few days earlier and released (p. ). The imprisoned William Paston had

served as Treasurer of the Household for James II and been one of the four peers deputed to invite James to

D r y d e n s L at e M y st e r y o f G e n e a l o g y !


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ancestry with his present Catholic and Jacobite experiences, Dryden reveals with

perfectly controlled irony that his conversion is consistent with his familys tra-

dition of courageous patriotism and loyal opposition. Within his cousins em-

brace, this kinsman of another persuasion composes opposites and balances

the poles of his life.In his character of Jacob, cousin Driden performs an even more delicate res-

olution. Domestic softness assumes a triumphant solidity within this masculine

disguise. The description of the female as a stream that wanders at random far

from the source of Gods image recalls another wanderer led astray by

Midianitish wives, with whom this essay began; but Dryden now shifts such

accusations back onto his conquerors, who leave home for foreign shores and are

undone by their conquests. Hannibal returned too late to keep his own, and

the ironic bell of won and undone tolls twice in this poem, and not for the

poet. The duchesss failure to produce an heir becomes subtly conjoined with

Ormondes absence in farflung conquest from the native source she represents.

Meanwhile, the feminine Jacob increases and shares his fruitful fields and abun-dant stores. The poem steadily distinguishes between wandering in the dark as

physicians dowandering at random as apothecaries do through their recipe

files and as warring men do (doctors and warriors killing whole parishes)

and the cool sylvan chase in which this Jacob participates. The chase was once

a fiery game in youth hunting down wily felons, as it was for Dryden when

he wroteMacFlecknoe andAbsalom and Achitophel. In later years that chase has

turned into a circular, coolly chaste yet fruitful activity, the healthy round of life

committed to rich produce. It becomes a pleasurable, purifying exercise, an ac-

knowledgment and embrace of extremes. The sylvan chaseif sometimes a

drudgeing round as the poet described his work on Fables, A Book of Mis-

c e llanyes, to Mrs. Stew a rdbecomes the poets final argument for his ow nmorality and steadiness of faith.

The verse epistles are separated by the poets translation of Chaucers The

Knights Tale,in Fablesentitled Palamon and Arcitea work much concerned

with the sexual chase, with the natural round of birth, reproduction, and death,

and with fame after death. In his epistle to the duchess of Ormonde, Dryden linked

her specifically with Chaucers Emily (lines ); and throughout the transla-

tion he added lines of his own to Chaucers original, notably in part when Emily

prays to Diana and expresses her desire to remain a maid al my lyf, / Ne nevere

return from Sheerness to Whitehall (along with Ailesbury, Feversham, and Middleton). See The Complete

Peerage, s.v. Yarmouth, ; andMemoirs of Thomas, Earl of Ailesbury (London, ), . The father of

William and Robert had been Sir Robert Paston (), M.P. for Castle Rising, Norfolk, and a faithful

supporter and friend of Charles II.



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wol I be no love ne wyf (pt. , lines ), or be with childe (line ).

Dryden increases that reluctance to loathing and adds the language of tyranny:

Like death, thou knowest, I loathe the nuptial state,

And Man, the tyrant of our sex, I hate,

A lowly servant, but a lofty mate;

where love is duty on the female side,

On theirs mere sensual gust, and sought with surly pride

(Part , lines )

Where in Chaucers text Emily asks that, if she must take one, let it be the one

who loves her best, Dryden adds, But Oh! een that avert! I choose it not, / But

take it as the least unhappy lot (lines ). This female viewpoint on marriage

and the sexual hunt prepares for and balances the narrators misogynistic outburst

against sex and marriage in To my Honourd Kinsman. Palamon and Arcite

ends with the poems chief representative of patriarchal values, Theseus, insisting

on the necessity of marriage and reproductiona nod to the biological world ofthe Ormondesand also eulogizing the importance of fame for the honorable but

childless life, which To my Honourd Kinsman professes to do. An equally deep

contest and resolution between the worlds of these epistles and the worlds of the

sexes have their roots, I suggest, not in Chaucer but in the Genesis narrative of

Jacob and Esau, an episode full of antithetical parallels and oracular reversals. The

feminine Jacob serves as a useful compromise between the masculine hunter of

Esau (William III, his officer Ormonde, but also all of the hunters who found

Dryden fair game) and the soft feminine state of domestic withdrawal with its

company of illness and age, its long wait for the conqueror to return homeor

for a Restoration.

In the final decade, in exile within a home that anecdote suggests may nothave been a particularly happy one, the poet lays to rest a complex of feelings that

must have included nostalgia, threat, and disappointment behind softness. He

seeks asylum with his cousin of his own name who, as a second son, is removed

from the pressures of the duchesss biological world. After all, according to one

report it was to cousin Driden of Chesterton, and not the firstborn Sir Robert,

the country justices brother and heir to the Dryden baronetcy and family seat at

Canons Asby, that Dryden sometimes escaped for relief from marital discord. A

letter written to Malone in by a distant cousin, Honor Pigott, makes clear

the poets habit of association with Chesterton and not with the family, who

had never favored his popish connections: I have often heard my Aunt Lyster say

her Cousin John Dryden & his Wife were very Unhappy, for she was of a mostsad temper & He was often Obliged (I suppose for Peace) to seperate from her,



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& my Aunt said spent often those days at Chesterton, for the family never Liked

his Connection. In The Monument of a Fair Maiden Lady, Dryden looks

through the soft and fair and ill, now crystallized as that transparent symbol of

the round of mortality, a timepiece.

M ary Frampt on : Th e Mast e ry of Feminine Gh ost s

The Monument to Mary Frampton briefly anneals and masters the poets fem-

inine, Catholic identity. Conscience appears to be no longer tender but trans-

parently clear:

Below this Marble Monument, is laid

All that Heavn wants of this Celestial Maid.

Preserve, O sacred Tomb, thy Trust consignd:

The Mold was made on purpose for the Mind:

And she woud lose, if at the latter Day

One Atom coud be mixd, of other Clay.

Such were the Features of her heavnly Face,

Her Limbs were formd with such harmonious Grace,

So faultless was the Frame, as if the Whole

Had been an Emanation of the Soul;

Which her own inward Symmetry reveald;

And like a Picture shone, in Glass Anneald.

Or like the Sun eclipsd, with shaded Light:

Too piercing, else, to be sustaind by Sight.

Each Thought was visible that rowld within:

As through a Crystal Case, the figurd Hours are seen.

And Heavn did this transparent Veil provide,

Because she had no guilty Thought to hide.

All white, a virgin-saint, she sought the skies,

For marriage, though it sullies not, it dyes.

. . . . . . . . . . . . . .

A Soul so calm, it knew not Ebbs or Flows,

. James M. Osborn,John Dryden: Some Biographical Facts and Problems (New York, ), . See also

P. D. Mundy, Drydens Dominican SonSir Erasmus Henry Dryden, th Bart.,Notes and Queries

(): . Mundy quotes from a letter of to Malone from Elizabeth Lady Dryden, the eventual

heiress of Canons Asby (the letter appears in Osborn,Biographical Facts and Problems, ). She writes

of Drydens wife and the family: having, to bad conduct before marriage, united bad conduct after-

wards, & having used Mr. Dryden very indifferently, the family confined their attentions to formal tea

visits, as I have heard.



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Which Passion coud but curl; not discompose.

A Female Softness, with a manly Mind:

A Daughter duteous, and a Sister kind:

In Sickness patient; and in Death resignd.

(Lines , )

This otherwise unremarkable poem is curious in its voyeurism: we are suddenly

and familiarly within Mary Frampton. Only there is nothing to spy, nothing

to hide. We watch Marys thoughts roll aroundbut they have become clock-

work. In such a slight epitaph, the poet has traveled quickly to reach this per-

spective of echoing interiority. His passage to within recalls and exceeds the

more sinister invasion of the duchess in her epistle. In both instances the poet

does not peer at a body but transports himself inside it. He imaginatively in-

vades the duchesss anatomy when he wonders How those malignant Atoms

forcd their Way, hinting that an interior weakness acquiesced to the possession,

and he travels with the atoms all the way to her fiery breast. But here, where the

female subject has actually died of disease, he makes no mention of illness, con-

flict, or affect but admires close-up the crystal perspective of inward Symmetry.

The fire of disease, the Temple burning, becomes Glass Anneald. And that

transparency of symmetry becomes his own mastery, like deaths, over the accu-

sations of feminine softness of his soft-headed conversion to Rome.

Mary Frampton is praised for A Female Softness, with a manly Mind, but

the poem contains little that is soft beyond one curl. Mi n d figures pro m i-

nently, rhyming within the second couplet and within each of two triple rhymes,

hardly softened by kind and resigned. If the Mold was made on purpose for

the Mind, softness as vulnerability has disappeared by composing itself into a

transparent Veil; even that curled lip of her soul under the pressure of passion

speaks contempt of discomposure. The mold has become fired glass, a crystal

case. And her souls symmetry, visible within, takes the form of the circular sym-

m et ry of a clock through whose crystal case of her body we watch f ig u rd

Hours. Solitary cousin Driden in his chase and the emblematic hare who runs

the Round, as well as the Boethian cycles rolld around like stars in the poem

to the duchess, pass before our eyes, rowld with the fair maidens dazzling, if

spare, interior movement. The epitaphs confident gaze into her clockworks re-

flects the clear air of dismissal.

Behind the prominence given to genealogy in both poems, Dryden joins his

present Catholic world and its experience of persecution to his own biological

family with its tradition of Protestant martyrs. And he claims his pedigree ofKindred Muses. For while the law of inheritance may insist on the importance



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of descent through the fathers eldest son, the verse epistles introducing Drydens

final expression of literary ease and independence use biology to muse on the

poetic psycheon the circular vagaries of associative thought and descent. A

comfortably roomy home of personal fit, Fablesoffers a tour through the poets

own country house of relations bound by resemblance of genius. And in ToMy Honourd Kinsman, Dryden acknowledges his wandering ways by show-

ing that they were, in the words of The Secular Masque, like the age all of a

piece throughoutthat like the age he had come full circle. He had wandered

but not strayed. The old hope of another Stuart restoration has dimmed; exactly

how that cycle of rebirth would work, that second coming, now looks unclear.

If the English Catholic world of the s presented some difficult realities,

its political and spiritual underground also offered an imaginatively useful

metaphor ready to hand. Embedded in the domestic with its ill health, age,

and dependents, Dryden turned domesticity into a poetics of genealogy, inheri-

tance, and homecoming. Adopting and then dismissing fabular feminine voices

dead and alive, in elegy and through contesting couples, he eulogized the ghost ofsoftness and buried threats of weakness. Through translation as the rather wifely

activity of reimagining for great poets their minds and writings, he succeeded in

reimagining himself as well. And he built his own house according to personal

taste and whimhe declared his own lineage in Homers line of masculine ve-

hemence and originality. Lord of that estate, he reigns supreme, like his Protestant

and bachelor cousin at Chesterton, whose house we never enter nor even seri-

ously imagine. The emblem of that late poem is not the great country house but

an indirect movement home, the hare wandering its circle of life. Dryden appears

to prepare for death by assembling a miscellany of family in his house of fables,

and the lines of inheritance we follow, like the order of the poems, are not linear

but digressive and circular, an internalized round, like the circle wandered andfilled by the emblematic hare in To My Honourd Kinsman. The deceased fem-

inine body of the Fair Maiden allows us to peer into an eerily transparent version

of Drydens more complex mental round, his opaque epic. Under the cover of dis-

enfranchised domesticity passed in recording family lineage and observing rites of

passage, and occupied in the preservation of family fruits while awaiting the heros

return, this exile has returned and has secured his own blessing.

Rutgers University


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