Tea at Trianon: On John Milton and the Gunpowder Plot

John Wilson Croker on Marie-Antoinette

"We have followed the history of Marie Antoinette with the greatest diligence and scrupulosity. We have lived in those times. We have talked with some of her friends and some of her enemies; we have read, certainly not all, but hundreds of the libels written against her; and we have, in short, examined her life with– if we may be allowed to say so of ourselves– something of the accuracy of contemporaries, the diligence of inquirers, and the impartiality of historians, all combined; and we feel it our duty to declare, in as a solemn a manner as literature admits of, our well-matured opinion that every reproach against the morals of the queen was a gross calumny– that she was, as we have said, one of the purest of human beings."

~from History of the Guillotine by John Wilson Croker, 1844

Edmund Burke on Marie-Antoinette

"It is now sixteen or seventeen years since I saw the queen of France, then dauphiness, at Versailles; and surely there never lighted on this orb, which she hardly seemed to touch, a more delightful vision. I saw her just above the horizon, decorating and cheering the elevated sphere she had just begun to move in, glittering like a morning star full of life and splendor and joy. Oh, what a revolution....Little did I dream that I should have lived to see such disasters fall upon her, in a nation of gallant men, in a nation of men of honor and of cavaliers! I thought ten thousand swords must have leaped from their scabbards, to avenge even a look which threatened her with insult. But the age of chivalry is gone; that of sophisters, economists, and calculators has succeeded...."

~Edmund Burke, October 1790

Tuesday, April 16, 2024

On John Milton and the Gunpowder Plot

From LitHub:

King James I died on 27 March 27th, 1625, some six weeks after Milton was admitted to Christ’s College. Cambridge produced an anthology of Latin and Greek verse, Cantabrigiensium Dolor et Solamen, to mark the death of the monarch and the accession of his son, Charles.

As a first-year undergraduate, at a college with little representation in the volume—King’s College men contributed 16 poems to the anthology, compared to only two from Christ’s—Milton would hardly have expected to feature, regardless of how lofty a sense of his poetic facility he might already have developed. (Although he might have observed that the precocious Thomas Randolph, who had matriculated at Trinity College less than year earlier, contributed a longish Latin poem to the Cambridge anthology later in 1625 for the marriage of Charles I and Henrietta Maria.)

The closest Milton got to writing an epitaph for James are four Latin epigrams—pointed, witty verses that in ancient Greece and Rome were originally inscribed on tombs—between four and twelve lines in length, all entitled In Proditionem Bombardicam (On the Gunpowder Plot), and grouped in the 1645 Poems with a fifth epigram on the topic of gunpowder itself, In Inventorum Bombardae (On the Inventor of Gunpowder); and the 226-line In Quintum Novembris (On the Fifth of November), which turned out to be the longest Latin poem that Milton would ever write.

Milton’s topic in these poems is James’s escape from assassination near the beginning of his reign, when the conspiracy of a group of Roman Catholics to blow up king and Parliament was foiled on November 5th, 1605. In Quintum Novembris was probably written in Cambridge in the autumn of 1626 to commemorate the foiling of the Gunpowder Plot—the headnote in the 1645 Poems informs us that the poet was Anno aetatis 17, a phrase which is usually used in the volume to mean his age at the time of composition—and it can reasonably be presumed, given that the epigrams seem to prepare the way for the much fuller treatment of the same topic in In Quintum Novembris, that they were composed around the same time. (Read more.)