Panegyric and Satire: The Hanoverians Enter EnglishLiterature

I want to begin by thanking Professor Volk-Birke and

the organizers of this conference for asking me to give this

lecture. This is my first trip to Germany, and that

opportunity adds to my gratitude. I’m delighted to be here,

in Germany and in Hannover. I’ve also learned a lot about

the Hanoverian dynasty in preparing for this talk, and it is

always gratifying to acquire new and more exact knowledge. I

say more exact, because I have acquired in my recent

research a new respect for the stability and continuity that

the first two Georges actually brought to British politics.

To say that is to confess that in 18th-century Anglo-

American literary studies the prevailing view of the first

two Georges has been guided by the powerfully negative views

of the Hanoverian kings of the Tory satirists, mainly Pope

and Swift, rather than by the Whig politicians with whom

George I made common cause when he arrived in 1714 and of

course by the writers, many employed by those politicians,

who sought to exalt the new sovereign.

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So when I began to think about this lecture and told

friends about it, I joked that the conference was to

celebrate the 300th anniversary of the Hanoverian accession

to the British throne, and then added that perhaps the

conference was meant simply to commemorate it, rather like

the current 100th anniversary of World War I. But I now have

a much better understanding of the first two Hanoverians and

even real admiration for them and their achievements as

monarchs during what were exciting and expansionary if

dangerous times for Britain on the world stage. They deserve

in fact a lot of credit for saving Britain from a return of

violent sectarian political strife. And George I, as the

historian, Ragnhild Hatton, puts it was not the stolid, pop-

eyed philistine of Tory and Jacobite propaganda but rather

“in tune with Early Enlightenment ideas both in domestic and

foreign affairs,” and although he ruled in Hanover as an

absolute monarch he was progressive and attentive to the

poor and needy. George’s motto – “Never desert a friend,

strive to do justice to every person, fear no one” –

according to Hatton accurately sums up his achievements in

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the electorate. It’s also worth noting that Voltaire

dedicated his Henriade (1723) to George, and in 1726 he was

allowed to find refuge in England and received financial aid

from the king and from the Prince of Wales.

To be sure, except for music, the first George seems to

have had little use for the arts, although Hatton says he

read French authors and that his “general interest in

philosophical exchange of ideas had given him the European

reputation of a ‘modern’ ruler.” He is reported to have

said, in his limited English, that he hated “all boets and

bainters.” Nonetheless, the literary record of the first few

years of George I’s reign is full of the most extravagant

panegryical poems you can imagine, as well as a much smaller

number of satirical, Jacobite-inspired verses. That the

arrival of a new and foreign king was greeted by an

outpouring of what has become effectively and perhaps

necessarily ephemeral panegyrical verse is I think important

for literary and political history. As my title will tell

you, I want to begin with a selection of poetic panegyrics

that greeted George when he arrived in London in 1714. And

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subsequently to discuss (again a small selection) the

panegyrical verse that marked birthdays and other important

royal events during his reign and that of his son, George

II. In part, my object is to marvel at the enduring

tradition of royal panegyrical verse, which survives for

modern readers when it does only as a literary curiosity. I

think you may well be amused by these samples of versified

flattery. Panegyrical verse was not only occasional but

meant for wide public consumption, a form of advertising as

it were, written to mark newsworthy events, to celebrate

political and military heroes, or to praise or to mourn

aristocrats and monarchs. A good deal of this verse is

opportunistic as well as occasional, with two practical

purposes: panegyrical, in an age when advancement depended

often upon aristocratic and political patronage, written to

curry favor with the great and the powerful; satirical,

written to protest what poets saw as unjust or immoral and

to attack the powerful and the corrupt (and thereby to

please the powerful enemies of such targets and to earn

patronage). But of course latter day readers like us can

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much more easily appreciate and value satirical verse, since

the political, economic, and moral corruption they attack is

still very much with us. Additionally, I would venture that

most of us are not monarchists and find royal panegyrics at

best amusing.

Poets we now consider major were hardly averse to

producing panegyrical verse. There are parts of Pope’s

Windsor Forest that celebrate the powerful and the powers that

be: in Windsor Forest “Rich Industry sits smiling on the

Plains,/And Peace and Plenty tell, a STUART reigns.” (ll.

41-2); and that Stuart monarch is Queen Anne, who marks the

end of the war with France through the Peace of Utrecht: “At

length great ANNA said – Let Discord cease!/She said, the

World obey’d, and all was Peace!” (ll. 327-8). Panegyric is

by definition flattery, and almost automatically can slide

into the obviously exaggerated, formulaic and predictable.

But a defense of what looks like mere flattery to us is

possible if we historicize the genre and try to imagine what

contemporaries would have made of such verses. Here is one

instance of what I would call a possible exception to those

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dangers of instant ephemerality, a panegyric by Matthew

Prior, celebrating the coronation of James II and his queen

in 1685: On the Coronation of the Most August Monarch K. James II. And

Queen Mary. The 23rd of April, 1685. The opening two stanzas, edited

somewhat, are totally extravagant, of course, in their

praise:

I.

No, ‘tis in vain. What Limits can controul

The Rovings of my active Soul?

That Soul that scorns to be to Place confin’d,

But leaves its dull Companion Earth behind . . .

II.

Thus methinks I see the Barge,

Pleas’d with the Sacred weight of its Majestick charge;

Argo a less Glorious Freight.

From impoverish’d Colchos brought;

The Cretan Sea now vanquish’d must confess

Its Burthen meaner, and its Tryumph less;

Since richer Thames doth James and Mary bear,

HE great as Jove, SHE as Europa Fair.

Prior was a young man of twenty-one in 1685, not yet the

distinguished diplomat and major poet he would become, so

this is the effort of an aspiring and inexperienced writer,

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the ambitious son of a carpenter, a scholarship boy who had

managed to go to Westminster School and then to St. John’s

college, Cambridge. Although nowadays readers no longer

tolerate panegyrical excess, the point of such poems was

precisely and overtly to glorify, to invent extravagant

praise, with truth or accuracy irrelevant. No one,

presumably, was fooled or was meant to take this fantasy

seriously or literally. Like other panegyrics, Prior’s poem

is a deliberately artificial almost ritualized vision, not

an observation of reality, and these opening stanzas make

that clear; the speaker leaves the dull earth; his imagined

version of the royal couple transforms them into figures who

outdo classical legend (although that last line is a bit

maladroit, with James as Jove, the bull who rapes Europa,

his queen, Mary!). As these things go (and there were

literally hundreds of them in the Restoration and even later

in the first three or four decades of the 18th century),

Prior’s youthful effort is smooth, relatively controlled and

elegant, not especially pompous and with a strong sense in

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the opening stanza of dialogue, of something like speech

rather than pure poetic rant.

I’m not sure that among the panegyrics greeting

George’s arrival in Britain that I’ve read I found anything

quite as smoothly elegant as Prior’s poem. But just about

all of them have a metrical fluency and professional ease,

testimony to the shared poetic culture of the period where

occasional verse was a familiar and indeed popular form of

expression suitable for public commemorative occasions.

Indeed. Laurence Eusden, a fellow of Trinity College and

prominent Whig poet, greeted George in 1714 with A Letter to Mr.

Addison, On the King’s Accession to the Throne, which imagines all of

Britain inspired to write verses on the new monarch:

Old Age, transported, feels a youthful Fire,

And trembling, strikes the long-neglected Lyre.

Poetick Youths their Infant Pinions try,

And every callow Muse attempts to fly.

Ev’n those, by Nature not design’d to Sing,

Who never tasted the Castalian Spring,

Forgetful of their unperforming Parts,

In homely Doggrel vent their honest Hearts:

At the high Theme they impotently aim,

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And sacrifice to Loyalty their Fame.

While dextrous Virgins nobler Arts pursue,

And with old Glories interweave the New:

Watchful the Slumbers of the Night they break,

And teach the curious Needle how to speak

One such poetic effort was the dramatist, Susannah

Centlivre’s 1715 short poem, A Poem. Humbly Presented to His most

Sacred Majesty GEORGE, King of Great Britain, France, and Ireland Upon His

Accession to the Throne, who begins by admitting her lack of skill

at verse: “Vouchsafe, Great Prince, to hear my humble

Muse,/And let my Zeal my want of Skill excuse.” Centlivre’s

short poem celebrates George in moderate, specifically

political terms for ending faction and division by casting

out Queen Anne’s Tory ministers: “A wicked Race of Men, for

private Ends,/ Had rais’d her baffled Foes, and sunk her

Friends,” but Heaven has sent George and “revers’d our

low’ring Fate,/And by thy destin’d ARM retriev’d the State.”

But Centlivre’s poetic modesty is rare. These poetic

greetings in 1714 to the new king are almost invariably

extravagant if professionally competent productions. One of

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the best of these poems, fairly restrained when it comes to

panegyric extravagance, is George: A Poem Humbly Inscrib’d to the

Right Honourable the Earl of Warrington. By Mr. Brereton, of Brazen-

Nose College, Oxford (1715). I was struck by this poem

because it is unique in making a point that I myself had

puzzled over: Georg Ludwig, Elector of Hanover, one is

surprised to find, was the first George to sit on the throne

of a nation whose patron saint since the end of the 14th

century had been St. George, a martyred Roman soldier

converted to Christianity (to be sure George is also the

patron saint of Aragon, Catalonia, Georgia, Lithuania,

Palestine, Portugal, Germany, and Greece, as well as of

Moscow, Istanbul, Genoa and Venice --second to St. Mark.) He

is also the patron saint of soldiers, cavalry, farmers, Boy

Scouts, butchers, of sufferers from leprosy, plague, and

syphilis, and of archers. And of course Spenser’s Red Cross

Knight in The Faerie Queen is meant to recall St. George. The

roll call of male English kings includes all those Edwards,

Edgars, Williams, Henrys, Richards, James, and Charles, even

a John, but no monarch chose a name that would resonate with

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the familiar memorable lines from Shakespeare’s Henry V as

his troops besiege Harfleur: “I see you stand like

greyhounds in the slips,/Straining upon the start. The

game’s afoot;/ Follow your spirit, and, upon this charge/Cry

God for Harry, England and St. George!” But this donnish

Oxford poet catches the significance of this the first King

George in a clever political allegory to be found in the

mythic moment:

Ills which have been do oft arrive again;

A George in Britain may not always Reign:

Tho’ sure the Omen does no Ill infold,

That now We first a Royal George behold.

Nor wholly Thou a Parallel disclaim

With the old Saint and Champion of thy Name:

Since the known Legend, whether feign’d or true,

Is a clear Type of Wonders Thou should’st do:

Discord, the Dragon ready to invade,

And who but Liberty the rescu’d Maid?

This panegyrical allegory is impeccably Whiggish in that the

poet celebrates George as a king chosen by the people, and

the dragon he slays is political discord:

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O Hail, the People’s Choice! the People’s King!

Their Choice the purest Title Thou can’st bring.

Thou com’st not puff’d with an imagin’d Right,

To rule a Nation in its own Despite: (5)

……………………..

But howe’er else debar’d, Thou dost succeed

By Acts of Settlement long since Decreed:

The Kingdom easing her devout Desires,

With all the Sanction that a Crown requires. (15)

In that regard, George is also chosen by God, like the

biblical worthies he resembles. He is like Saul first and

foremost the choice of the people but also like David

possessed of divine assent :

Thou, like Good David, dost the Throne ascend;

David himself scarce more th’ Almighty’s Friend.

And Saul, appointed by Divine Decree,

What Kindred Claim, what other Right had He?

The People Chose Him first with mutual Voice,

And in his Prophet God approv’d their Choice. (7)

So vox populi, vox dei! Brereton’s poem is judicious,

measured, analytical and thereby fairly distinct from the

many unrestrained panegryical verses that greeted George in

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1714. Here’s An Epistle to Mr. Steele, on the King’s Accession to the Crown

from that year that seems at first much more typical in its

exaltation of George, the warrior/king, by the Whig poet and

later Popeian dunce, Leonard Welsted:

Britain, at length, asserts her ancient Name,

And rises glorious with reviving Fame:

A finished Prince, a Hero, fills the Throne,

Graced with a Genius martial like her own;

…………………

Proclaim, ye Muses, thro’ these happy plains,

Proclaim aloud, another Nassau reigns.

Another Nassau, that is to say, a warrior like the Dutchman,

William III. But there follows in Welsted’s poem a

commercial vision of what Britain will become with George at

its head, although what is evoked is simply more of what the

nation already is:

I see disclos’d Augusta’s future State:

Lo! her proud Fleets admire their costly Freight:

Her busy Mart th’ adventuring World employs:

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Confusion greatly splendid! welcome Noise!

Thames, swelled with Wealth, his envious Banks oreflows,

Seeks other Shores, and a new Empire knows.

Welsted concludes, moreover, with a political vision that

pictures George as the perfect British constitutional

monarch, a ruler of citizens not slaves:

Let wanton Tyrants sport in power’s abuse,

And barbarous Nations to their yoke reduce;

Let them their conquered Vassals proudly tame:

Our Hero cherishes a nobler flame;

Ore freeborn Subjects he aspires to reign,

To govern Citizens, not Slaves to chain;

With scorn he looks on mean Despotic arts,

And seeks no Empire but in English hearts,

Accepts a Kingdom with a Patriot’s sense,

And in the People’s Father hides the Prince.

In similar fashion, the Edward Young, later the famous

author of Night Thoughts, could in a poem mourning Queen

Anne’s death and welcoming George, On the Late Queen’s Death, And

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His Majesty’s Accession to the Throne, mark the oddity of importing a

German prince but also affirm that all that matters to make

him a Briton is his governing well:

What tho’ thy Birth a distant Kingdom boast,

And Seas divide Thee from the British Coast?

The Crown’s impatient to inclose thy Head;

Why stay thy Feet? The Cloath of Gold is spread.

Our strict Obedience thro’ the World shall tell

That King’s a Briton who can govern well.

Of course, George as far as we know did not or perhaps

could not read these poems, although some of his courtiers

and ministers certainly did, and the custom of marking royal

birthdays (as well as other significant events such as the

births of royal or princely offspring) continued through the

reigns of the first three Georges in order to attract or

insure patronage from the powerful. My impression from

reading a good number of these is that they are more

hyperbolically strained in their praise than the poems

written to mark George I’s arrival in Britain. Perhaps there

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was a sense of heightened relief that this imported German

prince has worked out pretty well, and of course the 1715

Jacobite attempt to re-establish the Stuarts had been

defeated. So one of these birthday effusions from 1717, A

Poem on the Birth-Day of his most Sacred Majesty King George, in its

overheated enthusiasm takes a while to calm down and reach

the specifically political praise that the Whiggish poems on

the king’s arrival all seem to include:

Heav’n’s true Vicegerent, a Terrestial God,

Round where the Graces make their lov’d Abode;

………………………

Survey the Globe, no Kingdom of the Earth

Can boast a Chief of such transcendent Worth:

Rome’s Julius, nor Philip’s famous Son,

With conquering Arms have brighter Glories won,

Than this wise Ruler of Britannia’s State,

Who without Slaughter makes Himself more great:

Not but He has a Soul can Armies lead,

And make the Neighb’ring Kings his Valour dread;

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But no Tyrannick Power His Glory stains,

‘Tis only for the Common Good he reigns.

The extravagance and accompanying incoherence, to say

nothing of the opening blasphemy, of this praise – that

George is God’s viceroy on earth and that he exceeds Caesar

and Alexander the Great in his conquests but is, however, no

tyrant, rather the guarantor of the common good at home – is

typical of the political insistence of Whig panegyric, which

characteristically modifies extravagant praise with

political pragmatism, which slides from panegyric to

political commentary.

Reading royal birthday poems is not a task I would wish

on anyone, but in the spirit of marking the Hanoverian

accession I have read a good number of them for both of the

first two Georges. I will quote bits of only a few of them,

partly because they are so amusingly fulsome but also

because they will lead me to several of Swift’s most intense

attacks both on the Hanoverians and on the tradition of

poetic flattery of the great and powerful that he especially

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loathed and allow me a transition from panegyric to satire.

In other words, Swiftian and Popeian satire of the first two

Georges is provoked and inspired by a powerful and insistent

tradition of royal panegyric. Satire and panegyric are two

sides of the same literary coin; they interpenetrate and

fecundate each other. Without fulsome flattery, satire would

have nothing specific to attack; and the ferocity of satire

goads the writers of panegyric to more exalted praise. So

here are two more snippets from these birthday songs: A Poem

on the Anniversary of His Majesty’s Birth-Day (1718):

For ever, Albion, mark this joyful Day,

That gave thee GEORGE, and GEORGE th’ imperial Sway,

Made thee again thy wonted Freedom know,

And rescu’d Europe from impending Woe:

By whose strong Influence, in distant Lands,

Thy Isle the Riches of the World commands:

The Ocean round her Canvas Wings are furl’d,

And His blest Subjects Freemen of the World.

Let ev’ry Briton then exalt his Name,

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Extol his Virtue and admire his Fame,

Unite their Hearts in an eternal Praise,

And with the King a lasting round of Days:

And when in Heav’n he wears a starry Crown,

May then AUGUSTUS rule with like Renown.

I’m not sure George would have appreciated this anticipation

of his death, although the picture of him in heaven

surpassing in power no one less than the emperor Augustus is

quite a compliment. But note that even with this

extravagance (and some I haven’t quoted such as “Nature

triumphant o’er the teeming Earth,/ Exults at George’s most

auspicious Birth”), part of the Whiggish emphasis is on

George as the monarch of a commercial and trading nation

whose subjects are freemen, as this couplet emphasizes: “The

Ocean round her Canvas Wings are furl’d,/ And His blest

Subjects Freemen of the World.”

Annual birthday panegyrics do pose a challenge for

poets to find something fresh or new to say. Here is a

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fairly original bit of flattery in my second example of a

birthday poem, this time an anonymous performance from 1719:

A Poem on the Anniversary of the Birth-Day of His Majesty King George. With

somewhat dubious taste, the poet traces the production by

the Empress Sophia of many princes: “Hence the Rewards of

conjugal Delights,/Hence num’rous Pledges of connubial

Rites,/In new-born Princes almost yearly came.” Only three

of these princely babes survived, and the eldest was our

George. Like other birthday poems, this one imagines

George’s eventual demise (“But oh! when late (and be the

fatal Hour/ Far distant hence) the grand Destroyer’s

Power/Shall on this best of earthly Kings be shewn,/And waft

him up to a celestial Throne;”), but death leads to an

apotheosis as George looking down from Heaven like Caesar

before him sees what his successor, George II of course just

like Augustus, will contemplate.

So when Rome’s Julius Caesar reach’d the Sky,

Translated to a Heav’nly Deity,

Augustus, seated in his Porphr’y Chair,

Made the whole Empire of the World his Care;

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That in his mild Administration found

Her Armies, as before, with Triumph crown’d.

I want to jump now to 1728 when the young Irish clergyman

and friend of Swift, Matthew Pilkington, husband of Letitia,

produced the official royal birthday ode for Dublin Castle

for George II (the first of several such poems the ambitious

Pilkington would write) in the next few years. What makes

this otherwise unremarkable and formulaic paean interesting

is that it may have provoked Swift’s 1729 satiric poem,

Directions for a Birthday Song (which in one version has the

subtitle “in a letter to the songster”), the first of a

series of savage anti-Hanoverian poems from the late 1720s

and early 1730s, including On Poetry: A Rhapsody (1733) and To a

Lady (1733 published 1746). Most of Swift’s verses are a

challenge for normal, high-minded aesthetic criticism of

poetry, since in their Hudibrastic rhythms, bouncy

conversational and parodic irreverence, burlesque rhymes,

and demotic or even slangy diction, as well as the

uncompromising intensity of their contempt for his satiric

targets, they are subversions of the solemn, the serious,

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and especially the decorous. Swift’s art in his verses as I

see it lies in his appropriation and improvement of popular

verse, preserving its energy and easy accessibility without

reproducing its grosser crudities.

For a brief comparison of how low anti-Hanoverian Jacobite

satire could be and to help us appreciate what Swift’s

satire accomplishes, let me offer one sample, the 1722

Rightful Monarchy or, Revolution Tyranny. A Satyr: Being a Dialogue Between

High-Dutch Illustrious, and Low-Dutch Glorious, a dialogue set in a

dream in the underworld where George I meets William III,

who accuses George of usurpation: “’Tis an enormous Crime by

Craft or Might,/To take a Crown that is another’s Right.” To

which George counters that William was the usurper: “Of rank

Hypocrisy thy Phrases smell,/ What have you learn’d to Cant

and Preach in Hell?/You that gulll’d Heaven and befool’d the

State,/With that fair specious term of ABDICATE.” William

answers that they are both illegitimate and sums up in a

couplet that gives you some idea of how scabrous this satire

is: “In fine, so sum up all in one short Word,/Your title,

BRUNSWICK, is not worth a Turd.” It’s all downhill from

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there as William rehearses George’s sexual affairs, accusing

him of incest with his sister. George then responds by

invoking William’s reputed homosexual affairs, and this

exchange can show just how Swift avoids the mere grossness

and vulgarity of such verse:

Bruns. ‘How can you, Nassau, be so damn’d unjust,

T’upbraid my Passion, and condemn my Lust?

When Benten’s Bum, and Portland’s Common-shore,

Those luscious Bits supplied the Place of Whore;

You in lascivious Courses did carouse,

And for Italian Sports you robb’d your Spouse.

William in turn accuses George of buggering his two Muslim

servants, Mustapha and Mahomet:

Against my Bawdy Earls pray let me set

Mrs. Mustapha and Madam Mahomet.

Such lovely Creatures Man but must adore,

For while in their Backsides you rake and pore,

At once you Bugg’ry act as well as Whore.

The Reason’s plain, their Dress an Emblem bears

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Of that loose Garb the Female Coquet wears.

This is pure doggerel, simple mud slinging; Swift’s verses

are very different; they have a calculated simple eloquence,

and their invective is inventive and witty. Consider for a

moment these lines about William III from Directions for a

Birthday Song: “Nassau, who got the name of glorious/Because

he never was victorious,/A hanger-on has always been,/For

old acquaintance bring him in.” Or from On Poetry: A Rhapsody

some lines that skewer Walpole:

Now sing the minister of state,

Who shines alone, without a mate.

Observe with what majestic port

This Atlas stands to prop the court:

Intent the public debts to pay,

Like prudent Fabius by delay.

A contemporary reader would see the various jokes: Walpole

was enormously fat and thus (mock-heroically) an Atlas, and

his and his wife’s open infidelities were notorious. Fabius

alludes to Quintus Fabius Maximus, consul of Rome in the

second century BC who was styled the Cunctator or the

delayer for his caution during the second Punic war. Walpole

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is cautious, too, refusing to the dismay of the opposition

to respond with military force to Spanish privateers that

were in those years harassing British shipping.

But no one could accuse either of the first two Georges

of military cowardice. Like his father, George II was very

much a soldier, participating gallantly in the victory

against the French at Oudenaarde in 1708, and of course he

was the last English monarch to command a British army in

the field at the battle of Dettingen, which again featured

Britain and her allies against the French in 1743. And

praise of his martial success at Oudenaarde is the subject

of one especially blood-soaked stanza in Pilkington’s poem:

See! Fir’d with Ardor to engage,

The BRITISH AMMON pours along

With an impetuous Torrent’s Rage,

And pierces thro’ the thickest Throng!

Slaughter wastes at his Command,

And Thousands sink beneath his Hand;

The Combat bleeds where-e’er he goes

And wide the purple Deluge flows.

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Accompanying this sanguinary bellicosity, Pilkington’s

panegyric spends a bit of time with a few of the Whiggish

political compliments we have seen lavished on George I: “he

abundant Wealth supplies,/And bids neglected MERIT rise.”

Swift’s attack in his anti-Hanoverian satires on the

bromides of royal panegyrics is bracing as well as at times

disturbing, to say nothing of dangerous: Directions for a Birthday

Song was not published until after Swift’s death, and the

other two were like almost all of Swift’s verses published

anonymously. My object here is to think about the stark

differences between his fierce attacks not simply on the

Hanoverians but on the conventional poems written to flatter

them and other monarchs. In literary-historical terms, both

panegyric and satire are responses to political and moral

conditions, and each in its way represents a poetic fiction,

since Swift’s satires are as fanciful, strictly speaking, as

the panegyrics. Consider these incendiary lines from Swift’s

On Poetry: A Rhapsody:

O, what indignity and shame

To prostitute the muse’s name,

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By flattering kings who heaven designed

The plagues and scourges of mankind.

Bred up in ignorance and sloth,

And every vice that nurses both.

…………………….

But now go search all Europe round,

Among the savage monsters crowned,

With vice polluting every throne

(I mean all kings except our own)

The passage is pure, unforgiving invective, enjoyable but

extreme in a negative sense the way the birthday tributes

are extreme in a positive sense. But the irony of that last

line leads to a long section of similar mock-praise, a

parody of panegyric.

Say, poet, in what other nation,

Shone ever such a constellation.

Attend ye Popes, and Youngs, and Gays,

And tune your harps, and strow your bays.

Your panegyrics here provide,

You cannot err on flattery’s side.

Above the stars exalt your style,

You still are low ten thousand mile.

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Turn back to Directions for a Birthday Song and you will find

another kind of irony that is laced with furious invective

just below the placid surface of the advice offered to the

panegyrist. Swift advises the would-be panegyrist that his

“encomiums, to be strong,/Must be applied directly wrong:”

A tyrant for his mercy praise,

And crown a royal dunce with bays:

A squinting monkey load with charms;

And paint a coward fierce in arms.

………………………

For all experience this evinces

The only art of pleasing princes;

For princes love you should descant

On virtues which they know they want.

The passage that follows is the most specific and daring in

the poem, since it seeks to destroy the Whig exaltation of

the deal that empowered the Hanoverian dynasty and also

names names – William and George. He cautions his songster

not to omit that “in him such virtues lie inherent,/To

qualify him God’s viceregent.” (the rhyme is brilliant and

as we have seen from a couple of panegyrics an echo of some

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of their language). Swift shows that he had read those Whig

panegyrics; his parody of them is exact and telling.

That with no title to inherit,

He must have been a king by merit.

Yet be the fancy old or new,

‘Tis partly false and partly true,

And take it right, it means no more

Than George and William claimed before.

Heroes and Villains! The first two Georges were

represented as both in the poetry of the early and mid-18th

century in Britain. It may well be the case that extreme,

partisan views of the first two Georges via panegyric and

satire render these representations merely imaginative

rather than truthful. And yet panegyrics are almost

instantly and invariably ephemeral; their flattery seeks

only to do the immediate job of exalting the monarch and

keeping his name and glory before the public. Such verses

are very much of the particular moment and monarch; they

wither very quickly as monarchs come and go. For better or

for worse, however, satire with Swift’s ferocity and Pope’s

delicacy of touch endures, and the Georges truly enter and

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indeed enrich English literature in their satires, where the

satirical meanings are generalized, with the Georges used to

some extent as exemplars of perennial scandals.

So, finally, I want to consider a daring but teasingly

subtle anti-Hanoverian poem that avoids the extremes of

panegyric and satire and is thereby more convincing and

effective, Pope’s The First Epistle of the Second Book of Horace Imitated,

To Augustus (1737). Unlike the Whig panegyrics and royal

birthday poems that I have sampled, Pope’s poem is not

occasional. As Johnson remarked in his Life of Pope, he had no

need of currying favor with the great: “ he never exchanged

praise for money, nor opened a shop of condolence or

congratulation. His poems . . . were scarce ever temporary.

He suffered coronations and royal marriages to pass without

a song, and derived no opportunities from recent events, nor

any popularity from the accidental disposition of his

readers. He was never reduced to the necessity of soliciting

the sun to shine upon a birth-day, of calling the Graces and

Virtues to a wedding, or of saying what multitudes have said

before him.”

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Conveniently, George II’s middle name was Augustus, and

thus the Horatian model creates a delicious irony for Pope,

although for Matthew Pilkington in 1728 the identification

of the two was instead opportunity for an easy and

extravagant compliment. Pilkington began his birthday ode

by addressing the sun and then enshrining George as the

earthly equivalent, counting on the Roman resonances of that

middle name: “Like thee AUGUSTUS reigns below . . . He

emulates thy Reign above.” Readers of Pope’s Epistle to Augustus

would have smiled at the similarity of the names but

doubtless noted with amusement the differences between the

first Roman emperor and the second Hanoverian king. George

in this case had been aware of Pope’s contempt, and not at

all amused by some of his earlier satires as the courtier

Lord Harvey (Pope’s bête noir, Sporus) informs us in his

Memoirs of the king’s reign: Hervey reports that the king

had grown tired of his mistress, Henrietta Howard, Countess

of Suffolk, and what particularly irked him in 1734 was Lady

Suffolk’s “intimacy with Mr. Pope, who had published several

satires, with his name to them, in which the King and all

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his family were rather more than obliquely sneered at.” So

George may actually a few years later have read the Epistle to

Augustus or been told of it by others; he would certainly

have been aware of it.

This relationship between Pope and George’s court

matters since the poem is after all an epistle in which the

poet addresses the king with an ironically impertinent

familiarity, a mock deference as well as intimacy. In the

prose “Advertisement” to the poem, Pope discusses Horace’s

poem and his relationship to the emperor: “Horace made his

court to this great prince by writing with decent freedom

toward him, with a just contempt of his low flatterers, and

with a manly regard to his own character.” We know what Pope

is referring to, of course, the torrent of Whig poems in

extravagant praise (low flattery) of both the first two

Georges. The opening six lines of the poem set the tricky

tone, superficially polite but full of ironic and local

disparagement that is worth unpacking now but would have

been evident to contemporary readers:

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While you, great patron of mankind, sustain

The balanc'd world, and open all the main;

Your country, chief, in arms abroad defend,

At home, with morals, arts, and laws amend;

How shall the Muse, from such a monarch steal

An hour, and not defraud the public weal?

As Pat Rogers suggests in his annotation of the poem, the

main conjures up the Spanish Main, the Gulf of Mexico and

the Caribbean Sea abutting the Central American, Mexican,

and northern South American Spanish colonies, where as I

mentioned earlier in those years many critics of the

government argued that English shipping was being ravaged by

Spanish privateers without any forceful response from the

government. So the main is hardly open; in fact it is

effectively closed to British shipping. George is not

defending his country; he was in fact in May 1736 when Pope

began to compose the poem not bearing arms but in the “arms”

abroad in Hanover of his new mistress, Madam von Walmoden,

with whom he had begun a relationship in 1735. However, we

know that George II spent a fair amount of time in Hanover,

about one summer out of every three during his reign. But

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satire is never fair. The question that ends these lines

gives the phrase “such a monarch” a resoundingly negative as

well as incredulous and insulting charge, evoking a George

who was indifferent and even hostile to what Pope’s Muse

produced. So what looks without context as a respectful and

even flattering address to the king is in fact a sneering

and ironic attack, even a jeering one.

After listing a few great British kings, Edward, Henry,

and Alfred, who despite their accomplishments found “th’

unwilling gratitude of base mankind,” Pope advises George

that he cannot escape similar treatment, which seems like a

compliment. But then he launches into an encomium that has

the deadliest of stings in its sarcastic tail: “Wonder of

kings! Like whom, to mortal eyes? /None e’er has risen, and

none e’er shall rise.” Such remarks, implicit blame by

excessive, panegyrical praise, give the lie to Pope’s later

disingenuous apologies for poets, which forms part of the

middle of the poem’s look back at the history of English

poetry and its humorous characterization of the furor

poeticus seizing England in 1737 – “one poetic itch/Has

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seized the court and city, poor and rich:/Sons, sires, and

grandsires, all will wear the bays,/. . . To theatres, and

to rehearsals throng,/ And all our grace at table is a

song.” Things turn almost overtly serious some lines later

in Pope’s direct defense of poetry and poets:

Of little use the man you may suppose,

Who says in verse what others say in prose:

Yet let me show, a poet's of some weight,

And (though no soldier) useful to the state.

What will a child learn sooner than a song?

What better teach a foreigner the tongue?

What's long or short, each accent where to place,

And speak in public with some sort of grace.

I scarce can think him such a worthless thing,

Unless he praise some monster of a king;

Or virtue or religion turn to sport,

To please a lewd, or unbelieving court.

The last couplet is a hit at George’s intelligent and

intellectual queen Caroline, who was reputed to be a free-

thinker. George II spoke English fluently but observers

record with an atrocious accent, so these lines despite

their superficial, genial generality are meant to be

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specifically insulting and gossipy. And yet Pope saves his

most powerful ironies for the end of the poem when he

proposes to repair the mistakes George’s predecessors,

Charles and William, have made in their choice of poetic

panegyrists:

Oh! could I mount on the Maeonian wing,

Your arms, your actions, your repose to sing!

What seas you travers'd! and what fields you fought!

Your country's peace, how oft, how dearly bought!

How barb'rous rage subsided at your word,

And nations wonder'd while they dropp'd the sword!

How, when you nodded, o'er the land and deep,

Peace stole her wing, and wrapp'd the world in sleep;

Till earth's extremes your mediation own,

And Asia's tyrants tremble at your throne--

But verse, alas! your Majesty disdains;

And I'm not us'd to panegyric strains:

The zeal of fools offends at any time,

But most of all, the zeal of fools in rhyme,

Besides, a fate attends on all I write,

That when I aim at praise, they say I bite.

And that is precisely what these lines are doing, biting

with ironic praise! If only he had Homer’s eloquence to

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praise George, since the list of his accomplishments in

those first four lines in this passage is so compromised

that Homeric eloquence would be required to praise them:

“actions” and “repose” are contradictory, just as in the

next line those seas George traversed are the short voyage

to Hanover. Pope begins by promising panegyric, although the

praise of George as a peacemaker is really criticism of the

weakness as Pope said earlier of Walpole’s passive foreign

policy (“Your country's peace, how oft, how dearly bought!”

– a peace bought at great expense, the depredation of

British shipping in the Americas). The following lines in

which earth’s extremes and Asia’s tyrants tremble at George

are simply not true, although they echo many of the royal

panegyrics for the first two Georges, and prepare us for

Pope throwing up his hands in mock despair as a royal

panegyrist who can’t do justice to the king’s merits. The

government has hired “fools in rhyme,” especially noxious

for an independent poet like Pope, who adds that a foolish

panegyric is actually a satire: “A vile encomium doubly

ridicules:/There’s nothing blackens like the ink of fools.”

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So bad or untruthful panegyrics are inadvertent satires, and

Pope’s sly ironies undermine the literal panegyric surface

of these lines. The wonderful trick that Pope’s poem manages

is to turn panegyric by ironic manipulation into satire. The

accusation that Pope claims to deny, “That when I aim at

praise, they say I bite,” is in fact borne out by the whole

passage.

I want to offer as conclusion or better as a coda a

brief look at Samuel Johnson’s relationship with the third

George. A glance at Boswell’s Life of Johnson will show you what

you might have guessed, that the Tory Johnson, a lover of

monarchy as Boswell calls him, had no use for the first two

Georges, especially the second. In April 1775, as Boswell

records it, a conversation about recent English monarchs led

Johnson to this outburst after praising Charles II and even

James II: “’George the first knew nothing, and desired to

know nothing; did nothing, and desired to do nothing: and

the only good thing that is told of him is that he wished to

restore the crown to its hereditary successor.’ He roared

with prodigious violence [Boswell adds] against George the

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Second.” But his opinion of George III was quite another

matter. Boswell recounts a meeting in October 1767 between

Johnson and the king in the great library (expanded by

George III) at the Queen’s house, where Johnson liked to

read. Hearing of Johnson’s visits, George asks to meet him

and is ushered in by the librarian: “’Sir, here is the

King.’ Johnson started up, and stood still. His Majesty

approached him, and at once was courteously easy.” The

ensuing scene as Boswell masterfully renders it dramatizes a

dignity and equality for both the king and Johnson that

contrasts revealingly with the panegyrics and satires of the

Hanoverians that I have been surveying. The king asks

Johnson after a discussion of the libraries at Oxford and

Cambridge if he “was then writing any thing.” Johnson

replies that he has said all he has to say, and the King

replies, “I should have thought so too, if you had not

written so well.” Boswell reports that when Johnson repeated

this to a friend he was asked if he made any answer.

Johnson’s reply is priceless: “No, Sir. When the King had

said it, it was to be so. It was not for me to bandy

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civilities with my Sovereign.” And in the end of the

conversation George expresses a “desire to have the literary

biography of this country ably executed, and proposed to Dr.

Johnson to undertake it.” And as we know, Johnson would do

just that in his Lives of the Poets (1781), although it was the

London booksellers who initiated that project.

Boswell’s summary of the scene at the end is worth

quoting in part: “During the whole of the interview, Johnson

talked to his Majesty with profound respect, but still in

his firm manly manner, with a sonorous voice, and never in

that subdued tone which is commonly used at the levee and in

the drawing room.” And to a friend later, Johnson remarked,

“Sir, they may talk of the King as they will; but he is the

finest gentleman I have ever seen.” Like his grandfather and

great grandfather, George III endured his share of

panegyrics and satires, attacks from opposition polemicists

such as John Wilkes and Charles Churchill and cruel

caricatures by Gillray and other cartoonists. He had many

political enemies. But he was by his own fervent declaration

at the beginning of his reign a proud and genuine Englishman

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who never went to Hanover, indeed never traveled out of

Britain. And of course his comments to Johnson in the

library reveal him to be a thoughtful, intelligent man,

unlike his predecessors interested in and respectful of

British literary accomplishments, and perhaps thereby immune

or indifferent to both panegyric and satire, or at the least

earning Johnson’s prose panegyric.

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