The Augustan Reprint Society

 

JOHN TUTCHIN
SELECTED POEMS

(1685-1700)

 

 

INTRODUCTION
BY
SPIRO PETERSON

 

 

 

PUBLICATION NUMBER 110
WILLIAM ANDREWS CLARK MEMORIAL LIBRARY
University of California, Los Angeles
1964

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INTRODUCTION

When John Tutchin died on September 23, 1707, he had already created the image of himself which Alexander Pope has transmitted to posterity. There, in Book II of The Dunciad (1728), the Whig journalist appears as one of two figures in a "shaggy Tap'stry":

Pope, in his variorum notes on the passage, identified Tutchin as the "author of some vile verses, and of a weekly paper call'd the Observator," and revived the fiction of his sentence "to be whipp'd thro' several towns in the west of England, upon which he petition'd King James II. to be hanged." The "invective" against James II's memory, which Pope mentions, has now been identified in the Twickenham Edition as The British Muse: or Tyranny Expos'd (1701).[1] By 1728, this was all the reputation that remained for Mr. John Tutchin, Gentleman—irascible journalist, pamphleteer, and writer of verses.

The truth of the matter is that Pope was no more accurate about Tutchin's being whipped than about Defoe's losing his ears. From the sparse reliable information concerning Tutchin's early years, one consistent pattern emerges: he tended to depict himself as a hero and a martyr. Born in 1661 "a Freeman" of London, he was brought up in a family of scholarly nonconformist ministers probably on the Isle of Wight[2]. Even though an enemy claimed that he had been expelled from a school at Stepney for stealing (DNB), he received some education and travelled on the continent. In defending his skill with languages against Defoe, he once told how at his school, boys translated and capped verses, and how he travelled "from Leivarden in Friezland, thro' Holland and the Spanish Flanders."[3] Throughout his life, he proudly designated himself a gentleman: during his trial for libel in late June of 1704, he even escaped punishment by setting forth that he was a gentleman, and not a laborer as the indictment read.

In later life, he romanticized himself when young as the hero who fought in the Duke of Monmouth's rebellion, received the brutal "whipping sentence" from Lord Chief-Justice Jeffreys during "the bloody assezes" of 1685, petitioned James II for "the Favour of being hang'd" to avoid the sentence, and finally freed himself by paying so burdensome a bribe that he was reduced to poverty. All these claims were first made in "The Case, Trial, and Sentence of Mr. John Tutchin, and Several Others, in Dorchester, in the County of Dorset," which Tutchin added to the fifth edition of The Western Martyrology; or, the Bloody Assizes, published in 1705. As J. G. Muddiman demonstrated in 1929, most of these claims are outright fabrications. Tutchin was never indicted for high treason, he could never have been challenged by Jeffreys to cap verses, and he invented the petition to be hanged.[4] In The Observator (July 25-29, 1702), he honestly admitted that he was never tried in Devonshire, but claimed he did buy his liberty of James II; and in a later issue (Aug. 4-7, 1703) he challenged an enemy: "if he Pleases to give the World an Account, When, Where, and for What I was Whip'd thro' a Market-Town, he will inform Mankind of more than I or any Body else knows...." John Dunton believed in the whipping sentence; and Defoe, the story of the petition to be hanged. Throughout Tutchin's stormy career, his enemies made political capital of the flogging that never took place. He was probably twenty-four years old when, using the alias "Thomas Pitts," he was tried at Dorchester for "Spreading false news and fined five marks and sentenced to be whipped"—but he came down with smallpox and so was not whipped.[5] Lord Macaulay, who is incorrect on the facts taken from The Western Martyrology, certainly exaggerated in stating that Tutchin's temper was "exasperated to madness by what he had undergone."[6] That the Monmouth adventure and its aftermath mark a turning point in the young man's life, however, cannot doubted.

Tutchin may have fought with William III's army in Ireland as an officer.[7] After the Glorious Revolution and the establishment of William and Mary on the throne, Tutchin devoted himself to a succession of liberal causes. On

the one hand, he persisted in identifying himself with the former commonwealth, the Monmouth cause, the Revolution, the reform movement especially in the theater, and Whig liberty. He became noted for tactless exposés of high-level misconduct in his pamphlets and in The Observator (Apr. 1, 1702-Sept. 23, 1707). His detractors frequently paired him with Defoe as a monster or a villain. Again and again, he made himself obnoxious to important personages such as the Earl of Albemarle or the Duke of Marlborough.[8] On the other hand, his hatred for tyranny propelled him frequently into such extremes as his disgraceful complicity in William Fuller's impostures. In the years 1700-1704, he was generally reputed to be "Secretary to the abominal Society of King-Killers"—the secret Calves-Head Club made up of dissenters who met on January 30th, the anniversary of the death of Charles I, to sing prophane anthems.[9]

Dunton generously summed up the widely varied causes of "the loyal and ingenious Tutchin (alias Master Observator); the bold Asserter of English Liberties; the scourge of the High-flyers; the Seaman's Advocate; the Detector of the Victualling-office; the scorn and terror of Fools and Knaves; the Nation's Argus, and the Queen's faithful Subject."[10] Even his death in Queen's Bench Prison, on September 23, 1707, was romanticized into another instance of martyrdom. "... he liv'd and dy'd," announced the Country-man of The Observator, "for the Service of his Country." Tutchin's followers dramatized his death as the result of a politically-inspired thrashing which "six ruffians" administered to him, in revenge for slanderous remarks made in The Observator against Vice-Admiral Sir Thomas Dilkes.[11] The "Pulchrum Est Pro Patria Mori" portrait, reprinted here as the frontispiece, was circulated to attest to Tutchin's political martyrdom. However, as the autopsy-report demonstrates and as Muddiman rightly concludes, "Tutchin really died from a specific disease and not from the thrashing undergone seven months before his death."[12]

The young man of twenty four who went off to join Monmouth's forces had already published, in 1685, Poems on Several Occasions. With a Pastoral. To Which is Added, A Discourse of Life. In the preface, writing like a fashionable man-about-town, Tutchin describes the lyrics, translations, and satires of this volume as "trifles" which he had let circulate and had now secured "by promising to Print them." The book shows the variety in poetic kinds that one would expect in a young writer who had been drinking deeply of Lord Rochester, Waller, Cowley, the Earl of Roscommon, Oldham, and Dryden. Juvenalian satires reminiscent of Oldham are neatly balanced by memorial verses to Oldham and Rochester, late metaphysical lyrics ("And why in red dost thou appear"), classical dialogues ("Cleopatra to Anthony"), translations of Horace, and the well-turned "autobiographical" couplets of "A Letter to A Friend." In its variety and themes, Poems on Several Occasions resembles Oldham's Works, which was published twice in 1684. Tutchin's "The Tory Catch," like Oldham's "A Dithyrambick. A Drunkard's Speech in a Mask," has a speaker who ironically brags of the social misconduct which the author satirizes. "A Letter to a Friend" is a skillfully exaggerated account of the attractions and dangers in rhyming. Although perhaps autobiographical in part, the poem also imitates the long-standing tradition derived from Horace's first Epistle of Book I, and revived most recently in Oldham's "A Letter from the Country to a Friend in Town."[13] Both "The Tory Catch" and "A Letter to a Friend" are reprinted here from Poems on Several Occasions.

Tutchin's first book shows two impulses: the awkwardly lyrical and the directly satiric. He feels compelled, in the Preface, to defend his choice of less serious subjects. His light poems do not, "in the least, detract from Virtue; since I have Read the Poems of Beza, Heinsius, our own Donne, &c." He promises to turn to "some Graver Subject." There are other equally significant comments in a Preface that reveals a great deal about changing literary taste. In "To the Memory of Mr. John Oldham," Tutchin curiously avoids the main subject of Dryden's finer elegy, namely, Oldham's achievement in rough satire. His praise is that "Crashaw and Cowley both did live in thee." However, in his "Satyr Against Vice" and "Satyr Against Whoring," Tutchin has already learned the art of declaiming, from the poet who has been called "the English Juvenal," John Oldham.

In the years between 1685 and 1707, Tutchin's separate poems were mainly occasional and satirical. Panegyric for William III dominates such an early piece as An Heroic Poem upon the Late Expedition of His Majesty (1689), and hatred for the Stuarts possesses a later poem like The British Muse: or Tyranny Expos'd (1701). In Civitas Militaris (1690) Tutchin engages in city politics. The elegy on the death of Queen Mary irritated Defoe enough to have "T——n" placed among the "Pindarick Legions" in The Pacificator (1700). Two poems, however,—The Earth-quake of Jamaica (1692) and Whitehall in Flames (1698)—differ from the others in that they are Cowleyan "Pindaricks" moralizing on disasters. The Earth-quake of Jamaica is reprinted here to illustrate Tutchin's descriptive talent. He starts with an actual event, the Jamaican disaster of June 7, 1692; and then, as the epigraph on the title page suggests, he presents a variation on Horace's rejection of "senseless Epicureanism," in Ode 34 of Book I. The Earth-quake of Jamaica may have been worked over longer than was customary. It was published shortly before December 10, the manuscript date on Narcissus Luttrell's copy now in the Houghton Library. Some six months earlier, in the late morning of June 7, the earthquake had erupted in Port Royal, the "boom" port on the south side of the island. In three schocks lasting less than three minutes, the famed capital of the buccaneers had fallen. News of the disaster did not reach London until August 9. The earthquake then became one of the most widely discussed events. The London Gazette ran stories on it, scientists like Sir Hans Sloane published eye-witness accounts in the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society, the moralists declared God's wrath had come upon the wickedest place in Christendom, and "the actors of the drolls" in Southwark Fair even mockingly re-enacted the event until the Lord Mayor put a stop to the performances.

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If contemporary accounts of the Port Royal earthquake are compared with The Earth-quake of Jamaica, the reader becomes impressed by Tutchin's way of adapting the well-known details to a moral comment on life. His scenes are indeed graphic, but they do not have the immediacy of such eye-witness accounts as the following, preserved by Luttrell:

Tutchin's aim is to compare vulnerable nature with vulnerable man: "Can humane Race / Stand on their / Legs when Nature Reels?" He sees in the disaster a challenge for English sinners to repent: the "Hurricane of Fate" wails on "murder'd Cornish." He had not yet forgotten the Monmouth adventure. For he alludes here to the act of Parliament passed in 1689 reversing the attainder of Henry Cornish, the alderman who had been brutally executed in 1685 for high treason through participating in the Rye House Plot and attaching himself to the Duke of Monmouth. For Tutchin, politics were always relevant.

Tutchin's true forte is not the descriptive poem, but satire. Poems published in the years 1696 to 1705—from A Pindarick Ode to The Tackers—exploit the satirical impulse that had been latent in Poems on Several Occasions. Increasingly he turns to general denunciation and thinly disguised lampoon. Of the two main Augustan traditions in satire—the "fine raillery" that Dryden perfected and the rough satire that reached back to Donne, Cleveland, and Oldham—Tutchin belongs to the latter. Defoe found him to be "so woundy touchy, and so willing to quarrel," and noted that "Want of Temper was his capital Error."[16] The specific circumstance that produced A Pindarick Ode, in the Praise of Folly and Knavery (1696), reprinted here, is generally said to be his dismissal from the victualling office because he failed to establish his case that the commissioners mismanaged public funds. Such corruption in the administration would soon transform a deep admiration for William III into the disenchantment of The Foreigners (1700). That Tutchin was uneasy in his effort to write satire in the mode of Dryden is suggested by his abandonment of irony after the first part of A Pindarick Ode. In his introductory verses, Benjamin Bridgwater accurately observes that Erasmus' Ironia no longer suffices:

Echoing Dryden's Mac Flecknoe, Tutchin invites Dullness and "Immortal Nonsence" to inspire his ironic praise of the folly and knavery that now ride roughshod over such traditional values as learning, love, wit, and patriotism. A few of the lines have the moving quality of Augustan satire at its best:

The irony of A Pindarick Ode does not adequately mask the denunciation. In Stanza X, it is even replaced by the antiquated Hero's diatribe against "our modern Knavish Arts"—never to return to the rest of the poem. Doubtless, the indictment of the "nefarious Brood at Home" that grows rich in wartime was the heart of the satire. Defoe hinted at this motive in the satirical vignette of Tutchin as Shamwhig, which appeared in the first edition of The True-Born Englishman (1700):

Tutchin's satire would be henceforth the rough variety. In The Foreigners he would also resort to fierce lampoons of William III's court favorites.

In the rash of satires that followed The Foreigners and The True-Born Englishman, the anonymous author of The Fable of the Cuckoo (1701) pointed to the common tradition shared by both poems. For he attacked Defoe's "hatchet muse" as having been inspired by such "Modern Sharpers of the Town" as Tutchin and "Old[ha]m the Bell-weather of Tory Faction," who first horned Defoe's satire, "And ever since perverted all good Nature." Advertised in The Flying Post for July 31-Aug. 1, 1700, The Foreigners was published shortly thereafter by the ardent Whig Anne Baldwin. The "vile abhor'd Pamphlet, in very ill Verse, written by one Mr. Tutchin, and call'd The Foreigners"—Defoe recalled years later in An Appeal to Honour and Justice (1715)—filled him "with a kind of Rage." Tutchin's irascible temper had again taken hold. Scurrilously, he assailed foreigners in high office, especially William III's Dutch favorites, for their monopolizing preferments and usurping command, under such transparent aliases as "Bentir" for William Bentinck, first Earl of Portland, and "Keppech" for Arnold Joost van Keppel, first Earl of Albemarle. The manner was Dryden's in Absalom and Achitophel; the venom was Tutchin's own. Official reaction to The Foreigners came quickly. The untrustworthy William Fuller spread the gossip that Tutchin fled from his Majesty's messengers, and found refuge "in a blind Ale-house, at the Windmill, by Mr. Bowyers, at Camberwel." On August 10th, he was taken "into custody of a messenger"; and at the grand inquest for the city of London, held on August 28th, there was presented "a Poem called The Foreigners."[18] A mystery envelops the rest of the legal proceedings. There may even be some truth in the allegation that the parry would long since have "ruffled" Tutchin, except that he pleased them with his "railing at King William's Friends sometimes."[19] The Foreigners also aroused such ephemeral rejoinders as The Reverse:

or, the Tables Turn'd and The Nations: An Answer to the Foreigners. both published in 1700. Finally, in January of 1701, there was published a satire of more lasting worth, Defoe's The True-Born Englishman. Side by side, in Poems on Affairs of State (1703), were reprinted The Foreigners and The True-Born Englishman among verses "Written by the Greatest Wits of this Age."[20] Altogether, the two satirists had three poems apiece in the volume. One of Tutchin's poems, "The Tribe of Levi" (1691), was anonymously reprinted; the other two, The Foreigners and The British Muse, were identified as "by Mr. T——n." These were the achievements of Tutchin's "hatchet muse."

The poems are reprinted from copies in libraries of the U.S. and Great Britain. I am obligated to The Houghton Library for Poems on Several Occasions and The Earth-quake of Jamaica, to Yale University Library for The Foreigners, and to the British Museum for A Pindarick Ode, in the Praise of Folly and Knavery. For permission to reproduce the "Pulchrum Est Pro Patria Mori" portrait of John Tutchin as the frontispiece, I wish to express my thanks to the Trustees of the British Museum.

Spiro Peterson
Miami University
Oxford, Ohio

NOTES TO THE INTRODUCTION

Diary of John Evelyn, ed. E. S. de Beer, 6 vols. (Oxford, 1955), V, 115; Luttrell, II, 565; W. Adolphe Roberts, Jamaica: the Portrait of an Island (New York, [c. 1955]), pp. 44-45; and Mary Manning Carley, Jamaica: the Old and the New (London, [c. 1963]), pp. 34-36, 157-58.

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THE

Tory Catch.

I.

II.

III.

IV.

V.

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A

LETTER

TO A

FRIEND.

Divinity I think to find
A Soveraign Remedy for Soul and Mind:
But then, with Holy Flame, I strait do burn,
And all to Hymns, and Sacred Anthems turn.
Nay, when the Night does waking Thoughts redress,
And Guardian Angels with our Souls converse,
To busie Mortals is the sleeping Time;
I dream and slumber all the Night in Rhyme.
Then puzling Logick next I take in hand;
But this, Alas! can't Poesie withstand.
Barbara, Celarent, I with Ease express,
And yoke rough Ergo's into well-made Verse:
My Faithless Lover's Syllogism tries;
I by stout Logick find their Fallacies.
Then Scheibler, Suarez, Bellarmine I get,
And sound the depth of Metaphysick wit:
Streight, in a fret, I damn 'em all at once,
And vow they are as dull as Zabarel or Dunce.
Credit me, Sir, no greater plague can be,
Than to be poison'd with mad Poetrie:
Like Pocky Letchers, who have got a Clap,
And paid the Doctor for the dear mishap;
But newly eased of their nausceous pain,
Return unto their wanton Sin again.
So Poets be they plague'd with naughty Verse,
They never value good nor bad success:
Or be they trebly damn'd, they will prefer
Their next vile scribling to the Theater.
Well might the Audience, with their hisses, damn
The Bawdy Sot that late wrote Limberham:
But yet you see, the Stage he will command,
And hold the Laurel in's polluted Hand.
In slothful ease, a while I took delight,
And thought all Poets mad that us'd to write.
So long I kept from Verse, I thought I'd lost
My Versing Vein, and of my Fortune boast:
But having tryal made, I quickly found
My store renew'd, in numbers strong and sound
With ease my happy fancies come and go,
As Rivulets do from Parnassus flow.
Then finding that in vain I long had try'd
The Poet from the Tutchin to divide;
I charming Poesie make my delight,
And propagate the humor still to Write.
Our new Divines do alter not one jot,
From what their Tribe in older times have wrot;
Except, like Parker, to have something new,
They broach new Doctrines, either false or true:
A Publick Conscience, which for nought does pass,
But proves the Writer is a publick Ass;
Who the new Philosophick world have told,
Have for a new but varnish'd o're the old.
But all Poetick Phancy can't draw dry,
Th' unfathom'd Wells of deepest Poesie.
The Bifront Hill is always stout and strong;
The Muses still are handsome, always young.
The clearest streams of Chrystal Helicon
Do o're the Pebles in sweet Rhymings run.
Why then should you, Dear Sir, (that have pretence
To the extreamest bounds of Wit and Sense)
Lay by your Quills and hold your Tune-ful Tongue,
While all the witty want your pleasing Song?
Once more renew those Lays that gave delight,
That chear the Day, and glad the gloomy Night:
May with your dying breath your Verses end;
Thus prays your constant, and

Your truest Friend,

J. T.

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THE

EARTH-QUAKE

OF