Selected Poems Part 1

Selected Poems.

by John Tutchin.

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 "s.h.a.ggy Tap'stry":

Earless on high, stood un-abash'd Defoe, And Tutchin flagrant from the scourge, below.

Pope, in his variorum notes on the pa.s.sage, 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 pet.i.tion'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 spa.r.s.e 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 b.l.o.o.d.y a.s.sezes"

of 1685, pet.i.tioned 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 b.l.o.o.d.y a.s.sizes_, 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 pet.i.tion to be hanged.[4] In _The Observator_ (July 25-29, 1702), he honestly admitted that he was never tried in Devons.h.i.+re, 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 pet.i.tion 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 exposes 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 a.s.serter 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 thras.h.i.+ng 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 thras.h.i.+ng 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 fas.h.i.+onable 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"), cla.s.sical 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 ill.u.s.trate Tutchin's descriptive talent. He starts with an actual event, the Jamaican disaster of June 7, 1692; and then, as the epigraph on the t.i.tle 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 ma.n.u.script 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 G.o.d'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.[14]

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:

I cannot sufficiently represent the terrible circ.u.mstances that attended it; the earth swelled with a dismal humming noise, the houses fell, the earth opened in many places, the graves gave up some of their dead, the tomb stones ratled together; at last the earth sunk below the water, and the sea overwhelmed great numbers of people, whose shreiks and groanes made a lamentable eccho: the earth opened both behind and before me within 2 foot of my feet, and that place on which I stood trembled exceedingly; the water immediately boyled up upon the opening of the earth, but it pleased G.o.d to preserve me....[15]

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 pa.s.sed in 1689 reversing the attainder of Henry Cornish, the alderman who had been brutally executed in 1685 for high treason through partic.i.p.ating 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 circ.u.mstance 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:

This hard'ned Age do's rougher Means require, We must be _Cupp'd_ and _Cauteriz'd_ with _Fire_.

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:

Did e'er the old or new Philosophy, Make a Man splendid live, or wealthy die?

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):

As Proud as Poor, his Masters he'll defy; And writes a _Piteous *Satyr_ upon Honesty.

Some think the Poem had been pretty good, _If he the Subject had but understood_.

He got Five hundred Pence by this, and more, _As sure as he had ne're a Groat before_.[17]

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 a.s.sailed 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

THE

Tory Catch.

I.

A Friend of mine, and I did follow A Cart and Six, with Brandy fraught; We sate us down, and up did swallow Each a Gallon at a draught: The sober Sot can't drink with us, May kiss coy Wine with _Tantalus_.

II.

With Musick fit for Serenading, We did ramble to and fro; Then to Drink and Masquerading, 'Till we cannot stand nor go; One Leg by _Bacchus_ was quite lamed, 'Tother _Venus_ had defamed.

III.

At the Tavern we did whisk it, And full Pipes did empty drain: We eat Pint-Pots instead of Bisket, And p.i.s.s'd 'em melted out again: We beat the Vintner, kiss'd his Wife, And kill'd three Drawers in the strife.

IV.

In the Street we found some Bullies, And to make our valour known, We call'd 'em Fops, and silly Cullies, And knock'd the foremost of 'em down: And with praise to end the Fray, We, like good Souldiers, ran away.

V.

To the Play-House we descended, For to get a grain of Wit, Our own with Wine was so defended.

We sate spuing in the Pit, 'Mongst Drunken Lords and Whoring Ladies, To see such sights whose only Trade is.