§ 1 Choyce Drollery Inhibited
We may be sure the memory of many a Cavalier went back to that sweetest of all Pastorals, Shakespeare’s Comedy of “As You Like It,” while he clutched to his breast the precious little volume of Choyce Drollery, Songs and Sonnets, which was newly published in the year 1656. He sought a covert amid the yellowing fronds of fern, in some old park that had not yet been wholly confiscated by the usurping Commonwealth; where, under the broad shadow of a beech-tree, with the squirrel watching him curiously from above, and timid fawns sniffing at him suspiciously a few yards distant, he might again yield himself to the enjoyment of reading “heroick Drayton’s” Dowsabell, the love-tale beginning with the magic words “Farre in the Forest of Arden”—an invocative name which summoned to his view the Rosalind whose praise was carved on many a tree. He also, be it remembered, had “a banished Lord;” even then remote from his native Court, associating with “co-mates and brothers in exile”—somewhat different in mood from Amiens or the melancholy Jacques; and, alas! not devoid of feminine companions. Enough resemblance was in the situation for a fanciful enthusiasm to lend enchantment to the name of Arden (p. 73), and recall scenes of shepherd-life with Celia, the songs that echoed “Under the greenwood-tree;” without needing the additional spell of seeing “Ingenious Shakespeare” mentioned among “the Time-Poets” on the fifth page of Choyce Drollery.
Not easily was the book obtained; every copy at that time being hunted after, and destroyed when found, by ruthless minions of the Commonwealth. A Parliamentary injunction had been passed against it. Commands were given for it to be burnt by the hangman. Few copies escaped, when spies and informers were numerous, and fines were levied upon those who had secreted it. Greedy eyes, active fingers, were after the Choyce Drollery. Any fortunate possessor, even in those early days, knew well that he grasped a treasure which few persons save himself could boast. Therefore it is not strange, two hundred and twenty years having rolled away since then, that the book has grown to be among the rarest of the Drolleries. Probably not six perfect copies remain in the world. The British Museum holds not one. We congratulate ourselves on restoring it now to students, for many parts of it possess historical value, besides poetic grace; and the whole work forms an interesting relic of those troubled times.
Unlike our other Drolleries, reproduced verbatim et literatim in this series, we here find little describing the last days of Cromwell and the Commonwealth; except one graphic picture of a despoiled West-Countryman (p. 57), complaining against both Roundheads and “Cabbaleroes.” The poems were not only composed before hopes revived of speedy Restoration for the fugitive from Worcester-fight and Boscobel; they were, in great part, written before the Civil Wars began. Few of them, perhaps, were previously in print (the title-page asserts that none had been so, but we know this to be false). Publishers made such statements audaciously, then as now, and forced truth to limp behind them without chance of overtaking. By far the greater number belonged to an early date in the reign of the murdered King, chiefly about the year 1637; two, at the least, were written in the time of James I. (viz., p. 40, a contemporary poem on the Gunpowder Plot of 1605; and, p. 10, the Ballad on King James I.), if not also the still earlier one, on the Defeat of the Scots at Muscleborough Field; which is probably corrupted from an original so remote as the reign of Edward VI. “Dowsabell” was certainly among the Pastorals of 1593, and “Down lay the Shepherd’s swain” (p. 65) bears token of belonging to an age when the Virgin Queen held sway. These facts guide to an understanding of the charm held by Choyce Drollery for adherents of the Monarchy; and of its obnoxiousness in the sight of the Parliament that had slain their King. It was not because of any exceptional immorality in this Choyce Drollery that it became denounced; although such might be declared in proclamations. Other books of the same year offended worse against morals: for example, the earliest edition known to us of Wit and Drollery, with the extremely “free” facetiæ of Sportive Wit, or Lusty Drollery (both works issued in 1656), held infinitely more to shock proprieties and call for repression. The Musarum Deliciæ of Sir J[ohn] M[ennis] and Dr. J[ames] S[mith], in the same year, 1656, cannot be held blameless. Yet the hatred shewn towards Choyce Drollery far exceeded all the rancour against these bolder sinners, or the previous year’s delightful miscellany of merriment and true poetry, the Wit’s Interpreter of industrious J[ohn] C[otgrave]; to whom, despite multitudinous typographical errors, we owe thanks, both for Wit’s Interpreter and for the wilderness of dramatic beauties, his Wit’s Treasury: bearing the same date of 1655.
It was not because of sins against taste and public or private morals, (although, we admit, it has some few of these, sufficient to afford a pretext for persecutors, who would have been equally bitter had it possessed virginal purity:) but in consequence of other and more dangerous ingredients, that Choyce Drollery aroused such a storm. Not disgust, but fear of its influence in reviving loyalty, prompted the order of its extermination. Readers at this later day, might easily fail to notice all that stirred the loyal sentiments of chivalric devotion, and consequently made the fierce Fifth-Monarchy men hate the small volume worse than the Apocrypha or Ikon Basilike. Herein was to be found the clever “Jack of Lent’s” account of loyal preparations made in London to receive the newly-wedded Queen, Henrietta Maria, when she came from France, in 1625, escorted by the Duke of Buckingham, who compromised her sister by his rash attentions: Buckingham, whom King Charles loved so well that the favouritism shook his throne, even after Felton’s dagger in 1628 had rid the land of the despotic courtier. Here, also, a more grievous offence to the Regicides, was still recorded in austere grandeur of verse, from no common hireling pen, but of some scholar like unto Henry King, of Chichester, the loyal “New-Year’s Wish” (p. 48) presented to King Charles at the beginning of 1638, when the North was already in rebellion: wherein men read, what at that time had not been deemed profanity or blasphemy, the praise and faithful service of some hearts who held their monarch only second to their Saviour. Referring to their hope that the personal approach of the King might cure the evils of the disturbed realm, it is written:—
“You, like our sacred and indulgent Lord,
When the too-stout Apostle drew his sword,
When he mistooke some secrets of the cause,
And in his furious zeale disdained the Lawes,
Forgetting true Religion doth lye
On prayers, not swords against authority:
You, like our substitute of horrid fate,
That are next Him we most should imitate,
Shall like to Him rebuke with wiser breath,
Such furious zeale, but not reveng’d with death.
Like him, the wound that’s giv’n you strait shall heal
Then calm by precept such mistaking zeal.”
Here was a sincere, unflinching recognition of Divine Right, such as the faction in power could not possibly abide. Even the culpable weakness and ingratitude of Charles, in abandoning Strafford, Laud, and other champions to their unscrupulous destroyers, had not made true-hearted Cavaliers falter in their faith to him. As the best of moralists declares:—
“Love is not love
Which alters when it alteration finds,
Or bends with the remover to remove.”
These loyal sentiments being embodied in print within our Choyce Drollery, suitable to sustain the fealty of the defeated Cavaliers to the successor of the “Royal Martyr,” it was evident that the Restoration must be merely a question of time. “If it be now, ’tis not to come; if it be not to come, it will be now; if it be not now, yet it will come: the readiness is all!”
To more than one of those who had sat in the ill-constituted and miscalled High Court of Justice, during the closing days of 1648-9, there must have been, ever and anon, as the years rolled by, a shuddering recollection of the words written anew upon the wall in characters of living fire. They had shown themselves familiar, in one sense much too familiar, with the phraseology but not the teaching of Scripture. To them the Mene, Mene, Tekel Upharsin needed no Daniel come to judgment for interpretation. The Banquet was not yet over; the subjugated people, whom they had seduced from their allegiance by a dream of winning freedom from exactions, were still sullenly submissive; the desecrated cups and challices of the Church they had despoiled, believing it overthrown for ever, had been, in many cases, melted down for plunder,—in others, sold as common merchandize: and yet no thunder heard. But, however defiantly they might bear themselves, however resolute to crush down every attempt at revolt against their own authority, the men in power could not disguise from one another that there were heavings of the earth on which they trod, coming from no reverberations of their footsteps, but telling of hollowness and insecurity below. They were already suspicious among themselves, no longer hiding personal spites and jealousies, the separate ambition of uncongenial factions, which had only united for a season against the monarchy and hierarchy, but now began to fall asunder, mutually envenomed and intolerant. Presbyterian, Independent, and Nondescript-Enthusiast, while combined together of late, had been acknowledged as a power invincible, a Three-fold Cord that bound the helpless Victim to an already bloody altar. The strands of it were now unwinding, and there scarcely needed much prophetic wisdom to discern that one by one they could soon be broken.
To us, from these considerations, there is intense attraction in the Choyce Drollery, since it so narrowly escaped from flames to which it had been judicially condemned.