'An Extempore Invitation to the Earl of Oxford, Lord High Treasurer. 1712.' - Matthew Prior

‘If weary’d with the great Affairs,

Which Britain trusts to Harley’s Cares,

Thou, humble Statesman, may’st descend,

Thy Mind one Moment to unbend.’

 

‘An Extempore Invitation to the Earl of Oxford, Lord High Treasurer. 1712.’

Matthew Prior (1664-1721)

 




Robert Harley, First Earl of Oxford
and Mortimer. Detail from portrait
after John Richardson,1804
(Parliament of the United Kingdom).

In 1712, British politics was in the grip of competing factions, all bitterly struggling to direct the future of the country: not altogether unlike today. Back then, the question was all to do with who should succeed the ailing Queen Anne (whom some of you might have recently made acquaintance with through Olivia Colman’s Oscar winning-portrayal in the film The Favourite). Questions of religion intermingled with those of politics, with some seeking to continue the bloodline of the Stuart family by inviting Anne’s Catholic half-brother James Edward Stuart to be king after her, whilst others wanted to secure the monarchy for the Queen’s Protestant Hanoverian cousins. The competing interests of the two main political parties, Whigs and Tories, led to the formation of social clubs including the Kit-Cat Club (most probably named after the owner of the establishment where they met and nothing to do with chocolate bars), and the Tory Brothers’ Club (so-called because the members called each other ‘Brothers’: women were not admitted as members). Back then, the post of ‘Prime Minister’ didn’t really exist yet, but the broadly equivalent role of Lord Treasurer was held by Robert Harley, First Earl of Oxford and Mortimer. Having started out as a Whig, Harley later shifted to the Tory side but appears to have remained committed to acting in the best interests of his country and monarch. He is very far from being an unproblematic figure though: he masterminded and was Governor of the South Sea Company, which was set up with the aim of reducing British national debt via the transportation and trade of people as slaves across the Atlantic (for more info on this, see John A. Richardson, Slavery and Augustan Literature: Swift, Pope, Gay, 2004).

 

This was not the reason why he wasn’t ever admitted to join the Tory Brothers’ Club though: they actually seem to have just though he was powerful enough already. But that didn’t stop them inviting him to join a meeting in 1712, and rather than sending a tired little RSVP the invitation was written in verse by one of the leading British poet of the day, Matthew Prior. This was not altogether an unusual choice – poems would often be written and circulated between friends in manuscript form, and the later Scriblerus Club sent multiple verse invitations to Harley. Prior’s invitation begins with the practicalities, stating when and where the meeting is to take place, followed by the object of the evening:

 

‘Our Weekly Friends To-morrow meet

At Matthew’s Palace, in Duke-street;

To try for once, if They can ine

On Bacon-Ham, and Mutton-chine:’

 

Then, having tempted Harley with talk of food, the poem suggests that if he is ‘weary’d with the great Affairs’ of statesmanship, he ‘may’st descend, / Thy Mind one Moment to unbend’. It’s an eighteenth-century way of asking him to leave work at the office to come and chill for a bit. The poem then becomes even more deferential, as Harley is invited so that he might ‘see Thy Servant from his Soul / Crown with Thy Health the sprightly Bowl’ – in other words, Prior is proposing to toast him in his presence. This, Prior goes on to claim, would be the most ‘Honor’ that ‘e’er [his] House / Receiv’d’.

 

You can find this poem:

https://www.eighteenthcenturypoetry.org/works/pmp18-w0940.shtml

(a fantastic website with heaps of eighteenth-century poems all superbly curated and free to all!)

 

You can find more about eighteenth-century British club culture, Robert Harley, and the Succession Crisis in these excellent books:

 

Anne Somerset, Queen Anne: The Politics of Passion (London: Harper Collins, 2012)

 

Ophelia Field, The Kit-Cat Club (London: Harper Collins, 2008, repr. 2009)

 

Sources used in writing this blogpost:

 

John A. Richardson, Slavery and Augustan Literature: Swift, Pope, Gay (London: Taylor & Francis, 2004)

‘At Shotwig I chose to be married my dear

(A small country church, and to Saughall quite near);

For myself I had flattered in that rural scene
No other spectators around me would reign,
Excepting fair Flora, and the feathered train.
But trust me, when we to the village drew near,
The nymphs and the swains all in ranks did appear,
To see us fine folks; for sure, fine we must be,
When powdered, and dressed, à la mode de Paris!’

from Letter to a Sister, Giving an Account of the Author’s Wedding-Day

Priscilla Pointon
Written c. 1788; published 1794

It might seem affected or overblown to construct a ‘letter’ as a poem, but in fact there is a long and rather eminent tradition of letter-poems in the eighteenth century (a format that is technically known as ‘epistolary verse’).  Bill Overton has noted that ‘The verse epistle was a key form in eighteenth-century Britain’, but also marks the distinction between literary verses that were written as letters, and letters that happened to be written in verse.  For me, Pointon’s poem would seem to fall into the latter category.   In an earlier blogpost we looked at Alexander Pope’s Letter to Robert Harley, Earl of Oxford and Mortimer, a good example of an epistolary verse that was always intended for publication.  The gap of six years between the composition of Pointon’s poem and its ultimate publication would seem to imply a rather less formal motivation behind this poem’s composition.  Pointon’s husband sadly died by 1794, and Roger Lonsdale has suggested that Pointon’s ‘desolate situation’ following this may have prompted the publication of the new anthology of her poems in which this epistolary verse appeared.

In many ways, it is simply a narrative account of a rather delightful wedding day, involving lots of driving around through the countryside and eating.  Such a fun way to spend a day!  Like much eighteenth-century poetry, there is also ample use of classical characters, such as the reference to ‘Flora’ which (before margarine was invented) referred to the Roman goddess of flowers and spring.  When Pointon writes that she was getting married in the country in the expectation that ‘No other spectators around me would reign, / Excepting fair Flora and the feathered train’ what she is really saying is that she thought the only company would be the flowers and the birds.  Rather a nice way of putting it, eh? 

View of Parkgate today: the wall you can see at the bottom of
the picture would have originally been the quayside.  You can
also see Wales in the distance, visible as a blue line of hills.

For me, this poem is even more enjoyable because I am actually familiar with many of the locations which it refers to.  The historical city of Chester is hopefully already known to many.  It’s a glorious old place that, once upon a time, was an important Roman port; walking around the Roman walls that still encircle the city was a much enjoyed activity in my childhood, as was playing around the equally splendid ruins of a Roman amphitheatre.  I don’t want to start sounding like a travelogue here, but seriously it is definitely a place worth visiting!  Parkgate – one of the places to which the wedding party drive in the poem – is also of significant eighteenth-century interest: Lady Emma Hamilton, the mistress of the sea commander Lord Nelson, was born in nearby Ness and used to often visit Parkgate for the waters.  There is still a seawall at Parkgate today, and a lovely view across to Wales, but the River Dee has long since silted into a lush green marshland.  Now it is a major wildlife site, with an award-winning ice-cream shop across the road (highly recommended!).  It’s absolutely mindblowing to think how much, yet also how little, the place will have changed from when Pointon travelled there on her wedding-day, about 230 years ago.  

Happy reading!  As always, feel free to ask questions and/or leave comments!

You can find this poem:

Roger Lonsdale (ed.), Eighteenth-century women poets: an Oxford anthology (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990)
(available from numerous book shops online and on the high street: an excellent volume!  Last time I mentioned this book I said it looked like an interesting read: see, I was right!  The non-italicised ‘from’ reveals that this is an extract from a longer poem)

Trying to find sources of Priscilla Pointon’s poetry has actually been surprisingly difficult, so I have attached a reading of this poem from Lonsdale’s book:

https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=budbAAAAQAAJ&printsec=frontcover&dq=editions:k_O5naWEZggC&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0CCoQ6AEwAmoVChMIpK_p0pGDxwIVwkAUCh1siABS#v=onepage&q&f=false

(a link to a googlebooks preview from which some more of Pointon’s poetry can be accessed!)

About Priscilla Pointon:

Finding information about Pointon has proved rather more challenging than anticipated!  Pointon would seem to have been born in about 1740, and died in 1801.  From a fascinating seminar talk given by Kathleen Keown at Oxford earlier in the year, I learnt that Pointon was a woman who basically made her living from her poetry.  Having lost her eyesight at the age of 12, her poetry was composed inside her head and then written down by an assistant.  As such, Pointon became very good at extempore poetry, that is poetry made up on the spur of the moment (an enormously popular genre in the eighteenth-century).  Keown’s talk gave a fascinating insight into the life of a professional woman, whose disability did not prevent her from travelling widely around the country in search of subscribers willing to commit funds for the publication of her poetry.  Kathleen Keown is on Twitter @kathleenkeown and regularly tweets about matters relating to 18th century women’s poetry.

Information for this blogpost was derived from the following books:

Roger Lonsdale (ed.), Eighteenth-century women poets: an Oxford anthology (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990)

Bill Overton, The Eighteenth-Century British Verse Epistle (Hampshire: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007)

(A useful source of more information about epistolary verse!!)

Epistle to Robert, Earl of Oxford

'And sure, if aught below the seats divine
Can touch immortals, 'tis a soul like thine:
A soul supreme, in each hard instance tried,
Above all pain, all passion, and all pride,
The rage of power, the blast of public breath,
The lust of lucre, and the dread of death.'

Epistle to Robert, Earl of Oxford, and Earl Mortimer

Alexander Pope

(1721)

Writing poetry that was dedicated to, and about, an individual was enormously popular in the eighteenth century.  Indeed, composing dedicatory verses was in widespread use as a way of gaining (financial) patronage from a wealthy noble.  This poem, however, is a rather more genuine expression of respect and esteem.  The poem’s author, Alexander Pope, and its subject, Robert Harley, the Earl of Oxford were good friends, and both were part of the influential group of writers known as the Scriblerus Club (and which also included Jonathan Swift, Thomas Parnell, John Gay, and Dr. John Arbuthnot).  Unlike the other members of the group, Harley’s literary output was not in any way great, but he did leave a lasting legacy to British literature by gathering much of the collection of books, manuscripts, and pamphlets which his son would later donate to the nation to form the foundation of the British Library (the photo depicts Harley's portrait outside the Maps and Manuscripts reading room in the British Library).

Today’s poem owes much to the friendship that existed between the Scriblerians (as they are now referred to).  After Parnell’s death in 1718, Alexander Pope prepared an anthology of the late writer’s poems, composing this dedicatory verse to preface the collection and delivering a draft copy of the poem to its subject Harley on 21 October 1721.  Although this might be seen as somewhat self-advertising, an exchange of poetry had been an important part of the relationship between the friends during the heyday of their Scriblerus Club meetings in 1714.  Indeed, it is to these meetings that today’s poem seems to refer when it states how Harley was:

 

‘Fond to forget the statesman in the friend;

For Swift and him, despised the farce of state,

The sober follies of the wise and great;

Dexterous, the craving, fawning crowd to quit,

And pleased to ‘scape from Flattery to Wit’
(lines 7-12)

 The sense here is of the group as aloof from a world of petty political wrangling, free from the party politics that divided the government and thus able to find satirical humour in all the intrigue and political posturing.  Yet the poem is also very much about Harley’s own place in the political arena.  Having served as Lord Treasurer from 23 May 1711 to 27 July 1714 (effectively equivalent to the modern day role of Prime Minister), Harley had been at the very centre of the British government through what was perhaps the country’s most important political crisis in the early eighteenth century: the problem of who should inherit the crown when Queen Anne died.  The choice was between the Catholic heir of the deposed James II (Anne’s father, thrust from power in the ‘Glorious Revolution’ of 1688 by Anne’s sister Mary and her husband William III of Orange), or the royal family’s nearest Protestant relations in the German House of Hanover (the family which would indeed succeed to the throne upon Anne’s death in 1714).  As Lord Treasurer, Harley managed the opposing factions so well that, to this day, the question of which side he actually supported is still very much up for debate.  Whichever way his views truly tended, however, when Hanoverian George I succeeded Queen Anne in 1714, Harley’s rivals in government managed to implicate Harley as an opponent of the new regime, to the extent that from 1715 to 1717 he was held in the Tower of London, accused of treason.  Despite his ultimate release, his political career was now well and truly over, and it is to this that Pope alludes when he states that ‘In vain to deserts thy retreat is made’ (much like the political wildernesses often referred to today when politicians fall from power).

A true friend, Pope emphasises how Harley has retreated to this desert ‘In vain’, for ‘The Muse’ (presumably an allusion to Pope’s own poetic endeavour) has not deserted Harley but intends to ‘dignify disgrace’ of political exile through the honest admiration of the poem.  For as Pope is quick to emphasise, these dedicatory verses lack the more traditional financial motive; he describes the poem’s artistic ‘Muse’ (personified in classical style as ‘she’) as ‘No hireling she, no prostitute to praise’.  The flattery of this poem is not offered in exchange for money, but as a sincere and grateful return for friendship. 
 

You can find this poem: 

http://www.public-domain-poetry.com/alexander-pope/epistle-to-robert-earl-of-oxford-and-earl-mortimer-28781

(a free copy available online!)

Alexander Pope, The Major Works, ed. Pat Rogers (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993, repr. 2008)

http://ukcatalogue.oup.com/product/9780199537617.do
(a beautiful collection of Pope’s poetry, and with a helpful amount of explanatory notes; as always, check reputable second hand dealers for cheaper copies, e.g. Ebay, Amazon, and independent bookstores)

About the author:

Alexander Pope was one of the most important poets of the eighteenth century, and one of the best loved and most studied by eighteenth-centuryists today.  Suffering throughout his life from a curvature of the spine, Pope was further disadvantaged by the oppressive anti-Catholic laws of the time, and which forbid any Catholic from living in London or holding public office.  There is no repressing so great a poetic talent, however, and his place in the canon of eighteenth-century poetry is amply deserved.  His major works include comic poetry such as The Dunciad (1728) and The Rape of the Lock (1712-14) (yes, I know, the title does not tend to suggest humour, but the poem is actually about the theft of a lock of hair).  During his life he was most prominently known for his English translations of the Greek poet Homer’s Iliad (pub. 1720) and Odyssey (pub. 1725-6), the first major English versions of these texts to be published.

 

You can find out more about Pope:

http://www.britannica.com/biography/Alexander-Pope-English-author

(Encyclopædia Britannica: so much glorious information here, so beautifully and approachably presented! And freely available…)

http://res.oxfordjournals.org/content/66/273/106.full.pdf+html

(An absorbing example of current academic scholarship on Pope, this article is a really interesting look at Pope and his political poetry, together with the broader context in which he was working.  Like most academic writing, it does assume a certain knowledge of eighteenth-century literature, but nothing that can’t be gained with aid of an internet search engine! The author is on twitter @josephhone1 and well worth following!) 

http://www.twickenham-museum.org.uk/detail.asp?ContentID=19

(A museum about the Twickenham area, where Pope lived; this site has some interesting biographical info)

The facts and figures for this blogpost was obtained from the following sources:

Pat Rogers, The Alexander Pope Encyclopedia (Westport, Conn.; London: Greenwood Press, 2004)

Anne Somerset, Queen Anne: The politics of passion (London: Harper Collins 2012)