English, Scottish, and Welsh popular culture has Protestantism as the source of its ideology and much of its specific intent. The classics of religious, and especially Dissenting, literature are familiar from the lists of Everyman Books, where they strike the eye because they are never mentioned in ordinary literary conversation: for example, the Autobiography of Richard Baxter, the Memoirs of Colonel Hutchinson by his wife, John Woolman's Journal, William Penn's The Peace of Europe, Jacob Boehme's The Signature of All Things, Bishop Latimer's Sermons, William Law's Serious Call to a Devout and Holy Life. The unfamiliarity of these titles points to the difference between the new, university-derived middle-class taste and the old-fashioned, devout amateur middle-class taste, benevolent but in favour of order, and often Nonconformist.
Reading was a graver activity; frivolous and social entertainment was mainly oral, although recorded for us by a stupefying amount of printed ballads, aimed for singing in company and very little regarded by fans of literature, then or now. This stream of singing in the tavern was the ancestor of rock and roll, and had taught the negative reactions with which rock was so rapidly and crushingly surrounded right at the start of its career. Religious writing, then, was aimed along the axis of literariness, seeing the practice of private reading as leading away from vice and towards contemplative discovery of the truth. Social control was built into it.
Elements of Protestantism which may have influenced modern poetry are: the sovereign assembly, where the authority denied to the State and its officers and the prelatical hierarchy falls like rain onto the gathered faithful, and what seems right to them at any moment is right; the attitude of revolt, the craving to sweep away the existing power order and its language, and return to a pristine integrity; the promise of redemption after a repentance based on a reliving of the past, on confession and a peculiar selfconsciousness and finding of ominous patterns; the power of the spoken word, snatching up the gifted preacher like a great wind, an audible demonstration of the energy driving the undertaking, and constituting within earshot the gathering of plenary powers, with the Pentecostal cascade of words as its charter. What has entered poetry, perhaps, is a belief in truth and bearing witness to sin which contradict common poetic demands for mere beauty of language, and for adorning the person of the poet with words. The list of negatives might be much longer; after all, the groups in question are part of the ancestry of the fundamentalist Right in the USA. A predilection for repeating Biblical forms of language, devaluing a writer's creative additions as mere carnal wit, and an anxious distaste, going back possibly to the eighteenth century, for scholarship that finds out new things and so shakes the bases of faith, made a joint bid to prevent twentieth century literature from coming to pass.
Even before the Reformation, with its stress on making the Bible available in the language of the country, there was a "pre-reformation", which conventionally includes Wickliffe, writing theology in English, a revolutionary thing; and the English writings of Richard Rolle and his school, aimed at religious women, who had not the schooling to read works in Greek and Latin. Of course, England had missed the 12th century vernacular revolution of the rest of Western Europe, influenced by a female audience both in its theological (devotio nova) and courtly love poetry manifestations; partly funded by the francophone Plantagenet court. It was easy to progress from saying 'it is possible to be a true Christian knowing only English' to saying that 'the centres of Greek and Latin theological learning do oppress us'. The legal exclusion of Dissenters from the universities brewed a resentment of advanced learning and free ideas which still darkens the atmosphere. Knowledge is subversive, but the radicals and egalitarians weren't necessarily in favour of the knowledge which they didn't possess.
I have referred, already, to radical Protestantism. This draws an imaginary line at some point dividing the radical kind from the other kind (conservative? comfortable?). Of course there is no such line; a real dividing line has been the institutional one between the Established Church (the Anglican one) and the various nonconformist groups who have at various times seceded or been expelled. We would make a great mistake in supposing that there are different religions in Britain; the religious life of the British people is largely one, and the expression of cultural unity; the different sects go through the same changes of intellectual fashion in the same years, as for example the liberal theology of the nineteen-sixties affected all Protestant groups and the evangelical, fundamentalist, populist wave of the eighties did subsequently. Britain is the product of its religion, and vice versa. Indeed, it is this which causes problems to British Jews, Catholics, Moslems, and Hindus. We should not be surprised if a Russian Baptist writes like a Russian, and not like a Welsh Baptist.
Part of the image of the Centre, which is being used for propaganda still today, is the old negative image of the Anglican Church: recall in Daniel Owen's novel Hunangofiant Rhys Lewis the virtuous if rigorous mother of the hero, a Methodist, who could not imagine anything good being associated with the Church of England. Owen, a Methodist preacher, is gently satirising the fanaticism of the more partisan of his own flock. His character is humiliated by having to accept charity from the Anglican vicar, represented as a good man. The stereotype of the Anglicans involves:
excessive respect for dead forms from the past, to the neglect of living souls.
fear of conflict, and inculcation of submissiveness as a means to this
excessive respect for the social hierarchy, in which Anglican prelates played such a large part
benevolent ineffectuality, high-mindedness
antiquarian attachment to details of ritual, Church language, liturgical objects, architectural features
lack of passion and of millennial expectations
a certain kind of voice, partly upper middle class, partly benign and soothing, partly flawless in enunciation, partly indescribable and unique
inability to think clearly about theology (or other subjects?) because of a centuries-old series of brilliantly successful compromises between different wings of the church, to save the marriage
reducing Church livings to an item of property, owned by the landowners and parcelled out to younger sons; too close an embrace of the ruling class
lack of understanding of ordinary people and life in a commodity capitalist society.
The literary historian is less likely to buy these stereotypes, because the literary remains of the Anglicans so far outshine every other sect. Who will argue that these fine words did not come from fine feelings? The resemblances between the Anglican clergy and the kind of person who reads and writes poetry are striking, and much of the recent history of poetry is a wildly implausible attempt not to appear soothing and benign and averse to social conflict.
The steps by which the Methodists became separated from the main body of Anglicans are obscure, and theological differences between them are not there: the grounds of divorce had to do with ecclesiastical authority, the Anglican hierarchy not cooperating with the Methodist movement within it, which thus was defined more by its business energy and system than by anything else. This is important, because within England and Wales the number of people who were neither Anglican nor Methodist was never very significant: these were, prior to the large immigration of Irish Catholics, the only mass churches, and they barely differed. In the era of its greatest influence, Methodism was conservative in politics, frowning on any ardour to change the external arrangements of society; this is why it was claimed, by Halevy among others, to have saved Britain from revolution. However, individual clergymen were political, notably in opposing the Crimean War as heathen and wanton bloodshed, thus setting themselves up against the high and mighty and indeed the law of the land.
It was the Dissenting sects (a term which excludes the Methodists) which provided the real radicalism; but they were too demanding of intellectual ardour from their followers, and remained elite bodies, unable to become territorially dominant and so to sway the government to their ends.
One of the productive flaws in British literature is the contrast or succession between the wasteful, flamboyant, competitive, showy pride of Celtic tradition, and the sombre-suited, sober, egalitarian, prose, restraint of the Nonconformist Protestant preacher, the "organic intellectual" of Celtic society as it presents itself to us at the dawn of the twentieth century. The one expressed by eulogy, war poetry, catalogues of possessions. The other by sermons, reverent biographies of holy men, hymns, but also by journalism about the affairs of the day and even by radical politics. The birth of peripheral nationalism is tangled up with Dissent. Both could command soaring eloquence. We have to grasp how it is that the outspoken boasting and praise of traditional Celtic poetry could give way to the inch by inch mortification and purging of pride represented by, equally Celtic, Nonconformity.
One of the decisive features of British poetry is the inability to theorise; a trait, less applicable to certain modernist poets since around 1960 and to certain Scots, which attaches to a general empiricism of British life. Tracing the sources of this would fill a book in itself, which to my misfortune no-one has written; one sidelight is the empiricism held to by many currents in French and German thought, and the contempt which those factions hold for the sub-theology declaimed from a misty mountain-top by many professors. Distaste for theory is said to have set in train the decline of British industry, dated nowadays as far back as 1850; contempt for scientists and for mathematical models is not a form of inferiority complex but a superiority complex, a robust pride which is part of the culture of all British industrial regions. If one component is the distaste of working engineers for people who study at universities, another is the distrust of Dissenters for the products of Anglican universities from which they were excluded by statute; and another is public distaste, surging up in several waves over centuries, for the excessive argument of religious devotees, so that polite conversation (and literature too) shunned discussions of principle. When all sides agree to confine debate to common objects, these are taken as sign of virtue. Protestant enthusiasm was also fascinated with objects as Signs in providential narratives. The stability of the post-1688 settlement, itself based on county gentry's resentment of central symbolic discourse, was partly based on mutual consent to leave theology out of public affairs; and directed attention very much towards trade and industry, which encourage a precise habit of mind. Art was directed, amid this diffuse prosperity, towards the domestic circle, which means again towards floods of detail and away from grand principles. The business concern with rigorous observation of detail and fine calculation steer one away from poetry, too, and towards something like photography, with its mechanical affluence of data. Someone in Britain who can theorize is met by surges of envy, awe, and resentment; but, during a crisis of mediations, it is not clear whether anyone can write good poetry without first working out a theory which solves the urgent problems of language, knowledge, and political relations.
The Reform in England and Wales was sustained by ideas from Switzerland and Germany, and the geographical connections of Protestantism have remained international, pointing strictly away from any special concept of the region. Wesley received a decisive impulse from Count Zinzendorf, a nobleman of Moravia. The truths of Protestantism cannot vary according to what part of the globe you are standing on; albeit the faithful cast a blind eye to notions from Spain, France, or Italy. Ireland fell instead under the cultural dominance of Spain, where the friars and priests were trained, in the seventeenth century. Because the nobility of this country looked to France and Italy for the trappings of higher civilisation, notably in painting and architecture but also in literature, the more precise of Puritans looked askance at the whole world of high art, and this is one of the occult sources of resentment of the upper class by the lower. It is possible to regard the whole run of European art from 1500 to 1780 as neo-classicism, in many nuances; and regional, Nonconformist culture, rejecting all this, could preserve pre-Renaissance forms. The Romantic rejection of neo-classicism by Herder and Geijer may have been a continuation of this line. The prestige which Greece and Rome held for the gentry was disparaged by the Nonconformist interest, partly because of its association with Catholic church decoration, partly because the shores of the Mediterranean were Catholic, and partly because the (pagan) learning of the universities was envied and hated by the self-taught Dissenting divines, who lacked it. Martin Marty, in his book on Protestantism, wistfully admits a mismatch between Protestantism and the visual arts, as indeed with dancing and music. These resentments are still powerful today, although in disguised forms.
So what are the classics of Protestantism? We are going to consider just five: Foxe's Book of Martyrs; Morgan Llwyd's Llyfr y tri ederyn; the Memoirs of Colonel Hutchinson written by Lucy Hutchinson; Fox's Journal; Patrick Walker's book on the Covenanters.
Foxe's Book of Martyrs (1563, real title Acts and monuments, with an exhaustive description too long to quote) is one of the fundamental books of English culture. It is no longer read for a simple reason: it is about 7,000 pages long (in Cattley's standard 19th century edition). In this compass it covers the whole of Christian history, a relentless series of exemplifications, copiously illustrated with original documents, binding 2000 years into one continuous narrative centring on the pangs and plights of the righteous martyrs. Few English books have ever equalled it either in its scope or in its unity of vision or in its marshalling of facts and arguments. There is at least one other Protestant compendium of universal history (the almost contemporary so-called Magdeburg Centuries) which rivals it in scope; the Protestant movement was born with an animated, totalizing vision of history, which radical movements in Protestant countries envied and produced imitations of, as if the problems of contemporary politics could be illuminated by looking back 2000 years. How much time has been wasted trying to justify ideas in terms of history long past; but how stimulating this schema has been to poets. It's hard to force even a pin in between Foxe's illustrations and arguments, so densely packed they are. The closeness of Foxe's theological arguments brings us back to the most unwelcome truth, that the gap between the separating Churches was narrow and elusive, and that no-one in the sixteenth century would have accepted a durable separation, since all the effort was aimed at a single Christendom. Having separated churches betrays all the early leaders. Foxe's history of judicial murder is as compelling as a violent thriller; much of the action takes place in prisons and lawcourts, and the hero's head is generally at stake, its fate spinning like a die through a thousand reversals of fortunes and glittering rhetorical tournaments. The sense of danger, the threat to common justice and truth, the intellectual intensity, never let up. The acts refer to biographies of the martyrs, the monuments to their speeches and other declarations, reproduced at inordinate length, with the circumstantiality of the law itself. The gap between law and theology seems to have closed; it is hard to believe that this is not the origin of the taste for the detective novel, with its litany of accusations, cavils, and proofs. Foxe was not a subversive, but the government is always the villain in his book. His heroes go clad in an armour of arguments, an intellectual identity, with error or lying recantation besetting them from both sides; but he does not seem to treat of people who simply got confused by theology and made mistakes. The tenor of his book is strongly individualist, because the martyrs are institutionally isolated, lone witnesses beset by officers of the Catholic Church, grim-avised judges, torturers steeped in the traditions of their craft, and often by howling mobs of fanatical clerics. All 7,000 pages are a speech for the defence of murdered innocents, digging up large parts of history in order to prove the falsehood of established authority in both word and deed, a tirade poured out as if lies about the noble dead could be unsaid. Foxe lived through the Marian persecution and had some anticipation of a Spanish conquest which would have burned all Protestants who did not apostasize: religious politics were running at fever pitch, he is the supreme committed writer. He contains the one-sided, integral, infuriated view of the universe which all English writers of the past few centuries have tastefully shunned. Anglicanism of Foxe's stamp was itself a threat to civil order and the Crown while the latter ruled so many Catholic subjects, both in England and Ireland.
What we find in Fox's Journal, (really written retrospectively, and in the 1670s) is a pedestrian detailing of dates, places, and sequences of events; which may partly be faked, as the written account is so much later than many of the events; but the central event framed by these accurate trifles is always a miracle, the direct evidence of the Lord's intervention in terrestrial affairs. So we hear a good deal about a madwoman near Mansfield in Nottinghamshire; not evidently to inform us about social conditions in Nottinghamshire, but to build up to her healing by Fox, as a triumphant attestation of his divine powers, which would demonstrate nothing if it weren't an interruption to working of the known powers of the universe. This tone is defined by Auerbach as niedere Mimetik, lower realism, and it is predominant in the Gospels, which of course is where Fox gets it from. Because it bridges the gap between the revelation of the secrets of the universe and the coolest political or business prose, this tone brings realism into the realm of literary pleasure and so leads on to the bourgeois novel in England, as many historians have observed; Fox is much more modern, even lexically, than the pastoral romance. He is very reminiscent of Defoe in this profusion of artless details, propping up the narrative by their lack of connection to its main thrust, as circumstantial evidence raises the credibility of witnesses and versions in court. Indeed, it seems that the equivalent of such writing in mediaeval times, amid the idealisation and attenuation of all literary genres, would be in records of trials, so far as such exist. But everyone went into that court to prove something. The excess of evidence cuts us off from the truth. The courtroom is one of the main stages of Foxe's Acts and Monuments, the original popular classic of English Protestantism; the matter of factness of George Fox's style may go back to his namesake, as well as to the practical need of demonstrating truths to English people, whose ideas about credibility naturally resembled those of an English jury. George Fox is an obstinately provincial writer: 'Now, after I had some service in these parts, I went through Derbyshire into my own country, Leicestershire, again, and several tender people were convinced. And passing thence, I met with a great company of professors in Warwickshire, who were praying and expounding the Scriptures in the fields.' 'Then it was upon me that we should have a meeting at Skegby at Elizabeth Hooton's house; and we had her there.' His initiatory mystic experience came in 1652 during a retreat on Pendle Hill, in Lancashire: 'upon a very high mountain in some of the hither parts of Yorkshire' as William Penn inaccurately describes it. This provincialism was partly selfconscious: Fox wrote tracts entitled The West answering to the North, and A New England Firebrand Quenched, the title being the most conspicuous part of the work. Unfortunately, this localism is part of the recruitment of banal realistic details whose lack of intrinsic beauty is to persuade the reader that the whole account is not artful and imaginary. Fox differs from literature, which would show aristocratic characters, women with beautiful persons, lush landscapes, exotic locations, freedom from pressing material limits; so really he offers us the English regions because they are unattractive. This was not a good entrance to make into the big literary world. As for veracity, what is he trying to prove to us? that he was the chosen instrument of God.
We seem to have strayed a long way from modern poetry, but the Journal reminds me vividly of Barry MacSweeney and Michael Haslam, and the home of Richard Robinson, one of Fox's closest followers, was Brigflatts, the subject of Basil Bunting's greatest poem. When I interviewed MacSweeney, he described himself as a Protestant heretic, and made much of the hellfire sermons he attended, as a young child, in some chapel 2000 feet up on a Northumbrian hill. The literary model for much of modern British poetry is the saint's life. This is a logical, almost biologically conditioned, sequel to the predominance of saints' lives, over a thousand years, in European literary production; one hardly expects to find the strain of secular gaiety, of tavern ballads, in printed poetry, which indeed is defined by leaving that realm up to popular song. There is a strain of light verse, which briefly, during the sixties, seemed prepared to take over the poetry scene, but proved to be a flash in the pan. (I admit I may have biased the results by wanting to think about poetry; there is a lot of poetry which doesn't bear thinking about nor, for the same reason, writing about, but which may sell in thousands. The word serious may originally have had religious associations.) The act of occupying parts of the hard material world and narrating a link between them and inner emotional processes implies a cosmic harmony which seems to be of divine origin. The act, constitutive for so much of modern poetry, of putting of an individual's spiritual progress at the centre of a book, either requires the book to be of miniature scale, or that the progress concerned be heroic, and so resemble, despite advances of technique, the careers of Anthony, Martin, Guthlac, and so on, towards God. The other act, of piercing the bubble and proclaiming the insignificance of human life, reduced to an opportunistic adaptation to mindless and patternless natural forces, raises a laugh but leaves the poet without a book. Of course, there were no (purely) Protestant saints, and so no Protestant saints' lives; Fox's Journal is the direct equivalent to a Vita in a Catholic country. While plunging back to the Christian writing of the 1st century AD, he and his congeners were, unintentionally and out of the silencing of a developed model, making prose progress.
So in Fox we find the two strands of supernaturalism and journalistic detailing of dates and places: 'And the Lord opened to me at that place, and let me see a great people in white raiment by a river's side coming to the Lord, and the place was near John Blaykling's where Richard Robinson lived.'; which is by no means a desacralized, modern-empirical attitude towards human life and the universe. How close this passage is, incidentally, to Michael Haslam. This yoking of opposites is a practical literary technique, because a great deal of 20th C British poetry can be considered as the struggle to contain just these two opposites within the field of force of the poem; and much of what is bad in modern poetry is either excessively short of sensuous content, i.e. religiose or over-philosophical, or dwells torpidly and self-righteously on facts and objects as if these spoke for themselves, with totally depleted stores of ideas, emotions, or spirituality. In fact, the dominant feature of provincial poetry in Britain, if there is one, is the obstinate writing of poems that give bare physical details as if the freedom from any interpretation, or meaning, was a triumph in itself. The flourishing of intransigent dullness reminds us of Fox, who expected scorn and even violence from his audiences in the marketplaces. The reliance on place is a blown-up version of the reliance on objects which cannot lie because they are dumb; although whatever is said with them is therefore fictitious and groundless.
At the moment of Fox's literary creation, we find three models of happiness in literature. One is Fox's classless vision of Utopia, earthly and heavenly; the next is the exclusive notion of the life of the gentry, invested in certain lexical and literary forms, powerfully backed up by the aristocratic cultures of France, Italy, and ancient Rome, and available to the reader temporarily and symbolically by the act of reading; and the third is the hedonistic, carefree, vision of debauchery, purveyed by popular art in many forms but also elevated by the literature of the Caroline court, notably Rochester, and by the French-influenced Restoration dramatists. Aesthetic energy is tapped, profoundly, from the promise of the good life, whether the information we develop such a surprising appetite to consume is directly helpful in bringing such about or just a sensuously persuasive glimpse of it.
This is also the moment of foundation of modern Welsh literature, the brief but potent flare-up of Dissent in Cromwellian Wales giving rise, in the works of Morgan Llwyd, to the first significant Welsh prose (outside the Mabinogion) and to a model of Puritan and mystic prose oratory which retained its power until the 1920s. Llwyd features, as a matter of fact, in Fox's Journal.
The definition states that a program is data plus procedures. We live in an excess of data, due to mechanical capturing and storing devices such as cameras and printing presses; but the procedures for discovering reality and policy within this excess are less conscious and perhaps less evolved. I find that the radicals of the 17th century believed in the secrets of time being hidden in nature, in holy scripture, and in the stirrings of the human heart, and were obsessed by the laws of interpretation by which they could be disengaged. In Llwyd's Llyfr y tri ederyn (1666), we read: "(Eagle): But what is the Ark, do you say, mystically? (Dove): Immanuel. The Saviour. In this ark were three cells (that is the sum of every nature); as are spirit, soul, and body. (...) If it had not been for him being immured in the flesh of a man, and withstanding the flood of malice, there would not have been one flesh preserved, nor any man nor animal keeping their breath until now. Out of this Ark of truth all the evil birds flew, as the angels formerly fell into the great sea (that is the spirit of Nature) to glut on the dead carcasses which are the souls of miserable sinners." In this typology a new text is revealed under the bare, explicit, text of the Scriptures, and it includes the present time and ourselves. Analogy is beyond the simple evidence of the senses. This kind of groundless, tremulous, free reading, which assumes that the plain language of Biblical Hebrew, with its vigorous use of concrete analogies, is only the alphabet in which a new and secret message can be picked out by the inspired reader, reminds us not only of an earlier state of Welsh literature: 'There was, however, another kind of verse altogether, the mystery and prophetic poetry of the brut, which was an underground verse, anti-English, drawing on the vast store of the British Arthurian tradition and the prophecies of Merlin (...)It is impenetrable because it is written in a lost code." (Gwyn A. Williams); but also of modern radical poetry, where the cutting of language into finer divisions, the suspension of judgments accepted on all sides, the multiplication of aporias and of interpretative clues, slow down and exaggerate the moment of forming hypotheses until the text yields as many startling analogies as Llwyd's florid reading of Scripture. In the 19th century phase of Socialism, self-taught working men, raised to a state of high excitement by the knowledge and ideas available through reading, were liberated by their ability to read critically, to pry apart and dismantle the archaic, seamlessly integrated, story of how things are, which was told by clergy, politicians, approved books, and newspapers. The Left activist remains someone who reads a lot, perhaps too much, and who disbelieves a great deal of what he-she reads. The staples of the Left, arguably, are both primary evidence and critical procedures; the reportage of what is really happening in Liverpool, Petersburg, or Guatemala tends to come in prose, or film; modern poetry has specialised in the analysis of procedures. The computing analogy suggests that it's just as valuable, in the search for understanding, to spend a man-year probing and improving procedures, as to spend a man-year "in the field" collecting raw data.
The aim of overturning the monopolistic interpretations of Established divines conceals the claim to set up a monopolistic interpretation under the government of George Fox. Llwyd was, as a matter of fact, an Anglican, although of an original cast. Fox's plainness of language brooks no contradiction and disguises the infinite range of other possible interpretation, shutting out the ambiguity of language and the multiplicity of analogies, precluding the ironic awareness of the intelligent person that there is no single truth. It is authoritarian. Fox is not countenancing individual freedom of interpretation and so is not a theologian for a democratic society; the record of fiercely devout Protestant governments is not creditable, Geneva, Scotland, and certain American colonies being obvious examples. We have to ask what the Dissenters intended to replace the educated class, the world of Oxford, Cambridge, and Anglican prelates, with.
The Memoirs of Colonel Hutchinson were written by his widow, Lucy Hutchinson, in about 1665, for the moral benefit of their eight children. The Colonel had been one of the signatories of Charles I's death warrant, and died in captivity in 1664, a circumstance which made it urgent to defend his name and deeds. The setting is therefore partly the family circle and partly the political life in which Hutchinson took part as chief of the parliamentary party in Nottingham, The subject of Mrs Hutchinson's book is true love, the love affair between her and her husband, which is presented as a mighty force and the dominant thing in her life even after his death: "There is this only to be recorded, that never was there a passion more ardent and less idolatrous; he loved her better than his life, with inexpressible tenderness and kindness." She goes on to say she was his mirror: "she (...) when he was removed, was only filled with a dark mist, and never could again take in any delightful object, nor return any shining representation." This bereavement was twenty-six years after they were married. We find Romantic love, with its spiritual intensity, its capacity to endure over decades, its preoccupation with the family circle, its travails and sense of being surrounded by dangers, anticipated here in a form which is both Puritanical and realistic.
The Memoirs can be assimilated to the Saint's Life, but a vast development away from the timeless and into naturalistic observation also separates them from that genre; Lucy Hutchinson's conceptions of psychology are far more detailed, and fit the details into a far larger framework, than any Vita I know. Saints, after all, only lead half of a terrestrial life. When discussing the state of Nottingham Castle in 1643, she tells us how many flitches of bacon were in its storerooms. Her book is very far from any 17th century novel. However, it is based on the conversation which she must have been part of in those times; earnest, intelligent, sober, discussion of character, as the key to political events in difficult times, when gentry families, including wives, had still to choose patrons, friends, business associates, spouses for their children. The key to her assessment of character is a sense of surrounding disaster; her women-oriented assessment of cavaliers interestingly discards any glamour and excitement, to see them simply as wrecks, incapable of happiness except intermittently through vice, licentious and destructive to women, defying moral law to flare up into violence, alcoholism, and ruin. We can imagine that as a girl she was afraid of the rakes of Court; and that later, as someone with four daughters to marry, she was interested in gathering and exchanging information about the eligible men in her stratum of society. What she writes anticipates Pamela and Old Saint Paul's; the character assessments could later be worked up into a new kind of novel.
"King Charles was temperate, chaste, and serious; so that the fools and bawds, mimics and catamites, of the former court, grew out of fashion; and the nobility and courtiers, who did not quite abandon their debaucheries, yet so reverenced the king as to retire into corners to practise them." Mrs Hutchinson's distaste for these low sexual morals has to do with an exalted faith in true love; her book, as befits one aimed at children in her care, is all concerned with moral development, but debauchery is scorned because it spoils someone's ability to love and so to take part in a marriage based on abiding love, which is capable of bringing children up in a loving atmosphere, so that they will grow up able to love themselves. Even someone with a sneaking fondness for certain forms of court art can hardly find fault with all this. Lucy associates artistic style with morality in a way which a Ruskin could hardly improve on; referring to the reign of James I, she says: "The generality of the gentry of the land soon learned the court fashion, and every great house in the country became a sty of uncleanness. To keep the people in their deplorable security, till vengeance overtook them, they were entertained with masks, stage plays, and various sorts of ruder sports. Then began murder, incest, adultery, drunkenness, swearing, fornication, and all sort of ribaldry, to be no concealed but countenanced vices, because they held such conformity with the court example." The (incredible) point she is making is that the Catholics were pulling strings to fool and ruin the English. What interests us is her siting of moral events within history; morals change in 1603, and by this matter of factness she unconsciously moves away from theology and towards founding social history. The belief that Court manners affect the whole country is an interesting twist on developmental psychology. Her precise observation of character is also incited by paranoia, as is suggested by these accusations against the Catholics; the acuity of judgments like "This man had the most factious, ambitious, vainglorious, envious, and malicious nature imaginable; but he was the greatest dissembler, flatterer, traitor, and hypocrite that ever was" got its sharpness in intense factional struggles, and is related to Lucy Hutchinson's deep family loyalty. This combination of awe for good men, loyalty, and vindictiveness remained with the Dissenters. Business is the great sharpener of the art of judging character, but I perceive that making civil war makes even greater demands and sharpens the faculty even more. By 1661 Britain was a more astute nation.
Mrs Hutchinson had grown up at court; she was not part of any rising lower middle class, she came from a gentry family such as formed the backbone of the Puritans at that time. The doctrine that the Court was immoral needs to be looked at rather more closely, and indeed our sources allow us to be finer in our judgements: the state of Court morality fluctuated, and was of great concern to gentry families throughout the country. Gary Waller, in his book Sixteenth Century Poetry, points to a group of extreme Protestants (read: Puritans) at the Elizabethan Court, centring on the Sydney family. It was possible to be a pious courtier, even if this meant moral suffering when the monarch allowed low practices; Puritan literature includes the poems of Fulk Greville and Philip Sydney, as well as his sister's psalm translations.
Patrick Walker (circa 1666-1745) was the author in the 1720s and 1730s of a number of self-published books, sometimes known as The Lives of the Presbyterian Saints, and including, as a typical example Some Remarkable Passages of the Life and Death of Mr Alexander Peden, Late Minister of the Gospel at New Glenluce in Galloway (with many lines of subtitle), published in 1728. The drama of these lives is that their heroes were Covenanters, that is, they engaged in a society to stand by the Reformed Scottish religion against the expectation of bloody persecution from the crypto-Catholic Charles II and the bigoted Catholic heir, James II, when he succeeded in 1685. Indeed, James' policy in Scotland turned out to be one of large-scale murder of both priests and peasants. The Stuart army against the Covenanters, who were especially thick in Galloway and the south-west, was led by the Marquess of Claverhouse (two syllables!), a Catholic. The ballad says of the Covenanters at the battle of Drumclog,
There is not ane of a'yon men
But wha is worthy other three;
There is na ane among them a'
That in his cause will stap to die.
and:
Weel prosper a' the gospel-lads
That are into the west countrie
Ay wicked Claverse to demean,
And ay an ill dead may he die!
By a most fortunate turn of Providence, Claverhouse was killed at the battle of Killiecrankie, while fighting for the deposed James, in 1689. The theological basis for the movement was slight, and the passions which it aroused minimally Christian, but it has to be said in favour of the rebels that both Stuart brothers were well aware that a Catholic settlement in Britain was impossible without fighting a war against the south-west Scots, and both were happy to provoke an uprising, so as to fight this war of repression under conditions of their own choosing. Here is Walker's account of Claverhouse's visit to John Brown, a Protestant, in May of 1685: "which made Claverhouse to examine those whom he had taken to be his guides thorow the muirs, if ever they heard him preach: they answered, No, no, he was never a preacher.' He said, 'If he has never preached, meikle has he prayed in his time.' He said to John, 'Go to your prayers, for you shall immediately die.' (...) When ended, Claverhouse said, 'Take goodnight of your wife and children.' (...) he kissed his wife and bairns, and wished purchased and promised blessings to be multiplied on them, and his blessing. Claverhouse ordered six soldiers to shoot him; the most part of the bullets came upon his head, which scattered his brains upon the ground. Claverhouse said to his wife, 'What thinkest thou of thy husband now, woman?' She said, 'I thought ever much good of him, and as much now as ever.' He said, 'It were but justice to lay thee beside him.' (...) He said, 'To man I can be answerable, and for God, I will take him in my own hand.' Claverhouse mounted his horse, and marched, and left her with the corps of her dead husband lying there; she set the bairn upon the ground, and gathered his brains, and tied up his head, and straighted his body, and covered him with her plaid, and sat down and wept over him." Some of Peden's words are recorded, as when in 1682 he spoke of those martyred by the Government, that 'They were going off the stage with fresh gales and full sails, and now they are all glancing in glory. O if you saw them! they would fley you out of your wits.' (glance, dazzle; fley, frighten) What the Life of Peden most urgently reminds me of is a tale about witchcraft: he so constantly utters veracious prophecies, and the hand of God is so often seen in the stories Walker recounts, that Peden seems to move outside the laws of our cosmos. Walker narrates several visions seen by many people, in what I can only imagine to be a collective hallucination; the whole book is weird and frightening, points us forward to the Gothic, which is the reduction to the aesthetic of this material once literal belief in the supernatural has lost its grip on the populace, and backwards to the Middle Ages, when those same literal beliefs were in control, and belief in ghosts and demons was boundless and frightening. "'A pack of damn'd witches and warlocks, that have the second-sight, the devil ha't do I see.' And immediately there was a discernable change in his countenance, with as much fear and trembling as any woman I saw there, who cried out, 'O all ye that do not see, say nothing; for I perswade you it is matter of fact, and discernable to all that is not stone-blind'." (devil ha't, not a whit) The south-west counties of Scotland had spoken Gaelic up to about a century before these events, and are as 'Celtic' as any other part of the world; their radical Protestantism recalls the kind which took root in the Hebrides in about the early nineteenth century.
The stratum of Catholic poetry does not need to be forgotten just because it does not fit into the present book. Let us cite the names of Coventry Patmore, Francis Thompson, George Barker, Saunders Lewis, David Jones, George Mackay Brown, Tony Conran, Raymond Garlick, Peter Levi.