Abstract
The first decade of the eighteenth century saw England engaged in European conflict on an unprecedented scale. The start of the War of the Spanish Succession in May 1702, just after the death of William III, inaugurated a new decade of European warfare, in which Britain fought as part of the Grand Alliance. Countless would-be public poets queued up to celebrate the battles of Blenheim, Ramillies, and Oudenarde in print, documenting enthusiastically the piles of the slain, and steeds thrashing in their death throes that were central to the iconography of warfare in this period. Most of these poems were written by men (or occasionally, women) at a great distance from the European conflict, with little direct experience with which to authorise their account. Yet what such verse lacked in firsthand experience, it often attempted to match in emotional and visual affect, in vivid reimaginings of the battle scenes of Europe, and the men who had led and died on them. As a way of capturing the scale and the moving chaos of battle, many poets drew on ekphrastic techniques, and in particular, the popular seventeenth-century ‘advice-to-a-painter’ genre, envisaging the scenes they imagined writ large in heroic historical paintings decorating the homes of the elite.
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Notes
The fullest account of the war is still G. M. Trevelyan’s, England under Queen Anne, 3 vols (London: Longmans, Green, 1930–4). See also Derek McKay, Prince Eugene of Savoy (London: Thames and Hudson, 1977) for more detail on the Allied perspective, and J. B. Wolf, Louis XIV (London: Victor Gollancz, 1968) for detail of the French involvement.
Geoffrey Holmes, British Politics Under Anne (revised ed., London: Hambledon Press, 1987), 83. The two central Whig policies of the reign, the Regency Act of 1706, and the Act of Union of 1707, were designed to help safeguard a Protestant future. However, as Steven Pincus observes, the representation of the War of the Spanish Succession as a Protestant crusade was troubled by the Catholicism of the Habsburgs. Steven Pincus, Review of Linda Colley, Britons: Forging the Nation (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1992), Journal of Modern History, 67 (1995), 132–4.
Pia F. Cuneo, ‘Images of Warfare as Political Legitimisation’, in Artful Armies, Beautiful Battles: Art and Warfare in Early Modern Europe, ed. Pia F. Cuneo (Brill, 2002), 89.
Joseph Addison, The Campaign: A Poem to His Grace the Duke of Marlborough (1704), 13.
Richard Blackmore, Advice to the Poets. A Poem. Occasion’d by the Wonderful Success of Her Majesty’s Arms (1705), 22.
While the majority of the advice to a painter poems appeared between 1660 and 1688, 17 appeared under William III, and a further eight under Queen Anne. Mary Tom Osborne, Advice-to-a-Painter Poems 1633–1856: An Annotated Finding List (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1949), 17–18.
On the public function of these pieces for the earlier Stuart monarchs, see Edward Copeland, ‘Absalom and Achitophel and The Banqueting House Ceiling: “The Great Relation”’, Eighteenth-Century Life, 11.2 (1987), 22–40.
Thomas Tickell, A Poem to his Excellency the Lord Privy-Seal, on the Prospect of Peace (London, 1712), 4.
Matthew Prior, ‘On Seeing the Duke of Ormond’s Picture at Sir Godfrey Kneller’s’, Poems on Several Occasions (London, 1709), 53–4.
For further discussion of this dynamic in earlier advice poems, see Noelle Gallagher, ‘“Partial to Some One Side”: The Advice-to-a-Painter Poem as Historical Writing’, ELH, 78 (2011), 79–101, at 86.
Samuel Johnson, whilst praising the poem, comments on the repetitive nature of the simile, arguing that Marlborough is so like the storm, that the lines on the storm are merely repetitive. Samuel Johnson, ‘Life of Addison’, Lives of the Poets (1779–81), ed. G. Birkbeck Hill, 3 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon, 1935), ii. 130–1.
William Harrison, Woodstock Park: A Poem (London, 1705), 9.
See Julie Anne Plax, ‘Seventeenth Century French Images of Warfare’, Artful Armies, 131–155.
T. C. W. Blanning, The Culture of Power and the Power of Culture: Old Regime Europe 1660–1789 (Oxford: OUP, 2002), 33.
On contemporary German distrust of Louis XIV’s baroque court culture and patronage, see Georges Livet, ‘Louis XIV and the Germanies’, in Louis XIV and Europe, ed. Ragnhild Hatton (London: Macmillan, 1976), 60–81; 74–6.
Matthew Prior to Charles Montagu, 18 February 1698, HMC Calendar of the Manuscripts of the Marquis of Bath, 5 vols. (London: HMSO, 1904–1980), iii. 193.
Richard Blackmore, The Kit-Cats: A Poem (London, 1708), 4.
Charles Montagu, Earl of Halifax, An Epistle to the Right Honourable Charles, Earl of Dorset (London, 1690), 8–9.
Susan Jenkins, ‘The Artistic Taste of William III’, in The Kings Apartments: Hampton Court Palace (London: Apollo Magazines, 1994), 4–9; 9.
For a fuller discussion of the development of Whig literary and artistic patronage in this period, see Abigail Williams, Poetry and the Creation of a Whig Literary Culture (Oxford: OUP, 2005), Chapter 6.
On the changing relationship between patron and architect in this period, see Richard Wilson and Alan Mackley, Creating Paradise: The Building of the English Country House, 1660–1800 (Hambledon and London: London and New York, 2000), 109–44.
Geoffrey Webb, introduction to Sir John Vanbrugh, The Complete Works of Sir John Vanbrugh, ed. Bonamy Dobree and Geoffrey Webb, 4 vols (London: Nonesuch Press, 1927–8) iv; xxiii.
See C. H. Collins Baker, The Life and Circumstances of James Brydges, First Duke of Chandos, Patron of the Liberal Arts (Oxford: Clarendon, 1949).
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Williams, A. (2015). ‘Terrible Delight’: Art, Violence, and Power in Early Eighteenth-Century War Poems. In: Downes, S., Lynch, A., O’Loughlin, K. (eds) Emotions and War. Palgrave Studies in the History of Emotions. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137374073_12
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