Rethinking Royalism in Herrick’s Hesperides

Abstract

The scholarly consensus holds that Robert Herrick’s printed book of poems, Hesperides (1648), is the work of a royalist partisan. Yet for all its clear signs of royalism—from the large crown on the title page to the dedication to Prince Charles—Hesperides contains a much wider range of ideological and social commitments. Alongside the absolutist couplets are constitutionalist epigrams; mixed in with the pro-Stuart panegyrics, we find praises of parliamentarians. I trace this diversity to the book’s literary model: the silva or miscellany. Largely seen as a site of royalist community, seventeenth-century manuscript miscellanies were also marked by contestation and fracture. Hesperides likewise ranges across the varieties of royalism (and occasionally even republicanism), reflecting the real ideological diversity among the king’s supporters and sympathizers. The result is a profoundly polyvocal royalism increasingly tending towards constitutional consensus.