Royalist Reclamation of Psalmic Song in 1650s England

Abstract

This article brings into focus the royalist experience of political defeat and cultural recovery in mid-seventeenth-century England. It shows how royalist writers developed a polemically charged psalmic poetics that allowed them to appropriate the discursive authority of their Puritan enemies, reestablish their own cultural standing, and prepare the way for religious and political return. Several writers who found common cause in 1650s royalist poetics appear in these pages, including Izaak Walton, Thomas Stanley, Jeremy Taylor, Henry King, and the author(s) of the 1649 Eikon Basilike. Royalist writers with more divided responses to psalmic polemics appear here as well, including the episcopal divine, Henry Hammond, and the Davidic poet, Abraham Cowley. The poet, psalmist, and polemicist John Milton is an important presence throughout: his Eikonoklastes seems aware of his opponents’ polemical project, as do his 1653 psalms, and Paradise Lost itself may respond to what he once derided as royalist “Psalmistry.”