7 - Court Culture and the Tory Reaction

Summary

Give sentence with me, O God, and defend my cause against the ungodly people:

O deliver me from the deceitful and wicked man.

For thou art the God of my strength, why hast thou put me from thee:

And why go I so heavily, while the enemy oppresseth me?

Purcell's Give sentence with me, O God may, in its Exclusion Crisis context, be ‘consonant with the … image of an embattled king, unprotected save by faith and courage’. Even court anthems, which are usually considered to have been a vehicle for the glorification of monarchy, could reflect tensions between the king and some of his subjects. Whatever Dryden may have hoped at the conclusion to Absalom and Achitophel, Charles's dissolution of the Oxford Parliament in 1681 did not lead to the disappearance of the Whig party or to the vanquishing of direct threats to the king and the peaceful succession of his Catholic brother. Court odes, which we might expect to have been aloof and unsullied by the inconveniences of seditious activity, suggested that all was not well between the king and his subjects. The odes of the Tory Reaction years did include panegyrical themes and sentiments which had been offered to the divine-right king at his Restoration some twenty years previously, and which had since appeared periodically in court literature. For example, Thomas Flatman's new year ode in 1684 echoed the Christic Charles that had been portrayed by Dryden in Astræa Redux (1660). Flatman blurred the distinction between the King of Great Britain and the King of Heaven: ‘a Crown of Thorns no more | Shall His sacred temples gore’. His subjects, indeed, ‘Cover their faces, and fall down before Him; | And night and day for ever sing | Hosannah, Hallelujah to th’ Almighty King!’ An ode from 1680 had referred to Charles as ‘a mortal divine’ and Pelham Humfrey had previously set to music a birthday ode which celebrated the king whom heaven ‘Proclaim’d A God on Earth’. This chapter suggests, however, that court odes were not just characterized by a haughty and blinkered laudation of the king.