6 - John Dryden and His King

Summary

The Amnesty you gave, produc’d not all the desir’d Effects.

A number of figures associated with the court were at the vanguard of the Tory reaction. It was during the Exclusion Crisis and its immediate aftermath that the government, encouraged by Francis North, Lord High Keeper, went most conspicuously on the print offensive. This offensive was manifested primarily in royal declarations, Roger L’Estrange's Observator, loyal addresses in the London Gazette and in other literature associated with the court, especially that by John Dryden, the most prominent poet at court during the early 1680s. This chapter looks at the conceptions of indefeasible hereditary right, divine-right kingship, incentives for loyalty and the advice presented to Charles II by Dryden. He refuted Whig ideas of fiduciary kingship, stressed again the commitment of the Stuart monarchy to the rule of law and urged and justified a policy of royal retribution against rebels. He also meditated on the wisdom of mercy and indemnity which had initially been championed during the Restoration settlement, and he attacked those ungrateful rebels who had exploited the king's clemency.

Dryden and the Court

Dryden was a ‘court poet’, but one ‘in a quite different sense’ from the wits we encountered in the previous chapters. He succeeded William Davenant as Poet Laureate in 1668, he was appointed Historiographer Royal on 18 August 1670 (with an annual salary of £100) and a number of his plays were performed at court. Dryden was a friend of Lord Treasurer Clifford, and had periodic, if sometimes tense, contact with Lord Buckhurst, the Dukes of Ormonde and Buckingham and the Earls of Clarendon and Rochester. In his dedications to Marriage a-la-Mode (staged November 1671) and Aureng-Zebe (staged November 1675), Dryden noted and lamented the arts of self-interest seemingly necessary for advancement at court, as well as the presence at Whitehall of some of the more malevolent courtiers. Indeed, Dryden suffered at the hands of enemies at court. Sir Robert Howard, for example, may have been responsible for obstructions to the payments of Dryden's salary, while Baptist May, Keeper of the Privy Purse, has been proposed as another adversary.