Choyce Drollery: Songs and Sonnets: Being a Collection of Divers Excellent Pieces of Poetry, of Several Eminent Authors. — John Shaqi
Choyce Drollery: Songs and Sonnets: Being a Collection of Divers Excellent Pieces of Poetry, of Several Eminent Authors.
History
Choyce Drollery: Songs and Sonnets: Being a Collection of Divers Excellent Pieces of Poetry, of Several Eminent Authors.
English poetry -- Early modern, 1500-1700; English wit and humor; Songs, English -- Texts
It was not because of sins against taste and public or private morals,
(although, we admit, it has some few of these, sufficient to afford
a pretext for persecutors, who would have been equally bitter had
it possessed virginal purity:) but in consequence of other and more
dangerous ingredients, that _Choyce Drollery_ aroused such a storm. Not
disgust, but fear of its influence in reviving loyalty, prompted the
order of its extermination. Readers at this later day, might easily fail
to notice all that stirred the loyal sentiments of chivalric devotion,
and consequently made the fierce Fifth-Monarchy men hate the small volume
worse than the _Apocrypha_ or _Ikon Basilike_. Herein was to be found
the clever “Jack of Lent’s” account of loyal preparations made in London
to receive the newly-wedded Queen, Henrietta Maria, when she came from
France, in 1625, escorted by the Duke of Buckingham, who compromised her
sister by his rash attentions: Buckingham, whom King Charles loved so
well that the favouritism shook his throne, even after Felton’s dagger
in 1628 had rid the land of the despotic courtier. Here, also, a more
grievous offence to the Regicides, was still recorded in austere grandeur
of verse, from no common hireling pen, but of some scholar like unto
Henry King, of Chichester, the loyal “New-Year’s Wish” (p. 48) presented
to King Charles at the beginning of 1638, when the North was already
in rebellion: wherein men read, what at that time had not been deemed
profanity or blasphemy, the praise and faithful service of some hearts
who held their monarch only second to their Saviour. Referring to their
hope that the personal approach of the King might cure the evils of the
disturbed realm, it is written:—
“You, like our sacred and indulgent Lord,
When the too-stout Apostle drew his sword,
When he mistooke some secrets of the cause,
And in his furious zeale disdained the Lawes,
Forgetting true Religion doth lye
On prayers, not swords against authority:
You, like our substitute of horrid fate,
That are next Him we most should imitate,
Shall like to Him rebuke with wiser breath,
Such furious zeale, but not reveng’d with death.
Like him, the wound that’s giv’n you strait shall heal
Then calm by precept such mistaking zeal.”
Here was a sincere, unflinching recognition of Divine Right, such as the
faction in power could not possibly abide. Even the culpable weakness
and ingratitude of Charles, in abandoning Strafford, Laud, and other
champions to their unscrupulous destroyers, had not made true-hearted
Cavaliers falter in their faith to him. As the best of moralists
declares:—
“Love is not love
Which alters when it alteration finds,
Or bends with the remover to remove.”
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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