Realistic war poetry from the 1640s

All dagled o'er from face to feet / What with Raine and their own Sweat

Last week I was in London for a couple of days to do various things, but mostly to spend some time in the British Library. One of the items on my to-do list for the BL was to photograph in their entirety the two manuscript notebooks containing most of Payne Fisher’s earliest recorded poetry. I’ve known about these manuscripts for a decade or so, and I already had fairly detailed notes on them, but no full images and therefore no complete transcriptions.

Fisher, a fascinating figure about whom I hope to write a book in due course, went on to be Cromwell’s poet. I’ve written about him several times, both in scholarly articles and chapters and also here on substack:

Fisher came to the attention of Cromwell as a Latin poet, and it is as a Latin poet that he had great success in the 1650s (and diminishing success thereafter). His breakthrough hit was a remarkable Latin poem in the Claudianic style about the siege of York and the battle of Marston Moor in the summer of 1644. It is an excellent and unforgettable poem in large part because it is both genuinely a celebration of Cromwell’s unstoppable military might and a lament for the suffering of the defeated royalists and the besieged inhabitants of the city. (In this sense, though not really in many others, it is a bit like Lucan’s Civil War.)

Fisher had in fact fought at the battle of Marston Moor himself, on the losing royalist side, and the earliest versions of the poem — which exist in both Latin and English — are straightforwardly royalist. Here is a fragment of the early English version of the poem that would eventually become Marston Moor, describing the city of York:

That Matron-Citty prostituted now
To the leud embracement of hir Ravishers
Hung downe hir aged Head disfigur’d round
With Batteries both of Foes, and hir owne Feares.¹

When we think of ‘war poetry’ today we tend not to think of poetry celebrating the victors, but rather the verse that laments the suffering of the participants — as in the trench warfare of the First World War — or, as here, of innocent civilians. Conversely, if we think of the poetry associated with the English civil war, we think probably of the ‘cavalier’ poets, celebrating honour and chivalry mostly in a rather abstract if beautiful kind of way, as in Lovelace’s poem, ‘To Lucasta, on going to the wars’:

Tell me not (Sweet) I am unkind,
That from the nunnery
Of thy chaste breast and quiet mind
To war and arms I fly.

True, a new mistress now I chase,
The first foe in the field;
And with a stronger faith embrace
A sword, a horse, a shield.

Yet this inconstancy is such
As you too shall adore;
I could not love thee (Dear) so much,
Lov’d I not Honour more.

Fisher and Lovelace were almost exact contemporaries, and in fact Fisher met and became friends with Lovelace during the 1640s, when they were both serving in the army. But Fisher’s version of war poetry is entirely unlike Lovelace’s — and indeed it’s not much like anything else I can think of from this decade. The style is perhaps best described as ‘documentary’, and indeed several of the poems do seem to have their origins, at least, in material written during a campaign. One poem is in the form of a letter to his commanding officer, describing how Fisher, looking for shelter in Ulster in February 1643, led his men to the abandoned church on an island in Lough Beg, ending:

Noe other Newes hath happ’ned since
My commeing heere of Consequence;
In haste thus much: to let you knowe
Our Safetyes onely, and how wee doe.
Sr were I not soe busy aboard
The Barke; I’d sent exacter word.
If therfore what I’ve writt, in matter
Or Forme bee weak, t’was writt by Water:
Now let it serve; when I send o’re
John Hodges Boat, Ile tell you more.

(There’s also a Seamus Heaney poem about Church Island on Lough Beg.)

In one poem about the march to, and then siege of Breda², he describes the troops and equipment of the Swiss, Walloons and ‘Butterboxes’ [i.e. the Dutch] before adding some detail about the camp-followers:

But hold! I had allmost forgatt
To tell you of the Rable that
Came i’th’ Fagg-end of all, and these
Were Sutlers³, Bawds, and Laundresses
Following us like Spies aloof
With Bagge and Baggage and such stuffe.
These Gipsie-Jades the whole day in
The Raine had marcht through thick and thin
All dagled⁴ o’re from Face to Feet
What with Raine and their owne Sweat,
That hard it was to umpier whether
Which was most Foule: They or the Weather.

Fisher seems to have spent six or seven years as a soldier: first in the Low Countries, then in Scotland during the Bishops’ Wars (1639-40), then in Ulster and finally in England. Other poems are called things like ‘On a miserable wet march between Monnymore and Montjoy’ [i.e. in Ireland in 1642-3] or ‘On our dangerous voyage twixt Carrickfergus and Whitehaven’ (so rough that even the ‘bannock-eating blue-caps’ [i.e. the Scots] were throwing up).

After Marston Moor, Fisher was captured and imprisoned in Newgate Prison in London and does not appear to have rejoined the army after that point. One of the poems is a description of the conditions in Newgate, sent as a verse letter to Sir John Clotworthy, whom he had served under in 1641-2:

When shall wee meet againe, Sir, and restoare
Those pristine Pastimes wee found heretofore?
[. . .]
Those Bogges, those woods through which I marcht, and stood
Above my midle both in myre, and Mudd,
Were nothing to my present greifes; to these
They were but fictions, and Hyperboles.
Fatall Glencainton too, soe cursd by some
To this place sure was an Elizium.

The tense in this poem oscillates oddly between the present and past, suggesting that the poem was drafted in prison and then later revised. It is particularly memorable on the smell, the rats and the different reactions of other prisoners:

The Place tis true was Publique: yet my chamber
Was soe much Priuie that I needed amber
[. . .]
Oh how the stifling stench and conquering smoak
Of Jakes-euaporating⁵ fumes did choak
My inthraled sense! [. . .]
Nor am I all alone: for Ratts to sue
And scrape acquaintance will see how I doe;
And thoe more bold than welcombe, yet they use
This as their Head-Parrade and Randevouze.⁶
[. . .]
One [fellow-prisoner] hanges the head, and deprecates ye womb
Wishing his Birthplace had first beene his tombe:
T’other with patience spurnes his Bolts; and beares
His wronges more easie than the Weight hee weares.
This howles; That singes; whiles that a fifth halfe dead
With want complaineth and bawles out for bread.

The two notebooks in the British Library were prepared in 1645-1646 as gifts — one is dedicated to “E.P.” (whom I have not yet been able to identify) and the other to Denzil Holles. Fisher at his point was no doubt casting around for patronage, employment or any other kind of support, and they contain similar though not identical items — for instance, the collection to E. P. begins with an elegy for William Laud (Archbishop of Canterbury, executed in January 1645); this poem doesn’t appear in the collection for Holles, no doubt because Holles was hostile to Laud.

The collections do not consist only of political or war poetry. They include a selection of the sort of occasional verse you’d expect, including poems of consolation and religious devotion. The range of styles, though not all equally successful, suggests wide reading in fashionable verse of the day and the effect is sometimes rather lively, especially when Fisher is writing to his male friends. A poem in the metaphysical style to Henry Dixon consoles him, rather unusually, not on the death of his wife, but on the ‘disparity’ of his recent marriage (that is, on a choice of wife viewed by his friends as incongruous at best, disastrous at worst). Console yourself, says Fisher, by the contemplation of nature:

View but the Creatures and your eyes
Will shew you how they sympathize:
They scorne all tearmes, and seldoome doe
Stand on Titles where they Wooe.
The Plants doe all distinction fly
And thrive best through Antipathy:
The Ashe, doth with ye Elder joyne
The Bramble with ye Eglantine
The Oake too carelesse of his state
Doth with th’ Ivie incorporate.
Thus wee to Vegitables give
Natures due Prerogative.

Running through a rather witty series of inversions of the traditional tropes of marriage poems, he reassures his friend that his terrible choice of wife will only serve to highlight, as by a foil, his own virtue and excellence: ‘No Marriage-Metempsychosis / Can change a soul sincerely good. / Gold still is gold though laid on wood.’ This is a very funny poem though you have to wonder what Henry made of it.

To be fair, Fisher does seem to have been able to laugh at himself as well. In one of my favourite passages, he describes his own state by the end of a ‘miserable wet march’ between Moneymore and Mountjoy in Northern Ireland. (Google maps tells me this would take about 12 hours to walk.)

My wainscot doublet now grew wett: being stuffe
As thin as Paper, and not Weather-Proofe.
The Water from my broad=broacht-hat ran downe
As thoe I had a Conduit in the Crowne:
My Breeches gott the Dropsie; and drunck in
Such a draught as drencht mee to ye skin:
Like the flapping sayles to th’totterd Mast
My linings kissd my Breech, and there stuck fast.
I neede noe stringes: my stockings clung about
My leggs as tho I’d beene plaisterd for the Gout.
My liquord Boots much like black Jacks were fraught:
And carried more Water, then an Irish Cott:
My Cuffes that erst stood stiffe; now humbly kisst
My hand, and gently twined about my wrist.
My Gloves were glued to my Golls⁷; and stuck as fast
As thoe they had beene conjured on with paste.
My haire too clung in Clotts: soe that mine head
Lookt like some Swabber⁸, or a Maupp⁹ for a Bed.
Ponder’d and pickled thus; and in this Mood
Being Dress’t I lookt as if I had beene stew’d.
The Souldiers flockt to meet mee: some I met
Askt mee a Drie question, how I came soe Wett.

It’s so hot in Paris at the moment that it’s actually quite pleasant to imagine being drenched to the skin.

BL Add MS 19863, fol. 36v

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1. Both manuscripts contain two poems about the siege and battle: one in English and the other in Latin. They are not however straightforward versions of one another. The English poem is, as you can see here, interestingly in blank verse; not a common choice of metre for narrative verse in the 1640s.

2. Presumably the fourth siege of Breda in 1637.

3. A sutler is one who follows an army and sells provisions to soldiers.

4. The wonderful word dagled seems to be a variant of daggle: to get wet with mud, soil or water, e.g. by trailing through wet grass.

5. Jakes is a word for the privy or lavatory.

6. Randevouse is a version of rendez-vous, used by Fisher several times, as here, to mean something like a ‘refuge’ or ‘place of rest’ rather than a meeting; as also in Shakespeare, Henry IV, Part 1, iv.i.57: A randevous, a home to flie vnto. There are a very large number of English spellings of this word attested in the OED.

7. Goll means hand.

8. A swabber is the sailor who swabs the deck.

9. I assume that Maupp must have something to do with mop.