‘Every conqueror creates a muse’: Conquest and Constitutions in Marvell and Waller
In 1655, the year in which Marvell published his First Anniversary of The Government under His Highness The Lord Protector, Edmund Waller, described by Marvell a few years later as ‘Trumpet-gen’ral’, published two separate editions of A Panegyrick to My Lord Protector. The politics of Waller’s poem are unambiguous, and are clearly stated in the subtitles of the folio and quarto editions: one (printed by Thomas Newcomb, printer of the quarto First Anniversary) is ascribed to ‘A Gentleman That Loves the Peace, Union, and Prosperity of the English Nation’, and the other, ‘by E.W. Esq.’, on its title-page defines the aim of the poem as demonstrating ‘The present Greatness and joynt Interest of His Highness, and this Nation’? Waller s poem is an argument for the legitimacy of Cromwell’s Protectorate, on the grounds of patriotism, rational self-interest, and conquest theory. The ‘wars and fortunes son’ is metamorphosed into a man of peace, the regicide into a wise and benevolent monarch, a restorer of order rather than a powerful, feared agent of destruction.
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