EMLS 14.3 (January, 2009) 7.1-32 To ‘truck for trade with darksome things’: Faithful Teate’s ‘Epithalamium’ (1655) and Cromwell’s ‘Western Design’

To ‘truck for trade with darksome things’:
Faithful Teate’s ‘Epithalamium’ (1655) and Cromwell’s ‘Western Design’

Angelina Lynch
University College Dublin
angelina.lynch@ucd.ie

Angelina Lynch. "To ‘truck for trade with darksome things’: Faithful Teate’s ‘Epithalamium’ (1655) and Cromwell’s ‘Western Design’". Early Modern Literary Studies 14.3 (January, 2009) 7.1-32 <URL: http://purl.oclc.org/emls/14-3/Lyncteat.html>.

In 1655 a meditative work by Faithful Teate, formerly of County Cavan, but at that time ‘Minister of the Gospel’ for Sudbury in Suffolk, appeared in print. The text, entitled A Scripture-map of the wildernesse of sin, is described on the title page as being ‘the summe of lxiv lecture sermons … on cantic 8.5.’ It comprises two prefaces – one addressed to ‘My Dear Friends of the Burrough and Town of sudbury; Together with all Christian Auditors of the ensuing Lectures’, and the other to the ‘Ingenuous [sic] reader’ – the main work itself and finally, with a separate title page, Teate’s poem: ‘Epithalamium, or a love-song of the leaning-soul’.1
Teate’s reputation has been eclipsed by that of his more famous son the poet laureate Nahum Tate, and his poems – both the ‘Epithalamium’ (which is appended here) and his major work, Ter Tria (1658) – have received no sustained critical attention until now, although they are texts of significant literary and cultural value.2 It is hoped that this article, which will comprise a brief overview of the poet’s life and an extended discussion of the ‘Epithalamium’ in the context of the Western Design (Cromwell’s failed attempt to capture the Spanish West Indies in 1655) will help to redress this neglect and introduce Teate to a wider scholarly audience.
Teate was born in Ballyhaise, County Cavan in about 1626,3 the eldest son of a puritan doctor of divinity also named Faithful (hereafter referred to as Dr Teate) a landowner of planter stock who had been educated at Trinity College Dublin under James Ussher. Dr Teate was forced to flee his home at the time of the 1641 rising during which Protestant settlers were killed by Irish natives embittered by years of discrimination. The 1641 rising was a catastrophic event which plunged the country into nearly twenty years of war. It was also a defining moment in Irish Protestant history and was referred to for generations after as undeniable proof of the barbarity and godlessness of the native Irish. According to Dr. Teate’s own deposition of March 1642, on the morning of 23 October 1641, ‘fearing of a rebellion and seeing them begin to arise’, he set out for the refuge of Dublin with his eldest son and namesake, the future author of Ter Tria.4 It appears that he was forced to leave his wife and other children behind in Ballyhaise, and although they eventually joined him in Dublin, they suffered ‘ill usage’ at the hands of the insurgents.5 A pamphlet, published in London to alert English readers to the situation in Ireland, elaborates the story to suggest that God had shown ‘extraordinary providence’ to Dr Teate. The author claims that on the road to Dublin, exhausted, bleeding and near death, Dr Teate ‘came to a house where accidentally an Irish Chirurgion [surgeon] was, who formerly never had reported thither …’ The surgeon attended Dr Teate’s injuries, allowing him to continue his journey. Similarly, according to the same report, Dr Teate’s wife, travelling separately with her infant son, and both being close to starvation, ‘found a little Irish Mader (drinking vessel) full of Butter-milke … whereby the baby was preserved alive.’6 Over fifty years later, William Turner used the story to demonstrate the ‘existence of good angels’ in The Complete History of Remarkable Providences.7
Once in Dublin, Dr Teate was appointed provost of Trinity College, where he enrolled the young Faithful. Dr Teate had most likely been offered the position because his hardline puritanism agreed with the politics of those who had appointed him, the then Lord Justices Borlase and Parsons, who were known supporters of Parliament in the dispute with the king that was to lead to civil war in England the following year. Dr. Teate’s political views were eventually to cost him his position at Trinity College when the outbreak of the English civil war forced all Irish men to declare for Parliament or the king. By this time, Dublin was in the hands of the Royalists under the lord deputy Ormonde, and in August 1642, Teate’s patron, Parsons, was arrested and imprisoned in Dublin Castle, along with three other parliamentary supporters.8 In April 1643 Dr Teate was ordered to quit the college because he had shown himself as ‘ill-affected’ towards ‘the present established government under His Majesty’s subjection.’9
Perhaps angered at Ormonde’s decision to negotiate with the ‘bloody’ Catholics, Dr Teate left Ireland for England before 1648 in which year he appears as minister at Salisbury Cathedral. What is certain is that his son Faithful entered Pembroke College, Cambridge in 1646, most likely by incorporation of the studies he had previously undertaken at Trinity College Dublin.10 Faithful Teate remained at Pembroke College for some four years, during which time he took orders. He is recorded as taking his MA in 1650, at the age of 23.
Following his ordination, Teate seems to have received his first living in 1649 as Rector of Castle Camps, Cambridge, the second of three ‘Intruders’, that is, ministers appointed by Parliament. The first of these ‘Intruders’ had been Nahum Kenetie whose daughter, Katherine, Teate married. According to the parish records of Castle Camps, Teate remained there until 1656. However he was also minister at Sudbury, Suffolk from 1651 when he was granted license to preach at St Peter’s and St Gregory’s. While living in Sudbury, Teate published two works: A Scripture-map of the wildernesse of sin – a pedagogical meditation on the Song of Songs which contains the ‘Epithalamium’ – and his sermon The character of cruelty in the workers of iniquity and the Cure of Contention among the People of God (1656). The latter is dedicated to ‘His Highnesse Oliver Lord Protector of The Commonwealth of England, Scotland and Ireland’ and, according to the title page, had been preached upon a ‘Day of Publick Humiliation upon occasion of the late sad Persecution in Piedmont’ – a reference to the murder of the Protestant Waldenses in the valleys of Piedmont in 1655. Teate also wrote his extraordinary, long devotional poem Ter Tria (1658) while at Sudbury. Ter Tria is dedicated to Henry Cromwell – at that time lord deputy of Ireland – and it is likely that Teate was angling for a position in his home country, which was suffering from a dearth of able ‘Ministers of the Gospel’. Indeed Teate’s father, Dr Teate, had been personally directed by the lord deputy to preach at Drogheda and had returned to Ireland in 1658. A year later, in 1659, Teate himself was awarded a position in Limerick due to start on 25 March, and followed his father to Ireland. By the time Teate left Sudbury, he was the father of seven children, sons Faithful (the third), Nahum (the future poet laureate), Joseph and Theophilus and daughters, Mary, Fidelia and Ann.11
It is not clear whether Teate ever arrived in Limerick, but in May 1660, he was directed to preach at St. Werburgh’s in Dublin. Dramatic political and ecclesiastical change, however, ensured that Teate’s career would come full circle. Just as his father had been censured in Ireland in the 1640s because of his puritanism and his support for Parliament, and forced to leave the country, now the son was made to suffer the same fate. In May 1660, the same month that Teate was appointed to St Werburgh’s, Charles II was declared king in Dublin. Puritan ministers in Ireland were anxious to retain the reforms enacted under Henry Cromwell, but the reinstallation of episcopacy and the Book of Common Prayer in 1661 made this seem unlikely. In May 1661 a declaration ordering all ministers to conform to government by episcopacy was drawn up and ordered to be read at Sunday services all over Dublin. One month later, Teate was ordered to appear before the Irish Parliament to answer charges of preaching contrary to the declaration, and was suspended forthwith.12 It seems as though Teate may have seen his removal coming as, in 1660, he had published in Dublin one of his sermons, The Uncharitable Informer charitably informed that Sycophancy is a Sin, addressed ‘To the Principal Officers of the English Army Within these Three Nations’ in which he railed, with Swiftian acerbity, against an Ireland ‘replete with angry humors, and distempered with tongue-dysenteries’. It appears that Teate remained in Dublin until 1664. In July of that year he made a will in which he stated he was ‘of Dublin, clearke’ and intended ‘speedily a journey into England’. The following September he made a second will in which he said he is ‘late of Dublin, now of Holyhead, and intending a voyage into Ireland’.13
Teate did return to Dublin, and another of his sermons, The Thoughts of the Righteous are Right, was printed in Dublin in 1666. Teate died that same year at the age of 40 and three thousand mourners were said to have attended his funeral.14

II
According to Thomason’s dating on the title page, A Scripture-map of the Wildernesse of sin, containing Teate’s ‘Epithalamium’, was published in May 1655.15 This came one month after Cromwell launched his ‘Western Design’ to capture the Spanish West Indian colonies of Cuba and Hispaniola. The Design, which was intended to cut Spanish trade routes, culminated in a declaration of war on Spain later that same year. Government propaganda directed against Spain in the wake of the Design re-ignited a long and widely-held antipathy towards the great papist power that stretched back to the reign of Queen Elizabeth and the Armada. In the grand narrative of British Protestant history Spain was seen as the principal henchman of Rome, and was frequently cast as the anti-Christ or Whore of Babylon, determined to murder and enslave God’s chosen people like the Pharaoh of Exodus. Texts such as the first English translation of Tommaso Campanella’s Spanish Monarchy and Fulke Greville’s Life of Sidney, which both appeared in 1652, stressed Spain’s ambitions for world dominance and suggested that its pernicious interference in English affairs was ongoing. Walter Raleigh’s History of the World with its preface attacking the ‘betrayings, oppressions, imprisonments, tortures [and] poysonings’16 of the Spanish state ran for three editions that same year. It was even suggested by some that those politicians who had supported England’s war with the Dutch, principally the Anabaptists, were actually Spanish agents in disguise, who ‘like serpents that creep unawares into chambers’ had stealthily attempted to fuel a conflict between two Protestant nations for the benefit of Rome.17
It is certain that this kind of propaganda which identified Spain as a key player in a ‘Romish’ conspiracy to eradicate Protestant influence in the Atlantic would have chimed with Teate’s world-view: the belief that Spain had aided and abetted the Catholic insurgents responsible for the 1641 rising in Ireland, an event which, as we have seen, had affected his family directly, was widely reported at the time.18 Indeed historians have commented upon the analogous ways in which Ireland and the British Atlantic colonies were perceived and represented by the English throughout the 1640s and 1650s: both were places of contested loyalties and were constructed alternately as fecund Paradises and desolate wildernesses, as loyal dominions and as harbourers of treachery, as bastions of liberty and dens of slavery.19 Indeed, throughout the 1650s the loyalty of the inhabitants of Ireland and the British Atlantic colonies to the new government was constantly in doubt: Bermuda, Virginia, Maryland and Barbados had all initially proclaimed Charles II king after the execution of his father. Another focus of disquiet for the new Commonwealth was trade: the Atlantic colonists were not concerned, in the main, with the patriotic and ideological imperatives of their mother state, and had continued to trade with England’s main rivals – namely the Dutch, with whom England had been at war from 1651-4, and Spain – in direct contravention of the Navigation Act of 1651, which forbade trade with anyone but English merchants.
When Cromwell came to power in 1649 he wasted no time in invading Ireland and violently enforcing ‘loyalty’ to the English Parliament and, in launching the Western Design six years later, he was again attempting to regulate a contested and potentially threatening site of unrest. He could not (and indeed had no desire to) lay waste to the property of the English colonists of the West Indies as he had the property of the Irish in 1649, but he could force them to prove their loyalty by calling on their unequivocal support in a war against the great enemy, Spain. The nature of the propaganda employed by the Protectorate to garner this support for the war against Spain for control of the West Indies (namely a hermeneutical approach which saw Biblical narrative and the history of Protestantism as mutually validating) was virtually identical to that used to denigrate Irish Catholics throughout the 1640s, and to validate Cromwell’s invasion and conquest of Ireland in 1649. Cromwell hoped that existing colonists would ‘plant’ the captured territories in the same manner that families such as Teate’s had planted Ireland.
Although Teate’s ‘Epithalamium’ can be read as a meditative work, part of a long puritan tradition of exegesis of the Song of Solomon, it is also, as I hope to demonstrate, a politically engaged text which registers ambivalence towards the Atlantic colonies, as well as anxiety in the face of the Spanish threat that was palpable in the Protestant discourse of the 1650s. Whereas ‘court’ poets such as Waller and Marvell, praised Cromwell’s military achievements in occasional poems which followed the classical model, Teate, writing from his parish in Suffolk, chose instead to appropriate the discourse of Protestant historiography which underpins puritan writing of every genre – not only sermons and political tracts, but also personal testimonies, dream narratives and meditative writing of various kinds. Nigel Smith has commented that: ‘The triumph of Puritanism in the 1650s was concerned with the matching of inner and outer frames of awareness’,20 and this article aims to examine Teate’s ‘Epithalamium’ in this context: as a text which manages to be simultaneously both a pedagogical meditation on the ‘inner’ progress of the soul and a coded apologia for the puritan state’s aggression against the ideological enemy.

III
The ‘Epithalamium’ is a remarkable text for many reasons, not least because of the manner in which Teate appropriates its source text, Song of Solomon 8: 5: ‘Who is this that cometh up from the wilderness, leaning upon her beloved?’ Unlike many of his puritan contemporaries whose poetic engagement with the Song of Solomon did not move beyond verse paraphrase,21 Teate employs the sacred text as a jumping-off point for a meditation on the soul’s progress through a phantasmagoric ‘wildernesse of sin’. The poem’s narrative loosely mirrors the biblical journey of the people of Israel from slavery in Egypt into the wilderness and finally to the promised land of Canaan: the speaker of the poem begins as ‘An Orphan, in a Bulrush-Ark bound fast’ who is cast by ‘cruell stepdame, Nature’ by the ‘Miry Banks’ of the Nile, and who progresses through a topography subject to ‘hurricanos’ and populated by ‘lurking’ Negroes, resisting the temptation posed by the woman ‘in bright array’ whose ‘breasts are all made bare’, before he is able to see the ‘Sun of Righteousness’.
As an epithalamium it is also unusual in that it contains no reference to marriage. Teate’s rationale for effacing the wedlock metaphor from his ‘wedding song’ can, to some extent, be traced in A Scripture-map. The trope of sexual union at the heart of Canticles had always been deeply problematic for Protestant theologians, and Teate’s prefaces to A Scripture-map were but one example of many seventeenth-century commentaries dedicated to neutralising the book’s troubling eroticism. His overarching allegorical interpretation of the Song seems to take the standard puritan line – that the bridegroom represents Christ, and the bride, the soul of the believer – although he expresses this view with differing degrees of complexity in a manner which presupposes an astute awareness of the divergent reading practices and pedagogical needs of the different social strands of his readership. In the first preface, addressed to his parishioners and ‘auditors’, Teate assumes the role of the plain-speaking preacher, parsing his interpretation of Canticles in the simplest of terms – as a text best understood not ‘grosly and carnally’ but ‘Mystically of Christ and his people’ (sig. A3) – and recommending the ever-popular The Saints Everlasting Rest by Richard Baxter for those in need of further spiritual instruction.
Teate’s second preface to the ‘ingenuous reader’, however, strikes a self-consciously scholarly tone, and is perhaps intended more for his peers than his parishioners. In it, Teate identifies seven categories of ‘wilderness’ to be found in the Bible, ranging from the historical to the metaphorical, and justifies his conclusions by exploring the etymologies of Greek and Aramaic words, and by citing Beza, Junius and Tremelius – the theologians responsible for the various translations and commentaries that comprised the Geneva Bible – as well as his contemporaries Henry Ainsworth, John Cotton and William Burroughs.22 In conclusion Teate states, uncontroversially, that he understands the ‘wildernesse’ of Song of Songs 8: 5 to signify a state of ‘unconversion’, and ‘leaning’ to refer to the doctrine of ‘recumbency’, that is, total reliance on one’s faith in Christ. Teate’s unwavering focus on this one verse means that the image it contains – that of the believer being led out of the wilderness by a faithful guide – comes to stand, in a synecdochical sense, for the entire book of the Song of Solomon. The believer is no longer the female lover ‘leaning on her beloved’, but an explorer relying on a guide to lead him to safety. As Teate himself comments, the Old Testament type of Christ is not the bridegroom of Canticles, but the soldier Joshua leading his people from the wilderness:

I cannot but apprehend that the words of my text bear respect to Israels coming up from the Wildernesse of the land of Egypt by Josuahs conduct. (sig. a2)
In Teate’s discourse, therefore, the Song of Solomon becomes yoked to the narrative of exploration and occupation found in the book of Joshua rather than the trope of marriage and / or sexual consummation. The ‘Epithalamium’, then, is Teate’s dramatisation of the hermeneutical paradigm established in the prefaces to A Scripture-map – indeed in his introduction to the poem he refers to it as ‘but a Contraction of that Discourse’ – and consequently represents a divergence from the poetic model of the love lyric of the Song of Solomon and a move towards the epic narratives of Exodus and Joshua, and the prophetic visions of Revelation. Teate’s eschewing of the imagery of Canticles for that contained in the more violent and apocalyptic biblical books not only allowed him to dispense with a disquietingly ‘carnal’ metaphor for spiritual love, it also provided him with tropological language more suited to alluding to the Anglo-Spanish conflict taking place in the Atlantic colonies.
Although Cromwell’s decision to invade the Spanish West Indies had been motivated principally by economic and strategic concerns, the government, as we have seen, was keen to paint the design as a religious mission to eliminate Catholic influence in the New World, and to establish ‘triumphal Protestantism’ in every corner of the globe.23 In one government pamphlet, A Dialogue… concerning the present designe in the West-Indies, which takes the form of a debate between a pro-war ‘seaman’ and a sceptical ‘soldier’, England’s relation to Spain and the colonies is described as being:

in the capacity of Israel, upon the Borders of Canaan, lately brought out of Egyptian Bondage. They are entred the Land, and the Walls of Jericho, are fallen by Faith, they have got footing and what now must be done. They must proceed according to command, to destroy the inhabitants of the Land which God hath promised to give them.24
According to this typological schema, much employed during the Interregnum, the Protestant English are the Israelites, the Catholic Church the Egyptians and the Spanish West Indies are the city of Jericho, which must be taken by force from its ungodly rulers. The same references to the Book of Joshua – Cromwell’s ‘divinely prescribed military handbook’25 – had been used to legitimise his brutal conquest of Ireland six years previously; a move which Teate unsurprisingly endorses in A Scripture-map (pp. 223-4).
Another discursive strategy that the state employed to suggest divine sanctification of its political actions was less directional than the unambiguous typological exegesis found in A Dialogue. It involved relating the negative experiences of the English at the hands of the Spanish in a manner which mirrored biblical narrative, thus encouraging readers to see the parallels between the lives and histories of their country-men and the biblical text for themselves. An example can be found in Cromwell’s proclamation of war on Spain, which included a litany of Spanish abuses of English freedoms in the Americas from the late sixteenth century onwards.

After the Peace concluded in the Year 1605, a Ship called the Mary, Ambrose Birch, being Master, was in Trade upon the North-side of Hispaniola in the West Indies; and the Master with six of his Company being enticed on Shore by a priest called Father John, to see some Merchandize, under promise of secure and fair Trading, and twelve Spaniards going aboard the Ship to view the English Wares; whilst the English merchants were shewing them their Merchandize, nothing doubting of any fraud, the Watch-word being given from the shore by the Priest, every Spaniard drew out a great Knife, and stabbed all the English men aboard, except two that leaped into the Sea, and the rest on shore were put to strange deaths, and the Master himself was stripped naked, and bound to a tree with cords, and so pinched and stung to death, being naked, by Mosqueto’s; where continuing about twenty hours, a Negro hearing a man roar, and cry in that extremity, and finding him, ran him through with his Lance.26
The passage incorporates many of the pernicious traits assigned to the Spanish in Protestant propaganda of the time. The Spaniard is inherently treacherous and mercenary, in thrall to the priest and he would, given the opportunity, enslave or murder every freeborn, godly Englishman alive. It is also a classic example of puritan historiography for its suggestive conflation of the historical and the biblical, in this case the gospel narrative of Christ’s crucifixion. The ‘Master’, Ambrose Birch, is ‘enticed’ on to the shore by the Spanish priest under false pretences, betrayed and then ‘stripped naked and bound to a tree’ where he is left in agony for twenty hours before a Negro stabs him ‘through with his Lance’. Birch is never compared to Christ directly but enough parallels are suggested for readers to make the connection for themselves. This genre of ‘historical’ writing, which was predicated on its readers recognising the victimization of Protestants by Catholics as the contemporary antitype of the suffering of the Israelites and of Christ himself, underpins the ‘Epithalamium’.
One of the most famous and widely-read examples of this kind of Protestant historiography – one which would undoubtedly have been familiar to Teate – is Sir John Temple’s The History of the Irish Rebellion: an account of the 1641 Catholic uprising in Ulster. The History contains gruesome descriptions of the torture and murder of Protestant settlers related in such a way so as to invoke biblical parallels between the Irish Catholics and, amongst other things, the murderous Egyptians of the Old Testament. The text is also notable for the way in which it constructs the Irish Catholic as sexual deviant. Episodes recounted in grisly detail include the putting of babies to suck on the breast of their dead mothers, the arranging of dead bodies into sexual positions and the mutilation of genitalia. It is as if, in Temple’s eyes, these macabre rituals unveil the threatening monstrosity of the fertility of the native Irish.
In his study of the Gothic mode in the literature of Anglican Ireland, Jarlath Killeen has argued that Irish, Protestant historiography is illuminated by Julia Kristeva’s concept of the ‘abject’. In order for a child to develop an autonomous sense of self, it must disassociate itself from the mother through a process of abjection, during which what was formerly desired (the mother and the mother’s body) becomes imbued with an aura of disgust and is violently rejected. However the child cannot suppress totally its desire for the mother and consequently its identity becomes dominated by conflicting impulses of desire and repulsion. As Killeen explains:

The realm of subjectivity, what Kristeva calls the symbolic world, is dominated by Lacan’s law of the Father: it is a world of Self and Other, subjectivity and objectivity, law and government, paternity. The pre-symbolic world, what Kristeva calls the semiotic modality, is identified with the maternal, the abjected, the pre-verbal and the rhythmic. Crucially, these two worlds do not remain apart. Although for the symbolic world of paternity to exist it must abject the maternal, this pre-symbolic modality remains necessary for the continued existence of the symbolic, and often erupts into the world and destabilizes it.27
This process, as Killeen goes on to state, provides a useful model for examining the development of the Protestant sense of self after the Reformation: in order for Protestantism to establish itself, it must continually evoke the ‘mother’ church only to recast and reject it as a ‘whore’.
It seems to me that the ‘Epithalamium’, with its self-conscious rejection of what Teate calls the ‘lacivious levity’ of the love lyric, its effacement of the marriage trope which is central to its Biblical source text and its troping of temptation as a monstrous mother, registers an anxiety regarding the Catholic threat to Protestant self-hood (an anxiety that doubtless had its roots in the poet’s Irish upbringing) in a manner which fits the Kristevan paradigm. In 1655, however, this threat had moved from the towns and fields of Ireland to the tropical plantations of the West Indies – a geographical shift which, as we shall see, Teate registers in the ‘semiotic’ wilderness of the ‘Epithalamium’.

IV
The ‘Epithalamium’ is a version of the pilgrimage narrative of spiritual regeneration: the subject must resist the temptation of the material world and overcome his own doubts and fears concerning his election before he can receive God’s grace and be assured of salvation. The first half of the poem (lines 1-71) follows the contemptu mundi convention, and the central images would have been instantly familiar to Teate’s Protestant readership. Teate conflates the story of Moses with Calvinist theology to structure his narrative of deliverance from the evils of the material world. To be born is to automatically become an ‘Orphan’, cut off irrevocably from one’s divine origins, tainted with original sin and left at the mercy of the ‘cruell stepdame’ that is the physical world. However the reference to the story of Moses cast into the Nile in his ‘bulrush ark’ suggests a path to redemption: just as Moses’ rejection of the wealth and status of his Egyptian upbringing and his obedience to God freed the Israelites from slavery and set them on the path out of the wilderness and into the promised land, so the soul, by rejecting material temptations and opening itself up to God’s Word, can be assured of its own election.
Temptation is emblematised as the ‘crocodile’ and the smiling ‘woman’. The myth of the ‘weeping crocodile’ that would cry in order to lure in its victims before devouring them has its origins in classical writing but was appropriated into Christian tradition as an appropriate symbol for Satan. Many early modern Biblical scholars felt that the biblical monsters of the Old Testament – principally the ‘dragon’ and ‘Leviathan’ – referred to the crocodile. As Karen Edwards comments:

In Ezekiel 29.3, when God announces the punishment of Pharaoh, “the great dragon that lieth in the midst of his rivers,” he does so in terms that strongly suggest a crocodile, which is in any case associated with the Nile: “I will put hooks in thy jaws, and I will cause the fish of thy rivers to stick unto thy scales” (Ezek. 29.3). God speaks of the Leviathan in Job 41.1 in similar terms: “Canst thou draw out leviathan with an hook? Or his tongue with a cord which thou lettest down?” he asks.28
Sightings of ‘crocodiles’ (which were in fact alligators) also appeared in accounts of the New World that were written and reprinted throughout the late sixteenth and seventeenth century. The following account of Captain John Hawkins, who came across crocodiles on his way to the West Indies in 1565, echoes Teate’s description almost one hundred years later:

In this River we saw Crocodiles of sundry bignesses, but some as big as a boat, with 4 feete, a long broad mouth, and a long taile, whose skin is so hard, that a sword will not pierce it … His nature is ever when hee would have his prey, to cry and sobbe like a Christian body, to provoke them to come to him, and then hee snatcheth at them, and thereupon came this proverbe that is applied unto women when they weepe, Lachrymae Crocodili, the meaning whereof is, that as the Crocodile when he crieth goeth then about most to deceive, so doeth a woman most commonly when shee weepeth.29
In the ‘Epithalamium’ Teate is, in effect, conflating the speaker of the poem set afloat in his ‘Bulrush-Ark’ with men such as John Hawkins and the unfortunate Ambrose Birch: godly English captains of perilous voyages to the colonies whose stories took on a powerful resonance in the context of the Western Design and England’s renewed hostilities against Spain. The crocodile, as we have already seen, was associated with the ‘dragon’ Pharaoh, a tyrant who was in turn identified by Protestant commentators as a biblical type of the Catholic Church and its supporters.
The smiling ‘woman’ is a composite of different literary and biblical sources. With her hair of ‘Golden wire’, she is a parody of the mistress of the Petrarchan love lyric and of the sirens who lured sailors to their death in Homer’s Odyssey. She is also a version of the ‘mother of harlots’ of Revelation, and her lactating breasts are a metaphor (deriving from the many references in the Old Testament to suckling and weaning) for the empty gratification provided by the material world as opposed to the real and substantial nourishment of God’s love.30
Teate’s depiction of the woman also represents a telling appropriation of the story of Moses. She is described in parenthesis – the grammatical equivalent of a wink to the reader – as ‘A darling Minion of th’ Egyptian King’s / …to whose Coasts resort / Such as will truck for trade with darksome things’. The ‘Bay’ is described as her ‘Haunt’ where she lures ‘all afloat’ the ‘Children of Gods Israel’. Teate is refashioning the story of Moses’ rescue from the Nile for ideological purpose by inscribing deviance into the behaviour of the women involved. According to Exodus 2., Moses is found in the river by Pharaoh’s daughter who has ‘compassion on him’, and pays the child’s real mother to nurse him until he can be adopted into the Egyptian court. Teate, however, merges the Egyptian princess and Moses’ mother into one mother / whore figure – her breasts representing a grotesque conflation of the sexual (‘hills where wantons make their fire’) and the maternal (‘What more restorative for nutriment?’). Teate’s imagery seems to illustrate the thesis that Killeen posits in relation to the Anglo-Irish – that Protestant anxiety regarding the Catholic threat (in this case Spanish imperialism) is defined by the re-emergence of the abjected, semiotic world of the mother.
Indeed, the description of the woman’s ‘Court’ as a place ‘whose soule’s at sale’ to those who ‘truck for Trade with darksome things’ is a clear allusion to the threat posed by Spanish trade in the West Indies, which as we have seen, was depicted by English propagandists as nothing more than mercenary and murderous piracy. It is also perhaps intended as a rebuke to those English colonists who continued to trade with the Spanish after the passing of the Navigation Act of 1651. Indeed, the woman’s breasts are presented as metaphors for the corrupting spoils of imperialism – the ‘whole Worlds divided Treasure! / This Breast’s the one half-globe, and that the other / Who can suck them both, and want for pleasure?’ The speaker is about to ‘stretch forth’ his hand, ‘Having in heart quite sold [him] self’, when ‘Negroes on the strand’ warn him of ‘spirits stealing youth away’. Here Teate seems to be appropriating contemporary accounts, in circulation at the time, which depicted the Atlantic colonies as places of English enslavement. This association came about due to the new government’s policy of transporting criminals and political insurgents as slave labour to the colonies – a practice that increased dramatically throughout the 1650s. The word ‘spirit’ to mean ‘kidnapper’ appears to have come into use in England at around this time in reference to the practice of shipping labourers to the Atlantic colonies without their consent. Popular outcry against the practice – which focused on the accusation that children were being ‘spirited’ – led to Parliament passing an ordinance in 1645 against the kidnapping of children, although many believed that the practice continued unabated.31 Although ‘spiriting’ referred initially to English traders kidnapping English subjects, Teate’s reference to ‘spirits’ must be seen in the context of the Exodus narrative that frames his poem: Egypt is the archetypal slave-nation and the woman, the ‘darling Minion of th’ Egyptian King’s’, is simultaneously a kidnapper (a version of the Egyptian princess who adopts the infant Moses) and a slave-driver. This is also exactly the rhetoric used by the English government to denigrate the activities of the Spanish in the colonies before and subsequent to the Western Design. In A Dialogue, Spain is referred to as a ‘cursed Court … by whose power and cruelty the people of God living in or neer their Territories, are persecuted, afflicted and tormented, even as at this day’, and in A declaration as a power responsible for making ‘Our People Prisoners and Slaves’. 32 The ‘spirits’ are the Spanish ‘minion[s]’ of the Catholic ‘court’. Before the poet can succumb to the woman he is ‘waft[ed]’ across the ‘Channell’ by ‘Afflictions Hurricanos’ to the ‘Land of Rest’. Hurricanes, of course, were associated chiefly with the West Indies, and accounts of the phenomena often stressed their providential as well as their destructive nature.33
The second half of the ‘Epithalamium’ continues to mirror the Exodus narrative, enacting the poet’s escape from the ‘Egyptian’ court and into the ‘wildernesse’, which he must navigate before finding salvation. The imaginative topography of the ‘Desert-sin’ is drawn principally from the apocalyptic imagery of the prophetic books of the Old Testament – namely Isaiah, Jeremiah, Ezekiel and Malachi. The wild beasts (Isa. 13. 21), the bed of thorns (Isa. 7.19) and the inscribed scroll (Eze. 2. 10) are all images invoked by the prophets to denounce the sins of the people of Judah and Jerusalem, and to reveal the terrible retribution that God will enact against those that rebel against His law. The prophetic books are also those cited by the government author of A Dialogue to prove divine authority for England’s war against Spain.34 In response to the Soldier’s argument that these biblical texts relate ‘to a spiritual work, which the Lord hath to carry on in the souls of the sons of men, mystically by his spirit, which we generally apprehend not to be a work of the sword, but of the spirit and word preached’, the Seaman comments:

’Tis clear to me that the late war (in this Nation) was not an accidental War (as some seem to judge it) but the absolute appearances of God (by his spirit in his people) against the powers of the world, which are Antichristian. Now if it be lawful for the spirit to war against the flesh (which is granted of all) then it must be so in the general, as well betwixt people of several Nations, as betwixt the people of one Nation, one against the other.35
The ‘war’ between spirit and flesh – the ostensible theme of the ‘Epithalamium’ – is presented by the author of the A Dialogue as a microcosm for the actual war between the ‘darkness’ of popery and the ‘spiritual light’ of Protestantism taking place in the West Indies, and it is conceivable that Teate’s readers too would have ‘match[ed] inner and outer frames of awareness’, associating the ‘wildernesse’ of his poem with the Atlantic colonies – both those under Spanish rule, and those under English jurisdiction – that refused to give whole-hearted support to Cromwell’s military campaign in the region.
In the conclusion of the poem Teate spells out, for the instruction of the reader, the ‘mysticall’ or symbolic meaning of the wilderness of the poem, along with its inhabitants: ‘satan’s a Crocodile; the world’s a whore; sin is a Wildernesse’. He also makes direct reference, for the first time, to his source text, Song of Songs. However, following the precedent set out by Teate in his second preface to A Scripture-map, Christ the ‘bridegroom’ is not a lover but a guide – his appropriation of Song of Solomon 4. 8 transforms the believer from a love object (a ‘spouse’) into a lost explorer (an Ambrose Birch if you will). Teate similarly eschews the erotic imagery of the Song for the violent language of mortification, or to put it in Kristevan terms, suppresses the destabilizing semiotic with the self-authorizing symbolic, by laying siege to the Jericho within: ‘Cut off my part / In this black trinity that fools adore’.
Teate’s reference to the ‘black trinity’ of Satan, the World and Sin in the ‘Epithalamium’ anticipates the central motif of his next (much longer) poem Ter Tria, or the Doctrine of the Three Sacred Persons, Father, Son and Spirit; Principal Graces, Faith, Hope and Love; Main Duties, Prayer, Hearing and Meditation. As is the case with the ‘Epithalamium’, Ter Tria invites readers to see parallels between Scripture and their own personal and political milieu. Indeed, the first edition of the poem contains a dedicatory poem by William Jenkyn, a prominent Presbyterian minister who had been imprisoned in 1651 for his involvement in a plot to overthrow Cromwell, but was later released after publicly withdrawing his opposition to the government; by the time of the creation of the Protectorate he had been ‘publicly rehabilitated’.36 It is not clear whether Jenkyn knew Teate personally but his dedication reveals a desire to be seen in the same light as the ‘pious and ingenious authour’ – as a loyal supporter of Cromwell:

May pride of life, the lusts of flesh and eye,
Be poison’d by these leaves of thine, and die.
If any other three, I’de with were down,
’Tis Austria, Spain, the Pope with’striple Crown.
This latter Vote if th’ King of Kings would make
An Act, I’de willingly the Earth forsake.37
For the manner in which it equates the spiritual war against the ‘pride of life, the lusts of flesh and eye’ with the actual war against ‘Austria, Spain [and] the Pope’, Jenkyn’s poem could easily serve as a coda to the ‘Epithalamium’, as well as a preface to Ter Tria.

V
Teate’s ‘Epithalamium’, in which the discourse of anti-Spanish propaganda is inscribed on to the biblical ‘wildernesse’ of the Song of Songs, is a pithy example of how meditative writing of the period encompasses both the ‘private’ realm of spirituality and the ‘public’ realm of politics. Indeed, the poem is a kind of palimpsest consisting of multiple appropriations of biblical, political and literary texts. One such appropriation rests on Teate’s claim that the source text for his poem, Song of Songs 8. 5. (‘Who is this that cometh up from the wilderness, leaning upon her beloved?’) ‘bears respect’ to the soldier Joshua leading his people in the occupation of Canaan, an interpretation which licenses him to re-imagine epithalamium as epic. In this spiritual ‘Love-song’, the godly subject is no longer represented by Solomon’s bride but by the soldier / explorer who must traverse a foreign and threatening landscape.
One of the motivating factors in Teate’s move away from the conventions of the epithalamium towards those of the epic was a generalised puritan distrust of erotic verse – what the poet, in a prefatory poem to Ter Tria, calls ‘leud Poetrie’.38 Such distrust is exemplified by the motto which appears on the title page of the ‘Epithalamium’. It reads: ‘Parce tuum vatem sceleris damnare, Redemptor!’ [Redemptor, do not condemn your poet]. This is Teate’s adaptation of line 3 from Ovid’s Remedia Amoris (the original is addressed to Cupid). The Remedia Amoris had a particular place in the literary culture of seventeenth-century England. Since the medieval period the Remedia had been interpreted by some commentators as a renunciation of the Ars Amatoria – Ovid’s earlier poem on the intrigues of erotic courtship which was believed to have been partially responsible for his exile from Rome.39 It is therefore appropriate that Teate would choose lines from this text – which was widely read as a moral corrective to the dangers of sexual love – as an inscription to a poem predicated on the renunciation of erotic desire.
Another, more specific factor underlying Teate’s appropriation of the Song of Solomon was the long Protestant tradition of registering the corrupting influence of the Catholic Church in the language and imagery of sexual deviance. In a move which mirrors the psycho-political imperative registered in John Temple’s The History of the Irish Rebellion, Teate displaces the eroticism of the epithalamic bride on to a version of the Whore of Babylon who ‘truck[s] for Trade with darksome things’ in a quasi-West Indian landscape. In the ‘Epithalamium’, the discourse of erotic desire is no longer a metaphor for the spiritual union between Christ and the believer, but an expression of the corrupting power of the Catholic Church and its ally Spain – the foremost threat to England’s imperial power at that time.

Epithalamium, or a Love-Song of the Leaning-Soul

An Orphan, in a Bulrush-Ark bound fast,
(Vain Childhoods Emblem) when I h’d suck’d a while,
Like cruell stepdame Nature did me cast,
By Miry Banks afloat the sides of Nile.
Here crawl’s a Tearfull Crocodile:
There comes a woman with a smile.
The Crocodile creeps after me apace,
And weeps as’t creeps, and cries, thy friend, thy friend,
I look’d and list’ned, but soon turn’d my face;
Jealous at first: but whilst I did attend, [10]
Did Educations Eccho send
A Counter-Cry, thy end, thy end.
And now my fear hav’ng put me on my flight,
Poor wretch! what hast I might I made away.
No sooner was I gotten out of sight
Of that Pursuer, and into’ther Bay,
But th’ woman comes, in bright array,
Unto that Creek, and makes her stay.
In curious curles her Locks division’d are
To Captivate beholders, Golden wire [20]
Made into snares: Her breasts are all made bare.
(Naked Temptation’s more, shee counts, than tire)
The hills where wantons make their fire
In sacrifice to Lusts desire.
(I since have heard that she belong’d to th’ Court:
A darling Minion of th’ Egyptian King’s,
That Syre of Negroes, to whose Coasts resort
Such as will truck for Trade with darksome things,
Whose soule’s at sale; whole Egypt rings
Oth’ Custom that such Traffique brings)
This was her Haunt, here Natures high-tide spring [30]
The Children of Gods Israel (secured
From the birth-perill) all afloat doth bring:
Whom she by lying Vanities allur’d,
And of full fleshpots first Ensur’d,
To Brick-kiln-bake’-meats oft inured.
My son, said she, how cam’st thou thus afloat
In a Cold Ark, and Colder Element?
Behold my Bosom warmer than thy Boat:
What more restorative for Nutriment?
Here Bed and Board: My Breasts are pent, [40]
I’le give thee all to give them vent.
Look, look you, here’s whole Worlds divided Treasure!
This Breast’s the one half-globe, and that the other:
What one can suck them both, and want for pleasure?
Honor distills from th’ one, and Wealth from th’other
If busie Conscience make a poother,
Suck hard and that shall quickly smother.
With that my foolish heart began to dream
(When I saw milk run down her Breasts so fast)
Of housing in her Bosom; and the Theme [50]
How sweet to thought, to sense how gratefull was’t?
Affections clos’d and Mind embrac’t:
And all towards her made too much hast.
But just as I was stretching forth mine Hand,
Having in heart quite sold my self that day,
Me thought I spi’d some Negroes on the strand,
That fast by, in close posture, lurking lay;
And streight bethought what I h’d heard say
Of spirits stealing youth away.
Mine Heart draws in, suspitious of some Craft, [60]
Mine hand it recollects, evades the while:
Meantime, Afflictions Hurricanos Waft
Me crosse that Channell; sounding all the while,
Trust thou no more this Womans smile
Than the tears of the Crocodile.
Transported thus, and landed safe ashore,
I find my soul transported in my Breast;
This Land being so remote from that before,
I thought those foes in earnest, Friends in jest
Could never more my soul infest; [70]
This is, said I, the Land of Rest.
Shod with self-confidence, and girt in mind
I trac’t about, not doubting but to light
Soon on such lodging as I long’d to find:
But stumbled on the left and on the right,
Yea this and that did cast me quite,
So that more Waies, more Woe’s in sight.
Seeking, alas! my self was quickly Lost,
Yet found full many a path where Beasts had bin
Thwarting each other, Each by th’other crost: [80]
And I ’midst all perplex’t: intangled in
Thickets: it seems ’twas Desert-SIN,
And this, or none, must be mine Inne.
Thus housed in this dark and shady Bowre,
Yet having here and there an hole for light,
The sunsets in a cloud, and half an hour
Draws round the sable Curtains of the night:
This dark damps hope, and fills with fright,
Thus to see nothing, O sad sight!
My passion now breaks out in flings and throwes, [90]
No bread, No bed, whereon to feed, to lie!
I rush’t amidst the Bowre and streight arose
A Circling sound, a wind went whistling by,
And as it came it seem’d to cry
No food, no food, no food but I.
Thus having giv’n a rush in discontent
Whilst passion did weak Reason overbear,
I heard, and felt as well as heard, a Rent;
(Oh! the sad Bed, the bed of Thornes was there.)
Sounding as Cloaths and flesh did teare, [100]
No bed but here, but here, but here.
I heard the Lions roar, the Dragons howl,
Fierce Wolves and Leopards ranging to and fro;
Next lit upon my Lodge a flaming scroul;
By th’ light it cast I read th’ Inscription, Wo.
I sate on thorns, yet thence nor go,
Nor durst I cry, my fears were so.
These howling hunt, and hunting howl the more;
And yet as though the saddest sound did misse
In this confused consort, Heavens roar [110]
With thunder-claps: A fiery Worm there is
Just in my bed makes such an Hisse,
Out-fears are small compar’d to this,
Which when I heard, and look’d but saw no aid,
What self-tormentings worry, tear, and bait?
I am a Prey by a Prolepsis made:
Mine heart doth Death and Doomes-day antedate;
Fear first doth kill, then re-create;
Thus Horrour Hell doth imitate.
At length through Crannies of my black bed-tester [120]
Breaks in the lightsom star of long’d for day:
You never saw a Rising Sun at Easter
So drest on its (suppos’d) best Holy-day.
Said I, if such be th’ Day-star’s Ray,
What Glory, Lord! shall Noon display?
My God, said I, let me but see that sun:
Break day; break heart; Rise Sun of Righteousnesse!
Lo yonder’s He! wo’s me, I am undone!
Unclean in heart and lips! yet must confesse
I (then the least of Mercies lesse) [130]
Have seen that Sun, ’midst dark Distresse.
Let the remembrance never quit my Breast
How seav’n daies light the first appearance brings;
And as a mighty Eagle on her Nest,
This mighty Sun doth spread his beaming wings:
Mine heart was full of thorns and stings,
But O these raies were healing things!
Whilst such delights exiled all my fears,
Clos’d up my Rents, compos’d my troubled breast,
Fed busie sight, like glory fil’d mine Eares [140]
A voice that cannot yet must be exprest:
That joyful sound for ever blest
May’t with mine heart for ever rest.
Bewildred long, but not Deserted one
Come with me from the Lions Den away,
From Leopards Mountains, and from Lebanon;
Chosen of old, in Desert found today;
While grace makes wildernesse its Way,
For thee doth Love-pav’d Chariot stay.
Then answer’d I (and answ’ring brake mine heart): [150]
Satan’s a Crocodile; the world’s a whore;
Sin is a Wildernesse: Cut off my part
In this Black Trinity that fooles adore.
My god, Chief good, sole guide, thou art:
Here let me lean, hence never start.
If my Desert kept not thy Love from me,
Sure’ts thy Desert that I should Lean on thee.
My Christ, this is my Groan, my cry.
Let me Lean on thee, Live or die.
Live, oh! how can I live so Love-sickly? [160]
Hold head or heart breaks: Let me Lean or Dye:
Who dies and Leans not, doth in Dying Dye:
Who Leans and dies not, leans too sparingly.
Who leans and dies doth in the Bosom lie.
Oh! my heart breaks Lord, let me lean and die!
Notes

1. I will be quoting from the Trinity College Dublin copy of A Scripture-map of the wildernesse of sin (London, 1655) by signature and page number. Although the British Library listing for A Scripture-map refers to the ‘Epithalamium’ on sig. 3Q3 (where it appears in the TCD copy) it is in fact missing from the British Library microfilm copy, as is a table of contents and an index both of which appear in the copy at TCD at sig. b and sig. 30 respectively. The ‘Epithalamium’ appears as an appendix in my edition of Teate’s major work Ter Tria (Dublin, 2007), 243-248, and is included as an appendix here.

2. Extracts from Ter Tria have been anthologised in Andrew Carpenter’s, Verse in English from Tudor and Stuart Ireland (Cork, 2003), 321-345. The poem is also discussed briefly by Anne Fogarty in her chapter ‘Literature in English, 1550-1690’ in the Cambridge History of Irish Literature (Cambridge, 2006), p. 175. The section of the article outlining Teate's biography has appeared previously in my Introduction to 'Ter Tria'. Many thanks to Four Courts Press for permission to reproduce the material here.

3. Alumni Dublinenses, ed. G.D Burtchaell and T.U. Sadleir, (London, 1924). According to the Trinity College register, Teate entered the college in November 1641, aged 14.

4. Raymond Gillespie ‘The murder of Arthur Campion and the 1641 rising in Fermanagh’ in the Clogher Record (1993), pp. 52-66, p. 61.

5. St. John D. Seymour, ‘Faithful Teate’, in the Journal of the Royal Society of Antiquaries of Ireland (1920), pp. 39-45, 39-40.

6. G.S., A briefe declaration of the barbarous and inhumane dealings of the northerne Irish rebels (London, 1641), pp. 10-11.

7. William Turner, A compleat history of the most remarkable providences (London, 1697), p. 12.

8. Brendan Fitzpatrick, Seventeenth-Century Ireland: the war of religions (London, 1987), p. 182.

9. Seymour, ‘Faithful Teate’, p. 40.

10. S.C. Roberts, ‘The quest for Faithful Teate’, Times Literary Supplement, 19 April 1941, p. 196.

11. Seymour, ‘Faithful Teate’, p. 44.

12. St. John D. Seymour, The Puritans in Ireland 1647-1661 (Oxford, 1921), p. 201.

13. Seymour, ‘Faithful Teate’, p. 44

14. Phil Kilroy, Protestant dissent and controversy in Ireland 1660-1714 (Cork, 1994), p. 42.

15. A note by Thomas Gataker approving the ‘64 sermons on Cant 8.5’ for the press, dated 25 April 1654, appears on the inside cover. It is possible, therefore, that Teate composed the poem in the intervening period and that it, along with the index, was appended to the book as a separate gathering immediately before publication. On the title page to the ‘Epithalamium’ Teate writes that ‘[I] have been induced (when mine own thoughts were for Concealment) by Grave Advice to publish this Poem with these sermons.’

16. Sir Walter Raleigh, The historie of the world in five bookes… (London, 1652), sig. B3.

17. Steven C. A. Pincus, Protestantism and Patriotism: Ideologies and the making of English foreign policy, 1650-1668 (Cambridge, 1996), p. 187.

18. See, for example, Exceeding true newes from … Ireland (London, 1642), p. 4.

19. See, for example Nicolas Canny, ‘Identity Formation in Ireland: The Emergence of the Anglo-Irish’ in Colonial Identity in the Atlantic World, 1500-1800 (Princeton, 1987), 159-212.

20. Nigel Smith, Literature and Revolution in England, 1640-1660 (New Haven, 1994), p. 233.

21. For example, Henry Ainsworth, Solomons Song of Songs in English Metre (London, 1623), Francis Quarles, Sions Sonets Sung by Solomon the King, and Periphras’d by Fra. Qualres (London, 1625), George Sandys, A Paraphrase upon the Song of Solomon (London, 1642). For a recent study of appropriations of the Song of Songs during the early modern period see Noam Flinker’s The Song of Songs in English Renaissance Literature (Cambridge, 2000).

22. Teate refers to John Cotton, A Briefe Exposition of the whole Book of Canticles or Song of Solomon (London, 1648), pp. 240-1; Henry Ainsworth, Annotations upon the five books of Moses, the book of the Psalmes, and the Song of Songs, or, Canticles (London, 1627), p. 56; Jeremiah Burroughes, An Exposition of the Prophesie of Hosea (London, 1652), pp. 354-55.

23. Carla Gardina Pestana, The English Atlantic in an Age of Revolution, 1640-1661 (Massachusetts, 2004), p. 175.

24. A Dialogue, containing a compendious discourse concerning the present designe in the West-Indies (London, 1655), p. 13.

25. Robert Carroll and Stephen Pricket (eds.) ‘Notes’, The Bible: Authorised King James Version with Apocrypha (Oxford, 1997), p. 337.

26. A declaration of His Highness, by the advice of his Council (London, 1655), p. 10.

27. Jarlath Killeen, Gothic Ireland: Horror and the Irish Anglican Imagination in the Long Eighteenth Century (Dublin, 2005), p. 19.

28. Karen Edwards, ‘Crocodile’, Milton Quarterly December 2005, Vol. 39 Issue 4, 265-269, p. 265.

29. Richard Hakluyt, Principal Navigations, Voyages, Traffiques and Discoveries of the English Nation, 3 vols, (London, 1598-1600), p. 512.

30. Cf. Francis Quarles, Emblemes, I. XII. (London, 1635), pp. 48-51.

31. Pestana, p. 209.

32. A Dialogue … concerning the present designe in the West Indies, p. 12; A declaration of His Highness, by the advice of his Council, p. 9.

33. See for example, Newes and strange newes from St. Christophers of a tempestuous Spirit, which is called by the Indians a Hurry-Cano or whirlewind (London, 1638), pp. 10-12.

34. A Dialogue, p. 9.

35. Ibid., p. 7

36. E. C. Vernon, ‘Jenkyn, William (bap. 1613, d. 1685)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford University Press, 2004 [http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/14743, accessed 20 Dec 2006]

37. Faithful Teate, Ter Tria, ed. Angelina Lynch (Dublin, 2007), p. 41.

38. Ibid. p. 40.

39. See Fausto Ghisalberti, ‘Mediaeval Biographies of Ovid’, Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes, Vol. 9 (1946), pp. 10-59; on the continuation of the Christian-allegorical reading of Ovid into the seventeenth century see Richard F. Hardin, ‘Ovid in Seventeenth-Century England’, Comparative Literature, Vol. 24, No. 1 (Winter, 1972), pp. 44-62.

Responses to this piece intended for the Readers' Forum may be sent to the Editor at M.Steggle@shu.ac.uk.