Alexander Pope and Duke upon Duke: Satiric Context, Aims, and Means by Pat Rogers
Duke upon Duke (1720) is a satirical ballad, first firmly attributed to Alexander Pope in 1949 The article considers Pope's aims and methods in the light of new evidence concerning the main target of the poem, the Whig lawyer Nicholas Lechmere (1675-1727). Lechmere's conduct had long offended Pope's friends and allies, especially Tories, and the ballad draws on their accumulated resentment. The main linguistic resources of the poem include extensive use of proverbial lore, as well as mock-archaic effects which bring out sustained echoes of the border ballad Chevy Chase and of Robin Hood ballads.
Hardly any branch of writing within the corpus of Alexander Pope is more neglected than his range of ballads on topical themes. Items such as Moore's Worms (1716), Sandys's Ghost (c. 1717), The Court Ballad (c. 1717), The Discovery (1726), and Bounce to Fop (1736) may not rank among his greatest works from a literary standpoint. Nor are they all immediately attractive to a modern reader, in view of their dependence on a wealth of reference to fugitive events. However, even this apparent disincentive can be overcome, as shown by Dennis Todd's recent use of The Discovery (possibly co-written by Pope and William Pulteney) in his analysis of the famous episode involving the 'rabbit woman', Mary Tofts. (1) We should recall, too, that these were among the most frequently reprinted of Pope's poems in their time: indeed, Moore's Worms was 'probably the most popular poem (at least in his own day) that Pope is supposed to have written'. (2)
As effective as any of these items is a ballad entitled Duke upon Duke (1720). Pope told Joseph Spence that he was the principal author: that is, in the precise words of Spence's report, 'Good part of the ballad on Lechmere and Guise was written by Mr. Pope.' (3) In 1742 it was included in the Pope-Swift Miscellanies, although (as usual in this series) without any indication of authorship. Here it was described as 'An excellent new Ballad. To the Tune of Chevy Chase'. Gradually the piece slipped out of the canon, having been once included in an edition of John Gay, and elsewhere attributed to Swift or Arbuthnot. It was not until 1949 that Norman Ault mounted a decisive case for Pope's authorship, and not until 1954 that it appeared in Pope's collected works for the first time. (4)
There were three editions of the ballad in 1720, two containing music by 'Mr. Holdecombe'. The exact priority of the earliest editions has not been established: D. E Foxon lists six printings. (5) An advertisement by the fictitious publisher A. Moore indicates that one of the Holdecombe versions came out on 15 August. It may in fact have been a reissue of a printing from earlier in the summer: such a dating would square with the known facts more adequately. On 18 August 'Moore' was warning the public against one of the other editions, stating that 'The great Demand there is for this Ballad has tempted some Pyrates to print a Grub-street Copy of it. (6) One can easily believe that sales were brisk for this risque, topical, and amusing poem. Another reprint with a musical setting appeared in 1723. The poem with or without music was reissued in at least six miscellanies between 1724 and 1752, disregarding its inclusion in the Pope-Swift volume. The author of the earliest musical setting has not previously been named, but he can be identified as Henry Holcombe (c. 1693-1750), singer and composer, who published a number of popular songs, including Arno's hale, an extremely common anthology piece in the second half of the eighteenth century.' A further indication of the currency of Pope's ballad exists in the shape of an Answer to 'Duke upon Duke', advertised by the ubiquitous A. Moore just a week after the original work appeared. The title-page carries the name 'B. Moor' instead: again Holdecombe's music is added. It should be noted that this response addresses Pope as the known author of the first poem.
Despite the clear merits of Duke upon Duke, it has received little attention for one obvious reason. The ballad concerns a supposed duel between Nicholas Lechmere, the prominent Whig lawyer and politician, and a backwoodsman in the House of Commons, Sir John Guise. As Ault was forced to admit, 'documentary evidence of the cause of the trouble' between the two men 'appears to be entirely lacking'. (8) The duel almost certainly never took place: indeed, it is averted within the text of Duke upon Duke. The principals managed to keep the basis of their quarrel out of the public prints: like Ault, I have conducted a search of newspapers in the relevant period (the spring and summer of 1720) without coming up with any allusion to this episode. That the quarrel existed at all is attested by only one piece of independent evidence, outside the ballad and the reply. Just over a year later, Pope was staying at the Guise family home, Rendcomb, north of Cirencester in Gloucestershire. From here he wrote to his friend Edward Blount, whose wife Annabella was a sister of Sir John: 'I fear none so much as Sir Christopher wise, who being in his Shirt, seems as ready to combate me, as her own Sir John was to demolish Duke Lancastere.' Again the joke has not been properly explained. Pope writes of being 'directed by [Mrs Blount's] Ancestors, whose faces are all upon me'. (9) His reference is to a portrait of Sir John's grandfather Sir Christopher (d. 1670), the first baronet. On one occasion this ancestor provided a source of the dynastic pride which helps to explain Pope's use of the title 'Duke', for Sir Christopher had noted the heraldic account of his family origins as 'descended from a brother of the Duke of Guise who was a companion of William the Conqueror'. (10) This was probably a myth, but as will emerge it fitted the poet's purpose.
In fact, we can understand the main drift of the poem without having to know all the details of the quarrel, or even needing to be sure that a duel was ever really threatened. There are enough clues in the ballad and in the reply to make the intent of Duke upon Duke almost wholly transparent. A crucial consideration is that one of the pervasive strains in the poem has been missed: an undertow of references echoing the famous border ballad Chevy Chase. In exploring the work, it is natural to start with the protagonists.
The career of Sir John Guise (1677-1732) is easier to summarize, as he passed most of his life in obscurity. Succeeding as third baronet in 1695, he served as an MP in the reign of Queen Anne and again during the 1720s. He started out as an independent Whig, but played no significant role in national politics. Guise emerges from the poem with less discredit than Lechmere, but still cuts a rather foolish figure. Ault suggests that Pope gave him the style of a 'Duke' from the title of a play by John Dryden, The Duke of wise, but as just noted the word hints at family notions of historic grandeur. In fact the Guise lineage was one of substantial gentry: they held the manor of Enmore from the time of Henry III, and acquired their seat at Rendcomb in 1635. However, it suits Pope's aims, for a poem set in a world of mythical medievalism, that there should have been alleged links to the feudal aristocracy. Annabella Guise married Edward Blount c. 1700: their four daughters were brought up as Roman Catholics and three would marry into the Catholic aristocracy. Meanwhile Sir John stuck to Protestantism, and regarded his sister's conversion to 'the popish religion' with disfavour. He also discouraged her literary pursuits. (11) We have no evidence of his relations with Pope, other than the fact of the poet's visit to Rendcomb, but Sir John did subscribe to the Odyssey in 1725.
After the accession of the first Hanoverian, George I, in 1714, Guise described the regime as one of 'bad subjects and worse rulers'. He vainly attempted to heal the breach between the King and his son and daughter-in-law, the Prince and Princess of Wales, in 1717. According to Guise's son, the fourth baronet, his father had been 'too indolent and unhealthy to pursue a court intrigue and of too honest open a temper to have kept any power there'. Another observer described him as deliberately crossing a fellow MP for Great Marlow: 'for Sir John was of such a spirit of controversy and delighted in it that right and wrong it was all alike to him'. (12) The picture of Guise which emerges from Duke upon Duke shows the same characteristics: he is crotchety, perverse, and cantankerous, but also 'guileless' and gout-ridden (11. 49-52).
The strident Whig lawyer and politician Nicholas Lechmere (1675-1727) maintained a far more conspicuous presence on the national stage. Since the Hanoverian accession he had been in turn Solicitor-General and Attorney
General, and was still chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster (hence his naming in the poem as 'Nic of Lancastere'). He became a Privy Councillor on 1 July 1718, an honour mentioned in Duke upon Duke, 1. 92. Following the change of regime in 1714, he had been one of the most ardent in bringing to book those Tories who had served in the Harley administration: for this service and others in the Whig cause, he was rewarded in 1721 with a barony. In 1719 Lechmere married Lady Elizabeth Howard, daughter of the Earl of Carlisle: she was an early friend of Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, who had stayed with her at Castle Howard in 1714. (13) It helped Pope's purposes that his grandfather, also Nicholas, had served as a Baron of the Exchequer from 1689, even though this was a judicial title only. Like the Guises, the Lechmeres were an ancient but not noble family, settled at Hanley Castle, Worcestershire, at least from the time of Edward I: they also claimed to have been granted land by the Conqueror. (14) Nicholas represented the nearby borough of Tewkesbury in Parliament until 1721. The poem depicts Lechmere as passionate and capricious in his behaviour, as he was known to be, and also suggests his cowardice in avoiding the duel with Guise. An almost contemporary Scriblerian satire provides another passing reference:
First he bows to a conjuror with a white stick
Then cry'd to a Lawyer hoh, hoh Brother Nick! (15)
'Nick' is of course proverbial for the Devil, (16) but Pope's line certainly glances at Lechmere, whom the Duchess of Marlborough called 'the worst man that ever I knew in my life'. (17)
From the Scriblerian point of view, Lechmere's offences began with his role in the trial of Dr Sacheverell in 1710, when he had been among the Whig managers, and had led the assault in a hectic manner on the very first day of proceedings. This made him hugely unpopular among Tories. When he went out on circuit after the trial, Lechmere found himself the target of violent acts of reprisal: the windows of his lodgings at Hereford were smashed, and the mob hissed and jeered him at Shrewsbury." Swift's Examiner no. 26 in January 1711 predicted that Lechmere would bring in a parliamentary bill to allow freethinkers, deists, and atheists such as John Toland and Anthony Collins to serve in any official position. (19) Equally, a satire usually attributed to Swift, 'A Fable of the Widow and her Cat' (1712), singles out Lechmere for his readiness to speechify. (20) In early 1714 the lawyer had given Richard Steele some help in writing The Crisis, a pamphlet so offensive to the ministry that its author was expelled from the Commons.
After George I came to the throne, the rising politician was in the forefront of promoting measures against opposition groups. A client of the hated Earl of Wharton, he inherited the mantle of the Earl, who died in April 1715. (21) Very soon Lechmere made himself the most reviled member of the government in Tory eyes. Within a few months he served on the secret committee into the conduct of Robert Harley's government; helped to draw up the articles of impeachment against Viscount Bolingbroke and the Duke of Ormonde; oversaw the prosecution of the Jacobite lords implicated in the 1715 rising; and personally led the indictment of Lord Derwentwater. In the course of his arraignment of the peer, Lechmere asserted with some intemperance that the new King had done 'more for the honour of the Church, and the true interest of his kingdom, than any of his predecessors, in three times the number of years'. (22) He was also mainly responsible for the suspension of Habeas Corpus. (23) All these measures struck at Pope's family, friends, allies, and co-religionists: Derwentwater was a young Catholic lord, beheaded at Tower Hill--as it happens, a few months after he had been listed as a subscriber to Pope's translation of the Iliad. Pope also enjoyed the friendship of Lady Swinburne, a member of the Englefield family from Whiteknights, near Reading: the Swinburnes were closely related to the Earl of Derwentwater.
That same year, 1716, Lechmere joined with Lord Coningsby, a renegade Whig whom Pope attacked elsewhere, in two controversial measures. One was aimed against the former Tory ministers, including Lord Oxford. The second was designed to strengthen the Protestant interest by enforcing the laws against Roman Catholics: Lechmere spoke so virulently on this matter in the House of Commons that a number of Catholics and nonjurors felt they would have to leave the country. This was the juncture when Pope's family were forced to give up their home in Windsor Forest, as Catholics were driven from their estates by measures such as the act requiring registration of all property (1 Geo. I, St. 2, passed on 26 June 1716). Among all the Whigs, Lechmere was the most vehement proponent of these measures. A year later, he defended Lord Cadogan, 'a coarse, bull-necked Irishman', who was accused by Walpole of embezzlement. By now Lechmere was firmly leagued with the Sunderland faction of Whigs against his old boss. Pope's scornful reference to Cadogan in the Epistle to Bathurst, 11. 91-92, shows the depth of his dislike for this successful careerist, a bitter opponent of the poet's friend Atterbury. (24)
Then, as Attorney-General, Lechmere led the prosecution of High Church 'martyrs' such as the printer John Matthews in 1719. He secured a conviction for high treason against Matthews, who was still not out of his teens, on the basis of a Jacobite pamphlet he had printed, Fox Populi, Fox Del. The outcome was that the youth was sentenced to be hanged, drawn, and quartered at Tyburn; many considered this little better than judicial murder. (25) Leading for the defence was John Hungerford, a well-known Tory MP and lawyer. (26) The two advocates were bitter enemies: Hungerford would head a parliamentary inquiry into fraudulent insurance companies, set up in February 1720 and reporting in April of the same year. Among the allegations surfacing was one that Lechmere had been implicated in some of the muddy dealings. (27) Amazingly, the Solicitor-General, Sir William Thompson, had hinted that his senior colleague Lechmere had accepted bribes to grant charters to the burgeoning number of joint-stock companies. On this occasion Lechmere was exonerated by the House of Commons, but some of the mud stuck. (28)
An even more specific circumstance underlies Pope's treatment of Lechmere here. During the summer recess of Parliament in 1716
he joined with the Duke of Argyll in caballing against the Government; supplied Argyll with precedents to show that the Prince's powers as Regent were not as ample or honourable as in previous cases; and promoted congratulatory addresses to the Prince on his appointment to be Regent, with a view to masking the mischief between him and his father. At the end of 1716 it was reported that he was to be head of Argyll's party in the House of Commons. (29)
In other words, Lechmere had been active in the quarrel whose beginnings Pope had jokingly exploited in The Court Ballad, involving the faction of the King and that of the Prince of Wales, led by the Duke of Argyll. As we have seen, Guise had also made an effort to intervene in this dispute. It happens that Pope's contacts with the Prince and Princess of Wales were much closer than those with the King; but he found the whole episode irresistibly comic, and satirized both parties to the quarrel more than once. When Lechmere was removed from his post as government lawyer in April 1720, it was possibly because the Prince and Princess had returned to the fold after their split--for this was a price the King might have been able to exact from them. After his dismissal Lechmere continued his vendetta against Walpole, now back in power, and became one of the fiercest critics of the ministry during his spell in the Lords from 1721 to 1727.
So much for the background. If we turn to the poem itself, we find that Pope concentrates nearly all of his firepower on Lechmere, leaving a supporting role to the insignificant Guise. In forty-seven ballad stanzas, he takes the opportunity to utilize his familiar repertoire (in the ballad form) of pun, proverb, and bawdy language, with witty innuendoes concerning the principals. An alternative title found in one of the early printings, 'Pride will have a Fall', accurately describes the comic plot. The phrase actually occurs in the last line of the opening stanza, and forms the very last line of the poem (11. 4, 148). The use of a stock proverb is a common element in broadside ballads, but rarely does an author top and tail his work so neatly with such an expression. (30)
At the start Pope adopts the mock-archaic diction which he sometimes affected in his more demotic works, appropriate here to a faux-medieval narrative. In the manner of one of the Robin Hood ballads, he addresses 'Lordings' who feast 'In Bower or Hall', and promises to reveal 'what befel John Duke of Guise, And Nic. of Lancastere' (11. 7-8). This formula might recall Robin Hood and the Butcher, for example, which opens, 'Come all ye gallants, and listen a while [...] That are in the bowers within'. (31) In the days of Richard Coeur de Lyon, the poet continues, the barons 'rag'd and roar'd'--something for which the soon-to-be Baron Lechmere of the eighteenth century was notorious. In the next stanza Pope hints at two standard expressions:
A Word and Blow was then enough.
(Such Honour did them prick)
If you but turn'd your Cheek, a Cuff,
And if your A-se, a Kick.
(11. 13-16)
This abbreviates A word to the wise is enough' (Tilley W781) and incorporates the biblical 'turn the other cheek'. In those days the combatants fought 'from head to Foot', i.e. with every part of their body (OED, s.v. 'head', 40). The proudest of these warriors was the Duke of Lancaster: if that reminds us of the Wars of the Roses, then the first line of the next stanza recalls the verse 'I saw young Harry with his beaver on' from z Henry IV (IV. I. 105): 'Firm on his Front his Beaver sate' (1. 25). Nic dyes his complexion to a swarthy hue and pomades his hair: though short in stature, he stands as tall as possible, merely nodding where other dukes give a full bow. Yet he behaves in a 'courteous, blithe, and debonair' manner towards Guise, and there seems no reason to quarrel. Capriciously, 'having no Friend left but this', he resolves to challenge the other man. The absurd pretext is an invitation from Lechmere to a game of whist (hardly a medieval pastime), which 'the guileless wise' declines owing to gout. This provokes the main action.
Nic drives fiercely though 'Kingly Kensington' from his house at Campden Hill, and then assaults Guise .31 It is unlikely to be a coincidence that Guise had taken 'a little house at Kensington' in 1715, and had entertained George I to supper there around 1718 or 1719. (33) The outcome is not what Lechmere expected:
But mark, how 'midst of Victory
Fate plays her old Dog Trick!
Up leap'd Duke John, and knock'd him down,
And so down fell Duke Nic.
(11. 61-64)
'To play a dog trick' (Tilley D456) was a very familiar expression meaning to act meanly by anyone: Swift uses it in his poem Upon the Horrid Plot, just two or three years later. The point of the next stanza is less clear:
Alas, oh Nic Oh Nic, alas!
Right did thy Gossip call thee:
As who should say, alas the Day
When John of Guise shall maul thee.
(11.65-68)
The godmother ('gossip') has christened Lechmere 'Nick', and this apparently suggests the crucial opportunity (as in 'nick of time') which Guise seized to 'maul' him (or possibly grab, as in 'to nick', a long-established usage by this time). The victor sits on his vanquished opponent, and appears likely--by the rhyme at any rate--to be about to shit on his adversary. The threat is averted, and Guise triumphantly scoffs at his victim: 'No Sheet is here to save thee.'
Indignantly, Lechmere asks if Guise knows who he is, one who has brawled and quarrelled more than 'all the Line of Lancastere'. He proceeds:
In Senate fam'd for many a Speech,
And (what some awe must give ye,
The' laid thus low beneath thy breech,)
Still of the Council Privy.
(11.89-92)
This wickedly precise stanza alludes to Lechmere's known predilection for long speeches in Parliament and, as already remarked, to his continuing place on the Privy Council. The mechanism is of course a pun on 'privy', following on the scatological language of the preceding stanzas. Next the speaker reminds us of another of his perquisites:
Still of the Dutchy Chancellor,
Durante Life I have it;
And turn, as now thou dost on me,
Mine A--e on them that gave it.
(11.93-96)
The verses deftly integrate a technical term, durante vita, referring to an appointment granted for life, which was precisely the basis on which Lechmere had acquired a virtual sinecure in June 1717--one that he duly held until his death in 1727. The phrase about turning his arse on those who bestowed the appointment seems to refer to his invective in parliament during a debate over the South Sea bill in January 1720. In his speech he severely criticized a plan which had been put forward by Robert Walpole, giving the Bank of England a greater role in financial reconstruction at the expense of the South Sea Company. Walpole was now out of major office, but he had been leader of the Prince of Wales's party previously. It must be remembered that Duke upon Duke came out in the very midst of the South Sea year: if the ballad had contained no reference to the dominant news story of the decade, it would have been unique among such verses. (34)
At this juncture servants enter, and Lechmere proposes that the duel be fought 'under the Greenwood Tree', another preposterous pseudo-feudal touch, drawn especially from the Robin Hood ballads. In Pope's day real duels were waged in Hyde Park or another convenient part of London where a measure of privacy was possible: they did not take place in some rural nook. (35) So 'the valiant wise' sets out that evening for the appointed meeting, with his sword 'at Saddle Bow'. Another deliberate archaism is introduced: 'Full gently praunch'd he o'er the Lawn' (1. 109). At length he catches sight of the 'Merrymen brown' (normally the companions-in-arms of a knight, here presumably liveried servants) with Lechmere's coach and four. At first it seems his opponent is intent on going ahead with the duel, as he points out 'the gloomy Glade' where it should be held with his 'Wand so white'--his staff of office, but here also connected with pretended conjurors and charlatans. Suddenly Lechmere turns tail and heads for New Court, in the Middle Temple, where his chambers were, on the pretext that 'business must be done', another evasive cliche. He then slinks back by Brompton Park, best known at this time for the large nursery of the landscape gardener Henry Wise, and along 'the Gore' (Kensington Gore) to his home at Campden House. (36) Guise is left fretting in the evening dew with no adversary. He goes home, resolving to put Lechmere's name on every 'Pissing-Post' for each 'Pisser-by' to use appropriately. The ballad concludes with a stock formula, 'Now God preserve our gracious King', and expresses the hope that his nobles will all learn a lesson from Duke Nic: 'That Pride will have a Fall'. In the text Lechmere's fall is literal: in the wish-fulfilling ideology of the poem, it will be a descent from his arrogant use of power.
Some of the issues at stake are illuminated by An Answer to 'Duke upon Duke'. Ault dismisses this retort in a few words: As an answer it is not a success; as a poem it is a tedious failure.' Although its forty-one stanzas are 'redeemed by never a spark of wit or life', the poem leaves no doubt about 'the person it attacks for having written Duke upon Duke'. (37) In my opinion this is doubly wrong: the reply exhibits a good deal of imaginative energy, and it does not really attack Pope. The work might be regarded as a kind of prolongation of the original ballad, with no more than a few mild and good-humoured references to Pope. Five such allusions are cited by Ault, but none of them indicates real hostility. The opening stanza is indicative:
Thou Pope, oh Popery burning hot.
For none but Papists would
Enter into a cursed Plot,
'gainst Protestant so good.
(11. 1-4)
If there were any doubt that this is ironic, then the later poem makes it clear that Lechmere is no Protestant hero of the author, whoever he was.
Indeed, Ault misses the central point of the poem, which is a dramatic monologue in the voice of Lechmere himself. Thus the 'attack' on Pope comes from a wholly unreliable source; and ultimately the real target is Lechmere. A single stanza will illustrate the satirical approach:
Take heed thou Satan's crooked Rib,
For, though not Tall, I'm strait;
That thou, like me, not bilk thy Crib,
Like me, repent too late.
(11. 17-20)
The first verse here plays on the stock idea of Adam's rib; while the third line alludes to a gambling expression used in cribbage. (38) Clearly, we are meant to suppose that Lechmere has been caught cheating and made to suffer the consequences. In the fourth line comes a reminiscence of one more proverbial idea, 'Repentance comes too late'. (39) There is, too, an odd parallel with Pope's own line 'I cough like Horace, and tho' lean, am short' (Epistle to Arbuthnot, 1. 116). The Answer suggests that since the lawyer lost his post as Attorney-General in April 1720 ('cashiered like me', 1. 34), he has lost all favour at court. As a result, he has become anxious about his continuing hold on the Duchy of Lancaster. He may need to ask his wife to ensure that 'her Sire, in Upper House', i.e. the Earl of Carlisle, should take his side. There is mention of a certain 'Sir R -- t', described as 'of Law the very Pride' (1. 74), who is obviously Sir Robert Raymond, the man who had succeeded Lechmere as government lawyer. More significantly, the Answer makes a glancing reference to the 'Knight of Ipswich Town' (1. 103), who can be identified as Sir William Thompson, Solicitor-General from 1717 to 1720, and MP for Ipswich from 1715 to 1729. This draws attention to another salient episode in Lechmere's career about which Duke upon Duke had surprisingly said nothing: that is, the allegation of corruption levelled against him by his government colleague. As we have seen, the charge was dismissed after an inquiry by the House of Commons, and Thompson lost his job. When the committee's report was published after its presentation to Parliament in April 1720, some compromising facts were available to Lechmere's critics. The most likely explanation for Pope's silence is that he did not wish to highlight an episode from which his prime target had emerged relatively unscathed. Thompson himself had a sullied reputation, and tactically it would have been unwise for Pope to lay emphasis on his brush with Lechmere. (40)
The Answer extends not just the subject matter but also the methods of its predecessor. Like Duke upon Duke, it employs what might be termed a topic proverb, i.e. a saying which encapsulates the meaning of the whole poem: in this case, the expression is 'Little said's soon amended' (Tilley L358). Other stock expressions found are 'live and learn' (Tilley L379), 'ill jesting with an edged tool' (Tilley J45), 'pull someone down a peg' (Tilley P181), and 'Tewkesbury mustard' (Tilley M1333). (41) Another neat verbal manipulation occurs when Lechmere wishes he had held his tongue, and 'To cool my Porridge, sav'd my Breath' (1. 15), utilizing Tilley W422. While the formula 'a lucky hit' was not exactly proverbial, it was a cant phrase of the day, and a particular favourite of Pope himself. (42) All this helps to confirm the view that the retort comes from a source hostile to Lechmere, and probably friendly to Pope. It is not wholly out of the question that the Answer was written by one of the Scriblerian group or their close associates.
Pope's poetry in the ballad form is marked by a striking idiolect, which differs from the habitual linguistic tone and texture of his other verse. A closer similarity lies with the register found in Swift's poems 'The Virtues of Sid Hamet's Rod' and 'Dialogue between Captain Tom and Sir Henry Dutton Colt' (both 1710). In these cases the trick is to find details about the satiric object (in terms of his or her career, or character and reputation) which can be made to play into trite and familiar word patterns. Both Duke upon Duke and, a little less nimbly, the Answer, exhibit this technique. Among the predominant devices are puns, as in the joke on 'Council Privy' already quoted; neologisms and distortions, as in 'Pisser-by'; and a species of zeugma, as in As if he meant to take the Air, | Or only take a Fee' (11. 123-24). The poet draws in the victim's conduct to an existing hoard of worldly-wise maxims or pre-packaged formulas. Thus when Lechmere is made to say, 'I will not cope against such Odds' (1. 99), he appears distinctly unheroic, lacking even the braggadocio of Falstaff: behind the wording lie cliches such as 'two (or three) to one is odds' (Tilley T644). Repeatedly language enacts a judgement on the material in this way. (43)
In Duke upon Duke, too, the pervasive use of archaisms helps to create a linguistic template, absurdly costuming the participants in antiquated dress. As we saw earlier, in the Miscellanies Pope subtitled the work 'An excellent new Ballad. To the tune of Chevy Chase'. This was of course one of the most popular of all such musical settings; but the allusion does more than reinforce the spurious sense of medieval balladry. (44) Since the time of Joseph Addison's influential Spectator paper no. 70 in 1711, the original Chevy Chase, after which the tune was named, had been the most widely admired of the Border ballads. According to Addison, 'The old Song of Chevey Chase is the favourite Ballad of the common People of England; and Ben Johnson used to say he had rather have been the Author of it than of all his Works.' (45) It had been retold in numerous broadside versions throughout the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. The poem often surfaces under alternative titles, such as The Hunting of the Cheviot (Child 162). One of the most familiar versions of this poem begins 'God prosper long our noble king', which, as we have seen, is almost identical with the formula used at the close of Duke upon Duke. The endings are suspiciously similar. This is the conclusion of the Child ballad:
God save our King, and bless this land
With plenty, joy and peace,
And grant henceforth that foul debate
'Twixt noblemen may cease!
(11. 133-36) (46)
Compare Pope's closure:
Now God preserve our gracious King!
And grant, his Nobles all
May learn this Lesson from Duke Nic.
That Pride will have a Fall.
(11. 145-48)
Besides this, there are other details which amount to direct parody: thus, Chevy Chase employs a stock formula borrowed by Pope: 'The rest were slain in Chevy Chase | Under the greenwood tree' (11. 123-24). The phrase merry men appears in the older work at 1. 90. At the same time, Pope's subject is about as far as he could get from the elemental passions of the original. Instead of courageous and generous combatants like Earl Percy and Earl Douglas, we have two bickering commoners. The scene is set not in desolate Northumbrian moorland, but in the well-manicured outskirts of London, around 'kingly Kensington'. Lechmere arrives for the joust, not 'well mounted on a gallant steed', but in a coach and four, the symbol of conspicuous consumption in that South Sea year. Through echoes of Chevy Chase, Pope creates a kind of mock-heroic effect: just as an implied comparison with Homeric figures diminishes the stature of Belinda and the Baron in The Rape of the Lock, so the duellists in Duke upon Duke look puny beside the brave medieval antagonists.
Yet the use of archaism has a particular point, in view of the Guise family legend about the Conqueror, and the Lechmeres' belief that their roots went back to the Domesday Book. Sir John's grandfather had claimed that he could establish his pedigree 'without going to the Heralds Office'. Among his papers he found 'more certain lights of my own evidence' which traced the estate at Elmore to Anselm Guise, whose 'office in Edward I. time in the Gloucestershire book, in the Tower of London, I have seene'. He also had a charter 'very fayre written with large a seale' relating to this matter. (47) At the same time Lechmere's grandfather maintained that his forebears 'came in wth the Conquest, as appeareth in an authentick record in fflaunders, the copy whereoff I have inserted in this booke' (a family history). (48) This desperate urge to 'authenticate' their feudal past characterized both the Lechmeres and the Guises, and it gives added point to the pseudo-medieval manner of the ballad.
Pope's ballad celebrates the 'fall' of Lechmere, i.e. his loss of political office. That event occurred in April 1720, and this is one reason for suspecting that the work originated not in August but up to four months earlier. The second reason is the absence of any up-to-date reference to the affairs of the South Sea Company, whose stocks reached their peak on Io July and began their own precipitous 'fall' in the second half of August. Instead, Duke upon Duke fixes on a minor quarrel between two men not known to be centrally involved in the Bubble. (49) As we have seen, Guise was merely a bit-part player in Pope's narrative; and he was in any case likely to be spared as the brother-in-law of one of the poet's closest friends among his co-religionists, Edward Blount. All the animus of the poem is concentrated on Lechmere, a long-time bete noire of the Tories, who had been satirized by Swift almost a decade earlier. For his conduct in 1715 and 1716, Lechmere became especially obnoxious to the family and friends of Robert Harley: that he was already unpopular in the Harley country of Hereford and Shropshire is shown by the treatment he received from pro-Sacheverell mobs round these parts in 1710, an episode touched on above. By 1720 Pope was very closely tied to the Harleys.
The ballad portrays Duke Lancaster as 'Paramount in Pride' (1. 22). His choleric nature perhaps consorts with the fact that the real Lechmere died at Camden House 'of apoplexy, while at table' .5[degrees] The lawyer is cowardly and disloyal, someone always willing to turn on his friends: 'He kick'd and cuff'd, and tweak'd, and trod | His Foes, and Friends beside' (11. 23-24). Here, the inversion of the expected order 'friend or foe' produces the meaning 'he attacked his foes and even his friends'. This simple but effective device utilizes the small shifts in grammar at which the poet was so adept. Again, an implied contrast with historic warriors such as Earl Percy helps to produce the desired effect. Contemporaries would easily recall that a year before Lechmere had been instrumental in sending a fatherless boy to Tyburn, even though in the end Matthews' body had not been quartered. This puts the clumsy corporeality of the encounter in Duke upon Duke into a still more ignominious light. Pope makes the occasion of his work a trifling brush between the two politicians, rather than one of the better-known scandals in Lechmere's career. However, a careful reading prompts the view that the ballad enlists a much more widespread resentment, which had been building up for years in Pope and his allies. Like other ballads, it is a piece d'occasion which takes us well beyond the immediate occasion.
(1) Dennis Todd, Imagining Monsters: Miscreations of the Self in Eighteenth-Century England (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995), PP 72-94
(2) The Twickenham Edition of the Poems of Alexander Pope, vol. vi: Minor Poems, ed. by Norman Ault and John Butt (London: Methuen, 1954), P. 163.
(3) Joseph Spence, Anecdotes, Observations, and Characters of Books and Men, ed. by James M. Osborn, 2 vols (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1966), 1, 152.
(4) See Norman Ault, New Light on Pope (London: Methuen, 1949) PP 186-94; and Minor Poems, pp. 217-24. In his copy the antiquarian Maurice Johnson implausibly attributed the poem to James Craggs (nototherwise known to have written any verse), with revision by Thomas Tickell. The inclusion of this item in the Miscellanies renders Johnson's attribution untenable.
(5) See D. F. Foxon, English Verse, 1701-1750: A Catalogue of Separately Printed Poems with Notes on Contemporary Collected Editions, 2 vols (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1975), items D502-07. A further variant printing at the Bodleian Library is listed in the online English Short Title Catalogue, item N71066. One of the characteristic features of Pope's ballads is that, if they appear in an early printing, it is always through some illicit or clandestine outlet, such as 'Moore' or Edmund Curll.
(6) Post-Boy, 22 August 1720, quoted in Minor Poems, p. 186.
(7) For details on Holcombe, see The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians, e d. by Stanley Sadie, 20 vols (New York: Grove, 1995), viii, 643
(8) Minor Poems, p. 189.
(9) The Correspondence of Alexander Pope, ed. by George Sherburn, 5 vols (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1956), it, 85-86. Pope knew Sir John's uncle, John Grubham Howe MP, and stayed with Howe's son in 1728 at Stowell, Gloucestershire, just five miles from Rendcomb.
(10) Quoted by Felicity Heal and Clive Holmes, The Gentry in England and Wales, 1500-1700 (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1994) P 37 After reading of his family's antiquity. Sir Christopher went on to review deeds among his muniments showing that the Guises had held their Gloucestershire estates since the thirteenth century. See below, p. 887.
(11) See Autobiography of Thomas Raymond and Memoirs of the Family of Cruise of Elmore, Gloucestershire, ed. by Godfrey Davies (London: Royal Historical Society, 1917), pp. 142-43; and Eighteenth-Century Women Poets, ed. by Roger Lonsdale (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990), p 186.
(12) Romney Sedgwick, The House of Commons 1725-1754, 2 vols (London: HMSO for the History of Parliament Trust, 1970), ii, 89-90.
(13) Later Lady Mary reported heavy gaming losses by Lady Lechmere. See The Complete Letters of Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, ed. by Robert Halsband, 3 vols (Oxford: Clarendon, 1965-67), 1 (1965), 210; u (1966), 57
(14) Two generations later, in the main line through Nicholas's elder brother Anthony, the family were awarded a baronetcy, which survives today. The barony expired on Nicholas's death.
(15) 'A Strange and Wonderfull Relation how the Devill Appeared last night at the Masquerade in the Hay-market', University of Nottingham Library, MS Portland Pw V351. The manuscript is in Gay's hand, but again the authorship is not certain, with Pope a strong contender.
(16) See Morris P. Tilley, A Dictionary of the Proverb in England in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries: A Collection of Proverbs Found in English Literature and the Dictionaries of the Period (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1950), item N161.
(17) Quoted by Kerry Downes, Sir John Vanbrugh: A Biography (New York: St Martin's, 1987), p. 488. It has been conjectured without very much evidence that the character of Flavia in Pope's Epistle to a Lady refers to Lady Lechmere: see Epistles to Several Persons, ed. by F. W. Bateson (London: Methuen, 1961), p. 57.
(18) See Geoffrey Holmes, The Trial of Doctor Sacheverell (London: Eyre Methuen, 1973), pp 235-36.
(19) Swift vs. Mainwaring: 'The Examiner' and 'The Medley', ed. by Frank H. Ellis (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1985), p. 195.
(20) Swift also expressed the Tory line in 'The Faggot' (1713), 1. 48: 'A fig for Lechmere, King, Hampden' (Whig lawyers and politicians who had been active in the Sacheverell affair).
(21) Lechmere was one of the guardians of the Whig leader's son, Philip (later Duke of Wharton), who was only sixteen when he succeeded to the title.
(22) Quoted from Parliamentary History by Wolfgang Michael, England under George I, 2 vols (New York: AXIS Press, 1970),1, 208.
(23) In addition, he was centrally involved in introducing the Riot Act, about which Pope made a bitter little joke shortly after its introduction in July 1715 (Correspondence, 1, 311).
(24) On Cadogan see E. P. Thompson, Whigs and Hunters: The Origin of the Black Act (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1977), pp. 100-02, 202-04. For Pope's reactions, see Epistles to Several Persons, p. 97; and Correspondence, u, 386-87.
(25) The proceedings are reported in T. B. Howell and others, A Complete Collection of State Trials, 33 vols (London, 1809-26), xv (1812), 1323-1403. According to the Under-Secretary of State, Charles Delafaye, this great show trial lasted from 10 a.m. until past 11 p.m. (Public Record Office, SP 43/63).
(26) Hungerford subscribed to the Odyssey in 1725, as well as to volumes by Matthew Prior (1719) and John Gay (1720). He opposed the bill of pains and penalties against Atterbury, as well as a special tax on Catholics in 1722, and defended the ill-starred agent of the Atterbury plot, Christopher Layer. All these represent the negation of Lechmere's posture, and in most cases indicate Pope's own outlook on events.
(27) See John Carswell, The South Sea Bubble (Stroud: Sutton, 2001), p. 138. In Sedgwick, House of Commons, it, 161, the date is wrongly given as February 1721.
(28) There is no doubt that in 1718 the entrepreneur Case Billingsley offered both Thompson and Lechmere's predecessor Sir Edward Northey one thousand guineas each, if his marine insurance company charter was granted. He cheerfully admitted this to the Commons investigative committee, stating that he had not regarded it as a bribe. Billingsley was perhaps the most notorious company promoter of the Bubble era: he was a close associate of Thompson, and worked hard on Lechmere to get official backing for his schemes, such as the York Buildings Company: see also David Murray, The York Buildings Company: A Chapter in Scottish History (1883; repr. Edinburgh: Bratton, 1973), pp. 27-29. Eventually the insurance scheme went ahead. In 1722 Billingsley launched the Harburgh Company, with the Prince of Wales as governor, in which Lechmere (now out office) took part: it turned out to be a spectacular fraud. See A. J. G. Cummings and Larry Stewart, 'The Case of the Eighteenth-Century Projector: Entrepreneurs, Engineers, and Legitimacy at the Hanoverian Court in Britain', in Patronage and Institutions: Science, Technology, and Medicine at the European Court, 1500-1750, ed. by Bruce Moran (Ipswich: Boydell & Brewer, 1991) pp 235-61.
(29) Sedgwick, House of Commons, u, 203.
(30) For the proverb, see Tilley, P581.
(31) English and Scottish Ballads, ed. by Francis James Child, 8 vols (Boston: Little, Brown, 1859), v, 33.
(32) Kensington was of course 'kingly' on account of its royal associations. In fact the palace had become a great favourite with George I: it had recently been out of bounds to the Prince, and so it was part of the monarch's territory during their war. In addition, William Benson had begun improvements to the state apartments in 1718, as part of a series of measures to make the house and gardens more regal; but the new rooms were badly designed and 'in need of repair not long after their completion in 1722' (Ragnhild Hatton, George I: Elector and King (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1978), pp. 262-63). Pope's patron Lord Burlington recommended William Kent to carry out restorative work in 1722. In The Dunciad (i. 321) Pope would criticize the elevation of the amateur architect Benson, a Whig politician, to replace Christopher Wren at the Board of Works.
(33) Memoirs of the Family of Cruise, ed. by Davies, pp. 153-55 The date of this event is not given, but the likeliest time would be the late summer of 1719. This is another touch suggesting insider information, of a sort which Pope (but not Swift or Gay, for example) might have possessed.
(34) In any case, before the South Sea episode, Lechmere had become known for a lack of reliability: thus he had introduced a wrecking amendmentto the Septennial Act in 1716, even though this was proposed by the leader of his own faction of the Whigs, James Stanhope. See Basil Williams, Stanhope: A Study in Eighteenth-Century War and Diplomacy (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1932), P. 197.
(35) It was in Hyde Park that the most famous duel of recent times, that between the Duke of Hamilton and Lord Mohun, had taken place in 1712. Some details of the poem-the mention of the road to Kensington, the waiting coach-recall descriptions of the Hamilton duel.
(36) Camden House was a Jacobean mansion, destroyed by fire in 1862. According to Austin Dobson, Lechmere bought it from the Noel family in 1719, and lived there for several years. See Leigh Hunt, The Old Court Suburb: Memoirs of Kensington, Regal, Critical and Anecdotal, 2 vols (London: Constable, 1903), II, 200. I do not know the evidence for this.
(37) Ault, New Light, p. 188.
(38) 'Sometimes it so happens that he is both bilkt in hand and crib' (quoted from Charles Cotton's Compleat Gamester (1680) in OED, s.v. 'crib', 16).
(39) The Oxford Dictionary of English Proverbs, ed. by F. P. Wilson, 3rd edn (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1970), p. 672.
(40) In addition, Thompson had been one of the managers of the Sacheverell prosecution, and taken part in prosecuting the Jacobite lords. From the Tory viewpoint he was little better than Lechmere. On his career generally, see J. M. Beattie, Policing and Punishment in London 1660-1750: Urban Crime and the Limits of Terror (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), pp. 424-62.
(41) The joke here, in the last line of the poem, is that Lechmere was MP for Tewkesbury.
(42) See Howard Erskine-Hill, 'The Lucky Hit in Commerce and Creation', Notes f3 Queries, 14 (1967),407-8.
(43) The prime sense of 'upon' in the title is 'into contact or collision with, esp. by way of attack' (OED, s.v. 'upon', 15); but the wording also recalls phrases like 'age upon age'. There was a maxim, used by Swift, 'Metal upon metal is false heraldry' (Tilley M906), which might be applicable to the pretensions of these 'dukes'.
(44) See Claude M. Simpson, The British Broadside Ballad and its Music (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1966).
(45) The Spectator, ed. by Donald F. Bond, 5 vols (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1965), 1, 298.
(46) Child, Ballads, vii, 54
(47) Memoirs of the Family of Cruise, ed. by Davies, pp. 107-08. As Davies says, such pedigrees were often compiled with the help of 'those mythical genealogical trees which began to appear in Elizabeth's reign' (p. 85)
(48) [E.P. Shirley], Hanley and the House of Lechmere (London: Pickering, 1883), p. 52.
(49) In fact Lechmere seems to have supported the interests of the South Sea Company against rival companies promoted by men like Thompson and Case Billingsley. His own sister-in-law reported rumours that he deliberately stayed out of the firing line when the Bubble investigations wer