No poet laureate adorned the royal household for a quarter of a century. Some time before the death of Jonson, Charles I. had fallen on troublesome times. The poetry of life in court circles was gone, and even the prose was shorn of its beauty.
It is a strange chapter that recounts the way in which the Romish church, as well as the English, lost all power in the nation; the way in which the Presbyterian church, so long an outlaw, came into power with all the vigor of youth, and almost instantly went out of power in a panic; the way the ever-to-be-feared Independent, who never knows law or reason, came to haunt the dreams of the nobility.
The king was weak, timid, vacillating; the nobility came to be of no account to anybody; the House of Commons that prided itself on being radical, suddenly found itself so conservative as to be frightened even from its parliamentary place of rendezvous, and became an insignificant factor in the government. What a day was that in which neither the Romish, English, or Presbyterian church was of sufficient account to be consulted, when the king was a cipher, the nobility a minus quantity, the House of Commons an unknown factor, and two men, Hampden and Cromwell, rallied fifty Independents, constituted themselves a law unto themselves, organizing what has been known in history as the Rump Parliament, and beheaded Charles I.
In Jonson’s day the king saw the drift of affairs, felt the throne trembling beneath him, and had neither the funds to continue Jonson’s pension, nor was he in the sentimental mood to appoint a successor upon his death. It would have been cruel mockery indeed for any poet to rhyme his praise.
The ten years in which Cromwell rode rough shod over every established order of things did not develop a spirit that called for poetry. Life was too hazardous to incline any to sing in joyous strain. But when he died and no Independent rose to fill his place, Charles II. was called to the throne, and the House Of Stuart once more held the reins of government securely, and the citizens called for a knightly laureate.
Sir William Davenant assumed the position of versifier for the king. He was the son of a wealthy vinter who kept the Crown Inn at Oxford, where Shakspere always stopped, who, by the way, was such an ardent admirer of Mrs. D’Avenaunt that her son bore his name, and it was the quiet boast of Sir William that he was the natural son of the great dramatist.
He was early attached to the household of the gorgeous Duchess of Richmond as a page, and later attached himself to the retinue of Lord Brooke, until that nobleman was murdered, which affliction threw Davenant upon his own resources, which induced him to try his hand at versifying, but without success until one of those periodic freaks of Ben Jonson led the great poet to quarrel with the court architect, who in the emergency discovered Davenant and gave him the opportunity to secure the position on limited literary capital.
There was that in his nature which made him an active partisan, and during the Long Parliament he was imprisoned for scheming to seduce the army and overthrow the Commons. He escaped, was captured and reimprisoned, escaped the second time and fled to France, where he joined the exile queen and served the cause of royalty by smuggling military stores into England, and for personal bravery in the army of the Earl of Newcastle, who espoused the queen’s cause, he was knighted. After the fatal battle of Naseby he returned to France and assumed the management of the colonization society and sailed for Virginia, but his vessel was captured by a parliamentary man-of-war and he imprisoned on the Isle of Wight, and afterward sent to the Tower on the charge of high treason. The timely interference of his old poet friend, Milton, who had espoused the Puritan cause, alone prevented his being beheaded. This successful importunity of an old friend was in many ways most gratifying to Davenant, who, a few years later, when Charles II. was called to assume the reins of government and executed vengeance on all old time enemies, dooming Milton to sudden execution, was privileged to reciprocate the favor, and by timely intercession, recounting the service the poet had been to him, saved Milton from the fatal consequences of his political affiliations.
After Milton secured Davenant’s release from imprisonment the humbled courtier endeavored to win an honorable living as a poet, but in vain. He could only write dramas, but the Puritans had closed the theaters with a rigor that knew no exception. It was in this emergency that the knight whose experiences had been so varied did the one bright thing of his life: he succeeded in writing inoffensive plays, and having them acted by calling them operas, thus pacifying the ruling public, at the same time giving the world a new name for a diluted drama.
Charles II. when in power rewarded the faithfulness and loyalty of Davenant by crowning him laureate. It has been truthfully but cruelly said that there is not a more hopelessly faded laurel on the slopes of the English Parnassus than that which once flourished around Davenant’s grotesque head. Of the brighter man who followed him another chapter must account.