I cannot sufficiently represent the terrible circumstances that attended it; the earth swelled with a dismal humming noise, the houses fell, the earth opened in many places, the graves gave up some of their dead, the tomb stones ratled together; at last the earth sunk below the water, and the sea overwhelmed great numbers of people, whose shreiks and groanes made a lamentable eccho: the earth opened both behind and before me within 2 foot of my feet, and that place on which I stood trembled exceedingly; the water immediately boyled up upon the opening of the earth, but it pleased God to preserve me....[15]
Tutchin's aim is to compare vulnerable nature with vulnerable man: "Can humane Race / Stand on their / Legs when Nature Reels?" He sees in the disaster a challenge for English sinners to repent: the "Hurricane of Fate" wails on "murder'd Cornish." He had not yet forgotten the Monmouth adventure. For he alludes here to the act of Parliament passed in 1689 reversing the attainder of Henry Cornish, the alderman who had been brutally executed in 1685 for high treason through participating in the Rye House Plot and attaching himself to the Duke of Monmouth. For Tutchin, politics were always relevant.
Tutchin's true forte is not the descriptive poem, but satire. Poems published in the years 1696 to 1705—from A Pindarick Ode to The Tackers—exploit the satirical impulse that had been latent in Poems on Several Occasions. Increasingly he turns to general denunciation and thinly disguised lampoon. Of the two main Augustan traditions in satire—the "fine raillery" that Dryden perfected and the rough satire that reached back to Donne, Cleveland, and Oldham—Tutchin belongs to the latter. Defoe found him to be "so woundy touchy, and so willing to quarrel," and noted that "Want of Temper was his capital Error."[16] The specific circumstance that produced A Pindarick Ode, in the Praise of Folly and Knavery (1696), reprinted here, is generally said to be his dismissal from the victualling office because he failed to establish his case that the commissioners mismanaged public funds. Such corruption in the administration would soon transform a deep admiration for William III into the disenchantment of The Foreigners (1700). That Tutchin was uneasy in his effort to write satire in the mode of Dryden is suggested by his abandonment of irony after the first part of A Pindarick Ode. In his introductory verses, Benjamin Bridgwater accurately observes that Erasmus' Ironia no longer suffices:
This hard'ned Age do's rougher Means require,
We must be Cupp'd and Cauteriz'd with Fire.
Echoing Dryden's Mac Flecknoe, Tutchin invites Dullness and "Immortal Nonsence" to inspire his ironic praise of the folly and knavery that now ride roughshod over such traditional values as learning, love, wit, and patriotism. A few of the lines have the moving quality of Augustan satire at its best:
Did e'er the old or new Philosophy,
Make a Man splendid live, or wealthy die?
The irony of A Pindarick Ode does not adequately mask the denunciation. In Stanza X, it is even replaced by the antiquated Hero's diatribe against "our modern Knavish Arts"—never to return to the rest of the poem. Doubtless, the indictment of the "nefarious Brood at Home" that grows rich in wartime was the heart of the satire. Defoe hinted at this motive in the satirical vignette of Tutchin as Shamwhig, which appeared in the first edition of The True-Born Englishman (1700):
As Proud as Poor, his Masters he'll defy;
And writes a Piteous *Satyr upon Honesty.
Some think the Poem had been pretty good,
If he the Subject had but understood.
He got Five hundred Pence by this, and more,
As sure as he had ne're a Groat before.[17]
Tutchin's satire would be henceforth the rough variety. In The Foreigners he would also resort to fierce lampoons of William III's court favorites.
In the rash of satires that followed The Foreigners and The True-Born Englishman, the anonymous author of The Fable of the Cuckoo (1701) pointed to the common tradition shared by both poems. For he attacked Defoe's "hatchet muse" as having been inspired by such "Modern Sharpers of the Town" as Tutchin and "Old[ha]m the Bell-weather of Tory Faction," who first horned Defoe's satire, "And ever since perverted all good Nature." Advertised in The Flying Post for July 31-Aug. 1, 1700, The Foreigners was published shortly thereafter by the ardent Whig Anne Baldwin. The "vile abhor'd Pamphlet, in very ill Verse, written by one Mr. Tutchin, and call'd The Foreigners"—Defoe recalled years later in An Appeal to Honour and Justice (1715)—filled him "with a kind of Rage." Tutchin's irascible temper had again taken hold. Scurrilously, he assailed foreigners in high office, especially William III's Dutch favorites, for their monopolizing preferments and usurping command, under such transparent aliases as "Bentir" for William Bentinck, first Earl of Portland, and "Keppech" for Arnold Joost van Keppel, first Earl of Albemarle. The manner was Dryden's in Absalom and Achitophel; the venom was Tutchin's own. Official reaction to The Foreigners came quickly. The untrustworthy William Fuller spread the gossip that Tutchin fled from his Majesty's messengers, and found refuge "in a blind Ale-house, at the Windmill, by Mr. Bowyers, at Camberwel." On August 10th, he was taken "into custody of a messenger"; and at the grand inquest for the city of London, held on August 28th, there was presented "a Poem called The Foreigners."[18] A mystery envelops the rest of the legal proceedings. There may even be some truth in the allegation that the parry would long since have "ruffled" Tutchin, except that he pleased them with his "railing at King William's Friends sometimes."[19] The Foreigners also aroused such ephemeral rejoinders as The Reverse: or, the Tables Turn'd and The Nations: An Answer to the Foreigners. both published in 1700. Finally, in January of 1701, there was published a satire of more lasting worth, Defoe's The True-Born Englishman. Side by side, in Poems on Affairs of State (1703), were reprinted The Foreigners and The True-Born Englishman among verses "Written by the Greatest Wits of this Age."[20] Altogether, the two satirists had three poems apiece in the volume. One of Tutchin's poems, "The Tribe of Levi" (1691), was anonymously reprinted; the other two, The Foreigners and The British Muse, were identified as "by Mr. T——n." These were the achievements of Tutchin's "hatchet muse."