John Ogilby and the Iconographic Roads to a Restored Royalist Geography, c.1660–75

  • Robert J. Mayhew
Chapter
Part of the Studies in Modern History book series (SMH)

Abstract

Looking back from the vantage point of 1670, John Ogilby argued that it was the Civil War which had made him a writer: ‘in the first Fluctuations of the late Grand Rebellion, I being left at leisure from former Imployments belonging to the quiet of Peace wherein I was bred, in stead of Arms, to which in parties most began to buckle, I betook my self to something of Literature’.1 This does not mean that Ogilby’s response was that of the quietist, any more than it had been Heylyn’s, but that for both literature became the buckler they donned in the Royalist cause. Both Heylyn and Ogilby participated in a more general movement defending monarchy and Laudian Anglicanism in the Interregnum, the ‘golden age of High Anglican theology and apologetic’. Further, both were at the ‘lower’ end of spectrum of literary aspirations in this golden age, contributing primarily to the ‘host of popular controversial works, now forgotten, but effective propaganda in their day’.2 But where Heylyn’s contributions came in the form of a massive folio geography, Ogilby’s contribution came in Aesopian fables.3

Keywords

East India Company Political Language Coronation Procession Triumphal Arch Literary Aspiration 
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Notes

  1. 2.
    Robert Bosher, The Making of the Restoration Settlement: the Influence of the Laudians 1649–62 (London: Dacre Press, 1951), pp. 36 and 37–8.Google Scholar
  2. 3.
    The politics of Ogilby’s Aesopian fables is discussed in Mark Loveridge, A History of Augustan Fable (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), pp. 102–41;Google Scholar
  3. Jayne Elizabeth Lewis, The English Fable: Aesop and Literary Culture, 1651–1740 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), pp. 14–23; andGoogle Scholar
  4. Annabel Patterson, Fables of Power: Aesopian Writing and Political History (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1991), pp. 85–94.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
  5. 5.
    Cited in Katherine Van Eerde, John Ogilby and the Taste of his Times (Folkestone: Dawson Press, 1976), p. 27.Google Scholar
  6. 8.
    I.M. Green, The Re-Establishment of the Church of England, 1660–1663 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1978), p. 91.Google Scholar
  7. 11.
    Lawrence Manley, Literature and Culture in Early Modern London (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), p. 214.Google Scholar
  8. See also Roy Strong, Art and Power: Renaissance Festivals, 1450–1650 (Woodbridge: Boydell and Brewer, 1984);Google Scholar
  9. Stephen Orgel, The Illusion of Power: Political Theatre in the English Renaissance (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1975); andGoogle Scholar
  10. Vaughan Hart, Art and Magic in the Court of the Stuarts (London: Routledge, 1994), Chapter 7.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
  11. 13.
    Samuel Pepys, Diary, transcribed by Robert Latham and William Matthews (London: G. Bell and Sons, 1970), II 81.Google Scholar
  12. 15.
    See also Charles Withers, ‘Geography, Royalty and Empire: Scotland and the Making of Great Britain, 1603–1661m’, Scottish Geographical Magazine, 113 (1997), pp. 22–32.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
  13. 17.
    See John Keay, The Honourable Company: a History of the English East India Company (London: Harper Collins, 1991), Chs.1–6.Google Scholar
  14. 19.
    See David Berkowitz, John Selden’s Formative Years: Politics and Society in Early Seventeenth-Century England (London: Associated University Press, 1988), pp. 51–4.Google Scholar
  15. 20.
    Steven Pincus, Protestantism and Patriotism: Ideologies and the Making of English Foreign Policy, 1650–1668 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996).CrossRefGoogle Scholar
  16. 21.
    A distinction was drawn in seventeenth-century political thought between pernicious ‘universal monarchy’ and England’s beneficent commercial empire: but there is no sign that Ogilby’s procession draws such a distinction, simply claiming instead universal monarchy for England. For the distinction: see John Robertson, ‘Gibbon’s Roman Empire as a Universal Monarchy: the Decline and Fall and the Imperial Idea in Early Modern Europe’, in Rosamond McKitterick and Roland Quinault, eds. Edward Gibbon and Empire (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), pp. 247–70, at pp. 254–5.Google Scholar
  17. See also Steven Pincus, ‘The English Debate over Universal Monarchy’ in John Robertson, ed., A Union for Empire: Political Thought and the British Union of 1707 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), pp. 37–62.Google Scholar
  18. 22.
    See Richard Tuck, ‘Grotius and Selden’ in J.H. Burns with Mark Goldie, eds, The Cambridge History of Political Thought, 1450–1700 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), pp. 499–529, at pp. 527–8.Google Scholar
  19. 25.
    See Derek Hirst, ‘The English Republic and the Meaning of Britain’, in Brendan Bradshaw and John Morrill, eds, The British Problem, c.1534–1707: State Formation in the Atlantic Archipelago (London: Macmillan, 1996), pp. 192–219, at pp. 192–4.Google Scholar
  20. 28.
    See the balanced discussion in Ronald Hutton, The Restoration: a Political and Religious History of England and Wales 1658–1667 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1985), pp. 181 and 288–9.Google Scholar
  21. 29.
    Paul Seaward, The Cavalier Parliament and the Reconstruction of the Old Regime, 1661–1667 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), Ch. 3.Google Scholar
  22. 32.
    Those who see elements of absolutism include: J.R. Jones, Charles II: Royal Politician (London: Allen and Unwin, 1987), Ch. 5; andGoogle Scholar
  23. Maurice Lee, The Cabal (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1965).Google Scholar
  24. Those who oppose this view include Ronald Hutton, Charles the Second: King of England, Scotland and Ireland (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989), pp. 318–19; andCrossRefGoogle Scholar
  25. John Miller, ‘The Potential for “Absolutism” in Later Stuart England’, History, 69 (1984) pp. 187–207.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
  26. 35.
    Ogilby, Africa, br-v. (Original in italics.) See also Cynthia Wall, The Literary and Cultural Spaces of Restoration London (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998).Google Scholar
  27. 39.
    Van Eerde, Ogilby and the Taste of his Times, p. 151; see also Herbert Fordham, Notes on British and Irish Itineraries and Road Books (Hertford: Stephen Austin Press, 1912), pp. 7–8.Google Scholar

Copyright information

© Robert J. Mayhew 2000

Authors and Affiliations

  • Robert J. Mayhew
    • 1
  1. 1.Institute of Geography and Earth SciencesUniversity of WalesAberystwythUK

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