“IF TRUTH BE THINE, WHAT NEEDS A BRUTISH FORCE?”:
HENRY VAUGHAN, SILEX SCINTILLANS, AND INTERREGNUM ANGLICAN
SURVIVALISM

By
Brycen Dwayne Janzen
B.A., University o f Northern British Columbia, 2010

THESIS SUBMITTED IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF
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MASTER OF ARTS
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UNIVERSITY OF NORTHERN BRITISH COLUMBIA
May 2012

© Brycen Dwayne Janzen, 2012

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Abstract
The following thesis examines the historical and critical conflation o f politics and
religion in Interregnum England and Wales. W ith reference to Henry Vaughan’s Silex
Scintillans (1650, 1655), this thesis attempts to deconstruct this understanding o f
seventeenth-century poetry. While not a work o f deconstruction, as it is properly
understood, the following text argues that this historical and critical conflation has placed
an arbitrary and inhibiting limitation upon the scholarship o f the period. V aughan’s Silex
Scintillans has long been considered a representative text o f Christian mystical poetry.
However, since the 1970s, following the work o f Martz and others, the text has been
subject to increasingly political interpretations. In expanding the interpretive categories
mentioned above, this thesis attempts to resituate Silex Scintillans within the Christian
tradition while arguing that it is best understood as a representative piece o f Anglican
survivalist literature.

Janzen

TABLE OF CONTENTS
Abstract

ii

Table of Contents

iii

Acknowledgements

iv

Introduction
“Servus Inutilis: Peccator Maximus”

1

Chapter One
“Late and dusky” Days: Re-Evaluating Context(s)

14

Chapter Two
A “true, practick piety” : Henry Vaughan’s Religious Poetics

42

Chapter Three
“A sweet, revengeless, quiet minde”: Anglican Passivity
and Vaughan’s Hermeneutics o f Suffering

74

Conclusion
“A sad blubber’d story” : Closing Remarks

100

Notes

108

Works Cited

110

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Acknowledgments
It is impossible to undertake a project like this without accruing significant
debts—both intellectual and emotional. Above all, I am indebted to the Department o f
English at the University o f Northern British Columbia for the kind treatment I have
received over the years.
I would like to thank my committee members, Doctors Kevin Hutchings, Boris
DeWiel, and Dana Wessell Lightfoot for their insightful and much appreciated feedback.
My thesis supervisor, Doctor Lisa Dickson has been thoroughly supportive— even, I
suspect, at the expense of her own sabbatical. I cannot begin to thank her, but I would be
remiss if I did not confess my debt to her. She will likely say, as Polonius says, that
“brevity is the soul o f wit,” so I will simply answer her with Seneca: praeceptores svos
advlescens veneratvr et svspicit. I have truly stood upon the shoulders o f giants; and,
more than that, I have often asked them to carry me.
I would like to thank my friends and family for dismissing my constant aloofness
and irritability as being, somehow or another, “part o f the process.” Your patience has
been very much appreciated. Brenda Janzen, Kyle Janzen, Wayne Cline, and Krysten
Novak have been constant supporters. Neil and Virginia Lettinga, I fear, will never know
the extent o f their influence upon me. Moreover, I would like to thank Mareina Perreaux,
Alexis Rekdal, Amelia Scott, Shay Shortt and Sarah Geisheimer for their early (and
continued) support: their questions, suggestions, and myriad other contributions merit
credit beyond what I am able to afford them here. I hope my affection and gratitude are
sufficient rewards— I have little else to offer.
The names mentioned above have contributed only to the success o f this project.
Where it fails, let no one hold them accountable. Any shortcomings indicate only that I
was unable to reach the heights to which I was directed.
Research for this thesis was made possible by funding provided by the Social
Science and Humanities Research Council o f Canada.

I humbly dedicate this thesis to my frie n d
ALEXIS BETH REKDAL
Thanks

Introduction
“Servus Inutilis: Peccator Maximus”

In 1650 a volume o f poetry entitled Silex Scintillans: or, Sacred Poems and
Private Ejaculations was published by Humphrey Blunden and was to be sold at his
shop, The Castle, at Comehill in London. The volume identified its author as one Henry
Vaughan, Silurist. Its titular emblem featured a flinty heart crying or dripping drops o f
blood; the hand of God is portrayed striking the flinty heart with an iron rod, and fire is
seen igniting from the top o f it. Not surprisingly, what followed was a collection o f
deeply religious verse. The volume sold moderately well, but apparently not as well as
Blunden had expected. In 1655 when Vaughan approached Lodowick Lloyd and Henry
Crips—the new owners o f The Castle, following the death o f Blunden—they agreed to
print an expanded second edition o f the text. This new edition would consist o f a number
of poems appended to the unsold copies o f the first Silex. In addition, the titular emblem
and “Authoris (de se) Emblema” were removed; these were replaced with a textual title
page featuring an excerpt from The Book o f Job, a polemical prose preface, and an
expanded dedication. Because this “second edition” consisted o f recycled unsold copies
o f the 1650 text, it has often been conjectured that Vaughan was quite simply not a poetic
success during his own period. This assertion is given weight by the rarity o f extant
copies of both editions of Silex—a mere seven copies o f the 1650 edition and six from the
expanded 1655 collection are known to survive. However, William London’s 1658 list
compiling the sixty most vendible books in London includes both the expanded Silex and
Vaughan’s Olor Iscanus (1651), indicating that Vaughan was reasonably successful
(West, Scripture Uses 69). Despite this modicum o f success, Vaughan’s name has often

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been associated with a sort of obscurity; and indeed, Vaughan’s name does not again
appear in the English poetic consciousness for nearly another two centuries.
While Vaughan is reasonably popular today— in the recent Penguin collection,
Metaphysical Poets only John Donne and George Herbert feature more prominently— it
was not until the Victorian Age that Vaughan enjoyed any sort o f critical interest.
Scholars and students of Vaughan owe much, then, to the nineteenth-century ‘cult of
anthologizing’ for reviving Vaughan’s name. Anthologies from George Ellis (1803),
Thomas Campbell (1819), John Mitford (1827), and John Willmott (1834) brought
Vaughan’s name into mild circulation. Finally, in 1847, the Reverend H.F. Lyte would
publish an edition o f Vaughan’s Silex Scintillans (1650, 1655)— the first edition in nearly
200 years. In 1868, Archbishop Trench’s A Household Book o f English Poetry noted the
(likely coincidental) similarities between Vaughan’s “The Retreate” and W ordsworth’s
“Ode: Intimations of Immortality.” Trench soon thereafter received a letter indicating that
the sender had purchased a copy o f Vaughan’s Silex at W ordsworth’s estate sale. When
this note was added to the 2nd edition o f Trench’s book, Vaughan— now the recently
discovered intellectual and poetic progenitor o f Wordsworth— became something o f a
sensation. And while this Vaughan-Wordsworth connection has largely been discredited,
much of Vaughan’s attention is owed to this legend (McMaster 325). A four volume
complete works was soon published by the Reverend Alexander Grosart (1871).
Vaughan’s Victorian revivalists were interested in him not only for his influence on
Wordsworth, but also for the apparent purity o f his religious expression. Somehow
Vaughan’s political temper was completely overlooked— so much so that Grosart, an
avowed Puritan sympathizer, saw no problem in publishing his complete works. Vaughan

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was principally seen as a curiously mystical disciple o f George Herbert. The politics o f
his era were disregarded by these new readers; and the text of Silex Scintillans was, for
the first time, reasonably widely available to Victorian readers.
Vaughan’s religiopolitical affiliations were known to these readers, but his
relationship with Herbert was afforded a great deal o f primacy. These readings o f
Vaughan as a disciple of Herbert were so much in vogue by the mid-nineteenth century
that when F.E. Hutchinson—himself vocationally an Herbert scholar—undertook to write
what was to become the authoritative biography on Vaughan, he could not escape them.
Hutchinson acknowledges Vaughan’s political orientations, describing the frank candour
o f his early poems: “Vaughan ... had, in early years, at least, no political moderation; the
young Welshman takes fire and expresses his hot indignation in the reckless language of
a partisan.” He goes on to admit that this political temper even “disturb[s] the remote air
o f Silex Scintillans” (44). When Hutchinson asserted that outbursts of contemporary
consciousness weaken some o f Vaughan’s best poems, the academic world seemed to
have listened. “Allusions to contemporary events are constant in Silex Scintillans and are
often violent” writes Hutchinson, and he suggests that such “outbursts do not make for
good poetry and they mar some of Vaughan’s best poems” (121). Despite these
interpolations, the volume has largely been read as an apolitical religious document
composed (almost) in homage to George Herbert—a reading which explains Vaughan’s
various aforementioned Victorian revivals. Hutchinson’s assertion, in concert with the
then still-relevant Victorian readings, effectively depoliticized Vaughan’s writings;
spectres o f political thought were seen as regrettable, but easy enough to gloss over when
attempting to institute alternative readings.

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By the time John Davies published his popular history o f Wales, Canes Cymru (A
History o f Wales,) in 1990, this critical amelioration had been more or less completed. In
711 pages, Davies devotes the whole of two sentences to Vaughan: the first addresses
him as an English poet living in Wales, and the second remarks upon his political
orientation. Davies suggests that Vaughan’s “attitude towards the struggles was one o f
epicurean unconcern” (271). O f course, a popular history cannot reasonably be appealed
to for determining current critical trends; rather, it is quoted here to illustrate the
interpretive inertia of this earlier commentary, and to demonstrate just how far this
picture of Vaughan has come. Chris Fitter has commented on the insistence o f the
scholarly community to read Herbert’s almost passive religious voice into Vaughan as
recently as 1992. Fitter comically jabbed that such readers o f Vaughan are quick to
identify echoes of the canon George Herbert, while ignoring the cannons o f the civil wars
(123). However, by the time Fitter was making these snide remarks—as appropriate as
they perhaps may have been—the critical field o f Vaughan had long since begun to
acknowledge and appreciate the political orientation o f much o f Vaughan’s verse.
Beginning with Louis Martz in the 1970s, Vaughan’s religious poetry began to be
recognized for its political temper, and this realization has generated a wealth o f
commentary from E.L. Marilla, Frank Kermode, Jonathan F.S. Post, Alan Rudrum and
others. Moreover, discussions o f Vaughan’s political tones have contributed significantly
to chapters in Post’s Henry Vaughan: The Unfolding Vision, Philip West’s Henry
Vaughan’s Silex Scintillans: Scripture Uses, and Holly Faith N elson’s recent Simon
Fraser University doctoral dissertation “The Scriptural Texture o f Henry V aughan’s Silex
Scintillans'. The Poetics, Politics and Theology o f Intertextuality.” And Vaughan is

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mentioned frequently in Robert W ilcher’s recent The Writing o f Royalism: 1628-1660,
where Wilcher further entrenches Vaughan’s politics by using a line from V aughan’s
“The Proffer” as an epigraph for his book.
This recent emphasis on Vaughan’s political obduracy has sometimes detracted
from a genuine understanding of his poetry, and this ought to be contested. Throughout
his article, “Resistance, Collaboration, and Silence: Henry Vaughan and Breconshire
Royalism,” Rudrum refers to Vaughan and his circle as “ultra-Royalists.” Rudrum argues
that “the literary persona projected in Silex Scintillans is a deliberate artistic construct, in
the service of a political end” (102). Rudrum evidences this point by calling attention to
Vaughan failing to include an elegy for his friend and cousin Charles Walbeoffe in the
1655 edition o f Silex Scintillans. Rudrum reasonably dates the poem to either late 1653 or
1654, and finds the absence o f the poem in Vaughan's augmented volume conspicuous.
His answer to this is to suggest that Vaughan intentionally omitted the poem because in it
he is personally sympathetic to Walbeoffe’s acceptance of an administrative position
from the Parliament. Vaughan and his circle would have found themselves taxed in
attempting to accommodate Walbeoffe’s compromise. Instead, the poem appeared in
Vaughan’s 1678 collection of unpublished miscellany, Thalia Rediviva, in which he was
somewhat freer to acknowledge the moral complexities o f the period. Rudrum’s
argument, however, depends on the omission o f this particular elegy from Silex being in
some way exceptional; and given Rudrum's expertise with Vaughan, this is a surprising
oversight. Rudrum is correct in noting the presence o f a number o f elegiac poems in both
editions o f Silex Scintillans. There are six unaddressed elegies in Silex. O f these, five are
universally accepted to be about Vaughan’s youngest brother William. There is some

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dispute about one, however, but this disagreement is centred around whether this poem is
about William (like the others) or if it is an acknowledgement o f the passing o f
Vaughan’s first wife, Catherine Wise. These two deaths are usually mentioned in
commentaries on Vaughan’s religious conversion, and therefore, their inclusion in Silex
is sensical in a way that an elegy for Walbeoffe just is not. This is, perhaps, a slightly
tangental discussion; but it is necessary when challenging Rudrum’s depiction o f
Vaughan as being somehow merely a polemicist. While his poems certainly betray a
notable political temper, it is hardly appropriate to dismiss his truly devotional poems; to
do as Rudrum has done is effectually to invert the Victorian whitewashing o f Vaughan
and his poems.
Jonathan F.S. Post has adroitly suggested that Vaughan's sacred poems often
exhibit a manic quality: they express nostalgia for times gone by and a frustration with
times current—the fallen voice of Adam contrasted with the recuperative voice o f Christ
(Henry Vaughan: The Unfolding Vision 162-63). Not surprisingly, the critical community
is similarly polarized: scholars are either keenly aware o f the depth of Vaughan’s
religious experience or they are finely attuned to a deeply satiric and subversive political
temper of his writing. Given the political and religious temper o f the Interregnum, it is
not surprising that this is sometimes, or even often, the case. And while this distinction
may seem hyperbolic ad absurdum, it is an effective categorization to draw; what is
alarming, though, is the reluctance o f the Vaughan community to allow the lines that
demarcate these two approaches to blur. Most students o f Vaughan welcome M.M.
Mahood’s assertion that Vaughan’s work “reveals a deeper and finer knowledge of
[scripture] than even [John] Bunyan attained” (255); but West has recently remarked that

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“a glance of the most recent surveys o f mid-century literature ... shows that a 1970s
preference for what is radical and revolutionary still prevails” (2). There is, however,
certainly a political temper to Vaughan’s poems. But my contention here is that Silex
Scintillans is not intended for a strictly political audience. The text itself assumes that its
readers will share Vaughan’s political sympathies. But if Vaughan were looking for a
purely political audience, there seems little reason for him to have abandoned his
Cavalier roots. Vaughan is unique amongst Royalist poets in that the religious lyric was
typically associated with Puritan zeal. Vaughan, much like Robert Herrick, is a Cavalier
turned religious poet. J.C. Shairp comments on this generically coded form when he notes
that
Henry Vaughan belongs to that small band o f Royalist poets of the Caroline era
who stand discriminated from the host o f dashing, rollicking, cavalier lyrists, by
being essentially religious poets. What attracted them to the Royal cause was not
its worldly splendor; but they identified it with that refinement o f feeling and that
deep and sober piety which seem to have descended ... from Catholic ages. (120)
And indeed, in 1655 an augmented ‘second edition’ o f Silex appeared with a significant
quantity of newly appended materials including a polemical preface in which Vaughan
denounces non-religious poetry. In this preface, writes Jonathan Nauman, Vaughan likely
burned most o f his Cavalier bridges (“The Publication o f Thalia Rediviva” 88-89). He
advises those with poetic talent to turn their focus to religious verse. Vaughan declares
himself to be “pious convert” o f George Herbert, but is quick to deride others who have
similarly (though, in Vaughan’s mind, superficially,) styled themselves after Herbert.
Vaughan is addressing these poets when he writes:
They had more o f fashion than force. And the reason o f their so vast distance
from [Herbert], besides differing spirits and qualifications— for his measure was
eminent—I suspect to be, because they aimed more at verse, than perfection, as
may be easily gathered by their frequent impressions and numerous pages. Hence

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sprang those wide, those weak, and lean conceptions, which in the most inclinable
reader will scarce give any nourishment or help to devotion; for not flowing from
a true, practick piety, it was impossible they should effect those things abroad,
which they never had acquaintance with at h om e.... (391)'
This passage is worth quoting for a number o f reasons. First, it illustrates the severity o f
Vaughan’s religious conviction: he prefers to scorn potential allies for their superficiality
rather than align himself with them on principle. Moreover, his target audience is clear.
He is not interested in ‘dashing, rollicking, cavalier’ Royalists; but rather, he is interested
in Anglicans seeking after ‘true, practick piety.’
It is clear that Vaughan’s sacred poetry is imbued with both a religious and a
political temper. My contention here, however, is that when one champions one voice at
the expense o f the other, something is invariably lost. The poems in Silex are primarily
religious, but the strong secondary voice is very much a political one. Each o f these
voices represent an essential element of Vaughan’s creative vision; and his inability to
completely abandon his political context is very much portrayed in the form o f many o f
his poems. As mentioned by Post, Vaughan’s poems often exhibit distinct and conflicting
voices. I am indebted to Post, whose greatest contribution to the study o f Vaughan is in
identifying that Vaughan’s poems are very rarely one or the other, but often seem to
embody competing voices. Vaughan often changes what he is saying—and this is often
indicated by alterations to both form and prosody— within individual poems themselves.
However, rather than being a poet of binary voices, Vaughan is a poet who routinely
makes use o f a tripartite poetic model. Vaughan’s poems often begin with a meditation
on some grand spiritual theme before they shift to some worldly concern; and it is here
where Vaughan sometimes lacks moderation. Finally, and most importantly, though,
Vaughan recognizes how his material concerns often lead to spiritual failures, and he

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attempts either to reconcile these conflicts or console himself and his readers. Vaughan’s
answer is very often that his worldly woes will refine his spirit. His ‘hermeneutics o f
suffering’ often come near to being a contemptus mundi, but the Celtic immanence
tradition of which Vaughan was likely an inheritor—and which various orthodoxies have
never completely succeeded in eliminating from Wales and Ireland—prevented him from
entirely taking this step. Vaughan’s poem “The World” is a great illustration o f the
formal model described above. It begins with the beautiful and famous meditation: “I saw
eternity the other night / Like a great Ring o f pure and endless light” (1-2). The first
stanza o f this poem is generally considered to be Vaughan’s most beautiful work
(Simmonds, Masques 15), but Vaughan then shifts his focus in the second stanza to the
“darksome statesman” (“The W orld” 16)— Oliver Cromwell— and lashes out at the
parliamentary and puritan impositions upon the delicate pre-revolutionary world with
which he so strongly identified. Vaughan ends the poem on a consolatory note
referencing the traditional view of the Church as the bride o f Christ (cf. Revelations 19,
21). “This ring the Bridegroom didfor none provide, / But fo r His bride” writes Vaughan,
indicating a belief that, as true disciples o f Christ, he and his Anglican cohort would be
saved while his tormentors likely would not be. When Hutchinson speaks o f the remote
airs o f Silex being disturbed by a contemporary consciousness, he may very well be
speaking to this poem specifically. Anthologists often struggle with this poem; many
seem to resent the ephemeral beauty o f the beginning contrasted so alarmingly with
echoes of civic strife. Because o f this, it is somewhat common for only the first stanza to
be anthologized, a practice which “produces an attractive, if somewhat obscure poem”
(Pettett 193). There is a delightfully grotesque quality to this poem, and it is one o f

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dozens o f Vaughan’s finest poems that makes use of the tripartite model described above.
As Bennett has wonderfully suggested, “[f]ew poets have phrased more beautifully the
experience of time-bound man [.s'/e] striving to apprehend eternity” than did Vaughan
(87).
I would like to volunteer this reading o f Vaughan in preference to the existing
modes of interpretation which emphasize the incompatibility o f worldliness and
transcendence. To Vaughan, these discourses are part o f the same spiritual process, and
their divorce is part of a critical partisanship that has unhelpfully emerged. M y principle
argument is that Vaughan’s worldly concerns were an integral part of his religious
experience and his process of spiritual revelation. It is accepted that he was “nigh unto
death” with illness— though there is some debate as to whether or not this was ca. 1648
(Lyte xxix) or ca. 1653 (Simmonds, Masques 203)—and it is known that he was greatly
and personally affected by the “late and dusky” days o f the civil wars (“The Night” 51).
Contra Rudrum, my contention is that Silex Scintillans is primarily a religious text, but
Vaughan’s worldly experiences and trials shaped his religious expression. Despite the
mystic and transcendent character o f many o f Vaughan’s poems, he remained a poet for
whom the world was a stage with very real material (as well as spiritual) consequences.
This is not to say that Vaughan struggled with his faith in response to personal tragedy;
rather, following his conversion experience, and the evolution and refinement o f it, there
seems every indication that Vaughan’s faith was stalwart. Religiousness aside, though,
the living, material world provided a genuine problem for Vaughan: it was rife with
sedition, the Bible was being used to justify every manner o f abomination, and the
Anglican liturgy had been derided as Popish and banned from British parishes. It is

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scarcely surprising, then, that Vaughan would approach the world with disease and even
hostility, but one ought to remember that Vaughan him self saw his world as a purifying
fire which would temper his soul for its real existence. Vaughan’s relation to the world
seems at times to be one o f stoic resolution, and he sees this as ideal; however, he often
fails to maintain such composure, and it is precisely this anxiety which fuels much o f his
verse. The essential conflict in Vaughan is his inability to live up to his own heightened
religious sensibility. Vaughan’s reaction to the world, rather than the world itself, is the
source of his anxiety, and his struggle to attain stoical equilibrium charges his religious
poetry with yearning. It is for this reason that his chosen epitaph declared him to be
SERVUSINUTILIS: PECCATOR MAXIMUS—or, a profitless servant, greatest o f
sinners— and it is through this complex reflexivity hinged upon religious scrupulosity
that Vaughan’s worldly echoes within Silex ought to be understood. Treating Vaughan as
a religious poet who occasionally mars his verse with references to contemporary goings
on, as does Hutchinson, is just as problematic as suggesting that Vaughan’s religious
poetry was merely a strategic battleground on which to wage a political war, as does
Rudrum. Recognizing the co-textual role o f each o f these voices is vital in garnering any
genuine understanding, not only o f Vaughan, but o f his sacred poetry.
Vaughan was almost certainly, as Rudrum has suggested, an ultra-Royalist. He
was obdurate, scornful, and proud. And all o f these things are reflected in his religious
poetry. However, this is not the defining character o f the volume. Vaughan was also
intelligent, meditative and reflective, and Silex Scintillans, more often than not, is centred
around his sense of his own shortcomings. This is not to say that every poem in the
volume is based on this model— many scarcely achieve a peaceful religious note, and

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some never get past prolonged ravings— but this is the principle tension that Vaughan’s
verse seeks to overcome. While I agree with Pettett and Simmonds that V aughan’s
secular poetry is often unjustly disvalued, it is so tonally (and, o f course, thematically)
distinct, that it should be looked at differently. That Vaughan sometimes appropriated and
modified his own secular symbols and motifs in his sacred poems matters somewhat less
than has been suggested; what is important is that Vaughan was using these images to
express something radically different. Had Vaughan intended to be merely a poet o f the
world, there would be no reason for his adoption o f religious verse. What has been
proposed here will obviously and surely fail the reader who attempts to read Poems, Olor
Iscanus, or Thalia Rediviva with this interpretive model in mind. And while these
volumes may be appealed to for illustrative reasons, the focus here is on Silex Scintillans.
Vaughan’s prayer manuals and prose tracts are worth noting as well, since they were
composed between the two Parts o f Silex, and they are generally consistent with, and
indicative of, Vaughan’s anxieties therein. It was a common Stoic practice to record
one’s failures, to meditate upon them, and reflect upon how one could act ‘next tim e’ (the
most famous example of this practice is Marcus Aurelius’s journal, from which is given
to us his Meditations,) and Vaughan, as a very competent and learned Latinist, can be
reasonably conjectured to have been familiar with this exercise. Indeed, V aughan’s
poems often resemble the Consolation o f Boethius, and Silex, at its most basic, is
Vaughan’s attempt to work through nearly the same set o f existential problems. It is,
therefore, a deeply personal book. Simmonds objects to this notion, suggesting that Silex
is a book for the world. Vaughan intended the book to aid those in a similar position, and
as such, it has a very public purpose. I reject Simmond’s contention that this reflexivity

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precludes the possibility that the book is the product o f socially withdrawn introspection
(Masques 20-21); there seems little reason to assume that Vaughan was unable to see the
pedagogical values of his own struggles and reflections.

Chapter One
“Late and dusky” Days: Re-Evaluating Context(s)

Shall my short hour, my inch,
My one poor sand,
And crumb of life, now ready to disband,
Revolt and flinch,
And having bom the burthen all the day,
Now cast at night my Crown away?
—“The Proffer”

Since Lois Potter’s now seminal book, Secret Rites and Secret Writing: Royalist
Literature 1641-1660, royalist writing in the seventeenth century has garnered rather a lot
o f attention. Prior to Potter’s work, scholars o f the period laboured under the populist
belief that if anything subversive, seditious, or, to be frank, interesting, was written in the
period, it was republican or parliamentarian. However, notes Potter, the “source o f the
most consciously and deliberately subversive publications was the royalist party” (3).
Potter is interested in the scant scholarship available on this umbrella group. She writes
that “most scholars have been primarily concerned with literature which is subversive in
the literal sense of the word: coming from below, whether from the lower classes o f
society or from suppressed religious and political groups” (3). Royalist writers, however,
differ appreciably in their mode o f subversion; they are “writers who defied censorship
while defending censorship, [and] underdogs whose greatest desire was for the re­
establishing o f hierarchy” (3). Robert W ilcher’s book, The Writing o f Royalism 16281660, expands upon Potter’s work and acknowledges a significant debt to her. M uch of
Wilcher’s book is concerned with the years prior to 1649— filling the gap left in Potter’s
wake— and provides excellent historical context for the writing o f this period, but it is

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when he turns his attention to the interregnum years that his book really takes hold. He
spends some time discussing the lengths that were taken by the Rump Parliament to
stymie the diffusion o f information and ideas following the execution of Charles I (289).
For instance, when the gentry of Kent drafted a petition, signed by 2000 townsfolk, that
was “mildly Royalist” (but thoroughly Episcopal,) all copies o f the petition were burned.
The men trusted to deliver the petition to the Parliament, the renowned Cavalier soldier
and poet, Richard Lovelace and William Boteler, were arrested (121-22). It is not at all
surprising, then, as Potter claims, that Royalist writers adopted a “philosophy o f secrecy”
(113). From this ‘philosophy’ it would be safe to suspect that Vaughan, a staunch
royalist, would similarly use Silex Scintillans as a forum for royalist political
commentary. But before we turn our attention to Vaughan and Silex Scintillans again, it is
worth briefly discussing the goings on o f what Vaughan, in “The Night,” called the “late
and dusky” days of the civil wars (51).
That the civil conflict in England and Wales— legally a constituency o f England
since the Laws in Wales Acts o f 1535 and 1542— were inextricably linked with the
religious issues of the day is generally accepted. Religion and politics, then, were
conflated at the beginning of the civil wars; that the conflicts ended with the death o f
Charles in 1649 and the banning o f the Book o f Common Prayer assured that they were
similarly conflated at the end o f and throughout the Interregnum. It comes as little
surprise, then, that Vaughan’s religious poems sometimes acknowledge the political
unrest o f the period. In the same way, Vaughan, in the “Author’s Preface,” speaks of
Olor Iscanus, writing that it contained many “pious mixtures” (390). Certainly, then, the
era allowed (and even, it seems, expected) some admixture. The suggestion that poetry

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ought to be timeless— i.e., a pure aesthetic not rooted in context— was an invention in the
twentieth century o f T.S. Eliot and others, and would not have been how Vaughan and his
contemporaries understood poetry. For many reasons, the Interregnum policies o f the
parliament and the protectorate greatly and personally affected Vaughan, and his
rejection o f the Commonwealth is unsurprisingly predictable. As suggested previously,
Vaughan’s poems often seem to regress from heightened spiritual meditation to political
critique; however, such a view ignores the subsequent themic volta, after which Vaughan
often attempts to reconcile his material disgust with his earlier spiritual veneration.
Sometimes, as in “The Lampe,” Vaughan’s meditations go uninterrupted and he
maintains a pure spiritual poetic; but when he does pause to survey the world around him,
he never entirely loses himself to the negative emotions he attaches to it. One can see this
model at work by close reading several o f Vaughan’s most notorious ‘worldly’ poems—
“The World,” “The Constellation,” and “White Sunday”— and by parsing them with
reference to historical circumstance. Such interpretive weddings are sometimes devalued,
but, in the case o f Vaughan, such a strategy is vital: less than both Herbert and the Bible,
but more than any other competing influence, historical intertexts shape the fabric o f
Silex Scintillans.
On 13 April 1640, Charles I convened parliament. He required the parliament to
provide additional monies for his ongoing conflict in Scotland— the so-called Bishop’s
Wars of 1639 and 1640. Parliament, however, having not sat since 10 March 1629, was
much more interested in addressing the topic o f Charles’s eleven years o f personal rule,
and on 5 May 1640, some three weeks after it was convened, Charles dissolved
parliament and adjourned the session. However, when the aptly dubbed Short Parliament

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closed, the Convocation o f English Bishops did not; this group— traditionally and
conventionally tethered to the parliament since its members sat in the House o f Lords—
remained seated and during this time drafted the The Constitutions and Canons
Ecclesiasticall of the Church o f England. This document, a definitive statement o f church
policy, was deeply Laudian, and, therefore, English-Arminian and contrary to the
reformed theology that had characterized the Elizabethan and Stuart Church. This act
included provisions for the maintenance o f the episcopacy, and, moreover, implicitly
devalued the laity; it was a fairly direct response to the rise of presbyterianism in
Scotland, and was viewed as an affront to the parliament that had sympathized with
Scotland’s cause.
Without the financial backing o f parliament, Charles was eventually left with no
choice but to withdraw his army from Scotland. The cost of surrender forced Charles to
convene another session o f parliament on 3 November 1640, and this parliament quickly
passed an Act stipulating that parliament could only be dissolved following a motion
carried by a majority o f the members from both Houses— an Act which Charles him self
(albeit after some delay and almost surely with some reluctance) signed into law. In the
autumn o f 1641 Charles was in Scotland hoping to gain support from the Scottish
Assembly. The second Bishop’s War had only just ended, and Charles wished to smooth
things over in the north. In order to accomplish this, he, among other things, conceded the
Scottish Assembly’s wishes to adopt a Presbyterian church rather than an Episcopalian
one. Although approved by Parliament, the concession was unpopular, and suspicions
arose in England that Charles intended to reform the whole of the English Church in a
similar style— ironically forgetting the fears o f recusancy that had dogged Charles since

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his marriage to Henrietta Maria. However, while in Scotland, Charles wrote in a letter to
Edward Nicholas, his acting secretary o f state, that he was determined to maintain the
structures o f the Church “established by Queene Elizabeth and my Father”; this letter was
quickly published as King Charles his Resolution, Concerning the Government o f the
Church o f England, being contrary to that o f Scotland (qtd in Wilcher 85). And while
Charles enjoyed moderate success in Scotland, the domestic ramifications o f the two
successive Bishop’s Wars saw the king and parliament effectively estranged.
Charles’s military campaign in Scotland had been largely shaped by Sir Thomas
Wentworth, Earl o f Strafford. Strafford (as he is known) was to be the first significant
casualty o f the so-called Long Parliament. On 11 November 1640, he was charged with
treason, in an act that Robert Wilcher describes as “the first major offensive against the
administration o f Charles I” (42). In the weeks that followed, John Pym— Charles’s
greatest parliamentary adversary— and his allies effectively stripped Charles o f his
political support in the Houses. Most notably, Sir Francis Windebank, then Secretary o f
State, was forced to flee to France after accusations o f Catholic sympathizing arose;
Archbishop Laud was dispossessed and impeached; and Lord Keeper Finch found
himself attached to the Ship Money scandal and fled to The Hague (42). But it was the
trial o f Strafford in January o f 1641 that was to be the most significant. Aggressive
propaganda campaigns robbed Strafford o f public support, and his answers to his charges
were withheld from the public (55-56). However, at trial, with Charles in attendance,
Strafford’s answers were heard, and the tenuousness o f the case against him was made
apparent as his accusers’ perjuries were revealed; on the morning o f 10 April the case
against him was dismissed. That Strafford should be found innocent by a court was

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unacceptable to Pym, and in the afternoon o f 10 April, Pym’s supporter, Sir Arthur
Haselrig presented parliament with a Bill o f Attainder calling for the death o f Strafford.
Having been absolved by the judiciary, Strafford now faced death at the hands o f the
legislature. The parliament which had hitherto been a relatively banded and organized
political body united behind the vigour o f Pym suddenly found itself divided. George
Digby, up until then a friend and supporter o f Pym, castigated the Commons for
“committing murder with the sword o f justice” (qtd in Wilcher 58). There now existed in
parliament a Royalist party, and civil war was on the horizon.
The conflict in Scotland pertaining to church government eventually lead to civic
conflict in England; with Parliament adjourned, the Convocation o f Bishops was left to
craft England’s response: England was to remain obstinately episcopal and the
Parliamentarian preference for presbyterianism was discarded outright. (This is not to say
that Parliament was radically Puritan from the beginning— indeed, King and Church had
their support in both houses— but the houses, especially the Commons, certainly trended
in an identifiably republican direction.) If religious dispute and civic conflict were not
effectively conflated at this point, they certainly were following the detentions and deaths
of Laud, Strafford, and Charles; the banning o f The Book o f Common Prayer, and the
subsequent publication o f Eikon Basilike, a book purportedly written by Charles while
imprisoned by the Parliament. Eikon Basilike: The Povrtaictvre o f His Sacred Maiestie in
His Solitvdes and Svfferings is, in all likelihood, the most important piece o f Royalist
writing published during the seventeenth century, and, given its immense popularity, a
strong candidate for the most (historically and politically) significant work o f the century.
The structure of the work is simple: it begins with Charles’s justifications for many o f his

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political policies and ends with a devout prayer in which Charles beseeches God (and,
implicitly, his subjects) to understand his motives. The public, which hitherto had little by
way o f Royalist apologia, was given an account of the King’s actions which was
remarkably different from the parliament-sanctioned reports which they were used to
reading. The work was immediately popular and appeared in dozens of editions in just
the first year. Eikon Basilike began circulating in manuscript form on 30 January 1649,
the day o f Charles’s execution, and was released to the public very soon thereafter. The
2,000 original editions were in such high demand that booksellers were famously able to
charge the exorbitant price o f 15 shillings per copy. By the end o f 1649, Eikon Basilike
had appeared in 35 English editions. These varied widely in quality and appearance, and
could be found for as little as two shillings and six pence. In his Introduction to the
Folger Shakespeare Library edition of 1966, Philip A. Knachel summarizes the success o f
the book, writing that “[ajlthough it would be inaccurate to say that there was an edition
for every purse, certainly a wide choice existed” (xv). In addition to the myriad English
editions that appeared, the work proved popular in translation as well: by 1650, three
editions appeared in Latin, seven in French, seven in Dutch, two in German and one in
Danish, and such figures attest to the book’s unquestionable popularity on the continent
as well (xvi). Parliament attempted to stymie the book’s popularity; early publishers o f
the work, Richard Royston, William Dugard, and John Williams, all faced penalties and
ramifications, but these were remarkably mild. The work was such an astounding success
that Parliament famously failed to censor it for fear o f public opposition. Not
surprisingly, then, the Parliament enlisted its most able literary figure, John Milton, to
combat the work, from whence emerged Eikonoklastes. That a political biography, the

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civic account of a king, should be so sober and pious is a further indication that religious
and political causes were undeniably interwined— and indeed, they were essentially so,
given Charles’s role as both the secular and spiritual authority o f the realm. (I.e., English
monarchs are not only heads o f state, they are also “defender[s] o f the faith” and the
highest authority of the Church of England.) But the question here, especially as it
pertains to Vaughan, is whether or not a work can be primarily religious or primarily
political regardless o f the impediments o f a densely convoluted social reality that often
allowed for no effectual differentiation.
Between 1640 and 1642, a young Henry Vaughan was in London studying law.
The civil wars were to be a tumultuous time for a staunch royalist like Vaughan, and with
the outbreak of the first civil war in 1642, Vaughan was recalled to his native Brecon in
Wales. While there he was employed as a secretary to Judge Sir Marmaduke Lloyd until
sometime around 1645; and it has been noted that Lloyd’s “devotion to Church and King
would have appealed to young Henry Vaughan” (Hutchinson 49). (Although, during this
time, Vaughan seems to have spent rather more time preparing his first collection o f
poetry, Poems, and the Tenth Satyre ofluvenal Englished, for publication.) Following his
service to Lloyd, the historical record is somewhat wanting, but in 1947, F.E. Hutchinson
devoted a chapter in his biography o f Vaughan suggesting that he was an enlistee in the
Welsh forces of Charles. Vaughan was apparently a reasonably close acquaintance o f
Herbert Price (1605-1678), the Member o f Parliament for Brecon in both the Short and
Long Parliaments. His family lands, the Brecon priori (excepting the church,) were
notable for their expanse, and the estate house was less than three miles away from
Vaughan’s home. The Price estate was without much question a locale o f some

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importance for Vaughan. In his poem, “Upon the Priorie Grove, His Usual Retyrement,”
Vaughan recalls meeting his first wife, Catherine Wise, while lounging in the Price’s
grounds. And in 1645, Price hosted Charles at his estate. Clearly, then, Price was
important to Vaughan, and it is now accepted that Vaughan was among Price’s forces at
the Battle of Rowton Heath— a battle led directly by Charles himself, and occurring just
two months after Charles’s visit to Price’s estate. Such understandings o f V aughan’s
military life follow from the work o f Hutchinson and are now widely accepted; so much
so, for instance, that mentions of Vaughan’s military involvement are often referred to as
common knowledge. It is useful, I think, to parallel Vaughan’s life with historical
circumstance in order to gloss many o f his poems, and this is a useful exercise since
Vaughan, despite his turn to religious verse, was unable entirely to distance him self from
his historical goings on.
Before looking at Silex Scintillans, however, it is worth discussing Olor Iscanus.
Finished in 1647, it was not published until 1651. Often considered Vaughan’s second
work for this reason, the volume has attracted rather a lot of attention for its delayed
publication. Olor Iscanus is worth mentioning because it is Vaughan’s most explicitly
political work. In it, Vaughan includes a number o f elegies for Royalist friends and
acquaintances who perished in the civil wars as well as a number of panegyrics dedicated
to Cavalier poets and playwrights such as William Cartwright, John Fletcher and
Katherine Philips and other reputable persons. And while, in the introductory poem, “ad
Posteros,” Vaughan denies committing bloodshed on behalf o f his beliefs in the civil
wars, such poems made it certain that his readers would know to which party he
belonged; and his translations of Boethius describing the vicissitudes of Fortune would

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have only contributed to this understanding. However, the publication history o f the
volume has often been a topic o f debate for scholars: Vaughan’s reasons for publishing
Olor Iscanus in 1651 when it was seemingly complete in 1647 remain unclear, but there
has been no shortage o f speculation. It is generally agreed that hints to this publication
anomaly occur in the short prose introduction, “The Publisher to the Reader.” Here it is
made explicit that the work was published without Vaughan’s consent—the poems o f
Olor Iscanus are likely the poems Vaughan was speaking of in his 1655 “Preface” when
he recalled that some had “escaped”— but still questions remain. The anonymous
publisher has been variously understood as being Vaughan’s friend, Thomas Powell, or
his brother, Thomas Vaughan— the latter being accepted as the more likely candidate.
However, this seems to matter very little; no significant inferences depend on the text
being published by one or the other. E.L. Marilla believes that “The Publisher to the
Reader” was meant to protect Vaughan. He suggests that Vaughan’s personal disavowal
and the publisher’s confession that the text was stolen from its author would shield
Vaughan from parliamentary reprisals. James Simmonds, however, has contested this
suggestion. Examining Mount o f Olives and Flores Solitudinis, Simmonds notes that a
supercilious disregard for Parliament (and the associated repercussions) pervades
Vaughan’s religious manuals (“Publication o f Olor Iscanus'’’ 404-05). Simmonds
concludes that “[w]ith this evidence o f Vaughan’s temerity before a distinct likelihood o f
severe persecution, we can only infer that he did not himself seek by any subterfuge to
avoid the possibly disastrous consequences o f publishing Olor Iscanus" (408). Jonathan
Nauman speculates that Olor Iscanus was originally conceived as a “Cavalier celebration
of 'Love' and ‘ War'" to be released in 1648, before the edition underwent substantial

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editing by the volume’s publisher (“Toward a Herbertian Poetic” 93). Moreover, Nauman
indicates that only two o f the Olor Iscanus poems are known to have been composed
following the death of Vaughan’s younger brother, William Vaughan (99); indeed,
William’s death appears (again) to signal the end o f Vaughan’s explicit interest in the
Cavalier cause, but this will be discussed more thoroughly in Chapter Two. Building
directly upon Simmonds’s argument that Olor Iscanus does not diminish the force o f
Vaughan’s conversion, Nauman has suggested that the publication of Olor Iscanus
directly contributed to the intense religious rigorism o f the 1655 Preface (94). It should
be apparent, then, pace early commentators, that the publication o f Olor Iscanus
emphatically does not diminish the apparent genuineness of Vaughan’s religious turn.
The Interregnum was a difficult time for Vaughan and his circle. A number o f his
closest friends and family members faced persecution. In England, the Commission o f
Triers and Ejectors was generally unable to effect the religious reforms instituted by
Parliament, since public support for the Prayer Book proved to be more widespread than
initially suspected. In Wales, however, the “Act for the Better Propagation and Preaching
of the Gospel in Wales” was much more successful, and some 278 Anglican clergymen
were ejected. Matthew Herbert, Vaughan’s childhood tutor, was ejected from his living at
Llangattock; Thomas Powell and Thomas Lewis, both friends o f Vaughan, and persons
honoured by Vaughan in verse, were ejected from their livings in Cantref and Llanfigan,
respectively; and Thomas Vaughan, Vaughan’s twin brother and, in all likelihood, his
chief literary confidant, was ejected from his living in Vaughan’s own parish o f
Llansantffraed [sic].3 Vaughan’s neighbor, Rowland Watkyns, who will be discussed
later, was also ejected. The responses from these figures were varied: at extremes,

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Thomas Vaughan was to split his time between Oxford and London where he was to
establish himself as a marquis English alchemist— before eventually being killed by an
explosion in his laboratory in 1666; and Matthew Herbert continued serving his
parishioners, even going so far as suing several for not paying tithes, before his efforts to
serve were eventually thwarted.
The result o f the “Propagation Act,” as it is often called, was that many Welsh
parishes were left without ministers. Those that were actually replaced were often
criticized and derided as incompetent. This failure to replace clergy with competent
alternatives was owed to the Puritan belief that a university degree was not necessary to
administer the Word; rather, they believed, divinely inspired laypersons could more
effectively guide congregants. Thus, while itinerant Puritan ministers, the most famous o f
whom was Vavasor Powell, attempted to make their spiritual rounds across Wales, many
congregations were left without sanctioned clergy. Watkyns unapologetically lambasts
the authority of the laity in his poem “The New Illiterate Lay-Teachers,” in which he
writes of them that, “This is mere Hocus-Pocus; a strange slight, / By putting candles out,
to gain more light” (15-16).4 Watkyns is not content to criticize by abstractions, and
proceeds to catalogue how members o f secular professions had served church services:
Mad men by vertue o f this propagation,
Have Bedlum left, and preach’t for Reformation.
And they might well turn preachers, for we had
Many that were more foolish, and more mad.
The Tinkar being one o f excellent mettle,
Begins to sound his doctrine with his kettle.
And the laborious ploughman I bewail,
Who now doth thresh the Pulpit with his flail.
The louzy Taylor with his holy thimble
Doth patch a sermon up most quick and nimble.

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The Chandler now a man o f light we find,
His candles leaves a stinking snuffe behind.
The apothecary, who can give a glister,
Unto a holy brother or a sister;
Hath one dram o f the spirit, and can pray,
Or preach, and make no scruple o f his way.
Thus false coyn doth for currant money passe,
And precious stones are valued lesse than glasse.
Not disputation, but a rigid law
Must keep these frantick sectarists in aw. (17-38)
One can see in these lines that Watkyns makes explicit reference to the Propagation Act
(17), the myriad deficiencies o f the lay clergy (21-34), and, moreover, he notes that that
which is truly holy is now devalued (35-36). Churches and their congregants are no
longer ruled by holiness or an earnest will to receive the Word, but are strictly enforced
by law (37). That Watkyns could be so revolted by the Presbyterian structure o f worship
is made clear by the poem’s epigraphic use o f the Greek “Eicaq, sfcaq ears PefiriXoi" (Far
off, far off, O profane ones). Watkyns, and, likely enough, other ‘Anglican survivalists’
found themselves unable to cope with these church reforms. Such attacks occur
frequently in Watkyns’s Flamma sine Fumo, safely published in 1662, but most viciously
in the poem “The Presbyterian Covenanter.” Here Watkyns declares that “The
Presbyterian, as wise men may see, / Hath little knowledge, less o f honesty” (1-2). And
he continues:
In Scotland he was bred, a place too wild
To breed an honest, or a civil child:
Let Presbyterians be to Scotland sent,
I wish them no more plague; or punishment.
Than pleasant flowers will in Gods garden sprout,
When these unwholsom weeds are rooted out. (15-20)
Vaughan, too, was wont to criticize Parliament, Puritans and Propagators, although,
publishing in the 1650s, he was much less free than Watkyns. The poems o f Olor Iscanus

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are thoroughly Royalist, but these lack the vitriol that one might expect. Vaughan does
point mockingly in their direction in Olor Iscanus, but he does so in a rather selfcongratulatory manner and seems more interested in exhibiting cavalier pomp than in
deeply wounding his political enemies. But that being said, Vaughan was more than
capable o f being scathing, and a notable example occurs in his hagiographic effort,
“Primitive Holiness, Set Forth in the Life o f Blessed Paulinus, the most Reverend, and
Learned BISHOP o f NOLA,” appearing in his Flores Solitudinis. Readers o f Vaughan
have often seen echoes of him in the work, and early on he writes that “[Paulinus]
preferred the indignation and hatred o f the multitude to their love, he would not buy their
friendship with the losse of Heaven, nor call those Saints and propagators, who were
Devills and destroyers” (346). This passage addresses, again, the propagators as well as
the ‘New Saints,’ as the Fifth Monarchists in Wales had taken to styling themselves;
moreover, Vaughan’s disdain for the “multitude” is apparent.
As noted, Charles Walbeoffe, Vaughan’s cousin and close friend, had accepted an
offer o f employment from the new administration. It is generally accepted that Vaughan,
too, was offered some appointment, but, unlike Walbeoffe, refused it. This is understood
to be the topic and source of Vaughan’s poem, “The Proffer.” Vaughan begins the poem
by admonishing Commonwealth republicans, declaring: “Be still black parasites / Flutter
no more” (1-2). And Vaughan is adamant in his rejection; he will have nothing to do with
such shallow, worldly appeasements. He declares:
No, No; I am not he,
Go seek elsewhere.
I skill not your fine tinsel and false hair,
Your sorcery,
And smooth seducements: I ’ll not stuff my story
With your commonwealth and glory. (31-36)

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It is important to note that Vaughan’s poetry is constantly negotiating the tensions
between worldly goings on and spiritual rewards. Here, for instance, Vaughan has
resolved that surrendering his principle and accepting the appointment would be
spiritually detrimental. Moreover, when the poem appeared in the 1655 Silex Scintillans,
there would have been no indication to Vaughan, or other Royalists, that in a mere five
years Charles II would return from exile in France and restore the monarchy. This makes
Vaughan’s refusal all the more poignant since he was potentially consigning him self to a
lifetime o f difficulties. For someone like Vaughan, who had so thoroughly wed his
religious identity with his political loyalty, to compromise the latter was effectively a
sinful violation of the former. Vaughan’s poems are certainly worldly, but they are
always depictions o f the world relative to what might come next. If Vaughan is overtly
political, it is because he is concerned with Heaven and God’s gifts for the Faithful, and
these were not won with worldly compromise.
When Silex Scintillans appeared in 1650, its cover page identified its author as
one Henry Vaughan, Silurist. Because his first book, Poems, identified him as “Gent.,” it
is worth noting that Vaughan chose to abandon titular reference to his social rank. Silurist
identified Vaughan as a member o f the Silures, an ancient W elsh tribe which inhabited
Vaughan’s native Breconshire and who were renowned for their military prowess.
Vaughan also used the title for Olor Iscanus as well, and it is probable that Vaughan first
used it here (recalling that the volume was likely finished around 1647, but left
unpublished until 1651). This was a curious connection for Vaughan to make, especially
given the material o f Silex Scintillans. Vaughan, as an exceptionally competent Latinist—
even by the standard o f the time (Cheek 69)— was likely familiar with the Silures from

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reading Tacitus’s Annals. Tacitus refers to the Silures on several occasions in the twelfth
book of this work, but the picture he paints o f them remained consistent. Speaking of the
invaded Britons, Tacitus notes that “when a few who were beginning hostilities had been
slain and the rest pardoned, [they] settled down quietly; but on the Silures neither terror
nor mercy had the least effect; they persisted in war and could be quelled only by legions
encamped in their country” (§ 32); he says o f them generally that they were “a naturally
fierce people” (§ 33).
Alhough Welsh, Vaughan participated in an English social culture. Rudrum has
commented on this irony, writing that “on the one hand [the Welsh] belonged to what
was historically conquered and annexed territory; on the other, they were o f the same
nation as the English royal family.” Discussing the title page o f Poems, Rudrum notes
that “[a]s ‘gentleman’ [Vaughan] claimed membership in a class recognizable to the
English, as part o f the hierarchy by which they were ruled” (355). Following the
abolishment of the monarchy— and with it, a rigidly enforced social hierarchy— Vaughan
would have had little reason to claim membership in this group. The title Silurist allowed
him to do more: he could declare obstinate rejection o f the current social order by
abstractly appealing to another, more ancient, one. As Rudrum writes,
We should not underestimate the volte-face involved in the turning from
gentleman to Silurist, though it clearly had its own logic after the death o f
Charles: it implied a recognition o f the death o f a range o f hopes and aspirations.
The Anglican and Royalist lived on, but Vaughan’s sense o f what could be hoped
for from those loyalties was utterly changed. Poetry was no longer a way o f
making a claim upon the world and what the world could offer; it fell back upon
that function it had o f old among the Welsh, o f asserting undefeatedness in the
midst of defeat. (358)
The bardic tradition in Wales is important to note in concert with Vaughan because, as
Rudrum notes, he does seem to invoke it by adopting the moniker o f Silurist. Welshness

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in sixteenth and seventeenth century England was a complex social identifier. Speaking
Welsh— as Vaughan was able to— precluded one from attaining to any office, and
because o f this it was extremely important for the Welsh gentry to familiarize themselves
with the English language. Robert S. Babcock, however, has written on W elshness in the
context of Shakespeare, and he has attempted to articulate how Welshness was
understood. Most importantly, in distinguishing Welsh from English, is an emphasis on
historical consciousness; Babcock notes, for instance, that “[n]o character in Henry V is
more aware o f history than Fluellen; no one refers to it more often nor more precisely”
(198).5 Vaughan’s adoption o f the title Silurist, then, can be seen as an additional instance
of this consciousness. Those interested in caricaturing Vaughan will find themselves
immediately drawn to Thomas Grey’s iconic Bard, who is described as follows:
Robed in the sable garb of woe,
With haggard eyes the Poet stood;
(Loose his beard, and hoary hair
Stream’d, like a meteor, to the troubled air)
And with a Master’s hand, and Prophet’s fire,
Struck the deep sorrows o f his lyre. (“The Bard” 17-22)
The Interregnum Vaughan does seem to be a somewhat pitiable figure. W hether Vaughan
ever wore hoary hair and a loose beard is impossible to say since he has left no portrait
behind. But Silex Scintillans betrays Vaughan’s impulse to strike “the deep sorrows o f his
lyre.” The text achieves moments o f spiritual ecstasy, and during these moments
Vaughan’s tone becomes, not surprisingly, elated, joyful, and triumphant. However, large
expanses of Silex Scintillans'’s textual landscape are dour and grim; and it is not
surprising that Vaughan should clad him self in the “sable garb of woe.” This insight is
exceptionally apparent when one peruses some o f Vaughan’s more distinctly worldly
poems, such as “The World,” “The Constellation,” and “White Sunday.”

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There is another problem with clearly separating politics and religion in Silex
Scintillans, and that is that Vaughan speaks politically about his religious enemies in
much the same way that he speaks religiously about his political ones. Not surprisingly,
at this point, such a rhetoric is clearly intentional and is clearly a product o f the times. It
is worth noting that, following the death of Charles, Vaughan’s enemies were themselves
hardly an organized body of religious and political reformers. In Wales, the Fifth
Monarchists, lead by the itinerant preacher Vavasor Powell, continued to be a source o f
frustration for Vaughan. Along with Vaughan, however, Powell and other Fifth
Monarchists continued to be a thorn in the side o f Cromwell; notable Fifth Monarchists
had even gone so far as to identify Cromwell with the seven-headed dragon in
Revelations, typically identified as Satan him self (Bradstock 124). In addition to these
defamations, Powell said of Cromwell that he was the “dissemblingest perjured villain in
the world” (qtd in Bradstock 124). This characterization complicates the discussion o f
Vaughan because it becomes important to identify specifically whom he is addressing in
his various closeted attacks. Indeed, Cornelius Lettinga has even suggested that a
significant contributor to the failure o f the Commonwealth was that it united Anglicans
and forced them to clearly define who they were, while simultaneously driving various
Puritan groups further and further apart (292). However, Vaughan’s apparent and even
unapologetic worldliness ought not to be conflated with irreligiousness or secular
polemicizing. In Ceremony and Community from Herbert to Milton: Literature, Religion
and Cultural Conflict in Seventeenth-Century England, Achsah Guibbory offers an
insightful interpretation of the problem facing Vaughan and his contemporaries. Speaking
o f Robert Herrick’s Hesperides, she notes that Herrick’s secularism (and, at times,

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ostensible paganism,) demarcates him as an Anglican poet— and more specifically, an
Anglican poet rooted in the Laudian, viz., ceremonialist and sacramental, tradition. And
there is some precedent for comparing Vaughan and Herrick: both were Cavalier-tumedreligious poets, though few think o f Vaughan the Cavalier, and fewer still think o f
Herrick the pietist; and in a recent, influential article, Claude J. Summers has compared
the projects o f the poets in the context o f Interregnum “Anglican survivalism.” It seems
fair, then, that Guibbory’s commentary on Herrick can be considered valid here. Puritan
writers of the seventeenth century established an absolute dichotomy between God and
the world. Herrick’s poetic appropriation of paganism and his apparent salacious
merriment is a staunch rejection of this ontological divorce:
Whereas Puritan ideology, with its spirit/flesh dualism, criticized the ‘carnality’ of
ceremony, the English defenders o f ceremony insisted that ceremonies such as
kneeling or bowing are outward ‘expressions o f intemall devotion,’ intimately
connected to the spiritual. The corporeal, outward aspects o f worship can
represent and even sustain the inward because, in the ceremonialist mentality, the
physical and spiritual planes o f existence, like the body and soul o f the human
being, are interconnected. (Ceremony and Community 92)
If, therefore, Vaughan sometimes seems Janus-faced staring between God and the world,
spirit and flesh, it is because he recognizes a complex interrelatedness that his enemies do
not, and because he is attempting to navigate the challenges o f life in-between. For
Vaughan and those like him, accustomed to the liturgy o f the Prayer Book and the
traditions of the Anglican Church, these challenges were mediated by the various rituals
o f church ceremony and sacrament.
“The World” is much lauded for its beautiful opening stanza, and it is likely
Vaughan’s most commonly anthologized poem. In this stanza is all the elaborate
obfuscation o f the metaphysical mode. The first two lines, “I saw Eternity the other night

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/ Like a Ring o f pure and endless light,” lead into an elaborate meditation on the
complexities o f eternity. The second stanza, however, abandons this heightened
inspiration and turns, rather abruptly, to the ‘darksome statesman,’ Oliver Cromwell. This
shift has long made readers o f Vaughan uneasy, and E.C. Pettet notes that, beginning
with Palgrave’s Golden Treasury, a number of anthologies have printed only the first
stanza. “This drastic surgery,” he confesses, “produces a quite attractive, if somewhat
obscure poem” (193). But despite this concession, he laments the effect this habit has on
the lay reader who likely knows no other Vaughan than what is presented in these first
fifteen lines. And “this abridgement is to be regretted since it conceals a tough, coarse
textured rhetorical manner o f writing that is fairly common in Silex Scintillans'1'’ (194).
James D. Simmonds mirrors this displeasure. He remarks upon the irony o f criticizing a
poem called “The World” for being so topically material (Masques 15-16). Not
surprisingly, in a poem largely about Cromwell, though, Vaughan never glamorizes the
world; rather, he does just the opposite. Vaughan writes of Cromwell:
The darksome States-man, hung with weights and woe,
Like a thick midnight-fog, mov’d there so slow,
He did nor stay, nor go;
Condemning thoughts— like sad eclipses— scowl
Upon his soul,
And clouds of crying witnesses without
Pursued him with one shout.
Yet dig’d the Mole, and lest his ways be found,
Workt under ground,
Where he did Clutch his prey, but one did see
That policie,
Churches and altars fed him, Peijuries
Were gnats and flies;
It rain’d about him bloud and tears, but he
Drank them as free. (16-30)
Here Vaughan accuses Cromwell o f myriad offences. These are so many, notes Vaughan,

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that surely “Condemning thoughts ... scowl upon / His soul” (19-20). Vaughan also
identifies Cromwell with a mole— a symbol traditionally linked with Mammon. And
indeed, later in the poem, Vaughan continues this critique, referring to Cromwell as a
“fearful miser on a heap of rust” (31; C.f., Faerie Queene ILvii). But what, then, is
Cromwell’s greatest offence? Vaughan has an answer: “The down-right epicure plac’d
heav’n in sense" (emphasis added, 33). Recalling the Puritan dichotomy separating the
world from Heaven, Vaughan’s critique here is scathing: Cromwell, he suggests, has
conflated Heaven and sense— that is, he has wholly collapsed the Heaven-Earth
distinction so important to the Puritan camp which Cromwell’s government ostensibly
depended upon. Unlike Herrick, who would suggest that the world can serve as a tool for
devotion, Cromwell, according to Vaughan, as identified the world as the object o f
worship. While Vaughan has Cromwell in mind here, it is also important to note that
Vaughan is simultaneously speaking much more generally; Vaughan uses this darksome
statesman as a synecdoche, and this allows him to address his political enemies en masse.
Vaughan recalls the opening lines o f “The W orld” to begin the final stanza. He
writes that “some, who all this while did weep and sing, / And sing, and weep, soar’d up
into the ring” (41-42). But Vaughan laments that many will not direct their attentions
wholly toward God:
O fools (said I,) thus to prefer dark night
Before true light!
To live in grots and caves, and hate the day
Because it shews the way,
The way, which from this dead and dark abode
Leads up to God,
A way where you might tread the Sun, and be
More bright than he.
But as I did their madnes so discusse,
One whisper’d thus,

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This ring the Bride-groome did fo r none provide,
But fo r His bride. (41-55)
The ring o f “pure and endless light” that Vaughan recalls seeing in the opening lines o f
the poem is here identified: it is the wedding ring symbolizing the union o f Christ and
Church. This connection is a common one in the New Testament, and Vaughan could
easily expect his readers to be familiar with it. Vaughan’s main point in the poem is that
those who reject God or the church— those who choose the world— refuse the betrothal
of Christ. These people “live in grots and caves” rather than the paradise promised to
them. Vaughan’s criticism of Cromwell and those of his party is not that they are evil p er
se, although he acknowledges the blood and tears of the civil wars (29); instead, Vaughan
resents them because their worldly ambitions have robbed not only themselves but the
country of God’s grace. Vaughan’s poem, “The World,” then, is not so much about the
world as it is about the dangers of choosing the world before God. Vaughan illustrates
this religious danger by referencing the worldly preoccupations o f his political enemies.
Similarly, Vaughan’s poem “The Constellation” begins with the speaker
reflecting on the ordered, rhythmic movements o f the stars. The constancy o f the cosmos
is juxtaposed with the mutability o f human endeavours. The motions of the stars, which
Vaughan calls “fair, order’d lights” (1), is associated with Heaven, and, occasionally (as
with the stars), echoes of this cosmic order are felt on Earth (2-4). Categorically opposed
to this rigid discipline, though, is humankind. The stars may be characterized by “exact
obedience” (5), but man [s/c] is not: “He grops beneath ... with restless Care” (17).
Humankind may desire the “obedience, order, [and] light” o f the stars of their
prelapsarian forebears, but now they must settle for stifling political trifles:
But here commission’d by a black self-wil

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The sons the father kil,
The Children Chase the mother, and would heal
The wounds they give, by crying zeale. (37-40)
Vaughan’s complaint here is clever and would speak to his Royalist readers. Vaughan has
rather overtly referenced the political theory o f Sir Robert Filmer and his Patriarcha, or
the Natural Right o f Kings. Filmer based his political theory upon the Biblical
commandment to honour one’s father and mother. The literal meaning o f this
commandment is not lost on Filmer, but he is much more interested in interpreting Father
and Mother as the King and Church. To defy either o f these, then, is to defy the
Commandments o f God. Were one to use the Patriarcha as a gloss for the text, the “sons
the father kill” would refer rather obviously to the execution o f Charles. Moreover,
Vaughan identifies the banishment o f the Anglican liturgy when he writes that the
“children chase the mother, and would heal / The wounds they give, by crying zeal.”
Vaughan’s readers would also have found themselves directed to the Book of
Revelations, in which a woman “clothed with the sun” is eventually forced to flee into the
wilderness (12:1, 6.) Biblical exegeses variously identify this woman as Israel or the
Church, but what is important is that she is universally recognized as symbolizing God’s
faithful (or His chosen). Vaughan has consciously and deliberately appropriated this
intertext in such a way as to cast disenfranchised Anglicans in this role; the Puritans,
then, are implicitly seen as harbingers o f the apocalypse. The Puritan strictures o f the
parliament were justified with a language o f piety that Vaughan clearly rejects. Vaughan
ends this poem not by censuring his enemies but by suing for peace. Civic unrest, he
laments, is a remnant of the Fall. His enemies may have launched the country into
unnecessary conflict, and he may personally resent them for this, but he also recognizes

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that their failures are owed to their Lapsed natures. “Thus by our lusts disorder’d into
wars / Our guides prove wandring stars” (45-46), Vaughan writes, and I would like to
emphasize his use o f the first-person our. Vaughan might disdain, loathe, and blame his
political enemies for the personal injustices he feels he has suffered, but he
simultaneously recognizes that blame does not wholly rest there. Vaughan ends “The
Constellation,” then, not with a prayer for him and his, but with a prayer for all
humankind. He beseeches God to “Settle and fix our hearts, that we may move / In order,
peace, and love” (53-54); and indeed, Vaughan wishes for G od’s help in becoming an
“humble, holy nation” (56). What is one o f Vaughan’s most frank confessions o f political
and religious affiliation, becomes, at the end, almost a benediction. Humankind is
condemned to be disordered— and to suffer all the negative things that word connotes—
and only God can successfully order it. Vaughan uses similar language in “Affliction
[1],” in which he describes humankind as a cacophonous symphony, before asking God
to “key disordered man” and to “[make] the whole most musical” (35, 40).
“White Sunday” belongs to a group o f poems, including “ St. Mary Magdalene”
and “The Proffer,” that explicitly attack Vaughan’s enemies on religious and moral
grounds. “White Sunday,” writes Philip West, “is carved out o f Vaughan’s negative
emotions: hatred, enmity, bitterness, revenge, a strong dark side o f Vaughan’s poetry
which was long overlooked as an embarrassing slip in artistry” (Scripture Uses 150).
West praises the work of Jonathon Post and Stevie Davies for acknowledging that the
poem deserves attention that it historically did not receive. Moreover, the poem appears
early in 1655 edition of Silex Scintillans amidst a number o f poems lamenting the
illegality o f a number o f Church rituals and ceremonies (“Ascension-day,” “Ascension-

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hymn,” etc.). Traditional Christmas observances had been banned as early as 1645, and
bans on Easter, Whitsun, and Rogationtide followed in 1647. For Vaughan, and those like
him, these legislations reek o f blasphemy (West, Scripture Uses 148). The radical
rejection o f Church ceremony— with its emphasis on the Prayer Book liturgy— and the
official campaigns o f iconoclasm would have been seen by Vaughan as a terrible and
wickedly self-serving approach to religion. In “White Sunday,” Vaughan does not
hesitate to accuse to the Puritans o f eisegesis— or, of consciously misinterpreting the
Bible for self-serving ends. Holly Faith Nelson has noted that this was a major fear for
both Anglicans and Puritans during the civil wars and during the Interregnum. Nelson
notes that the Bible was understood to be immutable, and as a result, it was accepted as a
moral authority. Unfortunately, however, Anglican-Royalists and Puritan-Republicans
had a mutual claim to this authority. Neither side could combat the Bible as a source o f
authority, so they needed, then, to deny the legitimacy o f each other’s readings o f the
Bible. Nelson declares that it is “this very polyvalency o f Scripture that fostered the fear
of eisegesis” (31). Vaughan believed the Word to be easily understood and intuited by
those who would read it. In “White Sunday,” however, he spews venom at those who
would mislead innocents in their reading o f the Bible— and not surprisingly, it is his
Puritan enemies he accuses of this practice. “White Sunday” relies on a complicated set
of biblical intertexts to make its point. The second stanza depends on the reader’s
familiarity with the Acts o f the Apostles in which we are told that “suddenly there came a
sound from heaven as of a rushing mighty wind, and it filled all the house where [the
Apostles] were sitting. And there appeared unto them cloven tongues like as o f fire, and it
sat upon each of them” (2:1-4). This visitation o f the Holy Ghost allowed the disciples o f

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Christ to speak and prophesy in all the languages of humankind. Vaughan begins the
second stanza of “White Sunday” by asking: “Can these new lights be like to those, /
These lights of Serpents like the Dove?” (9-10). ‘New Lights’ was one o f the chosen
titles for the Fifth Monarchists in Wales, so Vaughan is issuing a fairly pointed criticism
in this poem. He then moves on to write that
Yet while some rays o f that great light
Shine here below within thy Book,
They never shall so blinde my sight
But I will know which way to look. (17-20)
In these lines Vaughan addresses those who would use the Bible to mislead others. In
addition to Acts, Vaughan invokes the Book o f Romans in which those “Professing
themselves to be wise ... became fools” (1:22). And the first chapter of Romans spends
considerable time discussing those who would pervert the Word o f God, those “Who
changed the truth of God into a lie, and worshipped and served the creature more than the
Creator” (1:25). Because of his access to the Bible, and his ability to read it correctly
himself, Vaughan cannot be swayed by the myriad Puritan interpretations that are
available. Indeed, Vaughan flatly declares his ability to “discern wolves from the sheep”
(24). And Vaughan again targets what he sees as conscious and self-serving
interpretations of Scripture in “The Day o f Judgment” where he writes
But what is highest sin and shame,
The vile despight done to thy name;
The forgeries, which impious wit
And power force on Holy Writ,
With all detestable designs
That may dishonor those pure lines. (33-38)
Clearly, Vaughan seems to believe that his enemies are willfully deceiving others with
regard to the Word of God. The Bible is a holy, sacred book, and Vaughan views it as the

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ultimate (and, indeed, the only legitimate) textual authority in the world; unfortunately,
though, Vaughan is cognizant o f the fact that not all readings o f the Bible are themselves
holy, sacred, legitimate, and authoritative— even when these readings declare themselves
to be precisely these things. The New Lights, who sometimes refer to themselves as the
New Saints, are in Vaughan’s eyes vain teachers less concerned with holiness than with
their own personal concerns. Vaughan again takes aim at them in “ St. Mary M agdalene,”
when he writes that those “who Saint themselves, they are no Saints” (72). New Lights,
New Saints, and Welsh Saints alike represent, for Vaughan, a blight upon the spiritual
and physical landscape he inhabited.
Potter’s argument that Royalist writers necessarily adopted a policy o f secrecy
implicitly indicts Vaughan and the poetry o f Silex Scintillans. Indeed, she suggests,
religious intertexts were often used to code Royalist writings. The problem with
Vaughan, at least in so far as Potter is concerned, is that his biblical intertexts are
ambiguously used. In the context o f subversive political poetry, Vaughan ranges,
unannounced, between innocuous religious lyric and polemic. Potter asks o f Vaughan
whether “the world [is] a hostile place simply because it is the world, or because its
dominant political or religious trends are uncongenial to the writer?” (133). The poetry of
Silex Scintillans affords its readers no answer to this question. Vaughan may indeed use
his religious poetry to score political points, but it has hopefully been demonstrated that
this is hardly his primary objective. Despite the work o f some who would prefer to
emphasize political intrigue, such angst remains, in most o f Vaughan’s Silex poems, a
secondary or tertiary motive. Vaughan often shifts his gaze away from the grandeur o f
Heaven, but he always works his way back again. In a complicated socio-literary reality

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where authority and allusion were both located in the Bible, Vaughan undertook the
challenge o f situating himself in the middle; biblical referents may allude to worldly
goings on, but they also refer to Vaughan’s personal handling o f these events and indicate
that his preferred method of coping during this period was primarily religious. It has been
suggested here that Vaughan would have found him self ill at ease with his contemporary
environment. What was needed in these dark times was a Christian poet, modeled after
the recently deceased George Herbert, who could direct the nation toward holiness. It will
be argued shortly that Vaughan had a personal conception o f the office o f Christian poet
and that this office entailed a great deal more than secular groaning; and, moreover, Silex
Scintillans represents Vaughan’s best effort to volunteer himself for that role.

C h ap ter Two

A “true, practick piety”: Henry Vaughan’s Religious Poetics

Ah Lord! and what a purchase will that be
To take us sick, that sound would not take thee!
—“The Pursuit”

It seems odd, perhaps, that there is a need to argue that a volume such as Silex
Scintillans is primarily a religious document. Given its subtitle— Sacred Hymns and
Private Ejaculations—nothing should be more obvious. The subtitular “ejaculation”
would have spoken directly to the seventeenth-century reader who understood the word
to mean “the putting up o f short earnest prayers in moments o f emergency” (OED,
“Ejaculation” 3.b); and while the word is commonly understood as an ejection or an
emission, it is important to note this specialized usage in order to accommodate the
accidental prurience o f the modem reader. Moreover, the subtitle would have reminded
Vaughan’s original readers o f George Herbert’s The Temple: Sacred Hymns and Pious
Ejaculations. This intertextual acknowledgement is important since it would have
contributed greatly to the volume’s success. Given the continued popularity o f The
Temple up to and during the civil wars, readers o f both Anglican and Puritan sympathies
would have been reminded of Herbert’s text. And while the 1655 edition o f Silex
Scintillans was to make Vaughan’s indebtedness to Herbert clear, this subtitular reference
was the only indicator in the 1650 edition to make this connection, although readers, then
as now, would likely have recognized that the titles o f several o f Vaughan’s poems are
identical to Herbert’s. With its unapologetic reference to George Herbert, Silex
Scintillans would have appealed to readers seeking after a similar collection o f religious

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verse. To further interest in the text, its cover made use of an obscure emblem; and
“Authoris (de se) Emblema," the Latin poem explaining the title page’s emblem,
identified the work as a piece o f conversion literature— a genre very much in vogue when
it was entered into the Stationers’ Register on 28 March 1650. “Moriendo, revixi; / Et
fractas jam sum ditior inter opes” (15-16)— In Dying, I live again; / And in the midst o f
my shattered means I am now richer—declares “Authoris (de se) Emblema”; and this
avowal, coupled with the volume’s dedicatory sonnet to God, firmly placed Silex
Scintillans amid a myriad number o f similarly styled works.
The titular emblem featured a flinty heart crying or dripping drops o f blood; the
hand o f God is portrayed striking the flinty heart with an iron rod, and fire is seen igniting
from the top o f it. The curious reader, opening the volume to its first page, would have
been met with the explanatory Latin poem “Authoris (de se) Em blem a'’’ This poem
identifies the Silex Scintillans o f 1650 as the work of a man who had undergone a severe
refocusing o f his religious sensibilities. Given the religious furor o f the age, such a work
was hardly novel. But the conversion o f Vaughan remains a popular topic for scholars.
He abstracts his conversion in “Authoris (de se) Emblema," but he makes it clear that a
considerable change has come over him:
Surdus eram, mutusq; Silex: Tu, (quanta tuorum
Cura tibi est!) alia das renovare via,
Permutas Curam: Jamq irritatus Amorem
Posse negas, & vim, Vi, super are paras,
Accedispropior, molemq, & saxea rumpis
Pectora, sitq; Caro, quodfuit ante Lapis. (5-10)6
One can see in these lines that Vaughan was not a willing or enthusiastic convert. He
refers to his stony heart that God alone could transform into flesh. Vaughan’s
seventeenth-century readers, versed in the Bible as they were, would have recognized in

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these lines G od’s promise in the Book o f Ezekiel: “And I will take away the stony heart
out o f your flesh, and I will give you an heart o f flesh” (36:26). Moreover, Lois Potter, in
her seminal work Secret Rites and Secret Writings, has indicated that emblems (and
emblem books) were more often than not the works o f those loyal to King and Church
(45-49). These two camps are popularly conflated—and indeed, it was unlikely for
Royalists not to be High churchmen and churchwomen, and vice versa—but I will here
suggest that a finer degree o f thematic demarcation needs to be acknowledged.
The interpretive debate hitherto alluded to— viz., whether Vaughan ought chiefly
to be recognized as a deeply religious poet or as a political polemicist—is one which
must now be seen as central to discussions o f Vaughan. To begin, it is worthwhile to
examine the “conversion” of Vaughan (though the term is misleading) and thence
proceed to establish a foundational understanding of his faith. Following this discussion, I
will describe the office o f the Christian poet as understood by Vaughan. And, vis-a-vis
Herbert, I will discuss Vaughan’s purpose in composing Silex Scintillans. It is not
without reason that critics o f Vaughan find themselves treading historicist territory;
Vaughan was socially aware and politically passionate, and he deeply felt the impact o f
the “late and dusky” days o f the English civil wars. F.E. Hutchinson has famously
remarked that this worldly consciousness or political temper, at times, even “disturb[s]
the remote air of Silex Scintillans” (44), but I will argue, pace many recent critics, that
these political interpolations do not detract from the volume’s essential religiousness.
Rather, this apparent thematic conflict represents an important component o f V aughan’s
meditative and consolatory project.
Looking at “The World”— and Silex Scintillans generally— Hutchinson declares:

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“[h]ere is authentic poetry of such arresting quality as had not been apparent in the Poems
of 1646 or would be found in the Olor Iscanus o f 1651” (99). Whatever happened to
Vaughan between 1642, at the outset o f the civil wars, and the publication o f Silex
Scintillans in 1650, the effect was readily observable in his poetry as well as in his
disposition. Like Robert Herrick, the young, rollicking Cavalier Vaughan was
transformed into a stem and somber adult— bitter, and suddenly ill at ease with the world.
Vaughan had become a man for whom the world offered little in the way o f consolation.
Between 1650 and 1657, however, Vaughan’s publishing record was prodigious. And
with the exception o f Olor Iscanus—which will be discussed shortly—these works were
almost entirely religious or medical texts. What fueled this sudden change is a common
topic for scholars o f Vaughan, and it is worth touching upon here. In a supplementary
footnote in his article, “Toward a Herbertian Poetic,” Jonathan Nauman writes that he
uses the term ‘rigorism’ [sic] rather than ‘conversion’ when discussing Vaughan’s
religious development “because [he does] not think that Vaughan's remarkable changes in
religious seriousness included any substantial changes in religious belief’ (100); and I
would like to endorse this distinction where possible. Semiotically, however,
“conversion” has a number of advantages over “rigourism,” which frustrates this
distinction. For this reason, conversion will sometimes be used where necessary, but the
‘rigorist’ approach presented here will be implied by such usages. And this
terminological conflation is hardly novel; indeed, Rudrum has noted that “[wjriters on the
seventeenth century ... have generally agreed to use the word ‘conversion’ to indicate not
the turning from a different belief system to Christianity, but rather the deepening and
intensification of the religious sense that Christianity became ‘true’” (“God’s Second

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Book” 202).
Conversion was obviously an important theme for Vaughan. The first poem o f
Silex Scintillans, “Regeneration,” depicts a figurative journey (pilgrimage) toward God—
properly understood as a metaphor for Vaughan’s own conversion. “Regeneration” is also
notable since it has received rather a lot of critical attention from Vaughan scholars.
Philip West has noted that the poem’s “allegories, emblems and soteriology have
delighted and taxed its readers, and given it one o f the richest legacies o f critical
interpretation among Vaughan’s poems” (30). Rudrum, also, has properly referred to
“Regeneration” as a “difficult but rewarding poem, rightly placed at the entrance o f
Vaughan’s first fully achieved book” (“God’s Second Book” 206), and while I do not
share Rudrum’s dismissal of Vaughan’s earlier material, his description is otherwise apt.
In 1957 Robert Allen Durr said of the poem that, when one understands it, it “cast[s] its
light out over all [Vaughan’s] lovely landscape” (15); and the poem remained such a
source of fascination for Durr that he spent considerable time in his 1962 book On the
Mystical Poetry o f Henry Vaughan parsing it. Both o f these sources contain much that is
helpful when approaching the poem for the first time— they provide an excellent
introductory gloss— and Durr’s conclusion in both, that the poem signifies a journey
toward Hermetic awakening or enlightenment, was current when he was writing.
However, while Vaughan was certainly well read in the literature o f Hermeticism, thanks
in no small measure to his brother Thomas, the most accomplished British mystic o f the
day, recent studies of Vaughan have tended to dismiss him from the Hermetic camp;
“Regeneration,” then, requires further attention. West notes that “[historians and literary
critics have tended to pigeonhole Vaughan as a mystical poet, whether in contrast to the

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churchier George Herbert, or under the tow o f Thomas Vaughan’s alchemical tracts....” I
think West quite right when he shortly thereafter concludes that Vaughan “seems to have
made a principled decision against the possibility o f knowing God in this life” (165)— in
response the mystic’s idea that God could be “unveiled” and subsequently known.
Therefore, “Regeneration” continues to demand (and arrest) scholarly attention.
Pilgrimage is an important metaphor for those seeking to describe the Christian
experience. In his book Pilgrimage and the Literary Tradition, Philip Edwards quotes a
Lollard tract which serves as a good initial gloss for the poem: “Euery citizen o f the
hevenli countre is a pilgrime o f this world for al tyme o f his present lijf’ (6). In
Vaughan’s corpus, however, pilgrimage represents a figurative search for God; it
represents Vaughan’s quest to secure his own salvation. “Regeneration,” the first proper
poem of Silex Scintillans, establishes this:
A ward, and still in bonds, one day
I stole abroad,
It was high-Spring, and all the way
Primros’d, and hung with shade;
Yet, was it frost within,
And surly winds
Blasted my infant buds, and sinne
Like Clouds eclips’d my mind. (1-8)
Vaughan’s metaphor for searching for God is stealing abroad. Durr has excellently noted
that Vaughan “is a ward who lives in the thraldom o f his ‘body’ (psyche)”; and this
condition is furthered by “his egotistical sense o f separate existence with all its lusts and
anxieties, in ignorance of Christ and the freedom o f the the spiritual life he may realize
through Him” (82). O f “Regeneration,” Edwards says that the “pilgrim here refers both to
the worldly person committed to his journey and the Christian who knows it is taking him
away from his God” (81). However, Edwards indicates a number o f issues with

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“Regeneration” being read as a pilgrimage poem. Most significantly, Vaughan never
finds God by searching in the poem; it is only when he stops his journey and listens that
he finds God— or finds some understanding o f what the Christian life entails. Vaughan
discovers that he need not search extrinsically for God; rather, he must search
intrinsically. Journey for Vaughan is futile and redundant, or, as Edwards suggests in his
reading of the poem, “an obsolete concept” (80). When Jerome undertook to translate the
Bible into Latin, he was (doubtlessly) beset by a number o f linguistic challenges. Among
these, Latin has no word for one who journeys to a sacred place or one who journeys for
a sacred cause. The word chosen, peregrinus or peregrination, denotes wanderer,
traveller, or alien— but importantly, connotes an exile. Peregrinus, in Germanic and
romance vernaculars became pelerine (French), Pellegrino (Italian), pilger (German), and
finally, pilgrim (English) (Edwards 6). This etymology is important for Vaughan, whose
poetic use of pilgrim would seem to depend on this connoted exile.
“The Christian in Vaughan’s poetry is indeed a pilgrim, but pilgrim as exile”
writes Edwards: “ [b]eing a Welshman estranged from his own people, an Anglican
utterly opposed to the changes imposed on his church, living in seclusion by his beloved
river Usk, Vaughan knew on his pulses the alienation o f which he wrote” (80). Edwards
spends a great deal o f time discussing the nature o f pilgrimage in Vaughan’s poetry.
Referencing Vaughan’s “The Resolve,” Edwards concludes that pilgrimage means
something quite different for Vaughan than it did for most poets:
...[Tjhere is
An ancient way,
All strewed with flowres and happiness,
And fresh as May,
There turn, and turn no more; let wits
Smile at fair eies,

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Or lips; but who there weeping sits,
Hath got the Prize. (21-28)
Here, too, Vaughan reveals that if one wishes to seek for God, one must seek within.
Edwards concludes that Vaughan was not a poet o f motion, but o f standing still.
Referencing many of Vaughan’s more overtly Neo-Platonic poems, Edwards describes
pilgrimage for Vaughan as a “travelling back” to the simplicity and divine understanding
of childhood (83). This is a common theme for Vaughan— even more so than it is for
Thomas Traherne and William Wordsworth, who are often associated with the notion.
For Vaughan, this journey inside was also a journey backwards: and this belief finds
biblical support in the Gospel o f Matthew in which Jesus tells his assembled disciples
“[vjerily I say unto you, Except ye be converted, and become as little children, ye shall
not enter into the kingdom of heaven” (18:3). What is to be acquired from an
understanding of “Regeneration,” then, is a sense in Vaughan that one is sufficiently
capable of intuiting holiness; one must first seek holiness within before endeavouring to
seek for it without. Vaughan’s preferred symbol for such genuine religious experiences in
Silex Scintillans is tears— “who there weeping sits, / Hath god the prize”7— and Vaughan,
it seems, had reasons of his own to cry; and these reasons, it will be shown, were to have
a profound influence on him and his ‘conversion.’
There are six untitled elegies in the Silex Scintillans o f 1650 and three more in the
augmented 1655 edition; these poems are merely identified with a titular pilcrow— ^—
but they represent some of Vaughan’s most impassioned, personal verses. These are
understood to have been written for Vaughan’s youngest brother, William, who died in
July o f 1648— often conjectured to have perished as a soldier in the King’s service. It is
acknowledged, though, that “ [Joy o f my life! While left me here]” from Silex Part I, and

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“[Fair and yong light]” from Silex Part II, may have been written for Vaughan’s first
wife, Catherine Wise. However, since the date o f her death is uncertain, such attributions
are generally tentative at best (Hutchinson 107; Martz, George Herbert and Henry
Vaughan 497). Despite these allowances, it is worth noting that it is common to see all o f
the elegies as dedicated to William, and indeed, his death certainly seems to have played
an important part in Vaughan’s conversion. For instance, in Henry Vaughan: A Life and
Interpretation, the authoritative biography on Vaughan, Hutchinson spends most o f his
chapter on Vaughan’s conversion speaking to the death o f William Vaughan. He makes
the argument that William’s death drove Vaughan to the Bible: “It seems ... more
probable that the shock o f his brother’s death or some other cause that made him ‘hurt or
sick’ brought him to a renewed study o f the Bible.” He finishes this thought by
suggesting that, “there m u s t... have been a cause which drove him back to the Bible”
(106). Hutchinson’s commentary is valuable, but the importance o f William’s death is
made apparent when one looks at the poems themselves. In the first elegy o f Silex
Scintillans, “[Thou that know’st for whom I moume],” Vaughan credits W illiam ’s death
for his conversion. Addressing God— the “thou” of the first line— Vaughan writes
But ’twas my sinne that forc’d Thy hand
To cull this Prim-rose out,
That by Thy early choice forewarn’d
My soule might looke about. (9-12)
It might make the modem reader uneasy to see Vaughan suggest that William’s death
was God’s way o f directing Vaughan toward spiritual rebirth. Philip West has remarked
that such “unabashed selfishness may now shock,” and this seems fair. However, West,
apologizing for Vaughan, suggests that it was an “inevitable consequence o f the
providentialist world-view o f that Reformed Christianity which in its most extreme form

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produced the ‘experimental’ Puritan practice o f sifting every event in one’s life for sign
of election (or, indeed, reprobation)” (84). Vaughan’s ‘selfishness,’ though, continues
throughout the whole o f the poem. Vaughan is critical o f himself and humanity when he
writes:
Dull, wretched wormes! that would not keepe
Within our first faire bed,
But out of Paradise must creepe
For ev’ry foote to tread!
Yet had our pilgrimage bin free,
And smooth without a thome,
Pleasures had foil’d Etemitie,
And tares had choakt the com.
Thus by the Crosse Salvation runnes;
Affliction is a mother
Whose painful throws yield many sons,
Each fairer than the other.
A silent teare can pierce Thy throne,
When lowd Joyes want a wing;
And sweeter aires streame from a groan,
Than any arted string.
Thus, Lord, I see my gaine is great,
My losse but little to it[.] (37-54)
George Parfitt has said of Vaughan that he is “not really equipped to describe grief,”
delineating explicitly his elegiac failures vis-a-vis the successes o f Ben Jonson; but Parfitt
eventually concedes that Vaughan can nevertheless “write quite effectively about loss”
(qtd in Davies 83). Stevie Davies, though, deriding Parfitt’s initial claim, indicates that
Vaughan “writes unsurpassedly about loss; it is the symphonic theme of his works” (83).
It is worth noting, however, that her chosen elegy par excellence, “ [Silence and stealth o f
days],” is more consistent with what one expects when one encounters an elegy. “ [Thou
that know’st for whom I mourn]” is important because it indicates Vaughan’s need to
make sense of and justify the death o f his brother; the only way to clean G od’s hands o f
William’s death, in this case, is to find that his own are ensanguined with W illiam ’s

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blood. The poem is much less about W illiam’s death than it is about Vaughan’s internal
struggle with his death. The poem concludes with Vaughan beseeching God:
Yet something more I must entreate,
And only Thou canst do it.
O let me (like him) know my End!
And be as glad to find it:
And whatsoe’er Thou shalt Commend,
Still let Thy servant mind it!
Then make my soule white as his owne,
My faith as pure and steddy,
And deck me, Lord, with the same Crowne
Thou hast crownd him already! (55-64)
Convinced of his brother’s goodness and salvation, Vaughan has, therefore, been forced
to examine himself and to look within to gauge the sanctity o f his own soul. Vaughan
takes solace in the realization that his brother’s soul has escaped its fleshy prison;
William’s ‘white soul’ was provided for by his ‘pure and steady’ faith. That Vaughan
concludes an elegy for his brother by asking God to refine his own soul ought to indicate
that he was not optimistic about his particular spiritual wellbeing. Vaughan wishes to
die—to ‘know his end’—but only after he has made spiritual amends.
If the deaths o f his brother and first wife were not enough, the “Author’s Preface
to the Following Hymns” from the augmented Silex o f 1655 makes it clear that Vaughan
experienced a period of prolonged and serious illness. Vaughan was, he writes, “nigh
unto death” and was “still at no great distance from it” when the second Silex appeared.
Vaughan goes so far as to note that his reader would not be much mistaken if he or she
“would judge [the last poems in the book] to be fatherless, and the edition posthume”
(392). Vaughan believed that God had postponed his death that he might yet accomplish
some good or another—and the vehicle for this act o f retribution, Vaughan seems to have
believed, was to be poetry. The account o f Vaughan’s illness has been somewhat

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impaired by history and requires a modicum o f clarification, but it is possible to draw a
reasonably clear picture o f it from his various prefatory materials— specifically, those for
his Flores Solitudinis. Collected in his Sicknesse and Retirement (1654) and the expanded
Silex Scintillans of 1655. It was once believed that Vaughan’s illness coincided with the
death o f William Vaughan. But such a claim seems to have been the invention H.F. Lyte
who first undertook to republish Silex Scintillans in 1847. Addressing Lyte, L.C. Martin,
and a “swarm o f others,” James D. Simmonds scoffs at those whose “scholarly
apparatus[es] [have] not been sufficient to withstand the romantic propensity for
tubercular genius fostered by the popular image o f Keats” {Masques 198). Simmonds
reasonably concludes that Vaughan likely took ill sometime between March and
September—he speculates April— 1653 and remained in a state o f compromised health
for much o f the next year. This refinement is congruous with other discussions o f
Vaughan’s illness which often merely suggest a date sometime in 1653 (Hutchinson 107;
Pettet 11 \e t cetera). Whatever the nature o f Vaughan’s illness, it is worth mentioning
since Vaughan himself thought it was spiritually significant. In addition, though,
Vaughan seems to have become increasingly obsessed with George Herbert during this
period, and this was to shape his understanding o f what poetry ought to do. The
realization (for Vaughan) that poetry should be informed by a religious sensibility was
complemented by his sense that his survival suggested {via G od’s intercession) a second
lease on life. Having already beseeched God— in “[Thou that know ’st for whom I
mourn],” and elsewhere throughout Silex Part I, for instance—to open his heart, this latest
act o f divine charity was likely understood by Vaughan as his final remission; not
surprisingly, then, the “Author's Preface to the Following Hymns” suggests that it was

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composed by a man whose scrupulosity had wholly consumed him.
Proving, perhaps, that absolutely nothing is safe from the skewers o f academic
scrutiny, however, even Vaughan’s conversion has been problematized. M ost o f this
debate is owed to the suspicion on the part o f Hutchinson (and other early Vaughan
commentators) that his conversion was essentially complete before the first Silex o f 1650;
and this will be discussed shortly. However, prior to this discussion, it is worth noting
and addressing the New Critical reading of Vaughan’s corpus undertaken by Frank
Kermode. In his (in)famous essay, “The Private Imagery o f Henry Vaughan,” Kermode
muses that Vaughan’s sudden shift to religious verse was “rather a poetic than a religious
experience” (206). The suggestion that Vaughan’s conversion represented a generic
experiment rather than a personal religious awakening has been wholly dismissed and
derided by Vaughan scholars; but Kermode’s fame necessitates recurring rebuttals. His
attempt to “appraise” some o f Vaughan’s poems as “poetry rather than as prayer” is an
attractive notion since it ought to validate the aesthetic value o f Vaughan’s poetry (206).
However, my critique o f this project stems from Kermode’s willful dismissal o f
Vaughan’s own chosen descriptors for his poems. I have already discussed the titular
mention of private ejaculations denoting, for Vaughan’s original readers, prayer.
Moreover, it is worth noting that Vaughan attached to the 1655 edition o f Silex
Scintillans an “Author’s Preface to the Following Hymns'’’ and not an “Author’s Preface
to the Following Poems''’-, such distinctions are, obviously, somewhat threadbare, but
when understood in concert with one another, they indicate Vaughan’s sense o f how his
works should be understood. The ‘prayers’ in Silex are without question poems; but they
are not meant to serve a purely poetic (i.e., aesthetic) purpose— and the nature o f this

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purpose provides the bulk of what will follow later. There are, o f course, those enduring
strains in Kermode’s article which are attractive. That “ [p]art o f [his] intention ... was to
vindicate Vaughan as a poet, pure and simple” merits some praise (225). But for those to
whom Vaughan’s poetry speaks passionately and beautifully, I think it not at all unfair to
suggest that no such validation is needed. Kermode also instigated the (now largely
accepted) understanding o f Vaughan’s use o f mystical imagery as being a poetical
practice. Whereas E.C. Pettet has noted that it is “impossible in a limited space to deal
adequately with ... Kermode’s argument,” he nevertheless takes pains to do so with
commendable brevity (17). Speaking o f “The Night,” Pettet resigns himself to the
occasional futility o f academic processes. “If,” Pettet says, “Kermode really considers
that The N ig h t... is principally the working out o f a major image-complex and not also
the expression of some o f Vaughan’s deepest devotional feelings ..., it is unlikely that he
will ever be reasoned out of a one-sided ... response to that lyric” (18).
In addition to the problem o f Kermode, there is another more pressing issue that
challenges the significance o f Vaughan's conversion. The “Author's Preface to the
following Hymns,” from the augmented Silex, makes it clear that secular poetry is
something which ought to be avoided. Gifted persons, and especially poets, have a duty
to extol the Word o f God. Vaughan’s catalogue, for this reason, has been problematized
by the appearance o f Olor Iscanus in 1651. If, as Hutchinson believes, V aughan’s
conversion was essentually complete by 1650 (99), Vaughan would seem to be guilty o f
the most profound hypocrisy. The dedication of Olor Iscanus, for instance, was
composed at “Newton by Usk this 17. o f Decemb. 1647,” and with the exception o f “To
Sir William D ’avenant, upon his Gondibert,” written sometime after 1650, the rest o f the

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poems in the volume appear to have been completed around 1647 (Marilla, “Conversion
(1948)” 394). Hutchinson, though, can hardly be blamed for this assumption. W hen Lyte
published Silex in 1847, the “Author’s Preface,” appeared prominently at the beginning.
And L.C. Martin, whose Vaughan’s Works in two volumes remains the academic
standard for Vaughan’s poetry and prose, similarly saw it fit to place the 1655 preface
inconspicuously at the beginning o f Silex Scintillans. This arrangment, while clearly what
Vaughan wanted in 1655, is problematic for modem readers o f the text; Vaughan’s
indictment o f secular poetry seems to appear before the publication of Olor Iscanus. In
the 1655 “Preface” he laments and disowns his own secular poetry. Recalling that he
once wrote in the mode he now condemns, Vaughan writes:
And here, because I would prevent a just censure by my free confession, I must
remember, that I myself have for many years together, languished o f this very
sickness-, and it is no long time since I have recovered. But (blessed be God for
it!) I have by His saving assistance suppressed my greatest follies, and those
which escaped from me, are (I think) as innoxious, as most of that vein use to be;
besides, they are interlined with many virtuous, and some pious mixtures. What I
speak of them is truth: but let no man mistake it for an extenuation o f faults, as if I
intended an Apology for them, or my s e lf who am conscious of so much guilt in
both, as can never be expiated without special sorrows, and that cleansing and
pretious effusion o f my Almighty Redeemer: and if the world will be so
charitable as to grant my request, I do here most humbly and earnestly beg that
none would read them. (390)
And while editions o f Vaughan’s poetry uniformly place Olor Iscanus prior to Silex
Scintillans— owing largely to the belief that Silex is ‘special,’ and that it indicates a
radical departure from Vaughan’s previous poetic inclination— this arrangment is clearly
still a problem. E.L. Marilla notes that such editing decisions have “unwittingly place[d]
Vaughan in the role of thoroughgoing hypocrite conniving in a scheme to promote the
benefits o f his duplicity” (“Conversion (1948)” 397). It is not surprising, then, that
modem editions, such as those by Louis Martz (1986), have placed the “Preface” before

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the appended material o f 1655. The “preface,” in such editions, appears in the middle o f
the volume, and what results is an organizationally confused collection, but one which is
interpretively much more helpful to readers not familiar with the text’s editorial history.
The “Publisher to the Reader” of Olor Iscanus makes it clear that “ The Author
had long agoe condemn’d these Poems to Obscuritie” (36), and it seems to be this work
Vaughan has in mind when writing his “Preface” to the 1655 edtion of Silex Scintillans.
But the questions surrounding Olor Iscanus remain. Marilla proposes, I think correctly,
that Vaughan’s religiousness was subject to refinement and evolution throughout the
1640s, and that it peaked sometime around 1654 (“Conversion (1945)” 16). However,
M anila’s inferences are problematic. His suggestion that Vaughan’s religiousness
oscilates around the political goings on o f the 1640s and 1650s taxes somewhat the
current discussion. It is not, I think, an indictment of Vaughan to suggest that his temper
softened after the Restoration. Indeed, for the reasons mentioned here—the death o f
friends and family, persecution, and personal infirmity— it is hardly surprising that
Vaughan should look despairingly at the world. Vaughan, like many of his day, both
Puritan and Anglican alike, believed the Last Days had arrived; it is not at all surprising,
then, that he should take pains to assure his own salvation wherever possible. And
indeed, eschatological and apocalyptic readings o f Vaughan make up some o f the most
interesting additions to the recent scholarly corpus. By way o f apology, it is worth
quoting Evelyn Underhill, who, speaking o f those imbued with innate mystical
inclination, notes that dissatisfaction with the world is often the precursor to intense
religious or mystical conversion. “The most highly developed branches o f the human
family have in common one peculiar characteristic,” she suggests, and while the apparent

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value judgement is unsettling for various reasons, what follows is worth considering in
the context o f Vaughan. Underhill declares that “[t]hey tend to produce - sporadically it
is true, and often in the teeth o f adverse external circumstances - a curious and definite
type of personality” which she defines as “a type which refuses to be satisfied with that
which other men [sic] call experience, and is inclined ... to ‘deny the world in order that
he may find reality’” (qtd in Loloi 37). Vaughan’s reasons for turning from the world are
many, and M anila’s attempt to assert the primacy of the civil wars, in lieu o f abounding
personal tragedy, seems to be an unsubstantiated valuation o f the extant historical and
biographical data. As Vaughan himself writes in “The Timber,” “He that hath left lifes
vain joys and vain care, / And truly hates to be detain’d on earth, / Hath got an house
where many mansions are” (29-31). Indeed, personal and political causes likely colluded
to instigate Vaughan’s rejection o f the material world. It is important to remember that
Vaughan passed away on 23 April, 1695: he survived Charles I by over 46 years, and he
lived some 35 years after the Restoration o f Charles II. Vaughan’s longevity would have
demanded increased moderation as the Restoration continued unmolested by notable civil
conflict.
As noted, the “Author’s Preface to the following Hymns” o f 1655 makes it clear
that Vaughan had, by that time, adopted the belief that gifted persons, and specifically,
poets, ought to use their talents to praise God. He makes his disdain for his previous
mode o f poetry clear, and he resolves to only write poetry expressing the Word and his
debt to it. Vaughan derides those o f talent who choose Tow’ topics for their pens. He says
of them that, “[wjhere the sun is busy upon a dunghill, the issue is always some unclean
vermin” (389). Clearly, when poets or ‘gifted persons’ expend themselves upon trivia,

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even the most competent amongst them is merely extolling scat; Vaughan seems to think
that he and others can reach much higher with their verses than this. Referring to writers
of secular verse, Vaughan notes that “to persist so to the end, is a wilful despising of
God's sacred exhortations”; and more, he laments that “a constant, sensual volutation or
wallowing in impure thoughts and scurrilous conceits ... both defile their authors, and as
many more as they are communicated to” (389). Vaughan expands on this notion further,
and it is worth quoting in full, since it seems to capture his sense o f the dangers o f ‘idle
verse’:
If every idle word shall be accounted fo r , and if no corrupt communication should
proceed out o f our mouths, how desperate, I beseech you, is their condition, who
all their life time, and out o f mere design, study lascivious fictions', then carefully
record and publish them, that instead o f grace and life, they may minister sin and
death unto their readers? It was wisely considered, and piously said by one, That
he would read no idle books; both in regard o f love to his own soul, and p ity unto
his that made them, fo r (said he) if I be corrupted by them, their Composer is
immediately a cause o f my ill: and at the day o f reckoning— though now d e a d must give an account fo r it, because I am corrupted by his bad example, which he
left behind him: I will write none, lest I hurt them that come after me; I will read
none, lest I augment his punishment that is gone before me. I will neither write,
nor read, lest I prove a fo e to my own soul: while I live, I sin too much; let me not
continue longer in wickedness than I do in life. It is a sentence o f sacred
authority, that he that is dead is freed fro m sin; because he cannot in that state,
which is without the body, sin any more; but he that writes idle books, makes for
himself another body, in which he always lives, and sins (after death) as fa s t and
as fo u l as ever he did in his life; which very consideration deserves to be a
sufficient Antidote against this evil disease. (389-90)
Vaughan’s theory on literature here is as interesting as it is unknown. Rather than
building a lasting monument as Horace suggests in his Odes (III.30), the poet creates
another body which can save or condemn the poet after death. This thought shows
Vaughan’s ability to synthesize ideas from several sources. In this case, it is the Bible and
Owen Feltham’s Resolves: Divine, Moral and Political (1623), a book which, like
Herbert’s The Temple, was very much in vogue. Passages likes this abound in Vaughan’s

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1655 preface, and they illustrate a theory o f poetics which very much emphasizes praxis;
indeed, Vaughan, like John Milton, had a conception o f the office of Christian poet, and
it is possible to discern in his writings an understanding of what this office entailed.
However, whereas Milton clearly codified this office, Vaughan did not, and in
establishing Vaughan’s project we must briefly turn our attentions toward his model,
Herbert.
In his poem “Obedience,” Herbert, addressing God, writes: “0 let thy sacred will /
All thy delight in me fulfill” (16-17). Herbert ends the poem with the admission and hope
that his verse will find and speak to his readers. Herbert is interested in those readers who
are receptive to the Word as well as those o f hard hearts that can be reached by his
example. He writes: “How happie were my part, / If some kinde man would thrust his
heart / Into these lines” (41-43). When, in 1633, Herbert composed these lines, he could
not have imagined the enthusiastic and zealous response he was to receive from Vaughan
less than two decades later. Herbert’s call in “Obedience” is directly answered by
Vaughan in his poem “The Match” from the 1650 Silex:
Dear friend! whose holy, ever-living lines
Have done much good
To many, and have checkt my blood,
My fierce, wild blood, that still heaves, and inclines
But is still tam ’d
By those bright fires which thee inflam’d[.] (1-5)
As with the subtitular Sacred Poems and Private Ejaculations, Vaughan here too relies
on his reader’s knowledge o f and familiarity with Herbert’s The Temple in order to piece
together an intertextual conversation between the poets. In the “Author’s Preface” o f the
1655 Silex, however, Vaughan was much more overt in acknowledging his debt to
Herbert. Here, quoting the Book o f Daniel, Vaughan says: “they that turn many to

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righteousness shall shine like the stars for ever and ever” (KJV 12:3). Following this
laudation, Vaughan declares his debt to Herbert, and credits Herbert with his conversion.
Referring to him as “that blessed man,” Vaughan writes touchingly of “Mr. George
Herbert, whose holy life and verse gained many pious converts, o f whom I am the least”
(391). Hutchinson— vocationally an Herbert scholar before taking religious orders in the
Anglican communion—has flatly declared that “there is no example in English literature
o f one poet borrowing so extensively from another” (102-3). This intense reverence is
even more interesting when one considers that Vaughan and Herbert were actually
distantly related.8 Whatever the nature o f Herbert’s influence, it seems safe to suggest
that he played an integral role in defining the office o f Christian poet as Vaughan would
have seen it; indeed, Joan Bennett has said, “whatever influences combined to make
[Vaughan] a religious man, Herbert was largely instrumental in making him a religious
p o e t' (75).
As Herbert spoke to Vaughan, so Vaughan wished to speak to others; he wished
to be the poet-proselyte consoling those whose faith was deterred, damaged and/or
diminished during the trials of the civil wars. Donald R. Dickson interprets the preface to
the 1655 Silex as being essentially a demarcation between ‘fashion’ and ‘force’— viz.,
religious artifice versus practical religious counsel (390). Herbert is great because o f the
‘perfect’ balance he strikes between the two: Vaughan tells us his “measure was
eminent” in the 1655 preface (390). Vaughan, suggests Jonathan F.S. Post, is more
interested in force. “As ‘conversion’ or ‘regeneration’ is his personal theme, so Vaughan
came to see ‘turning’ others as the urgent subject o f his age,” summarizes Post, and he
notes that this was “a subject made urgent ... by the evidence o f destruction everywhere

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around [Vaughan]” (“Civil W ar Cleavage” 27). To this end, Vaughan was successful in
the person of Nathaniel Wanley, whose Scintillulae Sacrae (ca. 1655-1667) has often
been understood as owing much to Vaughan. And while West has recently suggested that
Wanley, like so many others, owes more to Herbert than to Vaughan, he nevertheless
notes that “there is plenty of evidence that Wanley was an early reader o f Vaughan— one
of only a handful traced to date” (“Wanley” 339). The point here is to indicate that
Vaughan saw the Christian poet as one who incited action. This suggestion does not at all
constitute a call to arms, but rather indicates that the Christian poet, in practical terms,
aids in the reception o f the Word. That his own successes in effecting action—
‘conversion’ or ‘regeneration’— are impossible to speculate upon matters little; what is
important here is articulating Vaughan’s intent, and more, in understanding what that
intent entailed.
In 1662, a pamphlet entitled yf B rie f Account o f the New Sect o f Latitude Men,
attributed only to S.P.— now believed to be Symon Patrick, the then Bishop o f Ely—
attempted to justify the appointments o f conformist ministers. These preachers who were
promoted during the Interregnum and kept their appointments only by swearing loyalty to
Charles II, were, not surprisingly, popularly derided. Patrick’s pamphlet is important
because, in attempting to apologize for or justify the offices o f these clerics, he articulates
an understanding o f Anglicanism that remains current even today. The Latitudinarian was
one who affirmed “that vertuous mediocrity which our Church observes between the
meretricious gaudiness o f the Church o f Rome, and the squalid sluttery o f Fanatick
conventicles” (7). Patrick’s language, by modem standards, seems to lack moderation,
but his point is, I think, clear: the English (British) Church is at its best when it skirts

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these two extremes. In his poem, “The Preparative,” Thomas Traherne notes that the holy
mind of a child is an “Empty and a Quick Intelligence / Acquainted with the Golden
Mean” (64-65). And while Patrick, a ‘Cambridge Platonist,’ may not be the best indicator
of Vaughan’s faith—recalling that Vaughan attended Oxford, and that his brother,
Thomas Vaughan, found a particularly nasty literary nemesis in Thomas More, the
Cambridge Platonist—there remains an interpretive value in his delineation. Patrick’s
reconciliatory tone describes a ‘middle path,’ which was not readily apparent in the
religious polarization o f the civil wars; his ‘vertuous mediocrity’ was meant to soften
extremist understandings of what exactly the Anglican Communion was. Patrick was
attempting to assuage the positions o f the ‘meretricious gaudiness’ of the Anglicans and
‘squalid sluttery’ o f the Puritans. (This, o f course, refers to the language which each
group used to refer to the other.) In addition, therefore, to providing us with a working
definition of the English Church, it provides the historical reader with a sententious (or,
perhaps, caricaturized) summation o f the religious extremes which were to be found
during the civil wars. Not surprisingly, then, when one reads Vaughan, one is presented
with the former image: Vaughan felt a strong attachment to those Catholic remnants
which survived in the Anglican liturgy.
The Wales in which Vaughan grew up was one deeply touched by Catholicism.
Wales had long been associated with Cistercian monasticism— and monasteries, though
fallen into disuse, continued to dot the landscape even in the seventeenth century. The
Welsh have never forgotten the Catholic favours they received when English kings were
deaf to their complaints. The Puritan ransacking o f St. David’s Cathedral, then, would
have been well known to Vaughan, and one can speculate assuredly that he would have

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looked upon it with revilement. St. David’s had been a source o f pride for the Welsh
since William the Conqueror visited and prayed there in 1081— declaring afterwards that
it was a holy and sacred place. This pride was intensified in 1123 when Pope Calixtus II
awarded Papal privilege to the cathedral, declaring that just two pilgrimages to St.
David’s were worth one to Rome, and that three were worth as much as a pilgrimage to
Jerusalem itself. Even today— despite the advent of Methodism in the eighteenth century,
for which the Welsh are perhaps best known—these events are well ingrained in the
Welsh consciousness, and they continue to inform a sense of Welsh nationhood. It is,
therefore, hardly remarkable that a sort o f latent (Anglo-)Catholicism should find a voice
in the writing o f Vaughan. Moreover, “from 1655 on to the Restoration, Church o f
England men [sic] were under the Penal laws, and had a taste for five full years o f all the
disabilities which English Catholics underw ent...” and continued to undergo (Guiney
qtd inNauman, “Hutchinson and Guiney” 144).
In 1884, in one o f the first critical biographies o f Vaughan, J.C. Shairp wrote that,
“Vaughan belongs to that small band of Royalist poets o f the Caroline era who stand
discriminated from the host of dashing, rollicking, cavalier lyrists, by being essentially
religious poets” (120). Shairp’s conflation, here, o f Anglican and Royalist poetics is
deeply problematic; certainly, there is some thematic overlap, but this is not sufficient to
conflate these projects. However, Shairp continues immediately by suggesting that
“[w]hat attracted them to the Royal cause was not its worldly splendor; but they
identified it with that refinement o f feeling and that deep and sober piety which seem to
have descended... from Catholic ages” (120). Clearly, the poets Shairp lists— Vaughan,
Crashaw, Sandys, Herbert, Herrick (121)— identified such feelings with the Church', and

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while the English monarch is also the head o f the church, it is rightly understood that the
Monarchy and the Church are two distinct offices. Certainly, these poets were all
likewise Royalists, but they made a conscious and principled decision to write religious
verse, and this demands a degree o f demarcation which Shairp does not recognize. But a
nonchalant disregard for the Recusancy Laws appears throughout Vaughan’s Interregnum
corpus. Appearing throughout Silex Scintillans, both the 1650 and 1655 editions, are
poems such as “Easter-day,” “Easter Hymn,” “The Holy Communion,” “Ascension-day,”
“Ascension Hymn,” “White Sunday,” and “St. Mary M agdalene” which recall the AngloCatholic calendar and the veneration o f Mary Magdalene which was so repugnant to
Puritan sensibilities. Moreover, Vaughan’s 1653 Mount o f Olives; or, Solitary Devotions
included a translation o f St. Anselm’s Man in Glory. And his Flores Solitudinis: Certain
Rare and Elegant Pieces Collected in his Sickness and Retirement includes translations o f
such works as O f Temperance and Patience and O f Life and Death by the Jesuit writer
Johannes Eusebius Nierembergius; The World Contemned by Eucherius, a fifth century
Bishop of Lyons; Primitive Holiness [:] The Life o f Blessed Paulinus ...Bishop o f Nola by
a Jesuit, Francesco Sacchini. Vaughan was clearly remarkably familiar with Catholic
literature. (He also borrows from Hermetic sources, and, surprisingly, Puritan ones.) It is
not surprising, then, that Louise Guiney, interested largely in recusant literatures, would
have found Vaughan congenial. However, it is not my intention here to suggest in some
way that Vaughan was a covert Catholic— nor was it Guiney’s— but rather to illustrate
that he identified with those enduring strains o f Catholicism that survived in his beloved
Church.
Vaughan was a thoroughgoing Anglican, but there is little in his writing that

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suggests a definite theological position. Whereas a poet like Milton, for instance, at
different times o f his life, identified with Calvinist and Arminian orientations, no such
frankness occurs in the work o f Vaughan. Vaughan’s poetry, like Herbert’s, “leans
towards practical rather than controversial topics in theology,” and “the reader who
attempts to separate out entire theological positions is easily frustrated” (West, Scripture
Uses 120). Despite this ambiguity, Rudrum has illustrated how Vaughan and Milton, in
asserting the salvation of the creatures, would have offended orthodox Calvinist
soteriology. And it is known that Vaughan was familiar enough with Beza’s Latin
translation o f the Bible that he was strategically able to use these translated passages in
such a manner as to highlight Calvinist discontinuity (“Ecology o f the Hereafter” 50-51).
Moreover, in a similarly styled essay, Rudrum has elsewhere suggested that V aughan’s
opposition to Calvinism is somewhat more extreme than is often assumed (“Liberation o f
the Creatures”). Whether Vaughan was, strictly speaking, opposed to Calvinism out o f
theological principle, or whether he merely associated it with the Commonwealth
government, is too broad an issue to be adequately covered here. But given how deeply
affected Vaughan was by the “Act for the Better Propagation and Preaching o f the Gospel
in Wales,” passed by the Rump Parliament in February 1650, with its emphasis on radical
Calvinism, it seems not at all unlikely that Vaughan would conflate Calvinism with his
enemies; and the Commission o f Triers and Ejectors, established in 1654, whose office
explicitly consisted o f normalizing Calvinist teachings in British parishes, would have
only furthered this resentment. It is worth noting that such actions led to many parishes in
Wales— including Vaughan’s— being left without ministers. Whatever his precise view,
however, Vaughan was attracted to the sacredness o f the Anglican liturgy. And the

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Puritan disdain for this mode o f religious expression— emphasized in the banning o f the
prayer book and the official policies o f iconoclasm—would have outraged Vaughan.
Whereas Vaughan’s contemporary poet Milton was explicit in defining the office
of the Christian poet, Vaughan was rather more ambiguous. In his essay “The Making o f
a Christian Poet,” Milton defines and elaborates on what this office entails. He writes that
the purposes o f the real Christian poet are fivefold: he (or she?) must communicate
virtue, attempt to moderate the passions, praise the glory of God, celebrate the deeds and
sufferings of Christians, and finally, oppose recusancy in the English church (594-95).
Vaughan would likely agree with these, although, as noted, the ease with which he
interacted with Catholic literatures suggests that safeguarding the Church against the
terrors or recusancy was somewhat less important to Vaughan than defending it against
the terrors of Puritanism. However, I would like to draw attention here to a passage in
Vaughan’s 1655 “Preface” which has not attracted a lot o f attention. Vaughan expresses
his wish, like “Hierotheus and holy Herbert,” to write a “true hymn.” Vaughan says of
writing a true hymn, that
To effect this in some measure, I have begged leave to communicate this my poor
Talent to the Church, under the protection and conduct o f her glorious Head,
Who, if He will vouchsafe to own it and go along with it, can make it as useful
now in the publick, as it hath been to me in private. (392)
One can see here that Vaughan hopes that the poems o f Silex Scintillans can serve a
public purpose. The process o f writing them and reflecting on his favoured themes has
been, in some sense or another, a consolation in a time o f crisis. Vaughan, though,
recognizing that he is not alone in these sufferings, has attempted to reach out to his
fellow Royalist Anglicans. Civil wars are particularly devastating since they cast ‘brother
against brother’; certainly, therefore, it was a time o f emotional duress for Vaughan and

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for many others. Given that he was to become a country doctor o f good success, an
impulse to aid can, I think, be attributed to the post-war Vaughan who seems to have
been humbled during that period. During the 1650s, as noted, Vaughan published a
number of translations, and several o f these texts were o f a medical nature. And Pettet
thinks it not insignificant that two o f the four 1651 medical translations he published
dealt explicitly with mental health. There is, writes Pettet, “the possibility that he suffered
some kind o f mental breakdown” (12). Whatever the state o f Vaughan’s wellbeing—
recalling that he also experienced significant illness throughout the 1650s— it seems safe
to suggest that he intended to aid those similarly devastated by the wars. For this reason, I
would like to suggest that Vaughan’s poetry belongs to a Christian tradition o f (what will
here be termed) consolation literature.
Works of this nature are a generic staple in the West. They typically combine
autobiography with fantasy: the indolent protagonist, overwhelmed by some affliction, is
visited by a revered phantasm that teaches him or her to overcome their trials. The
essential literary mode, then, is that o f the dialogue with the author assuming the role o f
student. And this manner of writing is exemplified by Boethius in the Consolation o f
Philosophy, in which an imprisoned Boethius is visited and consoled by Lady
Philosophy. This model was adopted by Francesco Petrarch in his My Secret in which the
narrator is despairing at his acedia, and is subsequently visited and consoled by St.
Augustine. Whether Vaughan was sufficiently familiar with Petrarch to know My Secret
is not worth speculating upon here, but Vaughan knew Boethius, and he knew his
Consolation o f Philosophy intimately. Vaughan’s Olor Iscanus, for instance, contains
many verse translations o f Lady Philosophy’s songs— and the central metaphor o f the

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text, the wheel of fortune, seemed to be an enduring interest for Vaughan.
In The Anxiety o f Influence, Harold Bloom has suggested that the history o f poetry
consists of authors creatively reinventing the works which they have inherited. This, he
writes, is ultimately a process of externalized self-discovery; the poet novitiate finds himor herself in the poetry o f others (25-26). This is obviously the case of Vaughan vis-a-vis
Herbert, but it also describes his relationship with poetic consolatio. It is an integral part
of his poetic process. The precise nature of Vaughan’s consolatory process will be
covered later, but for now, it is sufficient to say that Vaughan’s interest in consolation
informs and explains the frequent worldly concerns which recrudesce throughout Silex
Scintillans. As Vaughan was to write in his poem, “On Sir Thomas Bodley's Library, The
Author Being Then In Oxford,” “Afflictions turn our blood to ink” (21). Vaughan’s
trials—both personal and political— during the civil wars made him an authoritative
speaker on the horrors of the times; similarly displaced Anglicans would have recognized
in Vaughan’s poetry the pathos of their own distress. It is from these shared foci o f
tragedy that Vaughan and other writers o f the ‘Anglican survivalist’ mode were able to
assert genuine religious crises, and were subsequently to work out their faith in fear and
trembling. Even casual readers of Vaughan will notice that he only very rarely indulges
in explicit dialogue or dialogic poetry, which would seem to complicate the generic
model suggested here. Vaughan understood the office o f Christian poet as being
primarily a position of service: service to God and service to the faithful. In Silex
Scintillans, the reader is presented with a dialogue between Vaughan and Christ in which
only the voice o f Vaughan is discemable. One cannot hear words o f Christ in V aughan’s
poetry; but one can hear Vaughan addressing and responding to the consolations o f Christ

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which he heard, and which he had internalized through careful and frequent readings o f
the Bible.
The poetry of Silex Scintillans was intended to provide practical devotional
counsel. As Sir Philip Sidney suggests in An Apology fo r Poetry, poetry can be a fine
dress for a difficult topic. “The poet is food for the tenderest stomachs, the poet is indeed
the right popular philosopher” (337), writes Sidney, and this would seem to describe
Vaughan’s purposes in composing the volume. Vaughan consistently defines his product
negatively; to wit, he is careful to tell his readers what he is not. Referring to inauthentic
religious poets of his day, though offering no names, Vaughan writes: “they had more o f
fashion then [sic] force. And the reason o f their so vast distance from [Herbert], besides
differing spirits and qualifications ... I suspect to be, because they aimed more at verse,
than perfection', as may be easily gathered by their frequent impressions, and numerous
pages” (391). Vaughan’s indictment is clear: writing for the sake o f writing, these poets
lacked proper religious fervor and were not to be taken seriously. “Hence sprang those
wide, those weak, and lean conceptions, which in the most inclinable Reader will scarce
give any nourishment or help to devotion; for not flowing from a true, practick piety, it
was impossible they should effect those things abroad, which they never had
acquaintance with at home” writes Vaughan (391). But Vaughan, it seems, is writing
from a genuine religious conversion. By distinguishing himself in such a way, Vaughan,
is able to assert that his religiousness is owed to a “true, practick piety.”
Vaughan’s emphasis on practical theology is made clear in his poem “The Hidden
Treasure.” This poem is perhaps most interesting for Vaughan’s brief meditation on
“M an’s favourite sins” (19), but it has nevertheless been ignored by scholars o f Vaughan.

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Echoing the Book of Ecclesiastes, Vaughan declares that “all is vanity” (10), and scoffs
at “[t]hose secret searches, which afflict the wise” (11). There is a stink o f antiintellectualism in these lines that may surprise readers familiar with Vaughan’s reputation
as a “bookish” poet; but they illustrate Vaughan’s interest in extolling the W ord to a
theologically Lay audience. Rowland Watkyns, in “To the Reader” from his Flamma sine
Fumo (1662), declares that “Ways, which are fair, and plain can nere displease” (6).
Watkyns, the ejected Lanfrynach clergyman, was a neighbour o f Vaughan, and their
views are often congenial. It is worth noting that a devaluation o f obfuscated theology
similarly informs Milton’s Paradise Lost. During the Interregnum, Anglicans like
Vaughan were without proper (liturgical) means o f worship. Vaughan, who wished his
poetry to be as “useful now in the public, as it hath been ... in private,” was attempting to
aid as many as he could. Simmonds has said, following the defeat of the Royalist and
Anglican causes, that Vaughan “appointed himself a lay preacher in the ‘underground’
church, his pulpit the press and his congregation anybody who would read” {Masques
13). Rudrum, emphasizing the private importance o f the volume for Vaughan, suggests
that “he was forced ... to carry around his Anglicanism in his head. Silex Scintillans may
be seen, at least in part, as the record o f Vaughan's attempt to be his own priest, ‘to unite
with God personally’” (“Paradoxical Persona” 367). This can be said, I think, o f
Anglicans generally. As a final insult, High-Church Anglicans like Vaughan were forced
to become radically protestant in order to satisfy their particular religious needs.
Herbert’s The Temple begins with a lengthy poem entitled “The Church-porch.”
The 77-stanza poem details explicit steps to holy living, and, by virtue o f this, readers o f
The Temple, before reading anything else, are presented with what is effectively a

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liturgical manual. Stanley Stewart has said o f “The Church-porch” that it is “ [s]tiffly
proverbial in language, didactic in intent, [and] [it] lacks the intensity of the Herbert
lyrics so admired by critics” (97). In Silex Scintillans, Vaughan includes a similar poem
entitled “Rules and Lessons.” This poem is likewise ‘stiffly proverbial and didactic,’ and
borrows from Herbert an identical stanza-structure and prosodic rhythm. Vaughan’s
poem explains how the true Christian ought to spend a single day; and this is reinforced
by the poem’s 24-stanzas. Formally, “Rules and Lessons” is an important poem because
it appears in the precise, literal centre o f the 1650 Silex Scintillans. Louis Martz notes that
the poem comes “exactly in the center o f the 1650 volume, as though the advice there
given formed the center o f the volume’s devotional life.” Martz makes the excellent
observation that the poem includes no references to churches or church life (43). Indeed,
Vaughan’s own church, the parish at Llansantffraed, was literally vacant and empty
between 1650 and 1658; his twin brother, Thomas, the priest, was slanderously evicted
from his living by Propagators, and no new minister was appointed.9 West notes that
Vaughan’s Mount o f Olives is his most instructional book, but he thinks it not
insignificant that the preface o f this volume directs “those who would be regular in their
lives and worship to the less evidently didactic Silex” (Scripture Uses 131). Times were
hard for Anglicans and Royalists alike. Vaughan sums up his religious message in the
final stanza o f “Rules and Lessons”:
Briefly, doe as thou would’st be done unto
Love God, and love thy Neighbour; Watch, and Pray.
These are the Words, and the Works o f life; This do
And live; who doth not thus, hath lost Heav ’n ’s way.
O lose it not! Look up, wilt Change those Lights
For Chains ofD arknes and eternal Nights? (139-144)
Vaughan’s counsel here is clear: live a holy life in this world or risk losing Heaven later.

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Vaughan’s practical religion consciously recalls Jesus’s dictum that “Thou shalt love the
Lord thy God with all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy mind. This is the
first and great commandment. And the second is like unto it, Thou shalt love thy
neighbour as thyself’ (22:37-39). If one wishes for Heaven, one must look towards it.
Vaughan advises looking up. But he could not entirely resist looking around.

C h ap ter Three

“A sweet, revengeless, quiet minde”: Anglican Passivity and Vaughan’s
Hermeneutics of Suffering

Thus doth God Key disorder’d man
(Which none else can,)
Tuning his brest to rise, or fall;
And by a sacred, needfull art
Like strings, stretch ev’ry part
Making the whole most Musicall.
—“Affliction [I]”

It has been shown that Henry Vaughan, in the poetry o f Silex Scintillans, had what
can only be called a political temper. But I have also attempted to demonstrate that a
political temper was not the only contributing voice to Vaughan’s volume, nor was it in
any meaningful way the sine qua non o f his poetic project. Rather, Silex Scintillans is a
book composed with the intention o f consoling those who were exiled, figuratively and
literally, by the civil strife of mid-seventeenth century England (and Britain, as a whole).
Vaughan, a triple exile—Welsh, Royalist, and Anglican in Puritan-controlled
Interregnum England—was seemingly well equipped to handle this theme. W hereas
Chapter One illustrated the much-noted political bias operating within the poetry o f Silex
Scintillans, Chapter Two argued that Vaughan intended for those same poems to serve a
practical religious purpose. The current chapter will elaborate on the previous, and will
define the method and parameters o f Vaughan’s literary praxis. For Vaughan, there is an
absolute distinction between writing and living, and emphasis is always placed upon the
latter. Consider, for instance, Vaughan’s prayer in “Anguish”:
O! ‘tis an easie thing
To write and sing;
But to write true, unfeigned verse

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Is very hard! O God disperse
These weights, and give my spirit leave
To act as well as to conceive! (13-18)
In the final line, acting is juxtaposed with conceiving; living is distinct from creating. In
situating these terms in apparent conflict, or, at least, in isolation from one another,
Vaughan has (in all likelihood, accidentally,) rendered them ontologically
complementary. This is the relationship articulated in the Gospel o f John when we are
told that, “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word
was God” (KVJ 1:1). In summarizing the Divine Fiat o f Genesis in such a way, John
situates the entire act of creation with the Word— logos; Being (esse) and conceiving are
theologically indistinct (Frye 18). Indeed, in creating humankind in His image, God
created, not a fleshy imago, but a creative creature. Vaughan is implicitly interested in the
power o f language to direct one back to God. He wishes to reach out to similarly
disenfranchised Anglicans o f the period by giving voice to a collective social dis-ease.
For Vaughan, at least in so far as Silex Scintillans is concerned, the banning o f the
Anglican liturgy is the most egregious o f the interregnum offences. In the absence o f the
Anglican communion, Vaughan’s counsel is twofold: he consoles the Anglican faithful
and stresses the importance o f passive resistance. In Silex Scintillans and his prayer book,
The Mount o f Olives, Vaughan constructs for his fellow despairing Anglicans an ersatz
Prayer Book (W all); Silex Scintillans is, for Vaughan’s readers, a means by which to
maintain their faith in an environment actively hostile to it. But Vaughan was not alone in
this project.
Beginning in the 1640s, Anglicans began taking Puritan criticisms o f the Church
increasingly seriously. Up until this time, Anglican theology existed piecemeal; it was a

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tenuously grafted synthesis o f Erasmian humanism and Lutheran reformed theology. This
multifarious theology worked well as a religious catchall for a church that needed to
appeal to and accommodate an entire population. However, not surprisingly, this did not
equip Anglicans with a strong theological base upon which to dispute Puritan attacks,
and, as a result, Anglican apologetics were much less developed than the reformed
complaints they faced. In response to this shortcoming, the Anglican Church restructured
and redeveloped itself throughout the Interregnum; while the fissiparous nature o f radical
Protestantism tore the Puritan camp apart, the Anglican Church solidified and
consolidated itself. This chapter will explore the extent to which Henry V aughan’s Silex
Scintillans responds to these changes in Church doctrine— if at all—and will discuss in
detail his understanding o f how Anglicans ought to cope with their absentee Church.
Between Henry VIII’s 1534 “Act o f Supremacy,” declaring him the head o f the
English Church, and the civil wars o f the mid-seventeenth century, the Anglican Church
underwent many changes. Founded on the theology o f Thomas Cranmer, Henry’s
Archbishop o f Canterbury, the Anglican Communion was centred around the practical
Humanist Christianity of Erasmus and the Protestant teachings o f Martin Luther. This
foundation was well equipped to recruit educated English men and women, but it was
“fundamentally unstable” (Lettinga 16). However, during Cranmer’s tenure as
archbishop, English parishes were uniformly equipped with an English Bible, Erasmus’s
Paraphrases, twelve standardized homilies, and, following 1549, The Book o f Common
Prayer (27). But the Church still lacked an official declaration o f belief. Various efforts
were made in 1536, 1537, 1539,1543, and 1552 to accomplish this consolidation; but it
was not until 1563, during the reign of Elizabeth I, that the Thirty-Nine Articles o f the

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Anglican Church were passed by the Convocation. By this time, though, Calvinist
Reformed theology was an increasingly popular alternative in the arena o f English
religious discussion. This was so much the case that in 1570, when Alexander Nowell
published the official church catechism, it was thoroughly Calvinist (Lettinga 56). These
foundational fault lines were held together by the will o f those involved, but one can see
that the seeds of fissure were sown prior to the Bishops’ Wars with Scotland. That even
today within the global Anglican church there are Evangelical and Anglo-Catholic
congregations demonstrates just how deeply entrenched these two voices are— and it
recalls Symon Patrick’s scathing criticism of those within the Church whose orientation
was, one way or the other, radical. With the rise o f Protestant theology in the Anglican
Church, though, there obviously emerged a simultaneous interest in Presbyterianism. And
it was precisely this threat that spurred Richard Hooker, in 1594, to begin publishing his
O f the Lawes o f Ecclesiastical Politie. Cornelius Lettinga has referred to this work as the
mature expression o f the Humanist voice o f the Anglican tradition (66). And while it was
largely ignored in the century following its publication, it would become a seminal work
in the Anglican tradition during the Restoration (67).
Hooker’s major achievement is the recognition that biblical laws differ in type,
and that there “are in men [sic] operations some natural, some rational, some
supernatural, some politic, some finally Ecclesiastical” (Hooker 125). Hooker’s text,
Humanist as it was, emphasized the individual’s ability to distinguish between types o f
laws, and lauded Reason as the ultimate moral arbiter; where the Bible is unclear,
humankind is endowed with a sufficient rational capacity for reaching a conclusion
amicable to God— a conclusion which, being reached through the use of reason, was

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wholly consistent with God’s plan. Similar discussions continued to occur throughout the
reigns of Elizabeth I and James I, obviously, but they enjoyed periods of relative religious
ease—particularly since recusancy continued to dominate the religious fears o f their
reigns. Such strands of thought continued even into the early years of Charles’s reign. For
instance, Thomas Hobbes, in the often ignored Third and Fourth books o f his Leviathan
suggests that “we are not to renounce our senses and experience, nor that which is the
undoubted word of God, our natural reason” (325). In “The Translator To the Ingenious
Reader” affixed to Vaughan’s translation o f Henry Nollius’s Hermetical Physick, he
makes clear his commitment to Truth. He writes that, “For my owne part, I honour the
truth where ever I find it, whether in an old, or a new Booke. [...] I wish we were all
unbiased and impartiall learners, not the implicite, groundlesse Proselyts o f Authors and
opinions, but the loyall friends and followers o f truth” (548). Vaughan’s commitment to
both truth, and the effectiveness of reason for discovering it, suggests at once a man
belonging to the church that Hooker sought to build. There is no reference to Sir Thomas
Browne in the works of Vaughan— although Thomas Calhoun, in his monograph Henry
Vaughan: The Achievement o f Silex Scintillans, references him generously throughout—
but given the immense popularity o f Browne’s Religio Medici throughout the 1640s, it is
possible Vaughan was familiar with it; he would doubtlessly have known o f it. It is
certain that Vaughan was a partisan, and had no reservations about mindlessly lambasting
his political and religious enemies. But in his more reflexive (and reflective) moments, he
would have found congenial large portions o f Browne’s Religio Medici. For instance,
given his prefatory remarks to his translation o f Hermetical Physick, it is probable he
would be o f one mind with Browne when the latter writes that

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I observe according to the rules o f my private reason.. neither believing this,
because Luther affirmed it, or disapproving o f that, because Calvin hath
disavouched it. I condemn not all things in the Councell o f Trent nor approve all
in the Synod o f Dort. In briefe, where the scripture is silent, the Church is my
Text; where that speakes, ‘tis but my Comment; where there is joynt silence o f
both, I borrow not the rules o f my Religion from Rome or Geneva, but the
dictates o f my owne reason. (8-9)
Such a position would have been amicable to Vaughan who was familiar with Seneca—
whom he addresses as “Rare Seneca” in “On Sir Thomas Bodley’s Library, The Author
Being Then In Oxford” (17). In one of his epistles to Lucilius (XXXIII), Seneca makes a
similar claim: responding to a criticism about his familiarity with Epicurus— popularly
portrayed as the antithesis of the Stoic spirit— Seneca suggests that he will not dismiss
the value o f the text because o f the author (78). Likewise, Vaughan will entertain a host
of ideas from myriad sources. Whereas Browne identifies the Church as a potential aid in
the delineation of what constitutes a holy life, however, Vaughan could only refer to his
Church in absentia. However, like Hooker (and Browne) Vaughan is committed to the
use of Reason to define the parameters o f one’s extra-biblical religious experience.
Following Hooker, Charles’s own Archbishop, William Laud, however, began to
emphasize the mystery o f God and to extol the importance o f the sacraments and rituals
of the Anglican liturgy. Laud’s changes to Church of England liturgical practices—
stressing that the sacraments were a point o f contact between God and man— were
bitterly received by those in England who favoured a much more strict, ReformedCalvinist approach to worship. And because James had sent official delegates to the
Synod o f Dort (1618-19) with instructions to support the Calvinists over the
Remonstrants (the Arminians)— except for the Calvinist doctrine o f limited Atonement
(Lettinga 110)— Calvinism in England was at its zenith when Charles took to the throne.

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While not in any significant way opposed to the humanist ethos inherited by earlier
Anglican discourse, Laud’s excessive sacramentalism and Charles’s marriage to
Henrietta Maria, a French Catholic— whose status as Queen allowed her to maintain
Catholic escorts and personal clergy— immediately hinted to many that Charles him self
was a closeted Catholic and that he intended to realign England with Rome. English men
and women, wary of Catholicism following the reign o f Mary I, the “gunpowder plot,”
and many assumed Catholic conspiracies, were easy targets for Charles’s enemies who
immediately began to raise cries o f recusancy. This, in concert with the issues addressed
in Chapter One, ultimately contributed to instigating the English civil wars.
In 1644, during the first of the two civil wars, Henry Hammond published his
Practical Catechism. Although neither a religious polemic nor a theological tract, strictly
speaking, it implicitly critiqued Calvinist preachers and Roman Catholic priests for
failing to present the gospel of salvation—the process by which lapsed men and women
were restored before the Father through their faith in Christ. The volume was immensely
effective because it articulated an understanding o f the covenant o f Grace that was based
upon English legal concepts (Lettinga 160). The covenant of Grace, according to
Hammond, was a contract between God and humankind: God made possible the course
o f reconciliation, but humans were expected to live holy, Christian lives. Faith alone was
not sufficient to secure Grace; one had to live a life extolling the virtues o f the Christian
faith. Obviously, failures were to be expected, but what mattered was a continued
commitment to this end. For this reason, the strength o f the volume is that it “told ... how
to be Anglican without a state church, without a king, and without an official prayer
book” (Lettinga 160). Hammond, who was godfathered by Charles’s brother, Henry, the

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eldest o f James’s children (before contracting typhoid fever), was undoubtedly a
Royalist. In 1643, for instance, prior to publishing his Practical Catechism, he was forced
to flee from his living at Penshurst after The Parliamentary Army issued an award for his
arrest; Hammond had aided Charles’s war effort and was forced to seek asylum at Oxford
(162).
Because the Practical Catechism denied the Calvinist doctrine o f total depravity
and limited election, human action mattered a great deal. As noted, his conception o f
salvation was contractual, and it therefore placed obligations on both parties, God and
humanity; the former would supply the means for salvation if certain conditions were
met, and the latter would endeavour to meet those conditions by living a life o f active
Christian charity, or, agape. Hammond’s biographer, John Fell, notes that Hammond was
apparently an effective preacher; he preached daily rather than on Sunday, Wednesday,
and Friday, and his parish’s poor box was so generously given to that he was able to help
the poor in neighbouring parishes (Fell). Hammond’s theology stressed practice over
right doctrine, and this allowed his followers to emphasize the importance o f doing good
(Lettinga 338). For instance, Francis Cheynell spoke against the volume at Merton and
several Oxford colleges, before eventually instigating a correspondence with Hammond.
The two seem to have had an extended communication with Hammond defending him self
against Cheynell’s disgust at the Practical Cetechism not once mentioning the Trinity;
Hammond’s response was that it was a practical catechism and that “speculative
mysterie” was not topical (Packer 51-52). Hammond was hugely influential to Gilbert
Sheldon, the first Restoration archbishop appointed by Charles II, and Richard Allestree,
the provost at Eton, who is believed to have written The Whole Duty o f Man, a bestseller

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that advanced Hammond’s emphasis on active religion. Moreover, it was to shape the
attitudes of many Restoration Latitudinarians (Cragg 63). These Restoration clerics had
“seen enough of the havoc wrought by religious controversy” (84), and the active piety
espoused by Hammond and his supporters gave them a framework with which to handle
matters of religious dispute amicably. The rejection o f the doctrine of sola fid e s— the
belief that salvation was attained by faith alone— espoused by both Luther and Calvin
cannot be easily ignored; and the transformation o f Anglicanism into a Christian religion
centred around good works rather than on faith alone is a matter o f church policy that
distinguishes the Anglican Church from others even today.
There is, quite frankly, no way o f attributing knowledge o f the Practical
Catechism to Vaughan. If he knew it, no direct reference appears to it in his writing. But
one will recall the “Author’s Preface” appended to the augmented Silex Scintillans o f
1655, in which Vaughan advises the cultivation o f “true, practick piety.” It seems vaguely
fair that a bookish poet like Vaughan, and one intimately interested in the topic, would be
at least passingly aware of such discussions happening. At least one scholar has remarked
on Vaughan’s surprisingly deep familiarity with contemporary Puritan literature (West,
Scripture Uses 114), which would seem to suggest, at least circumstantially, that
Vaughan was not completely divorced from the contemporary intellectual goings on in
England. Moreover, Vaughan discusses his contemporary print culture in his poem “The
Agreement” :
Most modem books are blots on thee [God]
Their doctrine chaff and windy fits:
Darken’d along, as their scribes be,
With those foul storms when they were writ;
While the mans zeal lays out and blends
Onely self-worship and self-ends. (25-30)

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Most books are composed to advance the author’s own reputation (his or her “self-ends”).
Vaughan emphatically disparages such publications, so much so that, contrary to the
publishing standard of the time, Vaughan refused to preface Silex Scintillans with
laudatory prefatory material from his contemporaries. Most significantly, Katherine
Philips’s poem, “To Henry Vaughan the Silurist: upon these and his form er Poems,”
which Vaughan included in his Thalia Rediviva (1678), was likely composed for Silex
Scintillans. Moreover, Vaughan acknowledges that he intends his volume to have a
practical purpose in consoling those whose stations in life were similarly compromised
by the civil wars. Vaughan hopes that the poetry o f Silex Scintillans will be “as useful
now in the public, as it hath been ... in private” (392). Vaughan’s practical religious
purpose in the poetry o f Silex Scintillans is to console those similarly disenfranchised by
the civil wars. Vaughan, as noted several times, keenly felt the sting of loss during the
Interregnum. The socially ambitious Cavalier makes for a particularly interesting case
study on the psychology o f class inversion; it is not surprising that Vaughan should look
to God, and find comfort there when the world ceased to provide him with a hope for the
future. Social aspirations dashed, a younger brother killed, the death of a beloved wife,
his own prolonged illness, and a host o f other difficulties likely expedited V aughan’s turn
toward God. Such stories are seemingly common enough, and it is worth noting that
references to Job abound in both editions o f Silex Scintillans (although, not with the
regularity o f Genesis, the Psalms, the Gospels, or Revelations— Vaughan’s favourite
biblical sources.) The poems o f Silex Scintillans, then, can largely be placed within the
tradition o f consolation literature. Indeed, “Vaughan’s instructions for a holy life do not
so much enjoin strict obedience to Cranmer’s liturgy as succour those dismayed by its

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passing” (West, Scripture Uses 131). Vaughan’s precise method o f effecting such
consolation will be explored here; but not surprisingly, his method rests on a tenuously
crafted paradox of nostalgia and expectation. Vaughan’s eschatology continues to be a
popular topic for critics— especially given the relative sparsity o f Anglican eschatological
poetry vis-a-vis Puritan poetry of the era. Vaughan, it will be argued, was deeply
committed to the tradition of Anglican ‘survivalism,’ and much o f his writing is centred
around the social reality o f necessitated furtive worship and closeted devotion. Rather
than promote active rejection o f the established order o f the Interregnum, Vaughan
counseled passive resistance centred around Christian perseverance.
Vaughan’s reading habits were wide and eclectic, and no complete catalogue o f
his sources— accidental or intentional— has been compiled. While in London, he was an
avowed Son of Ben, and his Poems (1646) betrays a significant and unsurprising debt to
Ben Jonson. Poets such as William Habington and Thomas Carew impressed themselves
upon Vaughan; and, more topically, Vaughan is known to have read John Donne and
George Herbert, and it is their influence, especially Herbert’s, which contributed,
poetically, to the construction o f Silex Scintillans. But Vaughan was also familiar with a
number of classical and religious sources. In one o f his book-poems, “On Sir Thomas
Bodley’s Library, The Author Being Then In Oxford,” Vaughan acknowledges Caesar,
Seneca, and Lucilius (15, 17, 23). Philip Macon Cheek has identified references to many
and various Latin sources including Horace, Persius, Juvenal, Catullus, Virgil, Lucan,
Ovid, Nemesianus, Plautus, Seneca, Cicero, Petronius, Livy, Pliny, and Manilius (78);
and in addition to these, he also finds references to a number o f medieval (and early
Renaissance) writers and divines, such as Prudentius, Jerome, Gregory, Cyprian, Thomas

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a Kempis, Macarius, Marcellus, Petrarch, Bisselius, Augurellus, Drexelius, Joseph
Grunbeck, Stobaeus, Baudouin Calilliau, Marcellus Palingenius, Alanus de Insulis, and
Henricus Cornelius Agrippa (85-86). Moreover, Vaughan translated works by Juvenal,
Ovid, Boethius, Claudian, Mathias Casimirus, Maximus Tirius,10 Don Antonio de
Guevera, Nierembergius, Eucharius o f Lyons, and Henry Nollius. Surprisingly, Vaughan
was even fond of Puritan tracts such as those by Lewis Bayly and Robert Bolton (West,
Scripture Uses 114). This brief catalogue contributes to the understanding o f Vaughan as
a bookish poet, and, with the exception o f Nollius’s work, fails to mention the Hermetical
works Vaughan is known to have had contact with through his twin brother, Thomas. For
this reason, Carol Gesner has remarked that a “critical study of Vaughan’s poetry cannot
fail to impress one with the wide range o f his reading and the effect that this background
had upon his work” (172).
Vaughan’s goal o f providing his readers with a volume o f consoling poetry with
the aim of advancing Christian passivity was well-sourced— by authors both within and
without his own specific religious and political orientation. Vaughan’s inspiration for
undertaking such a project might very well be Boethius’s Consolation o f Philosophy, a
volume which Vaughan knew well and to which he seems to have found a great deal of
recourse. Indeed, much o f Olor Iscanus (1951) and parts o f Thalia Rediviva (1678) are
verse translations o f the Consolation. Vaughan’s translations o f Boethius have often been
dismissed as filler or as bad translating. However, Jonathan Nauman notes that
Vaughan’s “feeling for Boethian philosophy ... seems to have gone well beyond the
contemporary status o f the Consolatio as standard intellectual equipment” (“Boethius”
194). Attempting to rescue Vaughan’s translations from a critical tradition that has

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openly (and often) disparaged them, Nauman declares that he knows no finer translation
of Boethius’s work than Vaughan’s conclusion o f the first metrum of the Consolation’s
first book: “Why then, my friends, judg’d you my state so good? / He that may fall once,
never firmly stood” (192). The main value of Naum an’s article, however, is his reevaluation of Vaughan’s translations. Vaughan’s generous use o f interpolation might
seem problematic for those looking for a strict translation, but w hat Nauman effects to
argue throughout his article is that the translations represent Vaughan’s attempt to
reconcile himself to his own world in a manner “not incompatible with Boethius’s
philosophical advice”; and recalling that Olor Iscanus was not intended for publication,
Nauman reminds readers that this was a “private exercise” (199). Vaughan’s work is not,
however, founded upon dialogical process, as was Boethius’s Consolation o f Philosophy
or Petrarch’s My Secret. Rather, the only voice in the volume’s in Vaughan’s— or, the
voice of the persona Vaughan presents to his reader11— and, as in Donne’s “The Flea,” it
is up to the reader to fill in the pieces of conversation that are withheld. In this sense,
then, the tone of Silex Scintillans— both in terms of its private and public affectations— is
a volume very much like St. John o f the Cross’s meditation on the Dark Night o f the
Soul. Claude J. Summers excellently speaks of Vaughan (and Robert Herrick) with
reference to what he calls an “Anglican hermeneutics o f suffering.”
In Herrick’s Noble Numbers— his collection o f religious poetry appended to his
secular and jocund Cavalier collection, Hesperides—he early on includes two poems
about persecution. “Persecutions Profitable” and “Persecutions Purify” make similar and
complementary points: God refines in miseries. Herrick writes in the latter o f these
poems: “So where [God] gives the bitter pills be sure / ‘Tis not to poison, but to make

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thee pure” (3-4).12 Vaughan plays on the same metaphor in his poem “Day o f Judgement”
when he writes that “That pill, though bitter, is most deare / That brings health in the
end” (35-36). This belief in the recuperative power o f affliction seems to be the crux o f
their hermeneutics of suffering. Speaking o f Herrick (but with Vaughan ever in mind),
Summers suggests that “he clings to a faith that the pain he and other dispossessed
Anglicans must undergo in their season o f adversity will serve as a kind o f medicine to
strengthen them and heal the nation” (57). Saint Augustine, in The City o f God, writes

Wherefore, though good and bad men [s/c] suffer alike, we must not suppose that
there is no difference between the men themselves, because there is no difference
in what they both suffer. For even in the likeness of the sufferings, there remains
an unlikeness in the sufferers; and though exposed to the same anguish, virtue and
vice are not the same thing. For as the same fire causes gold to glow brightly, and
chaff to smoke; ... so the same violence o f affliction proves, purges, clarifies the
good, but damns, ruins, exterminates the wicked. And thus it is that in the same
affliction the wicked detest God and blaspheme, while the good pray and praise.
So material a difference does it make, not what ills are suffered, but what kind o f
man suffers them. (10-11)
Refocusing on Vaughan, though, one can see how such a project is articulated in Silex
Scintillans. In “Affliction [I],” Vaughan comments on the importance of hardship; he
writes that “Were all the year one constant Sun-shine, wee / Should have no flowres” (2122). Moreover, there are, I think, echoes o f Augustine in Vaughan’s lament in “The
Wreath” :
Since I in storms u s’d most to be
And seldom yielded flowers,
How shall I get a wreath for thee
From those rude, barren hours?
But a twin’d wreath o f g rief and praise,
Praise soil’d with tears, and tears again
Shining with jo y .... (1-11)

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In these lines Vaughan wonders how he will ever be able to get a wreathe— a symbol o f
his love— for God. Vaughan is distressed because he “ in storms u s ’d most to be / And
seldom yielded flowers.” There is a latent suggestion in these early lines that praise can
only emerge from peaceful spiritual reflection. However, one witnesses a maturation and
refinement of Vaughan’s doxological consciousness. Vaughan realizes that singing
praises amidst his grief loses none o f its value; he is able, he realizes, to present God with
a wreath o f grief and praise. Indeed, West has said: “[Vaughan] felt tears should be the
constant companions o f prayer; his poetic pairings of prayer and tears are more frequent
than those o f any other devotional poet of the period” (Scripture Uses 95). In his “Holy
Sonnet X,” Donne asks God to “Batter [his] heart” (1). Donne’s rationale for this wish is
shortly afterwards expanded upon: “That I may rise, and stand, o ’erthrow me, and bend /
Your force, to break, blow, bum and make me new” (3-4). Vaughan, too, believes in
praising God amid affliction since God refines the faithful in their tribulations.
It is, perhaps, a cliche to suggest that Vaughan is largely interested in the
recuperative power o f affliction, but that seems to be the point stressed throughout Silex
Scintillans. O f course, there are more common tropes, but these work in concert with one
another rather than detracting from their shared rhetorical and practical purposes. Likely,
the most common image in Vaughan’s poetry is that o f journeying or searching. Vaughan
is frequently searching for answers in his poetry; only very rarely does he arrive at
conclusions. Indeed, the active, participatory role of searcher (seeker) seems to be an
answer in and of itself: that person constantly seeking without for God will come,
eventually, to find Him within. Vaughan prays to God: “I long, and groan, and grieve for
thee / For thee my words, my tears do gush” (“The Pilgrimage” 13-14). He compares

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himself to a bird whose nest has been destroyed, and, living in some adopted nest, hates
his new food and pines for home (17-20). It may appear that Vaughan is being nostalgic;
however, this is not the case. The sense o f the poem is clear: Vaughan’s interest here is
emphatically not in of pre-interregnum England, but rather, his first home, Heaven,
which Vaughan refers to frequently in Silex Scintillans with language that latently
suggests (Neo-)Platonic recognition (Cf. “The Retreate”). At the end of “The
Pilgrimage,” Vaughan, like his readers, fails to find a solution; that is, God has failed to
answer his behests. In “The Search,” Vaughan confesses: “all night have I / Spent in a
roving ecstasy / To find my Saviour” (3-5). Vaughan’s use o f the word “ecstasy” is
important here because its etymological origin sets the interpretive tone for the poem: it
depicts a figurative out-of-body journey. What follows is a catalogue of important Old
and New Testament locales where Vaughan has thought to seek for vestiges o f corporeal
Holiness left over from biblical Patriarchs and saints. Vaughan concludes that looking for
Christ in such a manner is ineffectual, and suggests to those wishing to follow after him:
“Search well another world; who studies this, / Travels in clouds, seeks Manna, where
none is” (95-96). West has remarked on Vaughan’s frequent use o f such images. He
writes that “Vaughan was probably the worst-travelled poet o f the seventeenth century”
because he “spent only four of his seventy-four years outside Wales[.]” He suggests that
it is ironic for Vaughan to make use o f these images; and more, he comments that, in “an
age of rapidly expanding communications ... Vaughan stayed home, aloof and disdainful,
a spirit too refined for the times” (Scripture Uses 58). I think West is correct when he
refers to Vaughan as being disdainful o f the world around him, but, pace W est, I think
this disdain actually explains, in part, Vaughan’s frequent use o f such metaphors.

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Returning to “The Search,” Vaughan’s speaker, looking around, laments that “So mild
Lamb can never be / ’Midst so much blood and cruelty” (51-52).
Paramount to Vaughan’s project is the idea o f passive Anglican resistance. It was
illustrated in Chapter One that Vaughan was not above succumbing to hate, anger,
vindictiveness, scorn, pride, entitlement, resentment, and a host o f similar emotions
typically disparaged. Indeed, such themes are frequently wedged within some o f
Vaughan’s finer poems—as one will recall, for instance, in “The World”— but those
interested in emphasizing Vaughan’s partisanship have often neglected his absolute
insistence on Anglican patience; if his spiritual kin are in the right, Vaughan is seemingly
content to discover it in the hereafter. Vaughan’s Royalist disdain for sedition is so
obstinate that he refuses to engage in it even when presented with what he would have
understood to be an illegitimate government whose existence was actually detrimental to
the commonweal. In “The Stone,” for instance, Vaughan admits to temptation and
confesses that he is no stranger to seditious thoughts— what he calls his “dark designs”
(9)— but he nevertheless counsels against such practices. Vaughan’s concern is with
privacy:
But where to act, that none shall know,
Where I shall have no cause to fear
An eye or ear
What man will show?
If nights, and shades, and secret rooms,
Silent as tombs,
Will nor conceal nor assent to
My dark designs, what shall I do? (2-9)
Vaughan makes it clear that he fears not the eyes or ears of his fellow citizens; he scoffs
that “Man I can bribe, and woman will / Consent to any gainful ill” (10-11). Rather, he is
worried about the creatures— i.e., the non-human products o f creation (whose breadth

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Vaughan expands to include stones and other inanimates). These “dumb creatures are so
true, / No gold or gifts can them subdue” (12-13). The obvious question emerges as to
why an omnipotent and omniscient God would need a network o f spies, and V aughan’s
answer is clever. God knows and sees all, but he “accuseth none” (29). Instead,
...he knows
All that man doth, conceals or shows,
Yet will not by his own light
(Though both all-seeing and all right)
Condemn men; but will try them by
A process, which ev’n m an’s own eye
Must needs acknowledge to be just.
Hence sand and dust
Are shak’d for witnesses, and stones
Which some think dead, shall all at once
With one attesting voice detect
Those secret sins we least suspect.
For know, wilde men, that when you erre
Each thing turns Scribe and Register,
And in obedience to his Lord,
Doth your most private sins record. (30-45)
This section o f the poem is worth discussing for two reasons. First, one can see Vaughan,
like Hammond, discussing m an’s [sic] duty before God with legal language. God accuses
no person, but relies on a host o f witnesses at the moment o f judging. Like Hammond,
Vaughan is capitalizing on the popular British conflation o f legal precedent with justice
to effect a deeply pragmatic theology. It recalls, as well, both the Welsh reputation for
litigiousness in the period, and that Vaughan himself was a student of law from c. 1640
until the outbreak o f the first civil war in 1642. Second, it illustrates an anxiety about
panoptic surveillance.
In his Discipline and Punish: The Birth o f the Prison, Michel Foucault expands
on Jeremy Bentham’s conception o f the Panopticon: a circular prison, or similar
institution, that enforces complacency with the threat— real or supposed— o f constant

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surveillance. The cells o f the prison are arranged circularly around a central tower, and
visual continuity is obstructed in such a way as to allow one to see out of this tower, but
not into it; prisoners, then, must constantly suppose they are being monitored (200). The
manifestation of this mechanism is obedience. Foucault writes that the purpose is to
“induce in the inmate a state o f conscious and permanent visibility that assures the
automatic functioning of power” (201); the internalization of this functioning results in
the inmates themselves sustaining this power relationship. But Foucault is not content to
suggest that the only role of the Panopticon is that of a prison; rather, it becomes, for him,
a metaphor for all power relationships, and he suggests that it “must be understood as a
generalizable model o f functioning; a way o f defining power relations in the everyday
life of men [s/c]” (205). One o f the ways this panoptic anxiety is erected as a state
apparatus is through the implementation and organization of a centralized police force,
which he calls the “most direct expression o f royal absolutism” (213). O f course, for
Foucault, it is the internalization o f this process that matters: the subject must feel him- or
herself to be under surveillance— even when they are not. In the case of Vaughan, we
might think o f the poem as operating in two ways. First, the stones function as reminders
o f God’s omniscience; second, this visible reminder o f God’s presence is subsequently
subsumed by the internalization o f this panoptic anxiety. There is, obviously, an issue o f
theodicy accidentally raised by such a suggestion—viz., referring to Creation as a police
state. And while a thorough discussion o f this is beyond the scope o f the current study, it
is, I think, worth mentioning that such suggestions are often present in the language of
devotion; consider, for instance, the ‘ave Christus R ex\’ tradition that is itself supposed to
be reflected in the structure o f Episcopal church hierarchy. The agency Vaughan assigns

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to dust, stones, and other creatures— as scribes and registers— creates, in effect, a sort o f
theological (and psychological) police state in which the genuinely seditious are marked
and noted. Vaughan is faced with a panoptic religious experience: he cannot see God, but
must assume that he is constantly being surveilled. This contributes nothing new to an
understanding o f Christian earthly experience. What it does do, however, is to illustrate
how helpless Vaughan and other Interregnum Anglicans must have felt. Being unwilling
to violate a deep, anti-seditious ethos implemented by a state church (and state) no longer
extant, the Anglican community found itself rendered impotent by its commitment to its
own clandestine religion.
Because God represents, for Vaughan, a pure expression o f panoptic power and
surveillance, there is a degree o f requisite anxiety that must be relaxed and, even,
familiarized. For Anglicans, this amelioration is accomplished by emphasizing the
importance of steadfastness in their faith; a steadfastness which is illustrated in “true,
pracktick piety,” and manifests itself as good, charitable Christian living— that is,
virtuous conduct. The Anglican persona here presented is a novel character in the context
o f Western literature. Whereas much o f Western literature is captured in the antithetical
characters of Oedipus and Hamlet— the one, wholly unknowing and all acting, and the
other, wholly knowing but incapable of action— our model Anglican faithful has no easy
literary demarcation with which to appeal. The Anglican faithful is at once knowing— he
or she knows the Anglican liturgy to be right—but is spurred to negative action, i.e.,
Anglican passivity. Inaction becomes the most powerful action available to surviving
Anglicans because it precludes the possibility o f sinning in the name of their faith. And
while Milton was a Puritan, we may here think o f his “When I Consider How M y Light is

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Spent,” in which he declares that, “They also serve who only stand and wait” (14).
Vaughan implicitly dismisses utilitarian religious-moralities that would see Anglicans
effect good (i.e., the reestablishment o f the state and Church) with sin. To Vaughan, it
matters not whether his “dark designs” induce goodness; they are sufficiently
condemnable. Recall, for instance, the haunting question posed by the Gospel o f
Matthew: “For what shall it profit a man, if he shall gain the whole world, and lose his
own soul?” (KJV 8:36). Rather than rebellion, then, Vaughan counsels passive resistance
centred around private maintenance of Anglican worship and the public execution of
goodness— i.e., what is theologically understood as good work.
The question that obviously emerges here concerns the method and the purpose o f
Vaughan’s counsel. Answering this question depends on how one reads Vaughan with
reference to the various intertextual processes he is engaged in. Louis Martz, in The
Paradise Within: Studies in Vaughan, Traherne, and Milton, suggests that V aughan’s
Silex Scintillans is best understood in Augustinian terms. He reads in Vaughan the three
divine books indicated by St. Bonaventure: The Book o f Scripture, the Book o f Nature,
and the Book of the Soul. Martz notes that these “three books are, essentially, one: The
Bible shows man [sic] how to read, first nature, and then his own soul” (17). This
understanding suggests, at least implicitly, a volume o f private meditative poetry
composed for private consumption and recollection. John N. Wall, however, in
Transformations o f the Word: Spenser, Herbert, Vaughan suggests that reading Vaughan
with any sort of success depends upon the reader’s knowledge o f the Bible, H erbert’s The
Temple, and The Book o f Common Prayer (301). This reading suggests a much more
public understanding o f Silex Scintillans. It has been indicated in Chapters One and Two

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that the poems o f Silex Scintillans emerged out o f Vaughan’s effort to make sense o f the
social disorder o f Interregnum England. It has also been argued, despite this meditative
origin o f the poems, that, by 1655, Vaughan clearly intended for them to serve a public
purpose. I do not want to reduce M artz’s suggestion here, since I believe his reading of
Vaughan to be generally good; but it seems important to relegate it to a subordinate order
o f interpretive correctness. Robert Duvall has said of Vaughan that “[h]is personal quest
is for purity o f heart—the progress o f the soul from darkness to brightness ... is worked
out as a unifying, incremental theme in Silex Scintillans'” (16-17). Duvall is interested in
the connotative values of darkness and brightness, i.e., evil and good, in making this
point. S. Sandbank makes a similar point in a discussion on Vaughan’s use o f light and
dark imagery in Silex Scintillans. Sandbank observes that “[djarkness, to Vaughan, is not
only the absence of light—and, figuratively, all o f the values light stands for. It is also a
necessary condition of light, the background which sets it o f f ’ (142). From here, it seems
safe to extrapolate that Vaughan would have come to view the “late and dusky” days of
the civil wars and the Interregnum as the necessary ontological negative which could
only exist in absolute contrast to the light and glory o f Heaven. Vaughan’s personal
circumstance, then, assumes immense spiritual importance because it provides him with
the basis for recognizing, ipso facto, the perilousness o f valuing the world at the expense
of Heaven. It is only when his world is turned upside-down that Vaughan realizes that it
was never right-side-up to begin with. For this reason, readers o f Vaughan ought to
recognize the importance of worldly frustrations— affliction, illness, disenfranchisement,
et cetera—as a spiritually recuperative act o f Providential direction; this is certainly how
Vaughan came to understand it. It is, obviously, necessarily a political act whenever one

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criticizes the world with reference to Heaven since it depends upon a deep dissatisfaction
with material circumstance. However, in works o f genuine political polemic, the
emphasis is on changing the material circumstance, and not on changing the self. This is
Vaughan’s project. In changing himself, Vaughan is obeying G od’s Providential directive
and is rescuing his soul; in writing Silex Scintillans, Vaughan is rescuing, or, attempting
to rescue, his religious community. It is through this lens that we must approach
Vaughan: Vaughan consoles the Anglican faithful by carefully articulating that their
salvation is a product of their patience—-they are themselves an historically positioned
tropological representation o f Job, and they would do well to both recognize this and
persevere despite it.
At the onset of the first civil war in January o f 1642, Vaughan would have been
merely twenty or twenty-one years old. When the so-called Cavalier Parliament met in
May of 1660, following the Restoration o f Charles II, Vaughan would have been thirtynine.13 This means, effectually, that the whole o f Vaughan’s middle age was spent in a
religiopolitical climate that was anathema to his conscience; he was hostile to this
environment, and he viewed it as being hostile towards him. It is not surprising, then, that
large expanses o f Silex Scintillans, as noted in Chapter One, betray disgust, indignation,
scom, et cetera. This should not, quite frankly, surprise readers with a modicum of
historical consciousness. Rather, what is worth noting is the extent to which Vaughan
attempts to effect passive resistance, and, even, toleration of these apparent interlopers.
Indeed, In his poem “Religion,” Vaughan suggests that Puritans are symptoms rather than
causes o f religious dis-ease:
.. .Religion is a Spring
That from some secret, golden Mine

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Derives her birth, and thence doth bring
Cordials in every drop, and Wine;
But in her long and hidden Course
Passing through the Earths darke veines,
Grows still from better unto worse,
And both her taste, and colour staines,
Then drilling on, leames to increase
False Ecchoes, and Confused sounds,
And unawares doth often seize,
On veines o f Sulphur under ground;
So poison’d, breaks forth in some Clime,
And at first sight doth many please,
But drunk, is puddle, or meere slime
And ‘stead o f Phisick, a disease[.] (29-44)
Vaughan writes that “Just such a tainted sink we have” (45). In these lines Vaughan
confesses that Religion, as it moves through the Earth, is tainted and corrupted by it. The
festering and rotten product o f this transmogrification “at first sight doth many please.”
Thus, writes West, “ [r]ather than blaming the Puritans as a cause o f corruption, this poem
begins to understand them as a symptom or o f a larger malaise” {Scripture Uses 161).
Vaughan, then, does not set himself in opposition to Puritans, p e r se, but rather, he
suggests that they are collectively victims o f a world in which G od’s Word has been
abused. What ought to arrest our attention when reading Vaughan is not his scurrilous
and abrasive vindictiveness, but this emphasis on finding God by way of peaceful
consideration. Vaughan is adamant that the path to Heaven is not won with bloodshed.
He asks in “Abel’s Blood,” for instance, “What thunders shall those men arraign / Who
cannot count those they have slain, / Who bath not in a shallow flood, / But in a deep,
wide sea o f blood?” (11-14). In “Righteousness,” the poem immediately following
“Abel’s Blood,” Vaughan lists the qualities o f a virtuous person. For Vaughan, that

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person is righteous “Who bears his cross with joy / And doth imploy / His heart and
tongue in prayers for his foes” (37-39).
The portrait o f Vaughan I have attempted to paint here is not the Vaughan o f
Rudrum, whose Silex Scintillans is a work of unquestionable political propaganda. Mine
is a different Vaughan whose focus has been on consoling his religious cohort through
the trials o f religious subjugation. I have hitherto endeavoured to demonstrate that
Vaughan’s goal in Silex Scintillans is to stress the spiritually recuperative power o f
affliction to a religious community whose raison d'etre— a fully collaborative
religiopolitical apparatus in which Church and State are effectually one— had been
desecrated by the English civil wars. In doing so, Vaughan is not interested in giving
literary weapons to those seeking to emphasize the political dimension o f this union, but
rather, is interested in giving succor to those whose soteriological persuasions were
bound to the Anglican liturgy. In “The Men o f War,” Vaughan is clear that he will not
engage in the villainy o f wishing harm upon his enemies. Addressing God, he writes that,
“Thy Saints are not the Conquerors, / But patient, meek, and overcome” (18-19). And,
moreover, that “Thou wouldst no legions, but wouldst bleed” (25). Vaughan maintains
the importance o f passive resistance, remarking that G od’s sword is his Word (26).
Rather than fall victim to his own ‘dark designs,’— his seditious impulses— Vaughan
ends the poem with a prayer in which he beseeches Jesus to “Give me humility and
peace, / Contented thoughts, innoxious ease, / A sweet revengeless, quiet minde / And to
my greatest haters kinde” (41-44). Vaughan foregoes his right to lambast his enemies,
and instead asks for the strength to deal with them kindly. It is easy, as has been shown
time and time again, to paint Vaughan as a political radical engaged solely in the process

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o f ushering in the Restoration. But such a caricature ignores the Vaughan who counsels
absolute passivity—the Vaughan who resignedly scoffs, “If truth be thine, what needs a
brutish force?” (“Rules and Lessons” 39).

Conclusion
“A sad blubber’d story”: Closing Remarks

Then kneel my soul, and body; kneel and bow;
If Saints, and Angels fal down, much more thou.
— “Dressing”

The civil wars o f mid-seventeenth-century England were a complicated social
phenomenon. Not surprisingly, these conflicts invited myriad responses from all levels o f
the social strata. Political and religious leaders alike clamored to claim moral authority.
As often as not, these groups even borrowed each other’s rhetorical and discursive tools.
The result was a religiopolitical milieu in which thematic demarcations were blurred and
obfuscated; this process has been seen throughout the whole o f this project. It is a social
reality that influenced Henry Vaughan, certainly, but recently has begun to impinge on
the scholarship surrounding his work. I should be clear: it has not been my intention here
to suggest that Vaughan’s poetry is in any sense apolitical. Rather, I have intended to
demonstrate that these frequent (and scathing) political echoes are circumstantial; that is,
I think it is hardly fair to suggest that scoring political points was a significant motivation
for Vaughan’s desire to publish Silex Scintillans. This is a point that is easily made when
one considers that Vaughan attempted to withhold Olor Iscanus— a much more explicitly
political volume— from publication. There is a degree o f generic conflation that must be
acknowledged, and I have been careful to do so. However, I nevertheless maintain that
these two poetic projects are not as congenial as they sometimes seem to be. I have
attempted, therefore, to expand the interpretive spectrum in such a fashion as to allow for
a broader range o f functional appreciation. If we wish to speak o f Vaughan’s aesthetics,

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as has been shown, we must speak o f them as an aesthetics o f praxis—and we must
simultaneously question the suggestion that these two terms exist only in
contradistinction to each other.
The generic conflation o f politics and religion that has been so often the focus of
this project can be seen clearly and illustratively in an anonymous 1643 poem often
entitled “The Oxford Riddle on the Puritans”— the title being something o f an
unfortunate editorial decision that robs the reader o f the satisfaction of answering the
riddle him- or herself. The brief four-stanza poem is worth looking at in its entirety, if for
no other reason than the fact that it is so rarely printed:
There dwells a people on the earth,
That reckons true allegiance treason,
That makes sad war a holy mirth.
Calls madness zeal, and nonsense reason;
That finds no freedom but in slavery.
That makes lies truth, religion knavery.
That rob and cheat with yea and nay:
Riddle me, riddle me, who are they?
They hate the flesh, yet kiss their dames.
That make kings great by curbing crowns,
That quench the fire by kindling flames,
That settle peace by plund’ring towns,
That govern with implicit votes.
That ’stablish truth by cutting throats.
That kiss their master and betray:
Riddle me, riddle me, who are they?
That make Heaven speak by their commission,
That stop God’s peace and boast his power
That teach bold blasphemy and sedition,
And pray high treason by the hour.
That damn all saints but such as they are,
That wish all common, except prayer.
That idolize Pym, Brooks, and Say:
Riddle me, riddle me, who are they?
That to enrich the commonwealth.

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Transport large gold to foreign parts ;
That house’t in Amsterdam by stealth,
Yet lord it here within our gates;
That are staid men, yet only stay
For a light night to run away;
That borrow to lend, and rob to pay:
Riddle me, riddle me, who are they?
The answer to this riddle, one knows from the assumed title, is the various Puritan sects
extant in the mid-seventeenth century. One can see the same exchange and explicit
rhetorical conflation of political and religious imagery that so often characterizes
literature of the period. The pervasive question that has informed much o f the preceding
discussion is whether or not one can speak o f religious poetry qua religious poetry, or
whether the interpolation of political consciousness robs such verses of their intended
divine and meditational aesthetic.
There is commonly supposed to be no difference between Royalists and
Anglicans in mid-seventeenth century England. Being one is sufficient to be declared at
once the other. But this conflation does not serve readers o f the period. To suggest this is
the same as suggesting, today, that all women are feminists, that all atheists are liberals,
that all theists are conservatives, or any number o f similar assumptions. Obviously, we
assume a degree o f conflation, and we generalize and stereotype accordingly. But this is
always done with a recognition that these conflations are not absolute—indeed, that they
are far from it. But in our collective handling o f the seventeenth century, we have
willfully suspended this reflexivity. All Puritans are Parliamentarians, all Royalists are
Anglicans, and vice versa. One need only examine our understanding of the term Puritan
to see this schema complicated, and, perhaps, deconstructed. The so-called Puritan voice
exists only in opposition to institutionally normative Anglicanism; elsewhere, we must

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speak of Puritanism as a series o f voices, sometimes amicable and sometimes not;
Puritanism qua Puritanism means nothing in contexts where we must differentiate
between radical Calvinists, Quakers, Baptists, Fifth Monarchists, et cetera. N or can we
assume, uncritically, that affiliation with any of these religious groups implies affiliation
with (and endorsement of) Oliver Cromwell and his government. In the case o f
Anglicanism and Royalism, the same is true; and while the civil wars and subsequent
Interregnum had a consolidating effect on the Church, as has been shown, it is
nevertheless helpful to maintain this distinction.
The argument here has been for an expansion o f the interpretive categories o f
seventeenth-century poetry, particularly, in this case, with reference to Vaughan and his
Silex Scintillans. I have advanced this argument in three constituent movements. First, I
began by acknowledging the political saw iness o f Vaughan’s verse. The purpose o f this
was to provide the reader with a modicum o f contextual appreciation for Vaughan’s
political environment. More than this, though, it provided me with an opportunity to
suggest a tripartite reading o f Vaughan’s religious poetry that I find to be particularly
helpful: many of Vaughan’s poems begin with heightened meditations only to regress to
worldly venting. This juxtaposition is stylistically and rhetorically powerful because it
affords Vaughan the opportunity to reconcile these conflicting realities—that is, the
ontological disparity dividing religious ideality and political reality. This attempt at
reconciliation constitutes the third movement of many o f Vaughan’s poems. And while
these attempts at reconciliation may be rarely satisfying, they nevertheless perfectly
illustrate Vaughan’s desire to see past the narrow-sightedness o f his political vision.
Obviously, problems arise, such as Alan Rudrum’s indication that Vaughan omitted from

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Silex Scintillans (1655) an elegy for his friend and cousin Charles Walbeoffe on the
grounds that Walbeoffe was politically moderate (“Breconshire Royalism” 112-13). This
argument, though, ignores Vaughan’s elegiac policy in Silex; that is, his included elegies
all remember immediate family, and these deaths all contributed to his religious
intensification. Stylistically and thematically, his elegy for Walbeoffe would have seemed
anomalous couched within the poetry o f Silex Scintillans. O f course, in Silex Scintillans
Vaughan advances a voice or a literary persona. Such suggestions need no qualification. I
do not disagree with Rudrum’s assessment that Vaughan was an ultra-Royalist— indeed, I
have taken pains to show that in fact he was. Rather, I object to his indication that
Vaughan’s ultra-Royalism precludes the possibility that the poetry of Silex Scintillans
could be intended to serve a genuine and practical religious purpose. My goal in this
project has been implicitly to question the historically and academically sanctioned
conflation of religion and politics. In doing so, I hope to expand the generic confines that
have limited scholarship o f the period. This is not to gainsay or combat scholarship that
has been conducted in this mode, but rather to illustrate and expand our understanding o f
the complexities o f this discursive phenomenon. In Silex Scintillans, Vaughan is certainly
political, but to suggest that he is only political is to do his poetry an injustice.
The second and third parts o f my argument are closely related, and, as such, ought
to be looked at together. I began by examining the extent to which Vaughan intended the
poetry o f Silex Scintillans to be a practical volume o f religious consolation; I followed
that by exploring the means o f Vaughan’s consolatory method. Vaughan acknowledges in
his poetry the unpleasantness o f his native environment, and he uses this
acknowledgment to advance his religious agenda. Rather than wishing harm upon his

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enemies, Vaughan prays throughout the whole o f both editions o f Silex for the strength to
deal with them kindly and peaceably. It will surprise no one who is familiar with
Vaughan that he is sometimes scathing, hateful, and bitter, but reducing V aughan’s
poetry to these themes betrays a rather narrow critical and aesthetic purview. Vaughan is
never satisfied with these emotions, and he indicates uniformly that his fellow Anglicans
should not be satisfied with them either. Silex Scintillans effects to demand from its
readers that they move beyond their petty and personal political hurts. For this reason,
Vaughan counsels patience and passive resistance. With no indication in 1650 or 1655
that the Restoration of Charles II would occur just a few years later, Vaughan hoped to
prepare the Anglican faithful for an extended period o f subjugation. Like the Israelites,
Vaughan was hoping for the strength to endure the wilderness for forty years. It is not
surprising, then, that Vaughan should take so many pains to model Silex Scintillans
around the Book o f Common Prayer (Wall 275). We can see this modeling in Vaughan’s
rarely examined poem, “Idle Verse,” which he concludes thusly:
Go, go, seek out some greener thing,
It snows, and freezeth here;
Let Nightingales attend the spring;
Winter is all my year. (21-24)
The imagery here is clever, and, as is so often the case with Vaughan, conflicting.
Vaughan advises those looking for ‘idle verses’— the pompous verses of the Cavaliers or
remnant Troubadours— to search elsewhere. Those seeking for such poems, what
Vaughan calls “greener thing[s],” will not be well served by perusing the poetry o f Silex
Scintillans. He then contrasts the figurative merriment o f spring— which he emphasizes
with reference to the nightingale’s song— with the severity o f winter. It is the winter
metaphor that I want to focus on here. Winter connotes suffering and death, so it may

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seem odd that Vaughan would wish to locate himself and his poetry there. However,
winter also demands work and perseverance, becoming, then, an appropriate metaphor
for Vaughan’s poetry: it is not casual and relaxed, but rather is written out o f hardship.
With no indication that the so-called Interregnum would soon come to an end, winter
truly was all Vaughan’s year. Indeed, his poem recalls an anonymous fourteenth-century
poem, “This W orld’s Joy,” that begins with the line: “Wynter wakeneth al my care” (1).
The poet expresses an admiration for the hardship o f winter because it reminds him or her
o f the frailty of life, and invokes, therefore, the memento mori topos so common to
medieval and early modem literatures. By reminding the poet o f his or her mortality,
winter simultaneously effects to remind the poet o f his or her spiritual obligations. The
poet concludes: “For y not whider y shal, ne hou longe her duelle” (15)— that is, the poet
knows not how long he or she shall “here dwell.” This is the topos invoked by Silex
Scintillans. The “late and dusky” days o f the Interregnum demanded that Vaughan and
his fellow Anglican faithful direct their attentions toward God; the best way to do this
was to periodically survey how unpleasant and mutable all else was.
My suggestion throughout has been, in fact, that the so-called devotional literature
o f the period can be appreciated for its religious function. Moreover, such an approach,
rather than depriving the critic o f the social and historical consciousness that informs
responsible scholarship, actually contributes to his or her understanding o f it. Religious
poetry o f the mid-seventeenth century exists at a nuanced intellectual intersection.
Viewing such works as mere political propaganda narrows our scope of the period, and
succeeds only in limiting our ability to interact with it from satisfyingly diverse
perspectives. That these threads have so often been wed together is not an accident, but it

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is the role of the critic to unravel them. The aim is not to dichotomize our interpretations,
but rather to call into question those readings that allow one perspective to wholly
subsume the other. With reference to Vaughan, I have illustrated how political
consciousness actually lends weight to the religious praxis o f his Silex Scintillans.
Vaughan’s political interpolations tell us more about his religious development than they
do about his actual political life. Whereas F. E. Hutchinson suggests that V aughan’s
political temper succeeds only in marring the “remote airs” o f Silex Scintillans (44), I
believe Vaughan’s verse is improved by it. Implicit in this thesis is the suggestion that the
politicization o f Vaughan’s poetry is an attempt to rescue an, at times, stylistically weak
poet like Vaughan from obscurity. Certainly, Vaughan needs rescuing if we wish to
approach him from a New Critical perspective in which we assign value only to prosody,
timelessness, and other aesthetics rooted in ahistoricism. The poetry of Silex Scintillans
ought to be, as it often is, recognized and appreciated for what it says about its
religiopolitical context, the person who wrote it, and the audience for whom it was
written; but, in doing this responsibly, we must re-evaluate (and ultimately contest) the
post-1970s emphasis on radically politicized criticism. Vaughan’s poetic project in Silex
Scintillans, can, I think, be summarized nicely with reference to his poem “The Timber,”
in which he writes:
But as shades set off light, so tears and grief
(Though of themselves but a sad blubber’d story)
By shewing the sin great, shew the relief
Far greater, and so speak my Saviour’s glory. (41-44)
Silex Scintillans may be the “sad blubber’d story” of a man emotionally ill-equipped to
cope with Interregnum life, but this dis-ease allows him to better speak his Saviour’s
glory.

Notes
1 Except where noted, all Henry Vaughan citations are from L.C. Martin’s Vaughan’s
Works. When referencing Vaughan’s prose, I have given page numbers; when discussing
his poetry, I have cited line numbers only.
2 Richard Lovelace was sent to Gatehouse while William Boteler was sent to Fleet
Prison. Lovelace was imprisoned several times throughout the civil wars. However, it
was on this occasion that he wrote his poem, “To Althea, From Prison,” in which he
famously declared that “Stone walls do not a prison make, / Nor iron bars a cage” (2526). Vaughan’s poem, ‘To his Learned Friend and Loyal Fellow Prisoner, Thomas
Powel o fC ant. Doctor o f Divinity,” which appears in Thalia Rediviva, has sometimes
been taken as evidence that he too was arrested sometime during the civil wars. Vaughan
similar meditates on the effect that imprisonment has upon the just:
‘Tis a kind Soul in Magnets, that attones
Such two hard things as Iron are and Stones,
And in their dumb compliance we leam more
O f Love, than ever Books could speak before. (7-10)
3 In 2008 the town council o f Llansantffraed voted to remove the ‘t ’ from the spelling of
the town name {viz. Llansanffraed); this was done in an effort to correct what was
understood to be an Anglicization. The new spelling is more consistent with W elsh
phonetic standards. I have maintained the spelling o f Llansantffraed here, however, since
this is the spelling o f record in materials pertaining to Vaughan. O f note: V aughan’s
grave can still be visited in the churchyard St. Bridget’s, Llansanffraed, and was the
subject o f a post-war meditative poem by Siegfried Sassoon, “At the Grave o f Henry
Vaughan.” On the anniversary of his death, 23 April, Vaughan is remembered with a
ceremony at St. Bridget’s.
4 All references to Rowland Watkyns are from Paul C. Davies’s edition o f Flamma sine
Fumo. I have cited line numbers only.
5 There is another connection between Henry Vaughan and Shakespeare’s H enry V.
Vaughan is descendent from Dafydd Gam, who is listed (as Davy Gam) among the
deceased nobility following the Battle o f Agincourt (4.8.103). Moreover, Dafydd Gam
has long been supposed to be Shakespeare’s model for the character Fluellen. Henry
Vaughan’s ancestor, Sir Roger Vaughan, also warred at Agincourt.
6 [I was deaf and dumb, a Flint: You (how great care you take o f your own!) try to revive
another way, you change the remedy; and now angered you say that Love has no power,
and you prepare to conquer force with Force, you come closer, you break through the
Rocky barrier o f my heart, and it is made Flesh that was before a Stone] (Martz, George
Herbert and Henry Vaughan 248)
7 The importance o f tears in the seventeenth century has often been remarked upon. John
Donne, in a sermon “Preached at White-hall, the first Friday in Lent” (ca. 1622), notes

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that “Fathers have infinitely delighted themselves in ... the blessed effect o f holy teares.”
And he concludes this thought by recalling “[t]hat our best sacrifice, even prayer it selfe,
receives an improvement, a dignity, by being washed in tears” {Sermons 175).
8 The two poets shared an ancestor in Gwladys Gam (the daughter of Dafydd Gam.)
Gwladys Gam was at one time married to Sir Roger Vaughan, to whose line Henry
belongs; following the death o f Sir Roger Vaughan, Gwladys Gam married one W illiam
ap Thomas— also known as Sir William Herbert, lord o f Raglan— who was to sire the
Herbert line to which George Herbert belongs. Both Herbert and Vaughan belonged to
the anglicized Welsh gentry, and neither was to inherit aristocratic title. However, “in
spite of the remarkable freedom with which the Welsh have extended the degrees o f
cousinship, [Vaughan] is not known to have claimed [Herbert] as a kinsman”
(Hutchinson 5).
9 A.E. Waite notes in a footnote in his The Works o f Thomas Vaughan, that Thomas was
evicted for “drunkenness, swearing, incontinency, and carrying arms for the king” (x). He
comments that the last of these charges was probable— indeed, the biographic record
seems to indicate that he, like Henry, participated in the Battle o f Rowton Heath.
However, he thinks the other charges were owed entirely to his Royalist sympathy. To
W aite’s credit, no known evidence for such incompetencies are known to me, either.
10 Vaughan acknowledges, however, that his translations of Tirius are based on Latin
translations of the Greek originals.
11 A possible exception to this is Vaughan’s poem, “The British Church.” The Church is
the speaker in the poem, and it is worth noting that it is Vaughan’s only poem to feature a
female speaker. Nevertheless, the poem is a clear representation o f Vaughan’s feelings
pertaining to the state of the Church.
12 All references to Robert Herrick are from the Henry Morley edition. I have cited line
numbers only.
13 Vaughan’s date o f birth is unknown. It is known that he was bom in 1621, however,
and that he died on 23 April 1695. Moreover, the inscription on his tombstone indicates
that he was 73 years old at his time o f death. From this, we can safely assume that
Vaughan was bom prior to 23 April, but to say more is purely speculative.

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W orks C ited
Augustine, Saint. The City o f God. Trans. Marcus Dods. Toronto: Modem Library, 1993.
Print.
Babcock, Robert S. ‘“For I Am Welsh, You Know’: Henry V, Fluellen, and the Place o f
Wales in the Sixteenth-Century English Nation.” In Laudem Caroli: For Charles
G. Nauert. Ed. James V. Mehl. Missouri: Thomas Jefferson UP, 1998.189-199.
Print.
Bennett, Joan. Four Metaphysical Poets: Donne, Herbert, Vaughan, and Crashaw. New
York: Cambridge UP, 1957. Print.
Bloom, Harold. The Anxiety o f Influence. 2nd ed. Toronto: Oxford UP, 1997. Print.
Boethius. The Consolation o f Philosophy. Trans. Richard Green. New York: Macmillan,
1962. Print.
Bradstock, Andrew. Radical Religion in Cromwell’s England: A Concise H istory from
the English Civil War to the E nd o f the Commonwealth. New York: I.B. Taurus,
2011. Print.
Brown, Thomas. Religio Medici. Birmingham: Classics o f Medicine Library, 1981. Print.
Calhoun, Thomas O. Henry Vaughan: The Achievement o/'Silex Scintillans. Newark: U
of Deleware Press, 1981. Print.
Cheek, Philip Macon. “The Latin Element in Henry Vaughan.” Studies in Philology 44.1
(1947): 69-88. JSTOR. Web. 30 August 2009.
Cragg, G.R. From Puritanism to the Age o f Reason. New York: Cambridge, UP. Print.
Davies, John. A History o f Wales. Toronto: Penguin, 2007. Print.
Davies, Stevie. Henry Vaughan. Wales: Seren, 1995. Print.
Donne, John. “Holy Sonnet X [Batter my Heart].” Metaphysical Poetry. Ed. Christopher
Ricks. Toronto: Penguin, 2006. 33. Print.
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