So… in today's chapter of Free Radical, I quote a poem from the 1650s. Seventeenth century English poetry is a fun ride. And it is what it is because of a VERY long story involving a lot of war. I’m gonna run you through it as quickly as I can. 

The big war that 17th century poets had to work around was the English Civil War, which was about both religion and distribution of power. 

You may not know much about that war, but you are probably already aware of how the trouble originally started…

Back in the early 1500s, the future King Henry VIII got himself into a bit of a pickle.

He had pulled strings and bent rules to be allowed to marry a Catholic hottie, Catherine of Aragon. She was the daughter of some very heavy-hitters… King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella of Spain. They were not to be fucked with. 

An alliance with Spain was a power move for a country that was in rough shape— England had just come off of almost two centuries of wars. The first was the Hundred Years’ War (1337-1453), which was a France v. England match-up, but the line between what was France and what was England had been blurry since 1066, so it was still kind of Civil-ish as wars went. They were fighting about a chunk of land in France (the Duchy of Aquitaine) that England wanted to have and France wanted to keep. France won, in part thanks to historical GirlBoss, Joan of Arc.  

As soon as they got THAT sort of resolved, a whole new series of wars started, and these were definitely England v. England. 

Specifically, the fight was between two mega-powerful families who both wanted to control the country and the throne, the Yorks and the Lancasters (Game of Thrones is based on this!!). The Yorks used a white rose as their family symbol. The Lancasters used a red rose. Thus, these wars were called The Wars of the Roses (1455-1487). They ended when, like… there was barely anybody important left in either family TO take the throne, and so it went to an upstart Lancaster cousin, a guy named Henry Tudor who had been hiding out in France (naturally!) for like 15 years but who came back and made a strong showing in the Battle of Bosworth Field (1485), defeated Richard III (a York), and became the last English person to win the throne in battle (fun fact!). Henry Tudor became Henry VII. 

Henry got straight to work. He was like… ENOUGH of this bullshit war stuff! We’re doing compromises and stability now. He made HIS symbol a red AND white rose, now known as the Tudor Rose. He also made himself some sons— Arthur, Henry, and Edmund, and in between those were some useless female children who would make good political pawns. None of this squabbling over who would take the throne when HE died. Everything was neat and tidy. Peace in England forevermore was virtually guaranteed… The End. Ha ha ha haaa no. Kidding. 

Henry VII married his eldest, Arthur, to Catherine of Aragon to make friendly with Spain, which is useful when you and your closest neighbor (France) can’t stop fighting each other and you might need backup. 

I can hear you… you’re like… Amour. You just said HENRY VIII was married to Catholic hottie Catherine. I did. I did say that. The thing is, a few months after Arthur and Catherine married, Arthur died of a virus that was prevalent at the time— sweating sickness. Oh noes! What about the alliance! What about the stability! 

His brother Henry (soon to be the VIII) was like… well… I mean… *I* could marry her, too? And then we’d still get all the sweet perks… 

Everyone was like... Nah, bruh. That’s weird. Marrying your dead brother’s wife? Also, it’s against church law to marry her. Not BIBLICAL law, for the record, just church law. 

So Henry VIII and Catherine cooked up various reasons why they COULD get married without breaking church law— and the crux of the argument was that Catherine claimed that she and Arthur, in their 6 months of young, healthy, vigorous marriage before Arthur got sick, never got around to fucking. So the marriage was supposedly annul-able and not real. I’m not sure anyone really believed this even then, and certainly almost no one believes it now. They totes fucked.

So Henry married the Catholic hottie, but when it came to cranking out sons, it turned out that Catherine was kind of a nottie. She really tried— she got pregnant a lot of times and gave birth multiple times, but produced no male children who survived infancy. She did have a daughter who lived, Mary. Poor Cath. Henry is 100% the bad guy here.

This is the part everyone knows— Desperate for heirs, and a known fuck boi, Henry VIII ends up falling for Anne Boleyn, a PROTESTANT hottie (protestantism was trending in Europe). He goes to the Church and asks for a divorce. Most people think the church just never gave divorces. Not true. They gave divorces from time to time. But if you think that the Church was about to alienate SPAIN, some of their most powerful supporters, you’re crazy. They were like… Nah. Hard pass. Can’t help you. Besides, we've already looked the other way for you once. Don't get greedy.

So Henry was like I HATE ALL YOU GUYS YOU ARE LAME AND I AM UNSUBBING FROM CATHOLICISM AND STARTING MY OWN CHURCH. So he did, and formed the Church of England, and gave himself a divorce. Then he pillaged TF out of everything the Catholic church owned in England and destroyed all their property (giving 19^th century poets nice monastic ruins to write about) and took all their money and then I guess went home to bang Anne in hopes of making a son or four. 

Most people don’t focus on this part of the story, but this divorce was NOT a hugely popular decision amongst the English— they really liked Queen Catherine. Also, they didn’t want to burn in Hell for all eternity, and centuries of Catholic teaching held that burning in Hell was EXACTLY what would happen if they converted. Henry forced the issue and made it very hard to be Catholic in England after that. So, lots of people converted, but plenty of people stuck to their original faith. Now we’ve got religious factions in England, and religious oppression, and bitter resentments to go with them. 

Anne, however, is ALSO a nottie when it comes to sons. She has a daughter first, Elizabeth (the future Elizabeth I), and Henry sorta takes that in stride, but people are in his ear criticizing Anne and he’s getting nervous. She gets preggo again but miscarries and WOE WOE it turns out the fetus was male. Now Henry is pissed. He turns on her, allows her to be accused of literally EVERYTHING (they threw the kitchen sink at her— incest, witchcraft, treason, you name it) and has her executed. 

He kept trying, I’ll give him that. He married four more times, mostly to Catherines and Annes (Catherine, Anne B., Jane, Anne C., Catherine H., Katherine P.), and he only got one sickly son out of all his attempts. That son (Edward) died as a teen, not too long after Henry did. That’s when things really got messy.

The next heir up was Mary, Henry’s daughter with Catherine. She was like EVERYBODY WE ARE ALL BEING CATHOLIC AGAIN OR FUCKIN’ ELSE. GET UP IN HERE AND EAT THE BODY AND BLOOD AND I DON’T WANT TO HEAR ANOTHER WORD ABOUT IT!

So all the new protestants were shit out of luck. Their turn to be oppressed.

After a brief and bloody reign full of protestant-killin’ and an unhappy marriage, Mary died without making any heirs. Protestants celebrate, Catholics mourn, factionalism intensifies. 

Next up was Elizabeth, Henry’s daughter with Anne Boleyn. She did a great job for the most part, as a woman does. She was a protestant and religious persecution-wise, she was relatively chill? The problem was… Catholics considered her a bastard because they did not recognize Henry VIII’s DIY divorce as having been valid, which means he was still married to Catherine when he married Anne. That made Henry a bigamist and it made Elizabeth illegitimate in Catholic eyes. Protestants disagreed, naturally. 

The Catholic Church very much had a dog in this fight. They wanted Elizabeth gone and England returned to the fold. So, they threw their weight behind various attempts to assassinate her, most notably the attempts to replace her with her Catholic cousin, Mary, Queen of Scots. This ended in Elizabeth having to imprison and ultimately execute Mary, AN ANOINTED QUEEN CHOSEN BY GOD VIA THE DIVINE RIGHT OF KINGS WHICH WAS ALSO THE SOURCE OF ELIZABETH'S POWER which realllly freaked Elizabeth out. She did it though, for good or for ill. 

**RELIGIOUS DISAGREEMENT INTENSIFIES.**

Famously, Elizabeth had commitment issues (and she wasn’t stupid). So, she never married. While she was a solid ruler, chaos was sure to follow if she did not appoint the right heir to rule after her death. She ended up going with Mary, Queen of Scots’ son, James Stewart. Mary had been Catholic, but James had been raised Protestant, so the protestant tradition would continue. Disappointing for Catholics, but it probably salved Elizabeth's conscience some. More bitterness ensues.

James takes over, and he’s kind of a prat, honestly. He has very little chill and he is very into the idea that God chose him to rule. So much so that he feels that Satan himself has taken a personal interest in the English government and has rallied many witches to try and take James down because he is so good and awesome. So James goes down in history as the King who was the Witch-Burniest. He wrote a whole book about it (Daemonologie). Fun fact— 84% of accused witches were female. 

Satan wasn't the only one who was after James. There was a famous Catholic plot to assassinate James and lots of his pals by blowing up the House of Lords with everyone inside it on November 05. It was known then as the Gunpowder Plot. Now Nov 05 is known as Bonfire Day, because people are still salty enough that they burn the would-be assassins in effigy every year on that day. Or it's just an excuse to party. One of the two. Anyway, the Gunpowder Plot sure pissed off the protestants. MORE TENSION.

The best thing about James, imo, is that Macbeth was written to suit his tastes (Scotland, witchcraft, assassinations, betrayals) and it’s my fav Shakespeare play. Fun fact— James was married to a woman, but he was suuuuper into having sex with guys for a straight man. How he fit that into his strict theology, I don’t know.

James is good at sons, though. He closes his eyes, thinks of England, and makes a few with his wife, nice and legit. The eldest surviving one is Charles. Charles takes over when James dies, but he is just not to the taste of English people. They like a nice, burly, physical, butch king. Charles is small and nerdy and fancy and he’s very up his own ass about how much God chose him to rule (got that from his dad), so he doesn’t play well with Parliament and tries to rule single-handedly and they fight back and forth.

Meanwhile, a new religious sect, Puritanism, has been catching on. And they SUCK. They just hate joy. Puritanism in a nutshell is this: “You are a disgusting sinful worm. You were born that way and your best shot at avoiding Hell is to spend your whole life apologizing to God for existing and showing Him how sorry you are by being as miserable as you can and by making others miserable, too.” For some reason, people kept joining despite the obvious flaws in the mission statement. And lots of ‘em made it into Parliament where they hassled Charles.

Charles and Parliament fight back and forth and it ends in the start of the English Civil War. Which is just… well… 

OK. So, you have one army where you get a cool job commanding troops if you’re from a famous family and you have nice hair and cool clothes. War is an excuse to party, amirite?? Bring your lady friends, it’s basically glamping! These are Charles's team. The Cavaliers (aka Royalists). The other side, the Puritans (aka Roundheads), are like… We don’t party, ever. Fun? Never heard of her. We’re here to work hard and suffer. We promote people who are actually GOOD at army things. 

Guess which side wins. Did you say the Puritans? BINGO. Now we have THREE religious groups that hate each other— Catholics, Protestants (Anglicans), and Puritans. 

After winning the war and capturing Charles, the Puritans, led by Oliver Cromwell, put Charles on trial. They convict and execute him (kind of Charles’s fault, they gave him chances to back down and leave quietly before and during the trial, but he was all prat, all the time, so he and his head parted ways). The Puritans take over under Cromwell (who calls himself The Lord Protector) and they just SUUUUUCK so very much. They outlaw all forms of pleasure. Sports, make-up, nice clothes, theatre, going to church on Christmas (??)… So that goes on for over a decade and the English are like FML. (I could tell you so many more wild Puritan stories if I had space). This is called "The Reformation."

Now, Americans, if you’re sniggering at England’s silliness, allow me to point out that the PILGRIMS, our beloved founders, were PURITANS. People who sucked so much that they got kicked out of their country and told to go suck elsewhere. Our cultural DNA is full of this exact suck. And to this day, we’re known for witch hunts and our nipples still aren’t free. 

Fortunately Cromwell dies of natural causes. He is succeeded very briefly by his son, but the English are like FUCK THIS NOISE. They run Cromwell, Jr. off and decide they were MUCH better off with a nice King or Queen than with a “Lord Protector” who outlawed eating goose on Christmas. Luckily, before Charles was beheaded, he'd fathered a brace of sons— Charles II and James II. They’re all grown up and they have been stashed safely away in hopes of exactly this occasion. 

Charles II is brought home from exile (this is called "The Restoration") and he is fun AF (if you’re rich and cool and louche). His username is the “Merry Monarch.” Protestant, but chill about Catholics. His brother is Catholic, actually. Understandably he was not a fan of Puritans, though. He has Cromwell’s bones dug up and dragged around for posthumous shaming. 

Charles II is GREAT at sons generally (he made 7), but HORRIBLE at legitimate sons (he made 0). So when he dies, the Catholic brother takes over. 

James II tries to pull a mini Bloody Mary and do a soft re-Catholicization of England. Everyone is like OH HELL NO. They shake him off like a bad case of fleas, and, visions of headless fathers dancing in his head, he leaves without much trouble… this is called "The Glorious Revolution” even though neither of those words really applies. 

To replace him, the English bring in his protestant daughter Mary and her Dutch hubby, William of Orange. Parliament keeps a firm grip on a lot of the power going forward, and the monarchy loses more and more influence over time until they become the figureheads they currently are. 

More on how all this affects poetry (I’ll be sorta brief, I swear) in the next episode...

King Charles II whose enviable hairdo has been immortalized in the form of Cavalier King Charles spaniels' ears: