The Politics of Wedding Poetry under the Cromwellian Protectorate: Sir William Davenant and “Hymen’s Policy”

Abstract: This essay presents a reading of Sir William Davenant’s previously unstudied poem “Epithalamium. The Morning after the Marriage of the Earl of Barymore with Mrs. Martha Laurence,” written in October 1656. The poem offers a significant comparison to Andrew Marvell’s near-contemporary wedding song for the marriage of Oliver Cromwell’s daughter Mary. It thereby sheds light on Cromwellian poets’ efforts to formulate a poetic language in which to address the Protectoral court. The essay contextualizes the poem in the political realignment of the Cromwellian regime in 1656–1657. It suggests that Davenant’s paradoxical style attempts to adapt the courtly epithalamium to the minimalistic religious settlement and the principle of toleration for Protestants that underpinned the Cromwellian coalition. In this way, the poem illustrates how the 1650s Davenant can be read as a Cromwellian poet, alongside Marvell, Edmund Waller, and even John Milton, developing his ambitious and idiosyncratic ideas about public festivity and civil religion.