“The So-called Council of State” 1649–1652My discourse, indeed, will be of matters neither small nor mean: a king in all his
power, ruling according to his lust after he had overthrown our laws and oppressed
our religion, at length overcome in battle by his own people which had served a long
term of slavery;... [and] condemned to capital punishment by the highest court of
the realm and beheaded before the very gates of the palace.... For what majesty of an
high-enthroned king ever shone with brilliance such as that which flashed forth from
the people of England when they had shaken off this ancient and enduring supersti-
tion. (CPW IV.1, 302–3)An epic-like invocation seeks comparable divine aid for the prose-poet who has
been chosen for, and has fully prepared himself for, the writing of this epic:
Even though the leaders of our state have authorized me to undertake this task... a
duty second in importance to theirs alone... and, although I take great pride in their
decision that by their wishes I before all others should be the one to take on this
enviable task for the noble liberators of my country (because indeed from early youth
I eagerly pursued studies which impelled me to celebrate, if not to perform, the lofti-
est actions)... I lose heart and turn to aid from on high. I call on almighty God, giver
of all gifts, to grant that just as success and righteousness attended those famous men
who led us to liberty, who crushed in line of battle the insolence of the king and the
passion of the tyrant... so I may now with good success and in very truth refute and
bring to naught the ill-tempered lies of this barbarous rhetorician [Salmasius]. (305–6)If circumstances preclude the writing of his long-projected epic poem, he wants, it
seems, to regard this work as some kind of substitute.
But his purposes here – to win over his chief audience, the learned of Europe –
require a mix of genres and styles. Personal invective is prominent among them. He
assails the mighty reputation of Salmasius with a barrage of epithets branding him a
fool, a pedant, a slavish toady, a meer grammarian, and a bad scholar. “You,” he
taunts, are a “tricky turncoat,” a “merchant of hot air,” “a homeless, houseless,
worthless man of straw,” a “prattling orator,” “an unpractised ignoramus,” a “dull,
stupid, ranting, wrangling advocate,” an “empty windbag,” a “truant cockerel,” a
“boring little weevil,” a “wretched false prophet,” a “luckless wretch” whose brain
is befogged, a “slave on horseback,” a “black rogue,” a “cheap French mounte-
bank,” a “crackbrained, moneygrabbing Frenchman.”^178 He supports those labels
with a mix of questionable rumor and textual evidence, catching the grammarian
out in several instances of bad Latin, and repeating the unproved but widely circu-
lated story that Salmasius wrote for hire, taking a hundred sovereigns from the
penniless Charles II.^179 Convicting Salmasius of lifting misunderstood tidbits of
Roman history and historians (notably Tacitus) out of context, he draws a sharp
contrast between Salmasius as a mere commonplacer and himself as a true scholar,
deeply versed in the original texts.^180 Salmasius “has spent his time thumbing an-
thologies and dictionaries and glossaries, instead of reading through good authors