Poet Samuel Daniel's career seemed to have its share of ups and downs. In 1592 he was fined for causing a family feud, in 1605 he was threatened with imprisonment for his play "Philotas", and incurred the wrath of the authorities again in 1604 with "The Civil Wars".

Copyright Henry E. Huntington Library and Art Gallery 2000

In 1592 the poet Samuel Daniel was living in London in the household of one of his first patrons, Sir Edward Dymoke. Dymoke was on very bad terms with his uncle, the earl of Lincoln, and on 1 March 1592 he wrote a letter to the earl's son complaining of the earl's hostility and threatening to repay it in kind. Dymoke later decided against sending the letter and gave it to Daniel to burn. Daniel, however, put the letter in a hole in the wall of Dymoke's house. Four years later, after an improvement of relations, Dymoke sold the house to the earl, who discovered the letter as he was pulling down walls for repairs. The earl was angry enough to start legal action against Dymoke, which finally ended in 1610 with a very heavy fine.'

Daniel seems to have suffered no lasting consequences from the mistake he made in 1592, but it did set a kind of precedent for a more serious problem that he encountered in 1605 over the publication of his play Philotas. The story is fairly well known and needs only to be summarized here.2 In January of 1605, Daniel was called before the Privy Council on account of a recent performance of the play by the Children of the Queen's Revels. (This was the same theatrical company that, while Daniel had been acting as licenser of plays, had been in trouble for Marston's The Dutch Courtesan and would remain in disgrace for its performance of Philotas and later Eastward Ho.) Composition of Philotas had originally begun in 1596, according to Daniel, under the patronage of Lord Mountjoy, and three acts were completed by the time of the Essex rebellion in 1601. At that point Daniel abandoned the play, whether motivated by prudence or distracted by other works. However, in i6o4 or 1605, he finished the last two acts in a manner that made the play considerably more sympathetic to the character of Philotas, whose resemblance to Essex was suspiciously apparent to Robert Cecil and the other members of the Privy Council. The council examined Daniel and frightened him sufficiently to generate apologetic letters to Cecil and to Lord Mountjoy, but it seems that the council must have dropped whatever charges were involved because the play appears in the 1607 and i6m editions of Daniel's works.3

The evidence for Daniel's guilt or innocence is often contradictory. In his own defense, Daniel pointed out that it was a play begun long before the Essex troubles and claimed he finished it only because he was short of money.4 He also claimed that he chose the story of Philotas for its general lessons rather than specific correspondences-because "it hath a generall alliance to the frailty of greatnesse, and the vsuall workings of ambition, the perpetuall subjects of books and Tragedies."S Similarly, he wrote to Cecil that his purpose in writing the play was to "reduce the stage from idlenes to those grave presentments of antiquitie used by the wisest nations."6 In his letter to Cecil, he depicts himself as so surprised and appalled at the Privy Council's interpretation of Philotas that he makes the following offer: "yf it shall seeme sknenduous [scandalous] to any by misconceiving it, and yr honour be so pleased I will finde the meanes to let it fall of it self, by withdrawing the booke & mee to my pore home, prtending some other occasion, so yt the supresssing it by autoritie might not make the world to ymagin other matters in it then there is."7

These protestations of innocence notwithstanding, a number of Daniel's contemporaries, as well as many present-day literary critics, have believed that the connection between Philotas and Essex is very apparent in the last two acts.g Daniel was connected to several figures in the Essex circle; as Cecil Seronsy points out, "Mountjoy, Sir Thomas Egerton, Lord Howard, the Countess of Bedford, and the Earl of Southampton, who were all intimate with Essex, were held in high esteem by Daniel, who addressed verses of commendation to all of them."9 Brents Stirling makes a case against Daniel that rests on five points: the common understanding that history had contemporary applications; his connections with the Essex circle; the timing of his revisions and expansions of the play; his altering of details of the play to further the similarity to the Essex case; and his subsequent efforts to change or cover up potentially suspicious aspects of the play, testifying to his consciousness of its relevance to the Essex case.` More significantly still, not all of Daniel's reflections on his troubles assume the cringingly apologetic tone of his offer to Cecil. In the same letter he obliquely asserts his right to make connections between Philotas and Essex by claiming that such parallels are universal: "No tyme but brought forth the like concurrencies, the like interstriving for place and dignitie, the like supplantations, rysings & overthrowes, so yt there is nothing new under the Sunne, nothing in theas tymes yt is not in bookes, nor in bookes that is not in theas tymes."" In a letter to Mountjoy, Daniel takes a totally different tone than he did in his offer to Cecil to retreat to his home until the troubles blow over; instead, he insists that "the world must, & shall know myne innocencie whilst I have a pen to shew it. and for yt I know I shall live inter historiam temporis as well as great men, I must not be such an abject unto my self as to neglect my repution [sic], and having bene knowne throughout all England for my virtue I will not leave a stayne of villanie uppon my name whatsoever error els might skape me unfortunately thorow myne indiscreation, & misunderstanding of the tyme."12

Thus Daniel's sense of himself as political analyst and as a member of his society undermines the picture of dejected apology some of his letters create and unsettles the usual critical platitudes about Daniel's character-shy, humble, conservative, and quiet. Indeed, Daniel's difficulties demonstrate conflicting impulses in his life and work: the struggle between his desire to succeed as courtier and poet, on the one hand, and his need to comment on the political problems of the past and present, on the other.13 Dymoke's entrusting of the letter to Daniel portrays Daniel as the reliable servant, the lesser courtier to the greater one, just as the writing of Philotas dutifully fulfills the expectations of Mountjoy as his patron, as well as the current courtly interest in Senecan drama. This is the Samuel Daniel who shaped his career with some success as a minor courtier: beginning with his stint as tutor to William Herbert, the future earl of Pembroke, and his service to Herbert's mother, the countess of Pembroke, Daniel moved on to attract Fulke Greville, Lord Mountjoy, and later Lord Ellesmere, the Lord Chancellor, as his patrons. He tutored Anne Clifford, and at the time of his death was given a grateful remembrance by her, a memorial erected at her expense. At the instigation of the countess of Bedford, he presented James I with a celebratory poem during a pause in his coronation procession. Daniel soon won his post as licenser of plays, wrote several masques for performance at court, and went on to be appointed groom of the queen's chamber.

However, Daniel's failure to destroy the Dymoke letter as ordered and his willful-and seemingly suicidal-revision of Philotas after the Essex affair make this picture of eager service more complicated. These two incidents testify to a side of Daniel that seems invested less in caution than in exploring the power he could obtain through "historic temporis," whether broadly philosophical or contemporary and specific to the point of local intrigue. This side of Daniel is unwilling to give up his privilege to know about, meditate on, and comment on the historical, political, and social events of the day, and realizes that such knowledge is dangerous but also empowering. Thus, in failing to destroy the letter to the earl of Lincoln and hiding it in the wall, Daniel-whether consciously or subconsciously-retained physical evidence of his access to the secret affairs of his patron, even while acknowledging the incendiary nature of such evidence by hiding it. Whether Daniel left the letter there intentionally or by accident is impossible to determine, but the question leads to interesting avenues of speculation about the way patrons could sometimes be at the merry of their servants.

In the completion of Philotas, Daniel seems to be asserting his right to see connections between classical stories and the present day, and his vocation to understand the value of history for the observer of the current political scene. Thus Daniel's life, as well as his works, records a struggle between his desire to be useful-that is, employable within the dominant paradigm of courtly serviceand his desire to be knowledgeable-to undertake serious investigations of the subjects he was writing about and to go beyond conventional platitudes in analyzing the causes and results of the problems he was grappling with.

Daniel's conflict between prudence and disclosure permeates The Civil Wars, an epic poem begun in 1595 and based on the struggles between the Houses of Lancaster and York. In this poem, the conflict is perhaps most clearly reflected in the different and competing notions of historiography that Daniel presents to introduce his account of the events from the deposition of Richard II to the reign of Henry VI. In his quest to be an acceptable courtier, Daniel begins his poem by invoking some of the most traditional and politically "safe" reasons for writing a history, as a didactic exercise in piety and morality. At its most traditional, this sort of historiography teaches that the hand of God is everywhere in history; we hear that history shows the reward of virtue and the punishment of sin. At its most "historical," it tells us that the various forms of political resistance shown to the English kings of the past always brought disaster upon the country.14 This theory of historiography is invoked at the beginning of many sixteenth-century histories, including the midcentury poem The Mirror for Magistrates; the chronicle histories of Hall, Holinshed, and Stow; many of the history plays published in the explosion of that genre in the i59os; and the prose and verse narrative histories of the same decade. However, the impact of this theory on the historical texts it introduces rhetorically has sometimes been overestimated;`5 much of the time it seems to serve as useful camouflage, hiding from the censors the much more complex and interesting ideas about history that are presented within the texts themselves. Daniel also gestures at this tradition of God's punishment and reward at the beginning of the 1609 edition of his work; he writes, "Come sacred Virtue: I no Muse, but thee, / Inuoke, in this great labour I intend" (L4.1-2).'6 He asks Virtue to "rayse up a worke, for later times to see, / That may thy glorie, and my paynes commend" (L4.5-6). For many critics, this has been convincing enough evidence that Daniel's historiography was of the traditionally didactic kind. 17

However, Daniel's opening commitment of his history to the cause of virtue is diluted just two verses later when he couples his invocation of Virtue with one to "MEMORIE, preserv'resse of things done" (L6.1-2). "Memorie" represents a challenge to the traditional form of didactic history in the shape of another theory of historiography that was gaining an increasingly important place in contemporary descriptions: telling an accurate and unmoralized story, using the facts at one's disposal to reconstruct the past but understanding that a previous age was a distinct and different entity from the present. Such histories interested themselves primarily in the secondary and human causes of historical events and, without a moral agenda, explored political situations. These new theories of history were entering the field from the researches of the antiquarians, the lawyers, and the clerics, and from the methods of both ancient and Continental historians such as Tacitus, Guicciardini, and Machiavelli.'8 Daniel reveals his affinity for this kind of historiography when he asks Memorie for the facts of the LancasterYork story and claims that his poem is "Unintermixt with fictions, fantasies. / I versifie the troth; not Poetize" (L6.7-8). Thus Daniel sets an intrinsic conflict between the moral and the objective at the heart of his endeavor, which is a new approach to political history founded on the limitations of both.'9

Daniel found this conflict productive and important enough to engage with it in all of his historical works. When he finally abandoned The Civil Wars to start work on a prose history of England, he carried this dichotomy over into the prefaces to the later work, The Collection of the History of England (1626). In his "Epistle Dedicatory" to Robert Carr, Daniel expresses his hope that James I might see this book through Carr, and reassures the king that he will "tread as tenderly on the graues of his magnificent Progenitors, as possibly I can: Knowing there may (in a kind) be Laesa Maiestas, euen against dead Princes."2 In making the conservative historiographical move, however, Daniel immediately turns it upside down by following it with the dictates of the newer historiographical objectivism:

And as in reuerence to thee, I will deliuer nothing but what is fit for the world to know, so through the whole worke I will make conscience that it shall know nothing but (as faithfully as I can gather it) Truth: protesting herein to haue no other passion, then the zeale therof, nor to hold any stubborne opinion, but lyable to submission and better information."

Making history "fit for the world to know" seems threatened by the turn to "nothing but . . . Truth"; and "reverence" and "conscience" face each other as antagonists in this dedication. Interestingly, even the final two checks on historiography, "submission and better information," seem to restate the conflict between the didactic and the "realistic" historian-the one subject to the demands of political authority and the other to those of factual truth.

Why does Daniel find this dichotomy so compelling? By invoking the ideal of didactic history, Daniel urges his reader that there is something to be gained by reading this history. However, the old didactic lessons of God and morality are rendered inapplicable by the components of political history, including evidence demanding that the historian tell both sides of the story; the perception that success is based more on political acumen tried by circumstance than on virtue; and the understanding that a historical figure's motives, thoughts, and feelings set political and historical events into motion. At the same time, some of what the new political history might seek out-such as motivation or intention, for exampleis unrecoverable. Political history, therefore, gives the reader both the sense of the importance of such knowledge and the realization that it is inaccessible. This dual sense transforms the didactic purpose of history into something much more complex: the common ground for past and present in didactic history has ceased to be the commonality of God's hand in history and starts to become the realities of political life-in their contingent way universal-including the realizations that legitimacy and political strength are not always united in one person; that deficiencies in leadership will be exploited by others to augment their own power; and that political figures are not always in control of the movements they appear to be leading. Daniel tells us that if we truly seek to understand the political life of the present through the filter of history, we must take with us the political lessons that are common to both past and present, and at the same time realize that what is irrecoverable from the past-such as the motivations of historical agents-is vitally important and (relatively) accessible in the present. These motivations therefore need to be pursued, investigated, and analyzed, despite the unwillingness of current political leaders to give the political nation access to the arcana imperii, "mysteries of state."

Let us return to The Civil Wars to see how this works. The dichotomy between history as moralizing tale and history as accurate re-creation is repeated in the dedication to a later edition of the poem (i6o9), the address to the countess dowager of Pembroke. Early in the dedication Daniel announces that the work was undertaken "with a purpose, to shewe the deformities of Ciuile Dissension, and the miserable euents of Rebellions, Conspiracies, and bloudy Reuengements, which followed (as in a circle) upon that breach of the due course of Succession, by the Vsurpation of Hen. 4."22 This passage suggests moralizing history of the most traditional, didactic, and politically conservative kind (and is consistently cited by critics as fully representative of Daniel's historiography). Luckily for us as readers, it does not accurately reflect the complexity of The Civil Wars, a complexity augured by the juxtaposition of the paragraph quoted above with the one that immediately follows it. Here Daniel insists that he has "carefully followed that truth which is deliuered in the Histories without adding to, or subtracting from, the general receiu'd opinion of things as we finde them in our common Annalles" (p. 67). Interestingly, Daniel pauses at, but then moves quickly on from, the historian's imperative to report the truth, or the "facts," of the case to the historian's obligation to report the common view of what happened. This complicates the idea of history as an objective account of the truth, making it both a record of what actually happened and a collection of historical authority built up by subsequent historians and the societies in which they lived and wrote. Furthermore, Daniel's insistence that he receives his history from a "general receiu'd opinion of things" highlights the fact that this historical authority may be faulty, that his source may be selective, biased, or lacking in the facts necessary for a complete picture. A little later, Daniel continues his revision of what kind of truth a historian is seeking when he declares, "I knowe, in these publike actions, there are ewer popular bruites, and opinions, which run according to the time and the Mass of mens affections: and it is the part of an Historian, to recite them, not to rule them" (p. 67).

By allowing himself to report popular sentiment as an aspect of the historian's duty to the truth, Daniel uncovers the radical potential of writing history: sharing the historian's authority with the populace as a whole and giving voice to a body of folkloric history and knowledge. At the same time, he implies the distance of that knowledge from an objective "Truth" by describing it as limited by "the time and the biass of men's affections." Thus, when Daniel returns to the idea of the didactic value of history, his refinements of the concepts of morality and truth allow him to attribute an instructive purpose to history that is far more complex and sophisticated than the feeble cheerleading for the current regime that so many have seen as the didactic goal of sixteenth-century English histories:

And although many of these Images are drawne with the pencil of mine owne conceiuing: yet I knowe, they are according to the portraiture of Nature; and carrie a resemblance to the life of Action, and their complexions whom they represent. For I see, Ambition, Faction, and Affections, speake euer one Language, weare like colours (though in seuerall fashions) feed, and are fed with the same nutriments; and only vary but in time. (P 68)

The subject of his history-the political reality of the endless struggle for power-is comprehensible through the contemporary operation of "Ambition, Faction, and Affections" (that is, bias), which achieve their present meaning in turn from a process of understanding how they functioned in past societies, a process of historical meditation that is necessarily incomplete and imperfect. In this way, Daniel's history illuminates both past and present, their shared political realities and their differences. It is precisely the incompleteness of the historian's access to the different "complexions" and "fashions" of the past-the fact that ambitions and affections lived also in the minds of those long dead-that demonstrates to him and to his readers that the present needs to be subjected to the same kind of analysis. Thus, "didactic" history, stiffened with the imperatives of a more objective and political history, becomes political analysis available for contemporary application.23

Daniel's prefatory verses, mixing invocation with dedication, reveal a practical side to his theorizing about historiography. His claim to have no muse but Virtue is undercut by varying sets of dedications in the different editions of the poem; indeed, in all the editions before i6o9, Elizabeth's name occupied Virtue's place, with Daniel insisting that he would have no muse but the queen. In the dedication to Elizabeth in the i6oi edition, Daniel claims that he "by that allreuiuing powre obtain'd, / That comfort which my muse and me hath blest" and thus, he implies, he was able to "Bring here this worke of Wane" (p. 65). From the i6oi edition onward, his prefatory verses make it clear that he owes the existence of The Civil Wars not to singular inspiration but to multiple patrons. In his i6o9 dedication to the countess dowager of Pembroke, he writes that he has resumed work on the poem in order to "pay my debts and the recknings of my gratitude to their honour who have donne me good, and furthered this Worke" (p. 67). More significantly still, in all editions Daniel follows the stanza that announces his sole reliance on Virtue with an invocation to Lord Mountjoy himself, thus placing a major patron between the already divided allegiance to Virtue and Memory. He gives Mountjoy nearly physical presence in his work, referring-as he also does in a later dedication to this patron (p. 66)-to the time that he lived in Mountjoy's house: "I, who heretofore have liv'd by thee, / Doo giue thee now a roome to liue with me" (LS.y-8).4 These lines lend a dif ferent valence to the traditional invocation of the muse; Daniel juxtaposes the literary need for the muse's inspiration with the financial and physical needs to be supplied by one's patron-not only for living expenses but also, perhaps, political protection. Thus, not only does Daniel juxtapose different versions of history to complicate his purported sole allegiance to Virtue, but he also reminds his readers that theorizations of historiography have to be founded upon the security of bed and board.

Daniel reconfigures the driving paradox of his work-the conflict between his need to subscribe to a practical morality and his need to scrutinize his topic rigorously-through the ambiguous account he gives of historical causality. Causation was another vexed question for historians of this time, caught as they were between the older tradition of invoking Divine intervention as the ultimate cause and a newer interest in describing events objectively.25 One way Daniel stages this historiographical dilemma is through an oscillation in the poem between providential explanations of God's presence in history and ascription of events to an inscrutable and amoral fate. The use of fate as an explanation of historical events was, of course, another conventional tool for the narration of history, particularly in the genre known as the de casibus tragedies. These stories often concentrated on the career of a single person and demonstrated how the wheel of fortune moves a person's life through prosperity and adversity. However, more recent histories had transformed the idea of fate into the more secular and political Italian idea of fortune, exemplified in the works of Macchiavelli and developed to account for the unpredictability and amorality of historical events.26 Thus, the idea of fortune offers Daniel another frame of reference for historical causation. His use of the notion of fortune signals his striking out into political, social, and psychological arenas to explain the story of Richard III's deposition and Henry Tudor's victory.

This particular story, that of Richard and Henry, is the one that begins The Civil Wars, and no story posed greater interpretive problems or greater personal risk for the historian. Richard's reign and deposition and Henry's ascension of the throne occupy the first three books of the poem and made up the entirety of the i 595 edition. As Daniel develops the historiographical problem of causation-indeed, as he proceeds through any of the events recorded he creates a narrative that mines the potential of both poetry and history. Specifically, although Daniel vows that this will be an accurate history ("I versify the troth; not Poetize"), he does claim for himself one particular poetic privilege:

I have onely vsed that poetical licence, of framing speaches to the persons of men according to their occasions; as C. Salustius and I Liuius (though Writers in Prose, yet in that kinde Poets) haue, with diuers other antient and modern Writers, done before me. (R 68)

The effect of these "poetical" speeches is to highlight character and motivation in the historical figures he is presenting; the speeches are more evocative of character than they are instrumental in furthering the plot, and often they recount what is happening in the minds of the various figures as they act on and react to the events of the history. However, character and motivation are almost always rendered as ambivalent or multiple, and ultimately impossible to know with certainty. The speeches contain contradictory elements, and they elicit from Daniel a multivoiced commentary. As poet-historian, he can and does take up the stance of a front-row observer at the moment of the drama, or alternatively the stance of a distant narrator recounting a sequence of long-past events. He often does both simultaneously, and the avowed "poetry" of his technique, the invented speeches, allows him to append a subjective, speculative commentary to the bare outlines of the history, evaluating the speaker in open-ended ways. This ambiguity points out to the reader that the mapping of past onto present produces an incomplete picture-that the didactic project of history fails to the extent that it cannot recover the personalities that drove the historical events. This, in turn, reminds the reader interested in acquiring political wisdom of the importance of understanding such things in the political present-the "Ambition, Faction, and Affections" of the people in power-despite official discouragement of speculations on the current political scene.

Providential theories of causation are certainly evident in the first three books of The Civil Wars. However, a political agenda behind these providential explanations is not so easily distinguished. Daniel begins by ascribing the kingdom's misfortunes to Richard's minority; a child ruler is "the plague which God Both threat / Vnto those kingdomes which he will transport / To other Lynes, or utterly defeat" (L28.q.-6). In the 1595 edition, Richard's minority is described as "this plague the heauens do for iniustice threat" (L33.q.). Thus Richard himself is the curse imposed upon England, and Daniel slips in the idea that a transfer of power to another family ("other Lynes") might be divinely sanctioned. Similarly, when Daniel considers Richard's failure, on the eve of his departure to Ireland, to perceive the exiled Henry as a threat, he attributes Richard's oversight to Divine intervention:

So blindes the sharpest counsels of the wise This ouershadowing Prouidence on hie; And dazzleth all their dearest sighted eyes, That they see not how nakedly they lie.

(1-78.1-4)

Again, Providence hardly seems to be working in favor of the legitimate monarch; instead, for reasons here left unstated, God is working actively for Richard's downfall. Several stanzas later, however, Divine portents seem to be sounding the impending disaster of Henry's invasion of England; Daniel describes the appearance of comets and stars as omens threatening disaster to the kingdom: "in this wide-spread volume of the skies, / The booke of Prouidence disclosed stood, / Warnings of wrath, foregoing miseries" (Lm3.2-4). Unlike the active intervention that seemed to be required to keep Richard from perceiving the threat that Henry offers, however, this Divine message seems to be merely predictive. The fearful consequences of Henry's usurpation, anticipated in this book and the next, are depicted in great detail (Lio7-118 and 11.95-103); but they are also accompanied by an occasional reminder that God has visited these troubles on England because of the faults of king and subjects. Daniel postulates some "careful lookers-on" (II.102) who do not receive Henry's coronation with the same joy as the crowd's; their lament seeks to excuse Richard, claiming that "time might well haue curd what was amisse" (II. 103.a), but they also acknowledge the Divine punishment implicit in the deposition:

But yet in this, the heauens, we feare, prepare

Confusion for our sinnes, as well as his;

And his calamitie beginneth ours:

For, he his owne, and we abused his powre.

(II-103.5-8)

It is noteworthy that while much of the discussion of Richard's failure falls into the providentialist category, much of the description of Henry's success is cast in terms of fate or fortune. By avoiding providential explanations of Henry's success, Daniel is of course protecting himself from appearing to believe that a usurper of the throne enjoys Divine sanction. However, by concentrating on how the Divine will opposes itself to Richard, Daniel also emphasizes the faultiness of Richard's reign. Furthermore, Daniel's use of fortune to explain Henry's rise to power enables him to investigate more immediate secondary causes of Henry's success, such as his leadership abilities and his championship of the common people.

Fortune is invoked at the beginning of the poem to explain the cyclical nature of political power and the prospects of the kingdom as a whole. Preceding the providential explanation of Richard's minority as Divine curse is a disquisition on the role fortune plays in leaving the throne of England to a child; it was, Daniel claims,

ordain'd by fate

To stay the course of what might growe too hie:

Here was a stop, that Greatnesse did abate,

When powre vpon so weake a base did lie.

(1.21.3-6)

The idea of the rise and fall of England's fortune is used fifty lines later as a paradigm to explain the distribution of power, specifically among the powerful noblemen at court: "Factions must be, and these varieties: / And some must fall, that other-some may rise" (I.74.7-8). However, the single person whose destiny is most closely linked with the movements of fortune is Henry Bolingbroke. For example, in his account of the eve of Henry's return from France, Daniel addresses Henry to explain the reasons for his success: "This care, the Heauens, Fate, and Fortune tooke, / To bring thee to thy Scepter easily" (L84.3-4). These lines suggest an unusual mix of Providence and fate. Furthermore, Daniel's descriptions of Henry's rise to power are heavily laced with the language of fortune, making for a strange mixture of blame and exculpation:

Then, Fortune, thou art guiltie of his deed:

That didst his state aboue his hopes erect:

And thou must beare some blame of his great sinne;

That lefst him worse, then when he did beginne.

Thou didst conspire with Pride, and with the Time,

To make so easie an ascent to wrong,

That he who had no thought so hie to dime

(With fauouring comfort still allur'd along)

Was with occasion thrust into the crime;

Seeing others weakenes and his part so strong.

And who is there, in such a case that will

Do good, and feare, that may liue free with ill?

(1-93.5-8 and 94.1-8)

Clearly, what Henry did is at some moments condemned, referred to as a "great sin," an "ascent to wrong," "the crime," and so forth. But just as clear is the theme that fortune is as much if not more to blame than Henry, who seems strangely passive in these lines. Henry has no hopes or thoughts for the throne until fortune makes his ascent easy and thus becomes "guilty of his deed." Here fortune increasingly seems to represent simply the course of political events, to be a personification of coincidence or contingency; by invoking fortune as the initiator of Henry's success, Daniel implies that Henry was carried onto the throne by the tide of events surrounding him. Furthermore, in the one active part attributed to him in these two stanzas, there is a hint of justification for Henry's actions-"seeing others weaknes and his part so strong." This is ambiguous language; it endows Henry with political acumen, at least, and perhaps even a rather Machiavellian legitimacy. The ambiguity is heightened by the last line of the second stanza, which slightly upsets the previous condemnation of Henry's deed by describing it as "living free," albeit with "ill." Even more oddly, what Henry should have done-sticking to the straight and narrow and denying all thoughts of kingship-is described as "do[ing] good and fear[ing]." What fear is it that an obedient subject would face? Perhaps the implication here is that Richard has put Henry in a position that forces him to seek the throne to survive. Certainly that would be one explanation for the sense hovering in these stanzas that Henry did not wish to be king, a position that left him "worse then when he did beginne."

Questions of the ambiguity of his language aside, Daniel's invocation of fortune opens up a way for him to talk about Henry as a partially innocent because reluctant conqueror. This in turn gives Daniel an entry into investigating Henry's halting acquisition of the crown, from his protests that he was only there to reform abuses to his gradual acquiescence to his followers' enthusiastic demands for his kingship. Daniel's portrayal ponders Henry's motivations, asking if his seeming reluctance was real or rather a cleverly concocted pose:

Doubtfull at first, he warie doth proceed;

Seems not t'affect that, which he did effect:

Or else perhaps seemes, as he meant indeed,

Sought but his owne, and did no more expect.

(1-93.1-4)

The tentativeness of the description underlines Daniel's point that the interior motivation of historical figures is lost to us and can only be speculated upon. From fortune, then, Daniel moves to more concrete investigations of political motivations and strategies; it is notable that what follows the two-stanza description of fortune's role is an even longer discussion of Henry's words, motives, and possible roles, running the gamut from sincere reformer to deceptive actor (I.95-98). Daniel's discussion of Henry's motives takes a winding path: first he claims that he will not "say or think" that Henry's motives were other than stated, but, of course, Daniel immediately supplies a fairly convincing case for the idea that Henry used his grievance against Richard to justify his return to England for more ambitious reasons:

Though we might say, and thinke, that this pretence

Was but a shadow to the intended act ...

For that hereby thou mightst win confidence

With those, who else thy course might hap distract,

And all suspicion of thy drift remove;

Since men easily credit whom they love.

(1.96.1-2; 5-8)

Next, Daniel makes a sweetly unpersuasive disclaimer, refusing to believe the worst of Henry and claiming, with saccharine piety, to extend Christian charity to the dead. These stanzas imply Henry's conscious orchestration of his movement toward the throne as Daniel sardonically refuses to pry into interior motives of long-dead people. However, in a characteristic reversal, the last stanza neatly up-ends all of these meditations on political strategy. Daniel claims that "outward lookers on" who do not understand politics might be fooled into believing that Henry's actions were determined by himself instead of the external forces that do in fact control them:

[They] hold that policie, which was but fate;

Imagining, all former acts did run

Vnto that course they see th'effects relate;

Whil'st still too short they come, or cast too far,

And make these great men wiser then they are.

(I.99-4-8)

In these lines, Daniel upsets his own relatively cynical comments on Henry's motives, questions the efficacy of political analysis of motives generally, and obliquely exculpates Henry-all at the same time. Interestingly, after having demonstrated the unrecoverability of history through his speculative language, Daniel here reverses that as well, implying that the historian possesses superior knowledgeand, more interestingly still, superior because it is simpler-to that of the posited "outward lookers on."

This is a startling instance of the blurring of traditional historiographical distinctions that we have seen as central to Daniel's historical project. Fate and Providence seem to be inextricably intermixed: fate gives Henry the throne while, as we have seen, it is Providence that denies it to Richard. Motive is at once deeply important-we are, after all, concerned with "these great men"-but possibly overrated: we must be careful not to make them "wiser then they are." And the role of political analysis in history is deeply conflicted: the argument that seems to denigrate a political reading of history is also the move that legitimizes the politically radical act of deposing the king. "Lookers on" and the historian compete with each other in this passage to offer definitive explanations of the same events.

Perhaps the best way to untangle this intricate knot of piety and politics is to remember Daniel's ultimate reliance on the reader. The final point he makes about the dichotomy between moral and political history in his prefaces to his works is this: that the instructive inconsistencies shaken out by the contrast are left up to the reader to understand, synthesize, and use. In this way, Daniel shares the work of doing history with the reader and builds himself a defense against those who would find the messages of his history subversive. In the i6o9 dedication to The Civil Wars, Daniel highlights the part of the beholder of the historical spectacle and gives him or her the power of judgment: "And all these great actions are openly presented on the Stage of the World: where, there are euer Spectators, who will fudge and censure how men personate those parts, which they are set to perform" (p. 68). In the "Advertisement to the Reader" at the beginning of the Collection of the History of England he becomes more specific:

Desirous to deliuer things done, in as euen and quiet an Order, as such an heape will permit, without quarrelling with the Beleefe of Antiquity, depraving the Actions of other Nations to advance our owne, or keeping back those Reasons of State they had, for what they did in those times: holding it fittest and best agreeing with Integrity (the chiefest duty of a Writer) to leave things to their owne Fame, and the Censure thereof to the Reader, as being his part rather then mine, who am onely to recite things done, not to rule them.27

In this mixture of order and chaos, praise and objectivity, belief and fact, fame and censure, Daniel leaves the reader to sort through this fruitful "heape."