Cecilia Cooper and The Battle of Tewkesbury

Michael Page

© Michael Page, 2001

Among the Romantic era texts recently made available in the Corvey collection is a slender volume with the title of The Battle of Tewkesbury by one Cecilia Cooper. Like many of the Corvey volumes, The Battle of Tewkesbury is an obscure artifact. There is a copy in the British Library as one would suspect; but beyond that, only three other libraries listed on the OCLC WorldCat database appear to own a copy: Yale University, Edinburgh University, and the University of Texas. It is possible that other libraries have the volume and just don't catalog it in this manner, but in this day and age, that makes the book virtually inaccessible. Now made more readily available in microfiche collections, like so many other romantic era documents, a poem such as The Battle of Tewkesbury, though far from a major discovery, can still enlighten us about this dynamic period in British history and tell us something about the literary culture from which it sprang.

The Battle of Tewkesbury appears to be Cecilia Cooper's only work. There are no other texts in the online catalogs under her name and there are no reviews listed in Ward's Literary Reviews in British Periodicals; nor does Cooper appear in any other bibliographic resource. Indeed, The Battle of Tewkesbury, despite the author's earnest desire to be engaged by the literary community as we shall see in a moment, evidently received no attention whatsoever in the newspapers or literary periodicals. However, given that the volume was published locally at Tewkesbury and that Cooper was a native of the area, it is possible that a deeper inquiry into the local (dare I say provincial) resources may in the future yield some sort of critical notice. At any rate, Cooper's slender volume, despite, according to the title page, being advertised and sold by Longman in London and by booksellers in a number of other communities, apparently failed to receive any attention from the literary community.

Cooper herself proves to be even more obscure than her poem. Like many of the women writers currently being rediscovered in Romantic era recovery work, there is little to go on except for a few clues in the text itself. Since many young female poets would later marry and take their husband's name, it is difficult to track the lives of these women, particularly those whose literary output was minimal. Fortunately, as many British historical records and documents are made available online - such as baptismal records, marriage licenses, and death certificates - it will be much easier for scholars to bring the lives of these authors to light. In the meantime, in Cooper's case, we are left with the few clues we can glean from the text itself, which I will try to elucidate here.

There is a fairly substantial list of subscribers to the work. The 160 individual listings account for 182 copies of the text. Among them are five Coopers: Mrs. Ware Cooper, Mr. J. Cotton Cooper, Mrs. John Cooper, W.Cooper, Esquire, and Mrs. Woodfield Cooper. All of these Coopers lived in or near Kidderminster. Kidderminster is approximately thirty miles north of Tewkesbury along the Severn. We can only assume that these Kidderminster Coopers are in some way related to Cecilia.

Cecilia lived in Tewkesbury as she explains in the preface: "my residence commanding a View of the Intrenchments of Queen Margaret, and the Ground on which this dreadful conflict took place." Tewkesbury was a fast growing town: the population of 3768 in 1792 had climbed to 5780 by 1831, eleven years after the poem's publication; it has stayed about the same population since (Pugh 120). This may explain why the Cooper subscribers were from Kidderminster, thirty miles up river, while Cecilia resided in Tewkesbury. Perhaps she was one of the two thousand émigrés that had joined the Tewkesbury community during the Romantic era.

This leads us to Cooper's Dedication and Preface at the front of the volume. These two brief portions of the work are quite extraordinary - indeed in many ways more interesting than the poem - because they reveal some quite intriguing insights into the young author's politics, which feeds directly into her intentions in the poem. Cooper has boldly dedicated her poem to "J.E. Dowdeswell, Esq. And John Martin, Esq., members in parliament for the borough of Tewkesbury." At first, this may seem a bit presumptuous, but then it becomes clear that Cooper probably knew these local luminaries personally - each appears among the subscribers, as does Lord Edward Somerset, M.P. for Gloucestershire - for she is "impressed with a lively sense of your indulgent kindness, in permitting me to Dedicate this, my first attempt, to you, I return my grateful acknowledgments for the same." So, clearly Cooper had been in contact with these two members who had each graciously conferred their blessing on the budding author. The political implications of this are striking, as we will see when we get to the poem. Add to this that Somerset had been a key figure in Wellington's army, and we start to get a sense of Cooper's political allegiances.

What do these clues tell us about Cecilia Cooper? First, she has access to the leading political figures of the borough and of the county. This suggests that Cooper's family has some standing in the community. Neither J.E. Dowdeswell nor John Martin merit an entry in either edition of the Dictionary of National Biography or in the Victoria History - though other members of both families dating back to the 17^th century do - but we do know that Dowdeswell was the Lord of Corse Chase Manor (Pugh 276) and was one of nine Dowdeswell's to sit for the borough between 1660 through 1865. And that John Martin was one of eight Martin's to sit from 1741 to 1845. So, the Dowdeswells and the Martins appear to have controlled the politics of the district for generations. The Victoria History further tells us that "with few exceptions MP's for the borough were connected with families owning large estates not very distant from Tewkesbury" (153). This, apparently, was a circle not unfamiliar to young Miss Cooper. So we can conjecture that she was among the social elites of the region. Her politics as revealed in the poem, but just as strikingly in the preface, would seem to bear this out.

The preface is perhaps the most interesting part of the entire Battle of Tewkesbury document. Cooper introduces her work as a high moral, instructional piece meant to lead the reader to higher feeling and understanding, not unlike the intentions of Anna Letitia Barbauld's Lessons for Children. The intention is that "persons of every rank, even of the lowest condition in life, may learn to bear their own difficulties and misfortunes with greater patience and resignation, when they see to what extreme distresses, even the most noble and the great, are likewise subject." Certainly Barbauld would have had trouble sharing Cooper's clearly elitist stance, nonetheless, the instructional parallel still holds between the two writers. Cooper's elitist position is stressed even further earlier in the paragraph when she writes, "among all sufferers, none feel this misfortune more keenly than those who have been most indebted to Fortune for the distinctions of high birth." She goes on to say, "some illustrious examples of these truths (my italics) may be found in the following Poem, The Battle of Tewkesbury." Cooper clearly sides with the elite, leading us to suspect that she resides among them. The preface, then, and the poem itself, suggest that Cooper is keenly aware of the radical politics most often associated with Romantic literature, and that she is voicing her refutation of the radical position. Either that, or she is simply a naïve provincial. Her apparent contacts, however, suggest the former.

But enough of Cooper's obviously conservative politics for the moment. What else does she reveal to us in the preface? She is "a young and unlettered female," the latter being debatable considering the historic source material she used in constructing the poem. Considering that the dedication and the preface are dated May 4, 1820, we can speculate that she is somewhere between 15 and 22 years of age, making her about the same age as Mary Shelley or Letitia Landon. Again, she is a Tewkesbury local, "my residence commanding a View of the Intrenchments of Queen Margaret." The volume was published locally by E. Reddell, though distributed more widely according to the title page. She is also somewhat self-deprecating as she was in the dedication: "It may, indeed, by some, be thought presumptuous, in a young unlettered female, attempting to write on so great an Historical Event." and, "Aware of its many imperfections, I leave it to the candour of my generous Patrons and Subscribers, and the well known liberality of an impartial public." But these seemingly self-effacing statements suggest, 1) that Cooper had some understanding about how literary culture operated and how women represented themselves in it; and, 2) that Cooper, though pretending otherwise, thought very highly of her work and saw it as her initiation into literary society. It is quite extraordinary, and leaves us to wonder, what happened?

Before addressing that question, though, there are some other observations to make about Cooper's understanding of the literary culture. Cooper is keenly aware of the romantic emphasis on imagination, "Imagination traces out the scene" (line 13), as the source of poetic practice. Whether she was familiar with Lyrical Ballads or not, we do not know. But if anything, this suggests that by 1820 the bold championing of the imagination in Wordsworth's preface had become completely embedded in the poetic discourse. Cooper also seems to be participating in the rising interest in historical fiction and poetry spurred by Scott's publication of Waverely in 1814, though again this in some ways goes back to Lyrical Ballads. Cooper, though, spurns Wordsworth's proclamation (and Scott's prose example) that poetry should be about the common people by suggesting a politic of the elite: that the emotional life of the elite is somehow of a higher quality than that of the mere commoner. By so doing, she is refuting the very egalitarian poetic on which the notion of English Romanticism is typically constructed.

It also seems likely that Cooper was familiar with Margaret Holford's long epic, Margaret of Anjou (1816) which deals with the same central character that Cooper features in Tewkesbury, though Holford is mostly concerned with Margaret's earlier travails during the War of the Roses. Unfortunately, Cooper didn't learn much about writing beautiful verse from her predecessor, Holford's poetics being far superior to Cooper's. Nor, from Shakespeare. It's inconceivable that Cooper was not familiar with Shakespeare's Henry VI trilogy and Richard III. Much of her disdain for Gloucester comes directly from the Bard, as does her conception of Margaret of Anjou as a warrior queen.

Cooper used a number of historical texts in constructing her poem, revealing, despite her claim of being "unlettered", a fairly sophisticated educational background. She is familiar with Holinshed's Chronicles of England, Scotland and Ireland, having cited it in her notes a number of times. She knows David Hume's History of England, an authoritative text at the time. She also cites and seems to depend largely upon French historian Michel Baudier's History of Margaret of Anjou. There is a final note at the end of the document attesting to the reliability of Baudier as per his English translator Mr. Carte. It sounds as if Cooper was personally acquainted with Mr. Carte and that this English translation of Baudier was at the time relatively new. Cooper seems to feel that she needs to defend this source more than the others which may suggest that Baudier's conclusions are slightly different from the more familiar English accounts. Cooper is also familiar with Edward Hall's Tudor apology, Chronicle of Lancaster and York, and this may indeed be the strongest source for her Lancastrian bias. Finally, and most intriguingly, Cooper clearly knew the "Chronicle of Tewkesbury Abbey", for it is only in this brief fragment that a number of the names of the Lancastrian casualties that Cooper eulogizes in the poem are found. The other contemporary chronicles and the modern historical monographs usually only give the names of a handful of the central figures: Devonshire, Somerset, Courtenay, St.John; and then say almost consistently, "and many others in great numbers" (Myers 313) or some such variant. Only in the "Tewkesbury Abbey Chronicle" are these "many others" listed in full. [1]

Finally, it seems evident that Cecilia Cooper quite earnestly desired to participate in the literary culture of her times. The poem as poem, as we will soon see, is for all intents and purposes a failure. Nevertheless, for all its failings, there is a certain amount of ambition underlying the enterprise. And despite its awkwardness as a poem, The Battle of Tewkesbury does render a compelling story. Cooper's skill as a poet might have been lacking, but she was capable of writing interesting narrative.

This brings us again to the question of what happened? Why are there no other works (apparently) by Cecilia Cooper, poetry or otherwise? Given the extent of her earnestness and ambition, as revealed in the dedication, the preface, and the poem itself, one would think that she would have continued to write even if this initial effort was a public failure. Did she die prematurely? Or marry and write under another name that awaits connection with this early work? It's hard to say.

It might be that her apparent ambition and earnestness was her downfall. It could have been a crushing blow when her poem received no attention from the reading public. Absolute silence is sometimes worse than harsh criticism. The truth is that The Battle of Tewkesbury, though interesting, is not particularly good, even by today's more tolerant aesthetic standards. This may have become more apparent to the young poet after she presented her work for public consumption. Furthermore, this subject was near and dear to her ("write what you know") and perhaps that spark of imagination that "revealed the scene" to her was a one time affair. It seems odd though that this earnest voice would so easily become silent. The realities of the publishing industry does not appear to have been a factor. The Battle of Tewkesbury is clearly a self-published, vanity book. Cooper seems to have had connections and resources that wouldn't have hindered her from making another effort. It remains a puzzle.

Let me conclude this essay by making a few comments on the poem. As I've suggested, The Battle of Tewkesbury is not a particularly good poem. Nor, I might add, is it particularly bad. The versification is at times awkward and clumsy as in:

He mounts his charger, grasps his shining lance,

And waits the signal for them to advance.

There is an overuse of exclamation and at times the poem is over punctuated to the point of distraction. The language of the poem is rather flat and simple with few allusions or interesting turns of phrase. When compared to Holford's Margaret of Anjou or Mary Rolls' lesser known Corvey text, Legends of the North; or, the Feudal Christmas, The Battle of Tewkesbury's flaws become more glaringly evident.

With that said however, the poem does charm in its way. Perhaps the youthful enthusiasm and earnestness of the author encourages the modern reader to treat the work with "the well known liberality of an impartial public." The verse, though clumsy and at times fractured, does have a certain cadence and rhythm that becomes more apparent as the story unfolds. Cooper seems to have gained more control of her poetry as she went along. It is this unfolding of story that is Cooper's real strength as a writer.

Cooper is not shy to take sides between the Red and the White Rose. The Battle of Tewkesbury is told with clear sympathies for the defeated Lancastrians, the bearers of the Red Rose. Here she accepts Tudor orthodoxy, which in itself indicates Cooper's Georgian conservatism. Margaret of Anjou is the heroine of the poem and by rendering her as a warrior queen, Cooper clearly set out to make her into an English Joan of Arc. Even though Shakespeare is largely responsible for the demonizing of Richard III, as John Gillingham so aptly points out (2), that Cooper so willingly employs here, Shakespeare's view of Margaret in the Henry VI plays was not particularly favorable either. He does portray her as a warrior queen, as does Cooper, but Shakespeare paints her as a heartless villain, not unlike his Gloucester. Cooper rescues Margaret from this unbecoming portrait, yet maintains the myth of the warrior queen, thus endowing her with the stuff of legend. This is where we get the clearest sense that she may have been familiar with Holford's poem of a mere four years earlier, because Holford, too, mythologizes Margaret and makes her into an English Joan, as opposed to a female Richard. Cooper has Margaret fleeing the battlefield and casting aside her armour and weaponry as she plunges across the Severn. In truth, Margaret was nowhere near the actual field of battle. The idea that she was equipped and engaged in battle is purely a product of the Tudor imagination.

The confrontation between Edward, Prince of Wales and Edward IV and his Yorkist minions is also the stuff of legend, as Myers shows in his compilation of historical documents (314-15). Cooper adheres to this legend in her poem, which does make for some of its most exciting passages. More accurately, however, the Prince of Wales was killed in the field, which is the report given by the Tewkesbury Abbey chronicler. We know that Cooper probably used this for one of her key sources, but she chose to keep the more dramatic legend of the Prince, rather than concede to the historically accurate representation of the "Tewkesbury Chronicle." It seems to me that this particular legend in which the Prince faces down the Yorkist enemies and is killed in a compact of evil by the main Yorkist generals, later to suffer for their misdeeds according to Shakespeare, is in part drawn from the episode of Vortigren and the night of the long knives in Geoffrey of Monmouth's History of the Kings of Britain. Cooper's use of this legend places her within the tradition of historical romance dating back to Geoffrey.

And like that early weaver of tales, Geoffrey of Monmouth, Cooper is able to draw the reader into her narrative, despite the clumsiness of the verse, even when the informed reader must remain a trifle incredulous regarding the history she presents. The reader, thus interested, is slightly unprepared for the stunning conclusion to the poem which brings the legend of the War of the Roses right to the front door of contemporary politics. Because it is at the very end that Cooper reveals her true purposes and creates a unity between the implicit politics of the dedication and the preface and the explicit politics of her poem. For in conclusion, Cooper makes a blatant pledge of allegiance to mad King George III, who at that very moment was fast approaching the end of his long reign:

The bloody Quarrels of these Houses show

What horrid scenes from Civil Discord flow.

May no contending Parties, here, again

Stain this fair Land with blood of Subjects slain;

But, may the Subjects' Love the Throne secure

To Brunswick's Line 'till Time shall be no more.

The lengthen'd reign of George the Third, has prov'd

A Monarch's Safeguard is - his People's Love!

This stunning move challenges everything we thought we knew about British Romantic poetry. Indeed, though Cooper obviously was unaware of Percy Shelley's "England in 1819," it not being published until much later, we still get the sense that these poems are engaged in oppositional debate, in that the canonical Shelley poem was representative, though in the extreme, of much of the poetic challenges to the festering political situation. Compare a few verses of Shelley's sonnet with the above:

An old, mad, blind, despised, and dying king, -

Princes, the dregs of their dull race, who flow

Through public scorn, - mud from a muddy spring, -

Rulers who neither see, nor feel, nor know,

But leech-like to their fainting country cling.

(Mellor and Matlak 1166)

There is a stunning opposition here between Cooper and the canonical Shelley. Cooper was no doubt aware of, and in opposition to, the radical poetic discourse that spawned Shelley's poem and therefore we can see a kind of intertextuality going on here. What this shows is that Cooper was earnestly trying to engage in poetic conversation with the literary community.

One final thing that this political move by Cooper points to is the conservative poetics of the Victorian era. Here Cooper is already laying down some of the nationalistic, domestic, and political conservatism most often associated with the later Felicia Hemans. So, though not as significant by any means as Hemans and her other contemporaries, Cooper is pointing to the transition from the radical ideology of the Romantic period to the conservative ideology of the Victorians. Taken within this context, Cooper helps to show that this transition was already taking place by at least the late 1810's. And thus, this singular work by Cecilia Cooper is able to shed some light on this period of British literary and cultural history, even when it struggles to stand up to a strictly aesthetic criteria.

If nothing else, Cecilia Cooper in The Battle of Tewkesbury was able to enlighten this reader not only on an earlier historical transition in English history- the War of the Roses - but also was able to provide insight into Cooper's own time. I have come away knowing more than I did before and have a deeper understanding. Can we ask anything more of literature?

Works Cited

Barbauld, Anna Letitia. Selected Poetry and Prose. Eds. William McCarthy and Elizabeth Kraft. Orchard Park: Broadview, 2002.

Cooper, Cecilia. The Battle of Tewkesbury: A Poem. Tewkesbury: E. Redell, 1820.

Geoffrey of Monmouth. History of the Kings of Britain. Trans. Charles W. Dunn. New York: E.P. Dutton, 1958.

Gillingham, John. The War of the Roses: Peace and Conflict in Fifteenth-CenturyEngland. London: Wedenfeld and Nicolson, 1981.

Hall, Edward. Chronicle of Lancaster and York. London, 1809.

Holford, [Margaret]. Margaret of Anjou: A Poem. Philadelphia: M.Carey, 1816.

Holinshed, Raphael. Chronicles of England, Scotland and Ireland. Three Volumes. London: Aldergate Street at the signe of the Starr, 1587.

Hume, David. History of England. Six Volumes. Philadelphia: Claxton, Remsen, and Haffelfinger, 1868.

Kingsford, Charles Lethbridge. English Historical Literature in the Fifteenth Century. Oxford: Clarendon, 1913.

Mellor, Anne K. and Richard E. Matlak. British Literature 1780-1830. Fort Worth: Harcourt Brace College Publishers, 1996.

Myers, A.R. Ed. English Historical Documents Volume 4. New York: Oxford University Press, 1969.

Pugh, R.B. Ed. The Victoria History of the Counties of England: A History of Gloucestershire Volume VIII. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1968.

Rolls, [Mary]. Legends of the North; or, the Feudal Christmas: A Poem. London: Simpkin and Marshall, 1825.

Shakespeare, William. Complete Works. Roslyn: Walter J. Black, 1937.

Stephen, Leslie. Ed. Dictionary of National Biography. 1885-1901 edition. New York: Macmillan, 1887.

-----. Dictionary of National Biography. 1937-39 edition. New York: Macmillan, 1937.

Ward, William S. Literary Reviews in British Periodicals 1798-1820. New York: Garland, 1972.

-----. Literary Reviews in British Periodicals 1821-1826. New York: Garland, 1977.

Wordsworth, William and Samuel Taylor Coleridge. Lyrical Ballads. Eds. R.L. Brett and A.R. Jones. London: Methuen, 1965

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[1] See English Historical Literature in the Fifteenth Century, edited by Charles Lethbridge Kingsford (376-78) for the "Tewkesbury Chronicle." Kingsford notes that "the list of the slain is noteworthy for its fullness and its descriptionof the places of burial. (376)