Awesome Pepys today:
The part I love, of course, is the "just like the interstice between the death of the old and the coming in of the present king, all the time is swallowed up as if it had never been." My god, how wonderful. First of all, the sheer ideological audacity of claiming that people can act as if the English Civil War never happened is stunning. (The "death of the old [King]" in Pepys's England of 1663 having been execution of Charles the I in 1649; the "coming in of the present king" having been perhaps officially performed at that death, but having been completely unrecognized and excluded until Charles II's installation after Cromwell's death in 1660.) Don't worry about the dissention and bloodshed that tore the country apart for nearly ten years. Dear boy, it's simply as if it never existed. Even keel again and all that, you know. How terribly English.
Then there's the implication that the way to do this, to heal the civil war, is to invoke the mystical/spiritual dimension of the King's two bodies that's inherent in the rites for succession. There may in fact be a temporal "interstice" -- a time between death of one King's body and the coronation of his heir, but that time is "swallowed up as if it had never been" in terms of the national Kingly body. The King is England, you see. His body is in a completely real, though completely non-physical sense, the Body Public. Thus there cannot, ideologically, be a time when there is no Kingly body, unless England itself ceases to exist for that time. The time must be folded into itself -- it's a sort of wormhole effect of succession.
The invocation of this intensely spiritual dimension of monarchy in a post-civil-war world is magnificently troubling. One of the things that had gotten Charles I into so much disfavor, for one thing, was precisely his insistence on the divine right of Kings -- on the spiritual weight of Kingship (i.e., Kingship derives directly from God). His execution and the subsequent dictatorship in some sense proved that the Divine Right doctrine had died along with Charles I -- politically, it clearly no longer applies, at least not with any force, to Charles II. Thus Mr. Creed's invocation of it (or Pepys's description of Mr. Creed's invocation of it) to apply to a contractual dispute has all sorts of fascinating ramifications for the way these men are treating not only the monarchy, but contract-making and the strength of bonds, both legal bonds and bonds of amity. It signifies to me the simultaneous uneasiness and need surrounding the idea of ritual and spirituality in financial contracts. Amazing.
Moreover, the elegance of the utterance is striking all of its own -- I'm always delighted with use of the word "interstice." For obvious reasons, I guess, given my lifelong preoccupation with that which falls between.
Oh, Pepys. You never really disappoint, do you?
And the peace between us was this: Says he after all, well, says he, I know you will expect, since there must be some condescension, that it do become me to begin it, and therefore, says he, I do propose (just like the interstice between the death of the old and the coming in of the present king, all the time is swallowed up as if it had never been) so our breach of friendship may be as if it had never been, that I should lay aside all misapprehensions of him or his first letter, and that he would reckon himself obliged to show the same ingenuous acknowledgment of my love and service to him as at the beginning he ought to have done, before by my first letter I did (as he well observed) put him out of a capacity of doing it, without seeming to do it servilely, and so it rests, and I shall expect how he will deal with me.
The part I love, of course, is the "just like the interstice between the death of the old and the coming in of the present king, all the time is swallowed up as if it had never been." My god, how wonderful. First of all, the sheer ideological audacity of claiming that people can act as if the English Civil War never happened is stunning. (The "death of the old [King]" in Pepys's England of 1663 having been execution of Charles the I in 1649; the "coming in of the present king" having been perhaps officially performed at that death, but having been completely unrecognized and excluded until Charles II's installation after Cromwell's death in 1660.) Don't worry about the dissention and bloodshed that tore the country apart for nearly ten years. Dear boy, it's simply as if it never existed. Even keel again and all that, you know. How terribly English.
Then there's the implication that the way to do this, to heal the civil war, is to invoke the mystical/spiritual dimension of the King's two bodies that's inherent in the rites for succession. There may in fact be a temporal "interstice" -- a time between death of one King's body and the coronation of his heir, but that time is "swallowed up as if it had never been" in terms of the national Kingly body. The King is England, you see. His body is in a completely real, though completely non-physical sense, the Body Public. Thus there cannot, ideologically, be a time when there is no Kingly body, unless England itself ceases to exist for that time. The time must be folded into itself -- it's a sort of wormhole effect of succession.
The invocation of this intensely spiritual dimension of monarchy in a post-civil-war world is magnificently troubling. One of the things that had gotten Charles I into so much disfavor, for one thing, was precisely his insistence on the divine right of Kings -- on the spiritual weight of Kingship (i.e., Kingship derives directly from God). His execution and the subsequent dictatorship in some sense proved that the Divine Right doctrine had died along with Charles I -- politically, it clearly no longer applies, at least not with any force, to Charles II. Thus Mr. Creed's invocation of it (or Pepys's description of Mr. Creed's invocation of it) to apply to a contractual dispute has all sorts of fascinating ramifications for the way these men are treating not only the monarchy, but contract-making and the strength of bonds, both legal bonds and bonds of amity. It signifies to me the simultaneous uneasiness and need surrounding the idea of ritual and spirituality in financial contracts. Amazing.
Moreover, the elegance of the utterance is striking all of its own -- I'm always delighted with use of the word "interstice." For obvious reasons, I guess, given my lifelong preoccupation with that which falls between.
Oh, Pepys. You never really disappoint, do you?
Labels: books, death/mourning/corpses, early modern, liminality
That is indeed quite an astonishing (and as a writer, humbling) paragraph of words...but what is really astonishing is how many times I had to read it before I understood it! I think I have a headache now. But in a good way. I would like to read more.