4.4 Later Political Career

Dering was probably drawn to Shakespeare’s Henry IV plays precisely because they deal with his own conflicting obsessions: on the one hand the attractions of private self-indulgence, which for Dering means theatre-going in London, household-based antiquarianism, book collecting, and amateur theatre; on the other hand public duty.  The theatre-related pleasures of trips to London, and indeed, the play-making in Dering’s country house, are his equivalent of the Eastcheap tavern.  Beyond that confine, distant but not entirely unrelated, lie the fields of history and of public life: a family pedigree, a place in the county political elite, representation of his constituents in parliament, and even contribution to the religious and political shaping of the nation itself. By modifying the play’s beginning and end he changes the way it engages with its moment in time.  He seems aware that putting on an amateur stage production based on plays of the professional London theatre that give a comic treatment of history might be construed as a self-indulgent indolence.  His response is to define the very event of staging the play as no more than a respite from the real, ongoing, urgent business of seeking what he called “honour and renowne”, implicitly in the Protestant cause.  And, given the over-excited religious patriotism of the early 1620s, this would probably have been well understood by his performers and invited audience.

If this interpretation of Dering’s revision maps somewhat uncertainly onto the direction of his emerging personal career, this is only because the direction of that career was itself uncertain. In the 1620s he became a client of the powerful Duke of Buckingham. But Dering’s connection with Buckingham was substantive only after 1 January 1625, almost two years after his adaptation of Henry IV, when he married Anne Ashburnham, a distant relative of the Duke, and until 1628, when Buckingham was assassinated. This alliance nevertheless helped him to pursue a court career, and in particular to secure the office of lieutenant of Dover Castle. In that capacity he was said to have been diligent in enforcing the unpopular and arbitrary ship money tax, and thus to show himself a loyal supporter of the King’s centralized administration. As Justice of the Peace from 1626 he was also well known for his rigorous enforcement of penalties against gentry who failed to take up knighthood and to pay the appropriate fee for doing so. In this too he was supporting the King’s attempts to raise revenue without resort to Parliament during his period of personal rule (1629-40). In other respects he was a supporter of the gentry in his locality. As his biographer S.P. Salt notes:

Yet Dering was not undiscriminating in the implementation of central initiatives in the localities: for example, he appears to have connived at the Cinque Ports’ petition for exemption from the knighthood compositions. Indeed, in his conduct as a magistrate and as lieutenant of Dover Castle there are signs of religious preoccupations which would also be evident in his later career as a member of the Long Parliament and the hope of promoting them may even have played a part in his pursuit of office. His anti-Catholicism is apparent in his activity as a JP while, as lieutenant, he sought to tighten the regulation of Roman Catholics passing to and from the continent. 

(Salt, “Dering”)

In line with the spirit of Dering’s additions to the play as calls for intervention in Europe, his later work as a Justice of the Peace shows him to have been a resolute anti-Catholic. This is also evident from two polemical works against Catholic doctrine: The Foure Cardinall-Vertues of a Carmelite-Fryar (1641), an attack on the Carmelite Thomas Doughty, and A Discourse of Proper Sacrifice (1644), which was sub-titled “in way of answer to A.B.C. Jesuite, another anonymus of Rome”.

Dering courted the godly community of Puritan gentry in his campaign for election to Parliament in 1640.¹ As a leading Member of the Long Parliament he denounced the allegedly crypto-Catholic Archbishop William Laud for exercising a tyrannical power.  His attack on Laud was circulated widely in manuscript. Soon after, at the pinnacle of his political career, he famously introduced the 1641 “Root and Branch” bill to abolish the episcopacy. Having, in the words of his correspondent Robert Abbot, “fought in the front,” Dering then “wheeles about”.² His account of the Root and Branch bill is part of this attempt to reposition himself. In his own words:

A composing third way was my wish, and my prayer. Thus in my weak understanding, I was bold in frequent argument to oppose either side whilst I resolved to assist neither. All my care was, not to trespasse against my inward thoughts. 

(Proper Sacrifice sig. b3r)

He was soon opposing Presbyterians and the Independents, and defending bishops, both in his criticism of the Grand Remonstrance of 1641 (the list of grievances presented to Charles I), and in his leading role in drafting the Kentish petition calling for the episcopacy to be preserved in the following year.

What is unusual about Dering as a Member of Parliament is his use of print to propagate his speeches beyond Parliament: his Speeches and Passages, Four Speeches, and Three Speeches, all of 1641, and his Collection of Speeches of 1642. These were apparently received to great acclaim among the godly.³ The last of these publications was issued in response to unauthorized printings of his speeches, of which, by Dering’s own reckoning, “above 45 hundred” copies had been sold, with “more in the printing”.⁴ His own edition was immediately a best-seller in its own right. It included his remarks on the Root and Branch bill–though not the speech itself.

In this 1642 collection of speeches he dissociates himself from the “Root and Branch” abolition, asserting that “if my former hopes of a full Reformation may yet revive and prosper; I will … yeeld my shoulders to underprop the primitive, lawfull, and just Episcopacy” (64). He describes his involvement with the bill with a curious and self-damaging justification of his role. Thus he defensively excuses his conduct by describing how the bill was peremptorily “pressed into my hand” by Sir Arthur Hesilrige at short notice, at the instigation of Sir Henry Vane and Oliver Cromwell (62). This was not, however, a random or arbitrary choice, for Dering was well-known for his attacks on Laud. Indeed, he had presented the Kentish Root and Branch petition that had led to the bill itself. His pamphlet reproduces his deflective remarks to the Speaker made before he delivered the bill, in which he declared that he did so only with great reluctance: “Sir, I am now the instrument, to present unto you, a very short (but a very sharpe) Bill: such as these times and their sad necessities have brought forth … It is a purging Bill. I give it you, as I take Physick, not for delight, but for a cure” (63).  If the bill itself calls for the complete abolition of the episcopal structure of the Church, Dering, so he claims, seeks merely to reform it. 

Dering’s attempt to oppose the prevailing mood in Parliament by appealing to public opinion through the medium of print left him isolated in the Commons. For exposing the secrets of the House of Commons, and for including a speech that he had not actually presented, the House briefly imprisoned him in the Tower of London and ordered the burning of the Collected Speeches by the public hangman. When the Civil Wars broke out Dering raised a regiment of cavalry for the King.  In a final about-turn, he defected to the Parliamentarians shortly before his death in 1644.

Dering’s drift from adherent of the court of Charles I to Parliamentarian reformer was characteristic of large swathes of the English elite. It can be seen at a higher level in the career of William Herbert, Earl of Pembroke, who as a courtier in 1615 first presented the future Duke of Buckingham and royal favourite to James I, but who remained an opponent of the proposed Spanish Match between Prince Charles and the Spanish Infanta Maria Anna, which was brought to a disastrous conclusion when Buckingham accompanied Charles to Spain, travelling in disguise to arrive in Madrid on 7 March 1623. Pembroke opposed Buckingham effectively through the support of the Parliamentary faction at court, and later supported the Parliamentarians in the Civil Wars. In this context, the dedication of the Shakespeare Folio to Pembroke and his brother Philip, Earl of Montgomery, in late 1623, has a political resonance in aligning that publication with the Parliamentary faction. Despite Dering’s connections with Buckingham during his marriage to Anne from 1625 to 1628, his religious and political sympathies before that marriage and later as a Parliamentarian were closer to those of Pembroke.

Dering’s political career seems tainted with instability. There are various reasons relating to both personality and the shifting circumstances in his roles as court administrator, magistrate, and Member of Parliament representing the propertied electorate of his constituency in Hythe, Kent. Indeed David Peacey argues that Dering was unusually conscientious in representing his constituents. In contrast, in vol. 1 of his History of the Rebellion (1702), Edward Hyde, himself a member of the Long Parliament who switched sides to the Royalist cause, called Dering “a man of levity and vanity”;⁵ it is not the only account of Dering as a man who lacked intellectual stability despite his profound learning. His personal uncertainty as to how to engage with the worlds of court and politics are expressed in his declaration in about 1631 that “the circumference which a Statesman must fill, is a larger Orbe then my ambition doth stretch unto” (“Notes,” 71). The imagery of these words mirrors that of the lines he himself gave to King Henry at the beginning of his play: the “lower orbe” to which the Muslims will (or rather, will not) be forced, the “larger Orbe” of politics from which Dering will (or rather, will not) lower himself.  Together, these passages suggest an ambiguity of outlook towards public life that would have made the ambiguous act of privately staging a play about political history especially congenial to the younger Dering.  Shakespeare’s theme of maturation to political responsibility would have been both appealing and problematic, as Dering’s added lines about the shift from private indolence to engagement in war suggest.

1. Peacey, 960
2. quoted in Peacey, 972
3. Peacey, 966-70
4. Peacey, 674
5. Salt, “Dering”