The Politics of Wine in Britain

A New Cultural History

C. Ludington

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9780230306226
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Political History & Theory
• Index: Politics & International Relations

A unique look at the meaning of the taste for wine in Britain, from the establishment of a Commonwealth in 1649 to the Commercial Treaty between Britain and France in 1860 - this book provides an extraordinary window into the politics and culture of England and Scotland just as they were becoming the powerful British state.

Part I

The Politicization of Wine

1

“A Health to our Distressed King!”

The Politics of Wine and Drinking in England, 1649–1681

King Charles I awoke at 5 a.m. on the morning of his execution and declared to his page, Sir Thomas Herbert, that today would be his second marriage, the first being to his beloved wife, Queen Henrietta Maria, and the second to Jesus Christ, whom Charles had every certainty he was about to meet. The king then famously put on two shirts; it was a bitter-cold January morning and he did not want to shiver lest people think he was scared to die. He then received the Blessed Sacrament from Bishop Juxon, and asserted that he would have no more food or drink that day; the nourishment of Christ was enough. But as the morning wore on Juxon implored the king to eat a piece of bread and drink a glass of wine, lest he should faint from hunger prior to his execution. Charles ate the bread and washed it down with a glass of claret while surrounded by guards at Whitehall, and that, not the Eucharist, was the last thing he had to eat and drink. By mid-afternoon he was dead, his head severed from his body for being “a Tyrant, Traitor, Murtherer, and a Public Enemy,” according to the people who had tried and convicted him.¹ And who were they? They were less than one quarter of the members of the House of Commons who had been elected in 1641, who claimed that they—not the king, nor the aristocracy, nor even the other three-quarters of the members of the House of Commons whom they had evicted—represented “the People of England.”

Much has been said by historians and others of Charles’s demise and the rise to power of the Rump Parliament, which within days was to become the legislative branch of an English Republic that would eventually encompass Scotland and Ireland as well. But among all the commentary, the symbolic significance of many details has often been lost. For instance, it was no mere accident that the last bit of nourishment to cross Charles’s living lips was bread and wine. Commodities have meaning and politics is theater, and no one better understood but was more confounded by these realities than Charles himself.² Indeed, his decision to eat bread and drink wine while waiting for the call to the scaffold—a symbol of his own Christ-like martyrdom—was no doubt intended to be seen by the regicide soldiers who were guarding him. Of course, it made no difference to the outcome of the day, and even to posterity Charles has not been entirely convincing as a martyr.³ But the symbolism of Charles’s last repast that did adhere whether it was the king’s intention or not, was that wine was distinctly Royalist. That Charles drank claret and not some other wine was also prescient, because as a product of France, claret would soon become the most Royalist wine of all. In fact, the period from the Civil War to 1681 witnessed the intense politicization of wine and wine drinking in England, a politicization that was to last for the next two centuries, and, in a less direct form, beyond that.

***

Long before the English Civil War, wine had been affiliated with the Court, the Church, and those with political power. Wine in England had to be imported, especially after the Little Ice Age of the late-medieval period and the dissolution of the monasteries in the late 1530s put an end to almost all domestic production. The result was that wine was heavily taxed and primarily for the wealthy.⁴ Kings, courtiers, aristocrats, high-ranking clerics, gentry, and affluent townspeople all consumed wine as a way to project or acquire status.⁵ A comedy written in 1629 by John Grove, entitled Wine, Beere, and Ale, together by the Eares, reveals wine’s place among the commonly consumed alcoholic beverages of the early seventeenth century.

Wine	I, generous Wine, am for the Court.
Beere	The Citie calls for Beere [i.e. ale infused with hops].
Ale	But Ale, bonny Ale, like a lord of the soyle, In the country shall domineere.
Chorus	Then let us be merry, wash sorrow away, Wine, Beere, and Ale shall be drunk to-day.^6

Alas, the harmony of these three drinks and the three social groups they represented was not to last, because when the violent struggle broke out between the supporters and opponents of Charles I, wine was clearly on the side of the king and aristocracy, while beer and ale sided with the Parliamentarians. Of course, that does not mean that Royalists never drank beer or ale, or that Parliamentarians never drank wine. But there was enough truth, and more than enough perceived truth, in the social affiliations of these drinks that Royalists claimed wine as a symbol of their cause, while simultaneously linking beer and ale to the middle-ranking and laboring class Parliamentarians who wanted at first to circumscribe and, eventually, jettison the monarchy altogether.

Evidence for the political meaning of wine, beer, and ale during the Interregnum comes from literature and song, and mostly from the Royalist side. It was they, after all, who had the most to gain politically from exploiting the link between beverages and social class. For instance, Alexander Brome repeatedly used wine to symbolize the king’s cause. His poem “The Royalist,” written in 1646 and circulated clandestinely until 1661 when it was published, shows how toasting Charles I with wine was meant to console the king’s supporters while he was in captivity.⁷

Come, pass about the bowl to me,

A health to our distressed king!

Though we’re in hold, let cups go free,

Birds in a cage may freely sing.

The ground does tipple healths apace

When storms do fall, and shall not we?

A sorrow dares not show his face

When we are ships, and sack’s the sea.

Just as toasting the king with wine (in this case “sack,” i.e. sherry) was a Royalist act, so too was getting drunk from so much loyal drinking. As Brome continues,

When we are larded well with drink,

Our heads shall turn as round as theirs;

Our feet shall rise, our bodies sink

Clean down the wind, like Cavaliers.⁸

Thus for Brome and the choir to whom he was surreptitiously preaching, to be a Cavalier—as opposed to a “Roundhead”⁹—meant to “drink in defence of the king.” In the process, toasting Charles I and his cause “represented an act of loyalty,” and drinking, especially wine, was an act of symbolic resistance to the Parliamentary regime.¹⁰ Indeed, the symbolism of toasting the Royalist cause in wine became even more potent after Charles I’s execution in January 1649, when the king himself was only a memory and the return of the monarchy in the form of his son could only be hoped for. As the anonymous author of a broadsheet ballad from 1649 punned: “The Father of our Kingdom’s dead, / His Royall Sun from England’s fled, /…/ A Royall Health I then begun, / Unto the Rising of the Sun.”¹¹

“In this miserable condition,” writes the leading scholar of seventeenth-century English political ballads, “the Cavaliers caroused and soused, drinking sorrows away in gallons of wine.”¹² Critically, only wine would suffice for articulating Cavalier hopes and sorrows; spirituous liquors were still considered to be medicinal, not recreational, while beer’s and ale’s affiliations with the lower ranks made these drinks politically anathema to those who believed that only the aristocracy were politically legitimate. In fact, Royalists attacked the legitimacy of the Cromwellian regime by pointing out that Cromwell, a member of the Huntingdonshire minor gentry, had links to the brewing trade.¹³

“In Small Beer,” a poem from 1653 by the Catholic Royalist Richard Flecknoe, emphasized the established political meanings of liquors by suggesting that the clergy should promote wine and discourage beer consumption:

Let the Divines, if they would mend it, preach

Gainst small beer only, and no Doctrine teach,

But drinking wine; no other vice dispraise,

But Beer, and we may hope for better days.¹⁴

Similarly, Brome made a distinction between the effects of drinking beer and ale, versus wine:

Beer and Ale makes you prate

Of the Kirk and State

…

But we while old sack does divinely inspire us

Are active to do what our Ruler require us.¹⁵

The lyrics of “Canary’s Coronation,” a song from Fancy’s Festivals, a Masque, are even more politically explicit. In this instance “Canary,” the eponymously named sweet wine from the Canary Islands, is a metaphor for the exiled Charles II, while beer and ale represent the existing social (dis)order. As the lyrics exclaim:

From Hopps and Grains let us purge our brains;

They do smell of Anarchie.

…

Why should we droope or basely stoope

To popular ale or beere?¹⁶

According to the self-affirming logic of the Royalists, because wine was the drink of the Court, the aristocracy, and the Church, wine was the drink of political legitimacy. Likewise, beer and ale were the drinks of those for whom God had never intended political power, and who had destroyed the order, beauty, and divinity of the Church of England. Consequently, the allegedly beer-drinking Parliamentarians were politically and religiously illegitimate. Moreover, Royalists claimed that their drinking made them honorable men, while Parliamentarians were dishonorable because they rejected the rules of behavior that governed male conviviality. To reject the rules of the group by drinking alone or refusing to drink at all was a direct affront to other men. It was, in fact, both dishonorable and womanly, for who but a false man would fail to uphold his own honor and that of his friends? Conversely, to subscribe to the rules that affected every man equally, showed respect for the members of the group and assured a man an honorable reputation.¹⁷

Wine under the Commonwealth and Protectorate

However much Royalists adhered to their rules, rituals, and symbolic commodities, the truth was that neither wine, nor beer, nor ale demarcated clear political or social divisions, largely because those divisions themselves were not ironclad. Beer and ale, for example, were ubiquitous beverages in England and Wales, consumed by all social ranks, genders and ages.¹⁸ And while wine was relatively expensive and therefore consumed only by those who could afford it, this did not relegate wine to the aristocracy alone; the middle rank of consumers also drank wine. Moreover, some of the aristocracy were Parliamentarians, just as some of the middle ranks were Royalists. But whatever their social backgrounds, Parliamentarians were convinced that it was the Royalists, not they th...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Tables, Figures, and Graphs
• Preface: A Word or Two on Statistics, Measurements, and Spelling
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• Part I The Politicization of Wine
• Part II Claret
• Part III Port
• Part IV Drunkenness, Sobriety, and Civilization?
• Appendix: Wine Duties
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index