John Phillips’ anonymous poem, A Satyr Against Hypocrites, was entered in the Stationers’ Register on March 14, 1654-55 as the work of his brother Edward and the property of his publisher Nathaniel Brook, and it was probably published on August 17 (David Masson, The Life of John Milton [London, 1877], V, 228n., cites the “Thomason copy” as indicating the date of publication). Actually, two issues appeared in 1655. One gave no indication of the publisher and is reproduced here, as perhaps the rarest, from the copy in the William Andrews Clark Memorial Library. The other was “Printed for N.B. at the Angel in Corn-hill.” The 1655 text was reprinted in 1661 as The Religion of the Hypocritical Presbyterians in Meeter, and a revised and enlarged edition appeared in 1671 under the original title. It was this rather than the original version which is known through the summary given by William Godwin (Lives of Edward and John Phillips [London, 1815], pp. 49-51) and quoted by Masson as the most “exact description” possible of the 1655 “performance” (ibid., V, 228). Other editions have been recorded for 1674, 1677, 1680, 1689, and 1710, the last being attributed to the author’s uncle, John Milton. Of these, the editions which I have seen show only minor revisions of the 1671 text. A holograph manuscript, preserved in the Bodleian Library, includes a two-page dedication to the successful barrister John Churchill, but the dedication was apparently never printed.

Neither the unpublished dedication nor the poem itself contains a clear indication of the purpose or the direction of the satire. In pleading her case for John Phillips’ authorship of the anonymous life of Milton, Miss Helen Derbyshire (The Early Lives of Milton [London, 1932], pp. xxii-xxv) has taken issue with the common statement that it marked Phillips’ departure from his uncle’s teachings and has described it as a satire against the Presbyterians from an Independent position with which Milton might well have sympathized. Yet the text hardly supports these contentions. The Sunday service which Phillips burlesques shows no signs of Presbyterian discipline. In fact, sectarianism is almost at its worst in his picture of a congregation crying destruction against Covenant-breakers, making grinning appeals for free grace, and screaming for the Fifth Monarchy in a state of revelation-madness. Furthermore, the Brother Elnathan who makes his appearance at the dinner following the Wednesday service received his name in a Baptist “Ducking-pond” rather than from the customary Presbyterian sprinkling. There may be some significance, too, in the fact that the particularly satiric reference to “the man midwife,” Dr. Peter Chamberlain, was to a noted Independent.

On the other hand, the church specifically identified as the scene of the weekday service was St. Mary’s Aldermanbury, and its minister was the Reverend Edmund Calamy, whose inclinations were Presbyterian and whose personally conducted fastday services were notoriously popular. Although Calamy’s custom of preaching from the desk rather than from the pulpit makes it unlikely that he was the minister satirized in the early part of the poem, he would normally have been identified as the object of Phillips’ most severe and scandalous attack; and the device of having him refer to “the Laud” instead of the Lord may have had reference to the rumors of early conformity which still haunted Calamy despite his service to the Puritan cause as one of the Smectymnuans and a member of the Westminster Assembly of Divines. There is no evidence, however, that Presbyterianism as a particular nonconformist sect stirred Phillips to any special antagonism.

In any case, it seems impossible to represent A Satyr Against Hypocrites seriously as a document of which John Milton would have approved. If he could have tolerated the violation of the Scriptures and the punning obscenity of his nephew’s introduction of the Prophet Habakkuk into the poem, he might have felt a personal offense in the use of such material for an attack upon the church in which he was to register his espousal of the pure-minded Katharine Woodcock. At best, Milton could have considered this first rhymed flowering of his nephew’s satiric humor a pointless piece of scurrility which lacked real wit, coherence, or character. If Phillips did not publish it in open recalcitrance, he published it with less confidence in his uncle’s sympathy than in his blindness and in the decent reluctance of friends to disclose the extent of a young man’s departure from the paths of good instruction.

The republication of A Satyr Against Hypocrites as The Religion of the Hypocritical Presbyterians, in 1661, was no more than an attempt to attract new interest with a title which would appeal to the post-Restoration tendency to condemn the strongest of the Puritan sects. The incongruity between the new title and the old poem, though, seems to have been more evident to the author than to later readers; for in the 1671 edition he introduced a satire on the ceremony of infant baptism which nullified the allusion to the “Ducking-pond” by making the Sunday congregation, at least, clearly Presbyterian. The other major revisions and additions were in the direction of greater licentiousness and more frequent references to “the Laud.” The editions of 1680 and 1689 (which are the only two later versions I have seen) are based upon that of 1671 and contain only such minor changes as might have been made by a printer alert to the possibility of introducing new bawdy implications by the change of an occasional word or letter.

The Bodleian manuscript is an approximate but not a true copy of the version which was first printed. A few lines appear in the published poem which are not to be found in the manuscript, the printed marginal annotations are fewer in number and considerably changed, and there are some differences in the musical notation. Except for an indication that the old Robin mentioned at the beginning of the poem was a particular “fool well known in the city,” however, the manuscript annotations are similar in character to those printed and add little to the comprehensibility of the text. The author’s signed dedication to Churchill shows an inclination (like that revealed in the concluding lines of the published text) to justify his poem as a defense of true religion against the sectaries whose words and actions brought it into contempt; but A Satyr Against Hypocrites appears to have been, in reality, little more than the irresponsible outburst of a young man of twenty-three who was tired of discipline, disappointed in his expectations of political preferment, and angry at the sort of people who had taken over the country but who seemed incapable of appreciating his peculiar merits.

Leon Howard
University of California, Los Angeles

A
SATYR
Against
HYPOCRITES

Printed in the Year, 1655.