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‘A Letter to Julian’.

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An attractive scribal copy of a ‘shotgun libel’ in verse, drawing attention to the scandals of the season at Tunbridge Wells and in London society. Captain Robert Julian had been imprisoned for a libel against Charles II in 1684-5; a number of verse satires of the time were addressed to him, possibly by the same unidentified author.

Here his targets are the intrigues of various married court ladies and the beaus they have attracted – e.g. Thomas Budworth, ‘A sott soe stupid & unheeding / Hee takes affectedness for breeding, / Her very singing can admit, / Do’s call a Crowd of tattling Witt’. The second wife of Adam Loftus (a Catholic favourite of James II) has been courted by both the seventh Duke of Norfolk and Viscount Cholmondeley; while Lord Berkeley ‘follows stuttering Brathwayt’ – the writer warns that ‘Women of quality despise / A man that ogles with sore Eyes’, and suggests he keep ‘to your old trade / Of common whore and Chambermaid.’

The Earl of Arran may aim to be ‘a first rate Fopp’, but ‘Of all the Travelld Youth none dare / With Newberry [Newburgh] vie for the Bell Air. / Hee’s so French in all his ways, / Loves, dresses, swears, a la Francaise …’. Meanwhile ‘her little Grace’, the wife of the Duke of Grafton, ‘whose charms lye onely in her face’ has taken for a lover ‘Antiquated Dover / Long since drain’d by her Husbands Mother’, and they go together masked to Bartholomew Fair.

True or libellous, this is all the season has been able to provide, but the winter should ‘prove more kind / For those that wait are sure to find / In Bettertons or Trevors House [i.e. on the stage or in the House of Commons] / Matters much more ridiculous.’

See John Harold Wilson, Court Satires of the Restoration (1976), pp. 141-148, dating the composition to the autumn of 1685 on internal evidence. The source text printed there (Harleian MS 7319, p. 405) differs in several places from the version here.

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