The Abraham Cowley
Text and Image Archive


I have overcome fate by enduring (Virgil, Aen. 11.156). This impresa is reproduced from Giulio Cesare Cappaccio, Della Imprese (Naples, 1592), by permission of the Folger Shakespeare Library. The great dutch commander Prince Maurice of Nassau took a similar device with the motto Tandem fit surculus arbor ("The shoot grows in due time to a tree") to commemorate his murdered father, Prince William the Silent of Orange, in 1584; Cowley, born after his father's death, made Prince Maurice's motto his own. A similar sprouting-trunk frontispiece-image with biblical mottos (Job 14:7-9 and Ezek. 17:24) forms a visual introduction to both Anthony Sadler's The Loyall Mourner, Shewing the Murdering of King Charles the First. Fore-shewing the Restoring of King Charles the Second (London, 1660) and Nancy Klein Maguire's Regicide and restoration: English tragicomedy, 1660-1671 (Cambridge, 1992).
Related links:
Restoration and Phoenix  //  Man ex tree; Link to Geerhardt de Jode: Microkosmos
Charles I on the Scaffold  //  The Royal Oak: Charles II and Carlos  //  John Crouch, "Loyall Reflections"
The Return of the King: Poems on Charles II's Restoration // Cowley's "Ode upon his Majesty's Restoration" // A Translation of the Sixth Book of Mr. Cowley's Plantarum, Being A Poem upon the late Rebellion, the Happy Restoration of his Sacred Majesty, and the Dutch War Ensuing (London, 1680)
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