and public political role met often in such formulas—“His sceptre and his prick are of a length,” to take Rochester’s famous barb—where the king’s pretensions to godhood or potential for tyranny and absolutism were figured by the powerful rule of the over-sized royal yard. Oldham’s Sardanapalus (late 1670s) alludes to Charles’s sceptre-phallus, linking political might to “thy Soveraign Pr-k’s Prerogative”:
Methinks I see thee now in full Seraglio stand,
With Love’s great Scepter in thy hand,
And over all its Spacious Realm thy Power extend:
Ten Thousand Maids lye prostrate at thy Feet,
Ready thy Pintle’s high Commands to meet;
.............................................................
Far as wide Nature spreads her Thighs,
Thy Tarse’s vast Dominion lyes:
All Womankind acknowledge its great Sway,
And all to its large Treasury their Tribute pay,
Pay Custom of their unprohibited Commodities.78
However preposterous the image, royal command and dominion here reside in the tarse, which embodies the king’s rule over Nature herself. More exaggerated yet are the opening lines of the obscene closet drama, the Rochesterian Sodom (1684), in which the hard penis of King Bolloximian (read Charles II) literally replaces both crown and sceptre:
Thus in the zenith of my lust I reign,
I drink to swive, and swive to drink again.
Let other monarchs who their sceptres bear,
To keep their subjects less in love than fear,
Be slaves to crowns—my nation shall be free.
My pintle only shall my sceptre be.
My laws shall act more pleasure than command,
And with my prick I’ll govern all the land.79
As Harold Weber has noted, the king “insists that political power can be understood and expressed only as a manifestation of his royal phallus, the male organ that generates and sustains the patriarchal structures of society.”80 But the figurative traffic between mind and yard is equally clear: because the erect pintle perfectly reflects the royal will and character, it is an even better symbol than the sceptre and crown it replaces, serving as instrument of the sovereign’s power and as surrogate for the royal mind itself.
The non-royal yard must not be forgotten in this context. Although hardly the only marker in the hierarchy of masculinity, the privy member of the well-hung gentleman or genteel whoremaster could add to one’s stature. Bolingbroke and Bathurst were both noted for their phallic exploits, causing friend Pope to commemorate the sexual appetites of both in his Sober Advice from Horace. But their notorious cocksmanship was also appreciated as an extra mark of their status among men. For someone like the passionate Alexander, whose erotic yearnings are so palpable in his poetry and letters, Bolingbroke represented a masculine model of the many things he admired or wanted for himself, including libidinal self-indulgence. As Brean Hammond has noted astutely, “ ‘all accomplish’d St. John’ was everything that Pope aspired to be in his imagination,” and if, “ludicrously, in spite of Pope’s actual physical incapacities, the poet liked to imagine himself something of a rake,” “in Bolingbroke he found the genuine article.”81 St. John’s phallic prowess was an extra badge of virility and manliness, his ambitious yard conferring a distinction of desirable masculinity which would gather respect even from other men.
Something similar is evident in Pope’s representations of Bathurst’s copious swiving, which is presented humorously as being in competition with Pope’s loving friendship:
There was a Man in the Land of Twitnam, called Pope. He was a Servant of the Lord Bathurst of those days, a Patriarch of great Eminence, for getting children, at home & abroad. But … his Love for strange women, caused the said Lord to forget all his Friends of the Male-Sex; insomuch that he knew not, nor once rememberd, there was such a man in the Land of Twitnam as aforesaid. It were to be wisht, he would come & see; or if nothing else will move him, there are certain Handmaids belonging to the said Pope which are comely in their goings, yea which go comelily. (Corr. 2: 292, 1725?)
In these epicoene romps, Pope’s mock-jealous desire for Bathurst’s love takes a backseat to the escapades of the Lord’s yard, which has been diverted by countless mistresses. The poet slyly suggests that it is only through the Lord’s aroused member that a person—whether mistress or male friend—can engage Bathurst’s attention, and Pope comically offers up his Handmaids for the friend’s phallic pleasures, if only to provide the occasion for a meeting of friends. However tongue-in-cheek these libertine insinuations, the flattery is real enough, depending on the equation of male authority or stature of character with potent yard. Adding to his other manly accomplishments, Lord Bathurst’s ambitious phallicism distinguishes his desirability to women and other men alike; to defer to the noble yard is, by Pope’s neat epicoene logic, to “converse with” Lord Bathurst himself.
Biographical and autobiographical domains yield other versions of the erection as measure of selfhood and worth, as in the case of Horace Walpole’s jealous care of Lord Lincoln’s reputedly gargantuan member, or in the obsessive self-regard of James Boswell. The homo-sexually-inclined Walpole was, according to a recent biographer, a “size queen”82 obsessed with the beloved Lincoln’s potency and genital dimensions. At a public masquerade night in February 1743, Horace explained to Mann,
I dressed myself in an Indian dress, and after he [Lincoln] was come thither … made him three low bows, and kneeling down, took a letter out of my bosom, wrapped in Persian silk, and laid it on my head…. They persuaded him to take it: it was a Persian letter from Kouli Kan…. here it is: “Highly favored among women … We have heard prodigious things of thee: they say, thy vigour is nine times beyond that of our prophet … Most potent Lord, we have sent thee as a mark of our grace fifty of the most beautiful maidens of Persia…. Adieu! happy young man! May thy days be as long as thy manhood, and may thy manhood continue more piercing than Zufager, that sword of Hali which had two points.”83
Although there are some similarities here to Pope’s epicoene play with friend Bathurst, Walpole’s risqué public gesture is more psychologically complex, involving both the exhibitionist display of Walpole’s wit, as well as an attempt to embarrass Lincoln, who “stared violently.” But there is an underlying jealousy here as well, in which the clever Walpole indecorously calls attention to the penis of his well-hung friend in order to assert a humorous mastery over it by invoking it publicly at his own will. Having conjured up Lincoln’s yard, so to speak, for the amusement of the assembly, Walpole’s seraglio impersonation archly insinuates some intimate knowledge, and therefore token ownership, of Lincoln’s “vigour.” And “to know” the phallus, by this psychological circuitry, is to own the man, even though the letters indicate that Lincoln was the dominant one in the relationship, and the infatuated Horace a passive, emotionally needy lover sometimes desperate for a reciprocated passion from the apparently bisexual Lincoln. My larger point about these examples is that, however different the personal circumstances between Pope’s epicoene friendships and Walpole’s sodomitical passion, their writing sometimes shared a metaphorical economy in which the stiff prick could take on symbolic properties which represented the power or desirability of the beloved male, whose very being and stature were in turn
