Future Contingencies: Sir Robert Howard and John Boys

Chapter 7 begins by discussing the works of Sir Robert Howard and John Boys, both of whom published translations of Virgil within a year of the Restoration. Howard’s translations and imitations of Virgil contained proclamations of his long-standing loyalty to the Stuarts, but they also expressed concerns over the stability and longevity of the new regime. Boys, by contrast, saw in Virgil a means of providing confident predictions of a glorious future for the nation under Charles II under the guidance of his chief counsellor, the Earl of Clarendon. Such predictions, however, were compromised even prior to the publication of Boys’s translations, and further undermined by events later in the decade. The chapter ends with a sketch of the continued connections between Virgil, providing political counsel to the Stuart monarchy and predicting its future from the period between Clarendon’s fall and the end of the seventeenth century, with a focus on the writings of John Dryden.