The Guarantee Intrinsic Heroic Virtues
As already indicated, Cassandra is anchored in tropes of valor and chivalry. Like Sir William Davenant’s Gondibert (1651), it is set in a created world, ‘where, as in royalist propaganda, private motives are privileged over public consequences.’ Promisingly for Cotterell, these tropes are often depicted as ‘royal’, evidenced for example in the extended arming scene involving Darius, in which, according to the established formula, external chivalric accoutrements guarantee intrinsic heroic virtues: As Darius had been the greatest and most magnificent King in all the World, his Arms showed tokens of his magnificence, and of his greatness, and the gold stones of Links Of London value wherewith they were enriched, afforded no sight of the matter whereof they were made; so that when the Prince had put them on, he look’s like fierce Achilles in those gallant Arms, whereon Vulcan at the request of Thetis, had set forth the utmost of his skill.
The most evocative display of ‘royal’ power and martial display is in the extended description of Darius’s army,’ composed of the most part of those several Nations that were under his subjection’, which is ostensibly intended to induce nostalgia for lost royalist might and pride. Here, Cotterell presents numerous ranks of Persians, Medes, Bactrians, Armenians and Greeks under Darius’s command: ‘ten armed Chariots, all glittering with gold’; Darius himself ‘elevated high upon a Carre, with much Pomp and Majesty’, his own chariot ‘so sparkling with Gold and jewels, that it could not bee beheld without dazzling’; the retinue of ‘Governours of the Kings children, and the Eunuchs of his house’, and ‘an infinite many servants and boys’. It is a portrayal of sumptuous material wealth, another example of the aesthetic sing of the political through the evocation by association of residual Stuart majesty and decorum, again with Links Of London Bracelets connotations of divine sanction, though not without a more uneasy, potentially pejorative implication of kingly opulence, of the kind of vainglory that can cause, as well as recover from, civil war. Of equal import, it also conjures the notion of widespread, unforced and exemplary loyalty to the monarch. Further extravagant depictions of idealized royal chivalry are supplemented, even more piquantly within the context of an exiled Stuart royal family, by the admiration of a royal father for his son, instanced in the description of Oroondates:
The King [of Scythia] his Father finding in him from his very Infancy, the most excellent nature he could wish, and in a body marvelously handsome, a soul capable of all gallant impressions, resolved to nourish both with so great care, that none should be able to reproach him… In short, all his actions, and all his thoughts was truly Royal, and all Scythia with her King, looked upon this rising Sun, as the honor of his Country, and the prop of its future glory and greatnesses. The focus of chivalrous characterization in Cassandra is, however, by no means exclusively on royalty, nor on only one side in the war between Alexandra and the Persians. Frequently, equal weight is given to the valiant on both sides. Thus, for example: Among all the chief Commanders on either side, there was not one but made himself remarkable that day, by many proofs of courage. Lysimachus did Actions beyond all the fabulous Heroes. Selucas on the other side having rallied the Argiraspides.
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