SOURCE: Wallace, John M. “Coopers Hill: The Manifesto of Parliamentary Royalism, 1641.” ELH 41, No. 4 (Winter 1974): 494-540.

In the essay below, Wallace attempts to establish composition dates for the various drafts of Coopers Hill, in an effort to identify more definitively the political events treated in the poem.

If we could discover the very day on which Denham stood on Cooper's Hill, staring out across the Thames valley and reflecting upon the history of its landmarks, we should not only be able to read his famous poem with more exactitude, but we could see where it belonged in the exciting history of which it is a part. Professor Brendan O Hehir in his edition of the drafts of the poem has concluded on the evidence of the stag hunt that Coopers Hill was begun in all probability shortly after the death of Strafford; that is to say, after 12 May 1641 and...