Women Writers and Public Debate in 17th-Century Britain (Early Modern Cultural Studies)

Early M odern C ultural Studies Ivo Kamps, Series Editor PUBLISHED BY PALGRAVE MACMILLAN Idols of the Marketplace: Idolatry and Commodity Fetishism in English Literature, 1580–1680 by David Hawkes Shakespeare among the Animals: Nature and Society in the Drama of Early Modern England by Bruce Boehrer Maps and Memory in Early Modern England: A Sense of Place by Rhonda Lemke Sanford Debating Gender in Early Modern England, 1500–1700 edited by Cristina Malcolmson and Mihoko Suzuki Manhood and the Duel: Masculinity in Early Modern Drama and Culture by Jennifer A. Low Burning Women: Widows, Witches, and Early Modern European Travelers in India by Pomp Banerjee Shakespeare and the Question of Culture: Early Modern Literature and the Cultural Turn by Douglas Bruster England’s Internal Colonies: Class, Capital, and the Literature of Early Modern English Colonialism by Mark Netzloff Turning Turk: English Theater and the Multicultural Mediterranean by Daniel Vitkus Money and the Age of Shakespeare: Essays in New Economic Criticism edited by Linda Woodbridge Arts of Calculation: Numerical Thought in Early Modern Europe edited by David Glimp and Michelle Warren The Culture of the Horse: Status, Discipline, and Identity in the Early Modern World edited by Karen Raber and Treva J. Tucker The Figure of the Crowd in Early Modern London: The City and its Double by Ian Munro Citizen Shakespeare: Freemen and Aliens in the Language of the Plays by John Michael Archer Constructions of Female Homoeroticism in Early Modern Drama by Denise Walen

Localizing Caroline Drama: Politics and Economics of the Early Modern English Stage, 1625–1642 edited by Adam Zucker and Alan B. Farmer Re-Mapping the Mediterranean World in Early Modern English Writings edited by Goran V. Stanivukovic Islam and Early Modern English Literature: The Politics of Romance from Spenser to Milton by Benedict S. Robinson Women Writers and Public Debate in 17th-Century Britain by Catharine Gray

W omen W riters and P ublic Debate in 17th-Century Britain Catharine Gray

17TH-CENTURY BRITAIN Copyright © Catharine Gray, 2007. WOMEN WRITERS AND PUBLIC DEBATE IN

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews. The book contains revised portions of the following articles: Gray, Catharine. “ ‘Feeding on the Seed of the Woman’: Dorothy Leigh and the Figure of Maternal Dissent.” ELH 68:3 (2001), 563–592 © The Johns Hopkins University Press. Reprinted with permission of The Johns Hopkins University Press. Gray, Catharine. “Katherine Philips and the Post-Courtly Coterie.” ELR 32.3 (2002): 426–451 © Blackwell Publishing. Reprinted with permission of Blackwell publishing. First published in 2007 by PALGRAVE MACMILLAN™ 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010 and Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire, England RG21 6XS Companies and representatives throughout the world. PALGRAVE MACMILLAN is the global academic imprint of the Palgrave Macmillan division of St. Martin’s Press, LLC and of Palgrave Macmillan Ltd. Macmillan® is a registered trademark in the United States, United Kingdom and other countries. Palgrave is a registered trademark in the European Union and other countries. ISBN-13: 978–1–4039–8194–3 ISBN-10: 1–4039–8194–9 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Gray, Catharine, 1966– Women writers and public debate in 17th-century Britain / Catharine Gray. p. cm.––(Early modern cultural studies) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 1–4039–8194–9 (alk. paper) 1. English literature––Women authors––History and criticism. 2. English literature––Early modern, 1500–1700––History and criticism. 3. Politics and literature––Great Britain––History––17th century. 4. Women and literature––Great Britain––History––17th century. 5. Politics in literature. 6. Public opinion in literature. I. Title. PR111.G73 2007 820.9⬘9287––dc22

2007060015

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. Design by Newgen Imaging Systems (P) Ltd., Chennai, India. First edition: July 2007 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 Printed in the United States of America.

For Ricky, Joyce, and Richard

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Contents

Series Editor’s Preface

viii

Acknowledgments

ix

Introduction: Crossing Borders: From Private Dialogue to Public Debate

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1 The Zealous Mother: Dorothy Leigh and the Godly Family

37

2 At “Liberty to Preach in the Chambers”: Sarah Wight, Henry Jessey, and the New-Modeled Community of Saints

67

3 The Knowing Few: Katherine Philips and the Courtly Coterie

105

4 New England Becoming Old: Anne Bradstreet and the Coterie of Ghosts

143

Scattering and Gathering in Katharine Evans and Sarah Cheevers: Conclusions

183

Notes

199

Works Cited

225

Index

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S eries E ditor ’ s P reface

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he Early Modern Cultural Studies series is dedicated to the exploration of literature, history, and culture in the context of cultural exchange and globalization. We begin with the assumption that in the twenty-first century, literary criticism, literary theory, historiography, and cultural studies have become so interwoven that we can now think of them as an eclectic and only loosely unified (but still recognizable) approach to formerly distinct fields of inquiry such as literature, society, history, and culture. This series furthermore presumes that the early modern period was witness to an incipient process of transculturation through exploration, mercantilism, colonization, and migration that set into motion a process of globalization that is still with us today. The purpose of this series is to bring together this eclectic approach, which freely and unapologetically crosses disciplinary, theoretical, and political boundaries, with early modern texts and artifacts that bear the traces of transculturation and globalization. This process can be studied on a large as well as on a small scale, and the books in this series are dedicated to both. It is just as concerned with the analyses of colonial encounters and native representations of those encounters as it is with representations of the other in Shakespeare, gender politics, the cultural impact of the presence of strangers/foreigners in London, or the consequences of farmers’ migration to that same city. This series is as interested in documenting cultural exchanges between British, Portuguese, Spanish, or Dutch colonizers and native peoples as it is in telling the stories of returning English soldiers who served in foreign armies on the continent of Europe in the late sixteenth century. IVO KAMPS Series editor

Acknowledgments

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o academic work, no matter how rough, can be produced without the input and critical insight of a great many people. Like the women I analyze here, I am indebted to clusters of readers and writers dispersed across an extended geographic context. This book began as a dissertation in Buffalo, but—in part because of my own peripatetic career— the interests and ideas that shaped it started much earlier, inspired by a host of friends, teachers, and readers in Britain and the United States. Of these I can only mention a handful: Sharon Tanton, Dom Verlade, Jessica Fisher, Chris Fitter, and Ellen Gardiner. From SUNY Buffalo, I am indebted for shared references, ideas, and occasional snowball fights to a smart and funny community of scholars and thinkers, including the fit though few Buffalo Renaissance students (Charlotte, Brad, Kevin), Deidre Lynch, Mili Clark, Shaun Irlam, Jim O’Loughlin, Julie Husband, Dan Weinstein, Jessica Nathanson, the members of Buffalo’s Graduate British Studies Group, Brian Lampkin, Stacey Blythe, Danny Rogers, Scott Klaurens, Laurie Ousley, Dan Moos, and particularly Zubeda Jalazai (whose work on transatlantic print culture greatly aided my thinking on transnational publics). I am especially grateful to the committee who suffered through this at the dissertation stage. Jim Swan combined cheerful encouragement with stimulating discussion. Elizabeth Hagemen shared her extensive bibliographic knowledge and gently corrected my more extravagant claims. Barbara Bono offered a model of scholarly commitment and pedagogical warmth that I have since tried to emulate. My director, Jim Holstun, has stuck by this project almost as long as I have, providing challenging ideas, encyclopedic knowledge of the period, wit, and even the occasional meal in his unwavering support of my work. Thanks, Jim. At the University of Illinois I have been helped by almost too many people to mention. This book benefited from conversations and email exchanges with participants in the Early Modern Workshop, IPRH reading groups, my graduate seminars, and a host of colleagues, including (but not limited to) Rob Barrett, Zack Lesser, Lauren

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Goodlad, Julia Walker, Julia Saville, Jed Esty, Siobhan Somerville, Tim Newcomb, Bob Parker, David Kay, Nina Baym, and Bruce Michelson. Bob Markley offered expert commentary on my Philips chapter, and Richard Powers gamely translated seventeenth-century Dutch for my chapter on Wight—my thanks to both. The support and generosity of my senior colleagues in the Renaissance has been boundless. Curtis Perry provided smart (and tactful) revision suggestions when a fresh perspective was sorely needed. Achsah Guibbory’s extensive knowledge and clarity of analysis honed and broadened my work. Carol Neely’s probing commentary and unflagging enthusiasm kept me pushing at the limits of my ideas. Lori Newcomb’s scholarly generosity, theoretical sophistication, and impeccable taste (in prose—and tea!) helped with all aspects of this book. Portions of this project have also benefited from the comments, challenges, and questions of audience members at conferences over the years, some of whom, alas, remain unknown to me. Many thanks to this larger community, in particular to Katharine Gillespie (for stimulating discussion and encouragement) and Nigel Smith (for praise and constrictive criticism). Margaret Ferguson, Fran Dolan, Mihoko Suzuki, Erin Murphy, Mark Llewellyn, Jen Munroe, Mary Ellen Lamb, Kathleen Lynch, Teresa Feroli, David Norbrook, Joad Raymond, and Todd Butler have all helped with support, research references, and questions along the way—though they may not all know it. I am grateful to librarians and staff at the British Library, Oakland University’s Kresge Library, and the University of Illinois’s Rare Books Room for their patience and expertise. I am grateful, too, to Lisa Schnell for her generous commentary and helpful revision suggestions as I was completing this manuscript. And to Ivo Kamps, who has been an exemplary editor. Finally, I am indebted to my family. Thanks to my mother and father, and the rest of the Wivenhoe gang, for the constant, unconditional— and largely undeserved—love and support I have received from them over the years. Thanks, too, to my boys, Izzy and Sammy, whose surprisingly simultaneous arrival delayed this project in the nicest way possible. Their laughter (not to mention their utter disregard for academia) helps keep me happy and grounded. Last but not least comes Ricky—my closest friend and ideal reader, without whose help, love, and sharp intelligence I would be a very unhappy camper indeed. If this book—and indeed my life—have any merit at all, it is largely due to him.

Introduction

C rossing Borders: From P rivate D ialogue to P ublic Debate

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riting in 1645, the Separatist leader Katherine Chidley diagrams a particular form of public debate, one based on collective dialogue and the public use of reason. Chidley’s pamphlets attack the infamous and (as her criticisms suggest) infamously long-winded pamphlets of Thomas Edwards, Presbyterian nemesis of the multiple religious sects that sprang up in Britain shortly before and during the mid-century Civil Wars. In opposition to Presbyterian calls for state control of religion, Chidley pitches sectarian bids for limited religious toleration and public dispute: And therefore the way to decide the controversy, is to cease writing of such large tractates, werein you do but (as it were) pick straws (and make abundance of repetitions, to trifle away the time,) (In my judgment) (I say). It were better for yourself and Mr. Samuel Rutherford, and Mr. A.S. (or any of you, or whomsoever the Parliament will appoint,) to produce Scripture and good reason for your way, (if you can) and let as many of the Ministers of the Congregations of the Separation, have freedom to produce Scripture and sound reason, for their way, [in a free conference.] And let the houses of Parliament who are able to judge of the great, and weighty business of the Kingdom (let them I say) have the hearing, and trial of the conference, and as things are cleared, so let them allow or disallow. (A New-Yeares-Gift 22)

Chidley’s example is instructive not simply because it forces us to attend to a woman involved in public debate, but because that

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woman’s involvement is enacted in a particular way. Deconstructing Edwards’s scurrilous attacks and anti-sectarian arguments line by line and taking on the ministerial tone of “admonition” to castigate him for his errors (22), Chidley proleptically practices what she preaches: she inscribes textually before a general readership the kind of trialby-dispute she advocates as occurring in person before Parliament, thus shifting judgment from the explicit authority of Parliament to the implicit authority of the general reader. More important for our purposes, her pamphlet models this trial-by-dispute on the notion of “free conference” (22).1 Conference in this period could just mean dialogue, but in the context of the seventeenth-century religious sects it was a semiformal associative activity, wherein the members of a separating congregation would gather to share personal testimony, expound on scripture, discuss sermons, and debate issues of religious controversy independently of the institution of Anglicanism (Caldwell, Puritan Conversion Narrative 76). Chidley’s pamphlet, therefore, explicitly deploys a practice of the Separatist congregations that, because of its positioning outside the state church, was considered private (though not domestic) as the material basis for her vision of public, political debate. This debate is collective: Chidley’s argument pitches Edwards in competition and conflict with not Chidley alone, but a sectarian “brethren” (title-page)—a fraternity into which Chidley, with a gender fluidity typical of women writers of this period, assimilates herself. It also comprises different registers of intimacy, as Chidley evokes the blurry boundary between godly family and intimate reformed congregation: Edwards is a disorderly, even rapist patriarch, who will “father upon us” a homogeneous state church without discussion let alone consent; Chidley and her brethren are “righteous parents” persecuted by old priests and new presbyters in turn (A New-Yeares-Gift 22, A2). In general, then, rather than treating public and private as mutually exclusive arenas, her writing crosses the border between them, presenting private conference as the metonymic ground for public debate (and her licensed role in it)—a part that serves as base and model for the whole. This book argues that attending to women writers like Chidley both illuminates their distinctive role in shaping seventeenth-century public culture, and in doing so, helps us see this culture differently. Though scholars have long argued that this period witnessed a proliferation of print that enabled a revolution in public life, women’s key contribution to this revolution has been rarely discussed—despite the fact that as a group of writers they benefited dramatically from the growth in publications. Women’s marginality to traditional institutions of church and state, however, made them crucial figures for

Crossing Borders

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imagining an expanded public culture beyond these very institutions— and beyond England. For, viewed through the lens of women writers, it becomes clear that this culture is not the homogeneous national sphere of disinterested discussion Jürgen Habermas first described in his hotly contested Enlightenment model.2 Rather it comprises multiple, politically marked communities, which run the ideological gamut from religious radicals to staunch absolutists and reach from archipelagic Britain to the continent and colonies. These communities produced not polite Habermassian discussion but violent dissent, not disinterested consensus but politically vested conflict—much of it armed. And they depended on the very kind of private dialogue foregrounded by women like Chidley. For women writers cast a series of overlapping circles of intimacy and extra-state exchange—the religious meeting, the poetic coterie, the extended family—as the material base and ideological model for public debate. By doing so, at moments of historical crisis, they become pivotal figures around which the above politically specific communities unite. Because women writers are particularly reliant on private affiliation to ground their public identity, then, they can play distinctive roles in shaping new forms of collective public debate that also involve men, especially those who (because of poverty or politics) are excluded from ecclesiastical and courtly paths to public life. To make these broad claims, my analysis situates women’s public careers within a narrative of political change that stretches historically from the tense middle years of James I’s reign to the precarious Restoration settlement of the 1660s, and geographically from the multi-kingdom contests of the Old World to the colonial aspirations of the New. After analyzing a wide cross-section of seventeenth-century women writers and their relation to public life below, I offer detailed historicist case studies of four very different women: the Jacobean conduct writer Dorothy Leigh; the radical mid-century prophetess Sara Wight; the Royalist coterie poet of the Interregnum and Restoration Katherine Philips; and the mid-century transatlantic poet Anne Bradstreet. Across this range, all four share a commitment to public politics and a sense of their own centrality as figures whose writing binds together specific communities of oppositional writers and speakers. They help galvanize what Nancy Fraser has called, in another context, “counterpublics”: “discursive arenas where members of subordinated social groups invent and circulate counterdiscourses to form oppositional interpretations of their identities, interests, and needs” (“Rethinking the Public Sphere” 123). As I will show, these counterpublics reveal new dynamics of public and private interaction, cross-gender identification, and transnational alliance.

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Fraser formulates the counterpublic as an alternative norm to Habermas’s emphasis on the public as a sphere of rational consensus, which she uses to explain the conflictual inequalities defining oppositional public activity in late twentieth-century Western democracies. Her concept grows out of a critique of Habermas’s idealization of the universal access offered by his bourgeois public sphere, which brackets social inequalities that work historically and even structurally to exclude women, the working class, and people of color from public discussion. According to Fraser, Habermas ignores the way that norms of polite discourse or a priori assumptions of what constitutes “the common good” can themselves become markers of race, class, or gender distinction, serving to “marginalize women and the members of the plebeian classes” (“Rethinking” 119). As an alternative theory of how modern publicness works, Fraser’s counterpublics constitute sites for discussion and debate that operate independently from the dominant norms and institutions that would exclude them. They are plural, a fragmented series of relatively discreet discursive communities, bound together internally by their shared ideological commitments.3 Interpublic relations are dynamic and transformative, characterized not by Habermassian consensus but, as Eyal Rabinovitch points out, by Gramscian conflict, as they engage in counterhegemonic activity against dominant publics within a complex and often changing social whole (349). In Fraser’s theory, they serve a double purpose: “On the one hand, they function as spaces of withdrawal and regroupment; on the other hand, they also function as bases and training grounds for agitational activities directed toward wider publics” (“Rethinking” 124). In this model, general publicness is not a coherent sphere but rather what Michael Warner has called “an imaginary convergence point” against which the battle between counterpublics and dominant publics is played out (55). In the case of the seventeenth century— when relatively low literacy rates and textual distribution still limit the number of people involved in public debate—we could characterize this wider publicness as a horizon of possibility and desire.4 As Mihoko Suzuki puts it in relation to women’s early forays into patronage and print culture: “women wrote for a public that in many ways did not yet exist” (23). Women’s writing, then, shifts our attention from public to counterpublic. I borrow Fraser’s concept, formulated for her study of late twentieth-century Western democracies, not to pose a critical panacea for scholars of seventeenth-century British culture, but to offer some productive new ways to think about women’s relation to public life and about seventeenth-century publicness in general. Though Fraser

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does not explicitly address the relation between private and public, for example, her emphasis on the counterpublic’s dialectic of withdrawal into a specific community and engagement of a wider public helps us characterize the dynamic relations between these two vexed concepts in early modern women’s writing. The concepts of private and public have formed powerful tools for feminist critique of the de-politicization of women’s oppression under changing forms of patriarchy. However, recent feminist theorists and historians across a range of periods have become increasingly skeptical about defining these categories as opposing “conceptual absolutes” (Davidoff 228).5 Exactly how we might redefine private and public, especially in the seventeenth century, has proved more elusive, however. Though a number of early modern scholars have begun to note the fluid and porous nature of the public/ private divide in this period, few have offered an extended map of the relations between the two.6 This is in part because definitions of both terms are entangled and layered, mutually determining and overdetermined even in modern use. As Warner points out, there are at least eighteen different current meanings of the word private alone, not all of them mutually compatible or corresponding to the multiple meanings of public (29–30). Add to this the difficulties of historical specificity, and the mapping becomes even more complex. Yet it is necessary, in part because they are such central, shaping concepts in modern thinking that it is hard to bracket them altogether. More important, the terms and concepts of public and private were in use at the time—though the meanings of the word private in particular did not always match our modern meanings. Indeed, as I argue below, redefining early public culture means taking critical account of a multiple, dynamic, and historically specific private. This rethinking of the relation between public and private is particularly crucial for female authors, for one influential tradition of writing about early modern culture argues that women were increasingly confined to one of the major subsets of private life in this period: the domestic. As David Norbrook notes, “Many historians, following on from the pioneering work of Alice Clarke [sic] and Charlotte Carmichael Stopes, have seen the seventeenth century as a period of particularly sharp exclusion of women from the world of work and civic activity” (“Women, the Republic of Letters, and the Public Sphere” 224). Clark and Stopes’s thesis, developed in the first two decades of the twentieth century, later received added impetus and a literary inflection from Joan Kelly’s 1977 essay, “Did Women Have a Renaissance?,” which argued that the Renaissance ushered in a narrowing of the range of social and cultural opportunities for women.7

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It continues today: Retha Warnicke’s “Private and Public: The Boundaries of Women’s Lives in Early Stuart England” (1993) traces upper-class women’s restriction to the household in terms of social roles and education. Corinne S. Abate’s Privacy, Domesticity, and Women in Early Modern England (2003) goes so far as to theorize the private as a “space that describes a female world inaccessible to male reason” (Mazzola and Abate, “Introduction” 2–3). Lorna Hutson’s “The Housewife and the Humanists” (1999) argues that “the humanist classical revival actually reinforced the idea that man’s destiny as a deliberative ‘political animal’ (in Aristotle’s formulation) was dependent on a prior definition of the household as the non-political sphere to which women were confined” (7).8 Though these scholars differ in subject matter and aim, they share the thesis of women’s intensifying exclusion from public political life. This thesis has heavily influenced readings of women writers, leading many critics to seek the most easily legible marks of gender in women’s relation to gender hierarchies or cultural prescriptions of a woman’s voice.9 A number of scholars have worked to combat this potentially re-domesticating model of reading women writers from the beginning, most notably Natalie Zemon Davis’s 1975 essay “Women on Top,” which argued that rituals of inversion centering on unruly female figures may have enabled women’s intervention in gender norms and local politics. More recently, Lena Cowen Orlin’s Private Matters and Public Culture (1994) has warned that seventeenthcentury culture had not yet “processed or acknowledged the feminization of the domestic sphere” (254), and Katharine Gillespie’s Domesticity and Dissent (2004) has argued that seventeenth-century sectarianism offers us a “much altered profile of the ‘private’ sphere from the one perpetuated by much of postmodern feminism as an unremittingly repressive space for women” (44). However, the belief in the private as constituting simply an emerging site of containment persists, and it persistently threatens to limit discussions of women writers and their relation to public life. The above works on women’s exclusion from public life can be valuable in illuminating patriarchal political theory or the sexual politics of women’s writing, but histories and readings that discount or bracket women’s active intervention in transnational change and public politics are in danger of overstating their case, thus reproducing critically the very patriarchal confinement they seek to contest politically. This neat, gendered division of public and private life also ignores the diversity of seventeenth-century women’s relations to public and private life in both practice and ideology: women played roles

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outside the home, and private relations in general were imbued with public meaning in this period—both by conservative conduct discourse and by the conflicting political communities that flourished in the Revolutionary Period. In terms of women’s multiple roles outside the home, Robert Shoemaker has argued, for example, that while women were responsible for domestic labor, they also worked in market gardens, in the fields, in marketplaces. They hawked merchandise in the street, ran shops, managed alehouses; they participated in local collective action, particularly food and enclosure riots and petitions; they even owned coffee houses—one of the main sites of collective sociability that Habermas argues grounds the bourgeois public sphere.10 The household itself of course was not so much a haven in a harsh world of socioeconomic necessity, but an economic unit of production and distribution involved in a number of trades. These included the trade in books, as publishing in particular was very much a family affair in this period, one that involved women as bookbinders, hawkers, and printers.11 Thus, in practice, seventeenth-century women were not simply confined to an apolitical domestic sphere. This is not to claim that women enjoyed unfettered access to a full range of public activities. Far from it: women’s roles were heavily circumscribed, and women were marginalized by male-dominated institutions of state power and social advancement such as Parliament, the Anglican Church, and the universities. Women could occupy some low-level public offices, as churchwardens and overseers of the poor, and were involved in patronage, but they were barred from public positions of authority in the Houses of Parliament and Church of England, prohibited from occupying official governmental office at the king’s court (although aristocratic women could and did wield sociopolitical power), and were excluded from the homosocial environs of Oxford, Cambridge, and the Inns of Court—the main training grounds for state and ecclesiastical office.12 Yet to extrapolate from this institutional marginalization that women were excluded from public life and confined to a domestic realm retrospectively imposes a concept of the prison-house of privacy that does not account for women’s varied experiences in seventeenth-century society, or for women’s complex structural relation to seventeenth-century publicness. Historians such as Shoemaker chart the gap between precept and practice. However, even within the realm of ideology, while the popular genre of conduct books stresses the disciplinary nature of the household, its role in containing women to a life of domestic bliss, it does not cast the public and domestic as mutually exclusive

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oppositions. Instead, as historians such as Susan Amussen and Patricia Crawford have shown, in general domestic life and political life were very much intertwined ideologically (Amussen 34–66; Crawford, Women and Religion 48–50), and conduct literature in particular characterized their relation through simile and synecdoche. On the one hand, the family is like the state: as William Perkins argues in 1609: “the Master of the family . . . is as it were, the prince and chief ruler” (173). On the other, the family functions as a training ground for subjectification or—in nightmarish visions of the failure of patriarchal authority—rebellion: “It was the error of David in the administration and guidance of his own house, which encouraged Absalom and Adoniah his sons . . . to become ill Commonwealth’s men, to aspire, and usurp the kingdom by plots and practices of rebellion” (Perkins 3–4). As such, the family is a part that reproduces the political whole, a “first Society” or “School, wherein are taught and learned the principles of authority and subjection”—or, as chapter 1 suggests, dissent (Perkins 3–4). As the following chapters will show, the links between family and state were often vexed and inconsistent, as authors viewed different family relations through competing systems of state governance.13 Prescriptions of a woman’s place were also contested, historically variable, and tied to politically specific notions of state formation and public life. However, if the dominant form of conduct literature imagines the domestic as always-already imbued with analogical or metonymic public-political significance, even domestic women are not simply excluded from public political life. The complexities attending seventeenth-century discursive and material organizations of public and private outlined above suggest that though women and men were certainly subject to divisions of labor and embedded in a clear-cut social hierarchy, these cannot necessarily be neatly superimposed onto a public/private dichotomy. We thus need a more nuanced model of the ideological and social complexities attending women’s public and private activity. Fraser’s concept of the counterpublic offers a third term that helps loosen the stranglehold of the public/private binary. It enables, that is, a more precise characterization of women’s simultaneous marginalization from and active engagement in public life. Like Habermas’s public sphere, it offers a multiplication of terms, a way of distinguishing between analytically distinct kinds of publicness—in the case of the seventeenth century, between homosocial institutions and local or transnational networks of heterosocial discussion. As alternate sites for the formation of public identity, counterpublics help us account for women’s marginalization or exclusion from state structures, but their inclusion in the public debates of this period.

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More crucially, building on the implications of Fraser’s work, we can also use the concept of the counterpublic to distinguish between analytically distinct modes of privacy, in this instance between an emergent sphere of domestic subjectification and multiple, equally emergent, spheres of collective anti-state subjecthood that sometimes— but by no means always—rest in radical revisions of that domestic. Indeed, the seventeenth century witnesses an increasingly self-conscious understanding of private spaces and relations as sites of intersubjective dialogue potentially imbued with oppositional political meaning. The Oxford English Dictionary notes that the word private in the seventeenth century had a variety of meanings: among others it could mean withdrawn, secret, exclusive, intimate, and ordinary (i.e., not holding public office). It also dates the notion of privacy as freedom from state interference—a dominant liberal definition—to the nineteenth century. However, if privacy does not yet signal liberal freedom in the seventeenth century, it does denote a withdrawn realm of safety and resistance to state decrees. Particularly in religious martyrologies, private places and activities come to define an arena of religio-political activism in the face of state persecution. The Presbyterian Samuel Clarke’s A Generall Martyrologie (1640), for example, tracks the withdrawal into privacy of the early Christians, the Waldenses, and the Bohemians. All three groups are identified as persecuted Protestants or protoProtestants who “could not administer and receive [the sacrament] but in private houses, in woods and caves” (170), and who “durst not preach nor pray, but in private” (176), yet who kept the faith alive. This negative identification of the private as a last resort in times of persecution becomes, in the hands of Separatists like Chidley, a positive identification of private affiliation as creating chosen communities that exist outside the state church. Sectarians defined their conventicles and informal “private meetings” through a particularly intense language of intimate familial and romantic affiliation: fellow congregants were sisters, brothers, yoke-fellows, spouses.14 Because private spaces and affiliations can become the means to preserve and transmit oppositional identities, they are also the source of nightmarish threat for some of the opponents of the sects. Attacking “Anabaptists,” Sir Simonds D’Ewes’s The Primitive Practise for Preserving the Truth (1645) argues: “but for those dangerous and unsafe doctrines of condemning Magistracy, extirpating Nobility, and permitting robberies, howsoever they may still in private teach and adhere to them, and would, perhaps, if they could once make the stronger party in any State, soon enough practice them, yet they have most politicly omitted, not only the maintenance, but the very mention of them also, in the said published Works and Tractates” (56).

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For proponents of a state church, then, private dialogue is potentially seditious. Indeed, Presbyterians like Thomas Edwards mock sectarians’ language of private familial interconnection as itself an anti-state ploy. In his answer to a group of Independents, Antapologia (1644), Edwards prefaces an attack on their defense of “private meetings” by quoting their argument for the gathered church and the family as autonomous realms in full: There is a Tractate in my hands about a Church, that goes under the name of one of you, wherein civil Magistrates are cut off . . . Saints as Saints have a right and full power to cast themselves into the fellowship without asking the consent of Governors and civil Magistrates, who have no power in the marriage of their people, nor should have, it being an act of natural civil right, and as Magistrates have no power over Family government to appoint whom I shall admit into my Family, &c. much less have they power over Christ’s Family. (160)

The Presbyterian Edwards unsurprisingly counters this quotation by vehemently denying the autonomy of conventicles, yet he retains the terms of privacy used to define these oppositional collectives: “The Presbyterians grant to the Magistrates a power in private meetings as well as in public Churches, over exercises there, as well as those in the public places” (Antapologia 161; my italics). Many of the religiopolitical battles of the Revolutionary Period, then, were fought on the terrain of public and private, pitching a “public” authority (a form of state church) in conflict with a “private” realm of extra- or even antistate activity that was yet imbued with religio-political significance. This suggests that seventeenth-century writers both drew clear—and religiously significant—distinctions between public and private, and saw them operating in (potentially seditious) overlap.15 This sense of intersubjective intimacy and private community as the basis for political bonding can also be seen in the widespread use of the discourse of friendship to unite like-minded groups of men and women. Not only Quakers, but also Interregnum Royalists such as Katherine Philips drew on and revised scriptural and classical civic models of friendship to refer to each other as “friends.”16 For example, the anonymous A Letter to a Friend (1645), which may be by Abraham Cowley and purports to describe a former Parliamentarian’s rediscovered support for the King, stages political affiliation as a jokey intimacy between friends. The writer mocks Parliament only to apologize, “I pray thee pardon me, that I a little sport with our misery; but ’tis in private, and only to thee” (6). As this allusion to “private” friendship

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occurs in a published pamphlet, its privacy is not literal, but instead serves as a witty code knitting together a Royalist writer and his readers.17 In a similar vein, Interregnum Royalist poets from Robert Herrick to Richard Lovelace notoriously cast friendship as the bulwark of loyalism in retreat.18 From the sectarian end of the political spectrum, Margaret Fell uses the language of friendship to draw together anxious fellow Quakers in the turbulent year of the Restoration: “Now dearly beloved Friends and Brethren, be strong in the Lord, and in the power of his might, take unto you the Armor of Righteousness, that you may be able to stand against the wiles of the Devil, for now you come not to wrestle with flesh and blood, but with principalities and powers, and against the Rulers of the darkness of this world, and against spiritual wickednesses in high places” (An Evident Demonstration 6). In the same year, the Quaker Samuel Fisher puns on this kind of language to cast opponents of his community as “more like Fiends, then Friends of Truth” (59). These examples suggest that traditional understandings of private relations as intimate, exclusive, and secret were being reshaped to articulate and enable distinct religiopolitical communities—in effect, and perhaps paradoxically, to express collective, public identities.19 As this book will show, it is these communities that women in particular help catalyze. The above examples also indicate that sites for private intersubjective relations were formed in addition to the family that anchors the Habermassian model. In an attempt to explain the genesis of the eighteenth-century public, Habermas theorizes the domestic realm as the basis for public activity. Dubbing the conjugal household the “audience-oriented” intimate sphere, Habermas describes it as an autonomous site in which the values of the Enlightenment public— such as parity, inclusion, and critical self-consciousness—are learned (Structural Transformation 49). This model entails obvious theoretical problems: as post-Habermassian feminists (and eventually Habermas himself ) have argued, predicating parity on the patriarchal household of the eighteenth century means that, from their very inception, bourgeois public identities were structurally compromised by a gender hierarchy that made some family members more equal than others.20 If we try to superimpose Habermas’s theory on earlier periods, reliance on the domestic also entails historical problems: as it is not yet the dominant social formation, the conjugal household cannot be the sole private site for female oppression, or even—as a Habermassian model might have it—of pre-public self-fashioning during this period. In the seventeenth century, women play a role not only in the domesticity of the conjugal home outlined by Calvinist

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discourse, but also in the exclusivity of the poetic coterie, where manuscript verses circulate among elite groups of like-minded individuals, and in the autonomy of the conventicle, where Separatists and semi-Separatists meet to worship and discuss religion beyond the confines of the Anglican Church. The counterpublic’s dynamic of withdrawal and engagement helps us characterize the dialectic of intersubjective intimacy and publicpolitical commitments that defines these multiple private spheres of “audience-oriented intimacy.” These spheres are diverse, but they share a basis in privacy, in that they are intimate and beyond state institutions. They function as spaces for dialogue and, in Fraser’s formulation of the genesis of counterpublics, “withdrawal and regroupment” (124). They also, like Fraser’s counterpublics, share an emphasis on public meaning and aspiration, and are represented in women’s texts as the basis of oppositional activity aimed at an increasingly wide and critically self-conscious readership. Given this dynamic, and the above examples of the political relevance of private relations in seventeenthcentury texts, we could say that at least one way to re-map public and private in this period is to see them acting in both competition and collaboration. As withdrawn, and even secretive, private relations occur independently of state structures—even in opposition to them—yet they simultaneously enable and model the political identities and public debate that characterize this turbulent period. Public and private are, that is, both rivals and allies—or, as Samuel Fisher might put it, “fiends and friends.” As Charlotte Sussman has argued, then, to trace women’s place in print culture, “We need to consider the history not only of the public, but also of the private sphere” (150), and this private sphere is plural, intimate, and yet imbued with political meaning. It is also constituted by collectives made up of both women and men. Both Sussman and Gillespie argue that private religious practices enabled women’s political profiles. Whereas Sussman and Gillespie follow a venerable critical tradition of focusing on privacy as an attribute of the individual, however, my study situates women within the specific social and textual dynamic of heterosocial exchange that helped produce those individuals, analyzing privacy as an attribute of diverse communities. This emphasis on communities is another shift away from Habermas and toward Fraser: at the heart of Habermas’s theory of the public sphere stands the lone individual, a figure that—as Habermas himself astutely recognizes—is synonymous in the eighteenth century with the property-owning male (28–29). Fraser’s emphasis on intersubjective solidarity, however, more neatly suits a period in which there was,

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as James Holstun has argued, “an explosion of experimental collectives” across the political spectrum (Ehud’s Dagger 21). It also suits the collaborative nature of the early modern book trade, which relied on the editorial and legal privileges of publishers as the owners as well as the distributors of books, substantial commendatory matter by supporting authors alongside common coauthorship of the body of texts, and a material distribution to specific communities of manuscript and print often registered in the texts themselves through multiple prefatory and textual modes of direct address. Paula McDowell has demonstrated that lower-class women of the late Restoration rely on “a social, collective” sense of self (The Women of Grub Street 19), and the same is true for women generally throughout the century. The multiple collectives women help forge are crisscrossed with gendered tensions and conflicts. However, since they are formed in large part beyond the long arm of the law of church and state, they are also sites of intimate cross-gender dialogue and heterosocial critical self-consciousness that help lay the foundation for much writing of the period. One of the aims of this book, then, is to de-domesticate women’s writing, resituating it in the public context it engages, without therefore divorcing it from the politicized private spheres in which it is nurtured. Women’s writing has too often suffered a double domestication, however, confined both to the domestic sphere and to the narrow isle of England.21 Fraser’s theory helps shift our focus from the concept of a homogeneous national “public sphere” to the local sites of conflict and resistance that make up the heterogeneous seventeenthcentury public. This displacement is crucial for considering women writers who, although their publications exploded in this period, never reached more than 1.6 percent of the total of seventeenth-century printed books, even at their highest point (Bell and Crawford 266).22 Despite their statistical marginality, as this book will show, at certain historical turning points, women authors catalyze ideologically, and even geographically, local public-political communities. However, though these women may draw on communities that are local, their concerns and circulation are habitually transnational. Dorothy Leigh’s book inspired a second text that was printed first in Amsterdam and then in England; Sara Wight corresponded with millenarians in Amsterdam, and was translated into Dutch and published there; Katherine Philips was an English writer, allied with a group of exOxford wits, who yet rose to prominence at the Restoration in Ireland; Anne Bradstreet was published transatlantically and engaged an international militant Protestantism that stretched from England to Germany to the Massachusetts Bay Colony. If women transgress the

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boundaries of public and private, indicating that seventeenth-century public life is internally fractured, the imaginative content and material circulation of their work also crosses national borders, suggesting that public life is externally expansive, disseminated along lines of communication and debate that extend beyond England. Marginalized by national homosocial institutions of publicness, such as the Church of England and the House of Commons, women can become key figures forging lateral communication between like-minded communities involved in political intervention within England and migration, exile, or colonization abroad. To the question of “When is a public sphere?” then, which has busied early modern scholars for over a decade, we might add the question of “Where is a public sphere?”—not only in terms of complicating the relation between public and private spheres but also in terms of theorizing an expanded geography of public life. For, especially in the wake of recent emphasis by both Habermas and Fraser on transnational and even global publics, we should be wary of assuming that the essentially imagined communities that constitute reading and writing publics demand a national habitation and a name to be cohesive or politically effective. Addressing twenty-first-century democratic theory, Fraser has cautioned that we also need to think about the political implications of talking about publics in transnational contexts, however. As publicness, in both Habermassian and post-Habermassian theory, is a correlative of public state power, she asks whether public opinion can exercise critical force if it does not emanate from a particular political citizenry or address a persuadable nation state (“Transnationalizing the Public Sphere” 1). Her answer is a qualified yes: post-national economic interests, political policies, and institutional power may be best answered by publics that include multinational interlocutors, broach transnational issues, and even address multinational administrations (“Transnationalizing” 4–5). Obviously, seventeenth-century writers do not inhabit such a post-national context, yet a range of historians and literary critics have argued that in this period the British nation state is an administratively and ideologically nascent formation. Monarchal, Parliamentary, and Cromwellian regimes struggled with governing a multi-kingdom and proto-colonial Britain, while also forging diplomatic and mercantile links with the European powers and colonial bodies that harbored the various groups of British exiles created by rapid political change.23 As the later chapters and conclusion of this book illustrate most clearly, to this shifting and extended state power, the corollary is a public culture that deliberately overruns national borders. Perhaps, drawing on Habermas’s

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more recent work, we could characterize this public culture as comprising a “pre-national constellation” of local and transnational publics and counterpublics. As key figures in this pre-national constellation, women writers work to connect ideological or geographical part to whole, imagining private alliances as the beginning of real and imagined communities of pan-Protestant opposition, proto-imperial expansion, and elite cross-cultural bonding. In its attention to early modern women and public life, this book is indebted to a concerted effort of feminist archeology that continues to unearth texts obscured in the late nineteenth- and early twentiethcentury project of literary canon-formation.24 Drawing on this continuing work of recovery, this study adds to a growing body of literature that integrates analyses of sexual politics and public politics in women’s writing of this period, including book-length studies by Gillespie, Carol Barash, Mihoko Suzuki, Phyllis Mack, and Dagmar Freist. With the exception of Barash, however, who focuses largely on Restoration Royalists, the majority of these studies emphasize sectarians and political radicals. Rather than focusing on a particular group of women, this book charts a specific social and discursive dynamic, offering a systematic analysis of the ideological divergences and structural similarities between a wide cross-section of women and their relations to public life. Betty Schellenberg has challenged us to imagine eighteenth-century women writers “at the center rather than on the margins, as the sought-after literary figure rather than at the periphery of someone else’s circle” (84). In part, this study takes up just such a challenge in an earlier period—a task made infinitely easier by the fact that female writers themselves (and their male interlocutors) often figure women at the center of communities of oral, manuscript, and print exchange. Though women may be statistically marginal to the transforming seventeenth-century public, this study argues that they are imaginatively central: pivotal for particular communities and for what they tell us about changes in public life more generally. For if women base public identity in private community, they also actively transfigure that private community into public presence, thus helping shape the widening horizon of public exchange and political opposition that distinguishes this period from its predecessors. This book is equally indebted to the innovative work of a number of postrevisionist literary historians who have charted this widening horizon, particularly those, such as James Holstun, David Norbrook, Nigel Smith, Sharon Achinstein, and David Zaret, who have analyzed Revolutionary or republican public spheres.25 These critics stress widespread activism and long-term oppositional struggle in order to

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refute or complicate revisionist explanations of the pre-Revolutionary Period as characterized by broad consensus, and the mid-century wars as caused by short-term triggers such as factional disputes.26 As the case of the Royalist Katherine Philips will illustrate, however, opposition is a relational term, constituted in a diachronically determined process through response to changes in the dominant order. In a period characterized by almost dizzying public, political reversals, women writers occupy an array of divergent and historically precise positions of opposition, forming networks of communicative action that contest the shifting and often temporary dominant orders— whether they be monarchal, Presbyterian, or Parliamentary. In so doing, they exemplify to their culture—and thus make visible to us—a newly emerging, extra-institutional model of public life that also involves seventeenth-century men. Though some mid-seventeenthcentury male writers such as John Milton found public roles within the new institutions opened up by the Revolutionary Period, from the Cromwellian government to the New Model Army, others such as the itinerant evangelist George Fox did not, relying instead on informal communities like the Quakers (not to mention his well-heeled wifeto-be, Margaret Fell).27 Moreover, many of those who attained positions of authority within these new homosocial public institutions maintained a tenuous and fluid relation to them, periodically moving into positions of opposition to the government and developing public profiles in their interstices. The radical army preacher John Saltmarsh, for example, built a career in the New Model Army, itself both oppositional and experimental in terms of structure and composition. However, he ended his life by drawing on the entirely extra-institutional (and, by this point, largely female) tradition of the prophetic trance to berate the army leaders with whom he had worked. The Baptist Henry Jessey includes members of the New Model Army and Parliament in the lists that begin his and Sarah Wight’s 1647 The Exceeding Riches of Grace, but he does not model their book on those institutions, relying instead on Wight herself and the gathered church as its collective base, during a period of Presbyterian governmental backlash.28 I focus on women authors because of their distinctive role in the development of oppositional public debate, but women’s evocation of a reflexively public address that emerges in and through extra-institutional, intersubjective dialogue helps shape larger transformations in publicness that affect—and are affected by—both genders. As Hobby notes, recovering women’s texts means recovering their noncanonical male interlocutors (“Recovering” 21), and thus offers opportunities for rereading seventeenth-century culture more broadly.

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By attending to those on the marginalized edges of public life, then, this study hopes to transform both our understanding of women’s public profiles, and of the relations between private dialogue and public debate in general in this period. In Fraser’s formulation, counterpublics do not infinitely pluralize sites of publicness, as they occur within a particular socioeconomic context that pitches them in contest with a dominant public. This dominant public is itself subject to change and transformation, however. Indeed, Habermas’s first book on the public sphere could perhaps be retitled in the plural as The Transformations of the Public Sphere, as he charts not only the degeneration of the bourgeois public sphere into mass society, but the earlier mutation of displays of courtly publicity into the discussions of a newly formed general public. Before looking in more detail at how individual women evoke counterpublics, therefore, we need briefly to characterize both the turbulent transformations in the dominant ideas of seventeenth-century publicness, and a broad cross-section of women writers’ relations to those transformations.

Seventeenth-Century Counterpublics To talk of seventeenth-century counterpublics is to revise the history and theory of Habermas’s history of the emergence of publicness. His narrative of the rise of the bourgeois public sphere locates its emergence in the Restoration and eighteenth century, when a civil society separate from the state developed out of expanding routes in trade and news, and manifested itself first as a literary and then as a political arena of discussion and critical debate. Indeed, he goes so far as to claim that not until the Glorious Revolution can we see even the glimmerings of an emerging early modern public sphere, and that “Under the Stuarts, up to Charles II, literature and art served the representation of the King” (Structural Transformation 32).29 However, as David Norbrook, among others, has argued, we can fault Habermas for “pass[ing] over the mid-century revolution, which arguably anticipated the developments he consigns to a later period” (Writing the English Republic 13). Adding the seventeenth century to his picture of early public culture challenges both Habermas’s historical claim and the role conflict plays in that history. For Habermas, the bourgeois public sphere emerges in a relatively smooth linear narrative of development, in contrast to a very different idea of publicness as a prerogative of nobles and their king: “This publicness (or publicity) of representation was not constituted as a special realm, that is, as a public sphere; rather, it was something like a status

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attribute” (Structural Transformation 7). This sense of early publicness as an aristocratic status attribute—one that, in the centralized governments of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, is vested increasingly in the king and court—is certainly articulated by courtly and satellitecourtly writings and performances of the first four decades of the seventeenth century, as a number of New Historicists have argued.30 James I, for example, echoing similar statements by his predecessor Elizabeth I, pictures the king strutting his stuff before an awed and wondering public audience: “Kings being public persons, by reason of their office and authority, are as it were set (as it was said of old) upon a public stage, in the sight of all the people; where all the beholders’ eyes are attentively bent to look and pry in the least circumstance of their secretest drifts” (Basilicon Doron 4). This notion of the king as embodying representative publicness is taken to its limit in Charles I’s posthumous Eikon Basilike, a book published after the first two Civil Wars and following Charles’s own trial and execution. Even Eikon Basilike’s title—which means “the image of the King”—aims at reinforcing the iconic quality of royalty, and the book attempts to engross textual publicity as royal prerogative. Presenting the monarch himself as the ultimate, divine text, Charles argues that those “rude and scandalous pamphlets” publicly criticizing the King simply cannot compete with the spectacular public presence of the monarch: “Nor shall all their black veils be able to hide my shining face” (135). However, Eikon Basilike’s embattled characterization of the public as royal prerogative is presented in the face of Revolutionary change that belies royal power and privileged publicity. Even in James’s formulation, made earlier in the century when monarchical power was relatively stable, his audience is threateningly ready to exercise critical faculties in “prying” into the opulent spectacle set before it.31 By the time Eikon Basilike was published, Britain had witnessed the defeat of the Stuart court that claimed to embody representative publicness: from 1649 to 1660, there was no monarchy, as after Charles I’s trial and execution in 1649 the office of king was abolished as “unnecessary, burdensome and dangerous” (qtd. in Barbar 136). This act was preceded and followed by a series of reforms that undermined monarchal ecclesiastical and government structures: with the dismantling of the monarchy’s prerogative courts censorship ground briefly to a halt in 1641; episcopacy was abolished in 1646, allowing a proliferation of religious sects as Parliament discussed how to restructure the state church; and the House of Lords was dissolved in 1649.32 As Achinstein has argued moreover, Charles’s trial occurred, as one seventeenthcentury pamphlet put it, “on behalf of the People of England” and

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Parliament published extended accounts of the prosecution’s accusations and the King’s defense in an attempt to gain popular approval (Achinstein 29; King Charls His Tryal 14). If the sense of the public as a status attribute is accurate as far as royal depictions of public power go, as New Historicists have argued, then it has to be measured against developing critiques of King and court from beyond the aesthetic and political confines of courtly publicness, and against these explosive seventeenth-century historical developments. Clearly, for the Parliament that prosecuted Charles and then published the trial, and the readers who bought its account as well as the various pamphlets discussing the political settlement to follow, publicness had devolved from the shattered court to settle elsewhere. Even the popular Eikon Basilike was paradoxically dependent on the very public it attempted to subsume, geared to appeal to the court of popular opinion that had turned against the Stuart monarchy at the outbreak of war. Thus at the very moment it held up an image of the King as the epitome of the public royal, it simultaneously circulated in a broader sphere of vehement political debate, offering to “redress all public grievances” and touting the “public good” (1, 19). As Smith, Norbrook, Achinstein, and Zaret have all argued, this more inclusive public activity was inscribed in a number of maleauthored texts. Alongside and in competition with royal insistence on publicness as a status attribute, the seventeenth century develops traditions of publicness as an activity in which a wider spectrum of readers and writers can participate to decide the political fate of the kingdom. This new tradition of more egalitarian and inclusive public culture is predicated on the assault upon—and increasing impossibility of—publicity as a display of status. In the anti-monarchal Eikonoklastes, for example, Milton specifically attacks representative publicness as a “civil kind of idolatry,” accusing the editor of Eikon Basilike of attempting to create a textual “masking scene,” sent to entrap the reading public through passive wonder: “by the shrine he dresses out for him [the King] certainly would have the people come and worship him” (Complete Poems 784). The early seventeenth century’s dominant notion of publicity as a display of status, epitomized by the Stuarts, then, is increasingly countered by a politically distinct vision of an active and engaged citizenry who create widespread debate. The seventeenth century presents not a period saturated by a homogenous vision of royal representativeness that lasts intact until at least 1688, as Habermas argues, but a developing field of combat in which different conceptions of the public, tied to different ideas of right rule and political power, battle it out.

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It presents, that is, a public constituted by politically vested conflict, in this case between a dominant court-centered representative publicness and an increasingly powerful, largely metropolitan, counterpublic, composed of Parliament men, New World merchants, and an activist urban populace, temporarily thrown into opposition to the dominant norms and institutions of Anglican monarchy.33 That conflict should play a larger role in the seventeenth century than in Habermas’s Enlightenment ideal should come as no surprise given that, as the above critics and historians have argued, it was the British Civil Wars themselves that opened up publication, activism, and political debate to a wide variety of nonaristocratic or “mechanical” men. The wars unleashed a flood of publication: over 34,900 broadsides, books, and pamphlets were published between 1640 and 1660, with 3,666 books published in 1642 alone (the first year of war in England)—compared to just 625 in 1639.34 The public culture of this period was, therefore, in many ways a war culture, where ideological battle emerged from and interacted uneasily with the real battles that shook England, Wales, Scotland, and Ireland. Milton promotes reasoned critical debate as the basis of public life in his Areopagitica, for example, but he simultaneously imagines books producing armed men, London as a “shop of war,” debate itself as part of the “wars of truth” (Complete Poems 720, 743, 747). Alongside defenses of a more inclusive public activity, books of this period acknowledge, even seek out, images of war, in ways that reveal a self-consciousness about this public culture’s basis in and motivation by bitter struggle—even violence. In this period, that is, the reasoned discourse central to all theoretical models of public debate relies on anti-monarchal conflict as its bloody ground. This ongoing ideological and literal conflict makes seventeenthcentury public culture very fluid, influenced by radical reversals of military fortune and political power. After the execution of the King, the Parliamentary counterpublic itself became dominant, linked to the Revolutionary power structures of Presbyterian and Protectorate rule. But its appearance was preceded and accompanied by a plurality of competing counterpublics that both facilitated its emergence and then contested its dominance. Post-revisionist historians and critics of the period before the Revolution have presented the mobilization of ideologically specific and politically vested communities of opposition against crown policy at a variety of controversial periods punctuating the rules of both James and Charles. The Bohemian Crisis, the Spanish Match, and the Forced Loan in the 1620s all acted as catalysts for emergent counterpublics of news networks, libelous ballads, oppositional preaching, and anti-tyrannical rhetoric.35 With the mid-century

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Civil Wars, new communities developed and old ones mobilized. Scots Presbyterians and Irish Catholics developed publication campaigns to complement their military action against the English; Independents and Separatists mobilized for religious reform while forming gathered churches across the British Isles; Diggers and Levellers launched large public campaigns of radical political critique and utopian planning; Quakers and Fifth Monarchists published tracts and traveled the country preaching equality of the spirit or millenarian revolution. Even English Presbyterians and Royalists employed widespread public communication and mobilization, energetically engaging in the pamphlet wars of religious and political controversy, especially in and around London.36 The de-centering of political hierarchies maintaining royal power and the de-institutionalization of the Anglican Church thus led to a sense of an expanding horizon of publicness and communicative action in which ordinary individuals— both men and women—could participate to decide issues of national and international importance. These individuals, however, did not primarily address this expanding horizon from a vantage point of atomistic Habermassian disinterest, but from positions of political interest that emerged in dialogue with some like-minded communities and in conflict with others. The battles over the nature of the public were thus both precipitated by moments of historical crisis and located in very specific networks of debate and critique—in counterpublics of religio-political bonding and opposition.

Women and Public Culture Before analyzing women’s debt and contribution to specific examples of these counterpublics, I will outline the broader structural conditions that enabled women’s published intervention in political culture, particularly during the Revolutionary Period when women’s role in cohering multiple counterpublics reached fruition. The above highpoints of debate must loom large in any broad definition of these conditions: the intermittent flurries of radical activity punctuating even the early reign of James profoundly affected not just mechanic men but also writing women, as chapter 1 will show. Hilda Smith has argued that genteel male publicness was grounded in the institutions of the court, church, and universities, institutions that for the most part marginalized women (“Women, Intellect, and Politics” 3). The temporary undermining of the cultural cache of these institutions at times of conflict created gaps and fissures in seventeenth-century literary and political culture that early modern women rushed to fill.

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The primary conflict of this century was the British Civil Wars, the tumultuous period that de-stabilized some of the prominent power structures excluding women, such as the court councils and state church. As Patricia Crawford and Lois Schwoerer have argued, the majority of women’s public identities were forged in this period’s furnace of sociopolitical upheaval (Crawford, “The Challenges to Patriarchalism” 125; Schwoerer 60–61)—at least in terms of printed materials.37 Older forms of manuscript and oral exchange, which also included women, of course survived, but they now interacted with a growing body of women’s published works. For the Revolutionary Period was primarily a revolution in print for women: the two decades of the Interregnum produced over 30 percent of published women’s writings for the whole of the seventeenth century—as opposed to only 9 percent in the forty preceding years—their output shifting from more traditional forms and genres, such as poetry, to newer and often more radical forms such as prophecy and political commentary (Bell and Crawford 267–68). As Crawford shows, women’s books increased not just in number but as a percentage of overall publications—thus the increase cannot be explained away as merely the result of the lifting of court censorship with the advent of war (Crawford, “Challenges” 124). Active in producing emerging counterpublics, women in particular published more, and more varied, texts. The expansion of women’s publication during the Civil Wars exemplifies the way that political upheaval and social conflict, rather than the Enlightenment values Habermas rehabilitates, are crucial to the growth of women’s writing. As Margaret Cavendish, in an unflattering depiction of the intersection of battle and proliferating discourse, puts it, peace may produce “best wits,” but “in war there are most writers, for war being full of factions, produceth subjects to write of ” (The World’s Olio 12). War brought poverty and disease, entailing severe material hardship for men and women all over Britain, but it also provided unprecedented opportunities for women’s participation in public culture. The sectarian Sarah Jones emphasizes her debt to armed political conflict, highlighting real war and ideological warfare as the condition of her authorship. In her 1644 defense of separating congregations, she begins, “Christian reader, I thought to have been silent, but this is a time of war, the war increaseth not only on earth but also in heaven, when the Lord will destroy his enemies, he provokes them to come out against his people” (A3r). Jones’s embattled justification for her duty to intervene in what she describes as an ideological holy war is repeated by other women writers, implicitly or explicitly indebted not just to the macro-conflict of the Revolutionary

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Period but also to the many micro-conflicts it precipitated. Chidley’s counter to the anti-sectarian invective of the Presbyterian Edwards justifies her publications using the same militant imperative to write that Jones presents: “Understanding that you are a mighty Champion, and now mustering up your mighty forces (as you say) and I apprehending they must come against the Host of Israel, and hearing the Armies of the Living God so defied by you, could not be withheld, but I (instead of better) must needs give you the meeting” (Justification A). Though these women position themselves in relation to literary genealogies of repetition and revision, they also evoke counter-genealogies of rebuttal and rejection. They indicate that female writers were as consciously reliant as male writers on the politically interested real and metaphoric conflicts that spawned competing communities of debate in this period. In fact, the mid-century wars were particularly useful to writing women because they could erase or temporarily dislodge the patriarchal figures that dominated traditional public institutions and culture. Civil war intensified a trend of male death and female survival that already impacted early modern society and culture. Sara Mendelson and Patricia Crawford argue that as most married women wed men older than themselves in early modern England, they often outlived their husbands (Women in Early Modern England 174), which led to a relatively high number of widows living with families or, more often, heading their own households—up to 84 percent in Erickson’s calculations (187–88). Widowhood was one of the most socially and economically precarious periods of a woman’s life, yet, if widows managed to support themselves, they gained special privileges married women lacked: they had independent legal standing and were more likely to own and bequeath property (Mendelson and Crawford 168–70; Erickson 193–95). During the battles of the 1640s, this trend of male death accelerated: figures for participation in and casualties of the war are speculative, but John Morrill suggests that as many as one in three or four men bore arms at some point during the wars and Charles Carlton that 84,830 combatants died in battle (“Introduction” xix; “Civilians” 273). This heavy death toll produced younger widows, often saddled with the responsibility of trying to make ends meet while raising small children. However, the context of war also gave these same widows a newly active sense of entitlement, and Geoffrey Hudson has detailed their successful activities as petitioners for new state and local pensions. The social loss of father-figures in war is registered culturally through the haunting figure of the lost patriarch: mid-century

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women’s texts inscribe husbands and fathers as fleeting, even spectral, figures, who, if they appear at all, serve to legitimate women’s public endeavors. The prophet Anna Trapnel and the sectarian writer Sarah Jones, for example, both allude to dead fathers: Trapnel notes her father’s godly life and death to shift her main attribution of spiritual influence to her mother, whereas Jones evokes her dead father as the ghostly conduit for her own sectarian relations in her dedication (The Cry of a Stone 3; A2). The Baptist petitioner Johanna Cartwright and the Presbyterian writer Mary Pope were widows, partaking of the potential sexual, economic—and literary—self-sufficiency this status imbued. Trapnel and another prophet, Elizabeth Poole, were both single and envisioned themselves as married only to God, a status echoed by some of the Protestant poets of the period such as Anne Collins and Elizabeth Major, who claim the public position of Bride of Christ. This patriarchal absence could be embattled or temporary, operating in the interstices of traditional marriage plots or historical narratives of change. The anonymous poet “Eliza,” for example, attempts to actively produce an all-too-present earthly patriarch as absent, rejecting mortal wife- and motherhood for marriage to Christ. Addressing Christ, she argues: A wife thou choo’st out for my part Which I misliked in my heart; And thought wedded to none to be Great Prince of Heaven and earth but thee.

(Eliza’s Babes 51)

Other married writers such as Anne Bradstreet and Katherine Philips, the subjects of later chapters in this book, address their husbands as absent presences whose business travel licenses their literary production.38 Women writers also register the temporary loss of religious or royal patriarchal icons, whose absence shapes new master narratives of national or global history. Millenarians such as Cary believed that Christ would return to earth at the end of time, bringing an international reign of the spirit in which: “all the Kingdoms and Dominions in the whole world, shall in more peculiar and more eminent manner than yet they have been, be subjected to the Lord Jesus Christ, and by him given to his saints to possess” (Little Horns Doom and Downfall 52). Royalist sympathizers such as the Presbyterian Mary Pope, on the other hand, looked forward to the domestic restoration of the monarch when Parliament or the people will “go to fetch home your King, Father and Prince” (C1v). Both women’s characterizations of past and future hinge on a patriarchal absence that licenses their

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authoritative public presence. In addition, their visions of patriarchal restoration offer a heavily revised gender order in which women will find their proper places as privileged members of the elite or leveled members of a nation of prophets: as the more radical Cary puts it, in Christ’s egalitarian restored rule, “that which is given to the head, is given to the members, that which is given to the husband, the wife must partake of ” (Little Horns Doom and Downfall 54). Women from “Eliza” to Cary, then, profit from war’s erasure or decentering of traditional father-figures, to pitch themselves as contingent commentators filling patriarchal gaps and to recast their roles in plots of personal, national, even international, scope. As the ideal of representative publicness espoused by the royals was challenged by new ideals of public political activism and collective communicative action, therefore, women of all denominations and ideological commitments began participating in public debate. Women’s public identities flourished in the loose voluntary associations of religious radicals, political moderates, and even Royalists outlined above—counterpublics that collected at times of crisis. Women were particularly active in the sects: as a number of historians have shown, women played crucial roles in the religious groups that sprang up in the middle of the seventeenth century, roles that would have been denied them in the hierarchized and sacramental structure of the Church of England.39 Women were also active in collective politics during this period: women petitioners directly addressed Parliament during the mid-seventeenth century on a number of issues from debt relief to the imprisonment of fellow radicals, Leveller women in particular turning petitions into stages for mass mobilization and protest.40 These expanded public roles opened up for conservatives and moderates as well as radicals: Royalists with literary ambitions such as Cavendish petitioned Parliament on behalf of their husbands’ estates, while Royalist prophets such as Elinor Channel competed with radical millenarians like Anna Trapnel.41 Because of the division of labor that barred these women from homosocial public institutions, however, they were more reliant than mechanic men on private spheres of voluntary affiliation to ground public identity. Even during the Revolutionary Period, though men could rise through the ranks of the New Model Army or civil authorities, reaching positions of power as officers, common councilmen, and Members of Parliament, women were still barred from state posts. Experiments with new forms of government might open up official public roles to nonaristocratic men like Praisegod Barebone, the leather seller and religious radical who became a member of the Parliament of

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Saints, but women like Chidley, stocking-maker and Leveller agitator, were restricted to unofficial public roles as writers and preachers. Women writers begin to articulate this exclusion from, and need to circumvent, new and old masculine positions of public authority. “Eliza,” for example, near the end of her prose meditations, replies to an unknown interlocutor: “Peace, present now no more to me . . . that I am a creature of a weaker sex, a woman,” and goes on to present a closed circuit of public male authority that is only undone by an internalized masculinity or androgyny: “Kings are men and men are Kings. And souls have no sex; the hidden man of the heart makes us capable of being Kings; for I have heard it is within that makes the man; then we are by election capable of as great a dignity as any mortal man” (Eliza’s Babes 100). The Quaker, Sarah Blackborow, pitches herself as a “true Witness to the Lord” against a list of male officials: “Rulers, Justices of the Peace, Constables, and other officers” (Herein Is Held Forth 7). In countering these male roles of institutional publicness, Blackborow evokes the Quaker sect as her collective base, defending “the meetings of the Lord’s people, his sons and daughters” (8). In Blackborow’s pamphlet, the autonomy of the Quaker meeting, outside the very state structures that create the male institutional roles she attacks, lends motive and support for her denunciation. Like Chidley, she suggests that women’s exclusion from even Revolutionary public structures motivated new models of oppositional public life based in private spheres of dialogue and political affiliation. In this evocation of private spheres as the base of public identity, Chidley and Blackborow are far from alone. Women as diverse as the Royalist Margaret Cavendish and the Puritan “Eliza” articulate a public address that emerges through private dialogue. In her published book, the 1653 Poems and Fancies, Cavendish presents her publication as scandalous self-display, happily welcoming the manyheaded monster of publicity despite her elite commitments: “For all I desire, is Fame, and Fame is nothing but a great Noise, and Noise lives most in a Multitude” (A4). Yet the book situates this public display within the class and gender hierarchies of the aristocratic household: it begins with dedications to her brother-in-law, Sir Charles Cavendish, and her maid and confidante, Elizabeth Topp, and contains prefatory material by both Topp and Cavendish’s husband, the duke of Newcastle. In a different vein, “Eliza” presents publicity as an act of pious cross-gender identification, in which writing reciprocates for Christ’s spectacular death on the cross: “And was so great a Prince, not ashamed to avow so great affection

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and love to me, and shall I be ashamed to return him public thanks, for such infinite and public favors?” (A3). Unlike Cavendish “Eliza” evokes not the aristocratic household but the familial intimacy of the congregation as her base: she not only dedicates her book of poems and meditations to her congregational “Sisters,” but addresses specific poems to literal or figural sisters and brothers.42 In some ways, Cavendish and “Eliza” are the most solitary of author-figures: Cavendish’s literary style was self-consciously eccentric, and Eliza presented herself as an exceptional woman, elevated above her earthly sisters through her position as Spouse of Christ. However, the works of even these writers evoke specific, intimate communities that exist beyond the bounds of homosocial institutions as the ground of their public identities. Drawing on these kinds of private spheres of dialogue enables women writers to engage debate across national borders, as women present both the violent crises of the period and their own public profiles in the context of multi-kingdom conflict, colonial dialogue, and continental rivalry. The born-again Anglican, Susanna Parr, blames her lapse into Independency on her transatlantic knowledge of the New England way (1, 22). When the sectarian Chidley defends her community against Edwards, she does so through a discussion of practices of persecution and reform in England, France, Holland, and New England (Justification 42). The Fifth Monarchists Anna Trapnel and Mary Cary both read the drama of the Civil Wars against the backdrop of multi-kingdom rule. The title-page of Trapnel’s Strange and Wonderful News directly addresses “the Government of the Commonwealth of England, Scotland, and Ireland” (title-page), while her Cry of a Stone evokes violence in Scotland and Ireland to critique Cromwell’s New Model Army (65–66). Cary builds a history of sectarian identity by measuring the past tragedies of the particular kingdoms of England, Ireland, Scotland, and France against the future triumphs of a universal kingdom of God (Little Horns Doom 6, 52). Topp’s dedication to Cavendish claims that the latters Royalist exile on the continent provides for an expansive public identity, “which apparently shineth in all Places, especially where your Ladyship hath been, as France, Flanders, Holland, &c. to your everlasting Honor and Fame” (Poems 1v). In these women’s texts, ideal audiences and thematic content are shaped by extended geopolitical contexts of war, persecution, and exile. Their writing promotes real and imagined communities whose geographical dispersal is overridden by common religious and cultural practices and shared political commitments and histories.

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These commitments and histories were also shared with men. The relative absence of public and private patriarchal figures does not mean women wrote in isolation from male writers—quite the reverse.43 Given women’s statistical marginality in terms of the total publication in the seventeenth century, when women engage in intertextual debate, it is most often with male interlocutors: Rachel Speght, entering the woman debate early in the century, counters the misogynous outpourings of Joseph Swetnam, while Susanna Parr, justifying her return to Anglicanism just before the Restoration, attacks her Independent minister, Lewis Stuckley.44 However, not all male interlocutors are dominant antagonists that must be countered; rather, many functioned as facilitators and correspondents, members of the extended literary circles women helped cement. Women authors, like their male counterparts, write multivocal texts that figure the collaborative or circulating authorship of specific communities: their books include prefatory poems and epistles by men, prophetic voicings of God’s word recorded by male amanuenses, even coauthorship with male writers. Anna Weamys’s continuation of Sir Philip Sidney’s Arcadia, for example, is introduced by five male prefatory writers (and one who is possibly female) who usher her into print by praising her abilities and situating her in the literary tradition of the romance; Johanna Cartwright writes a petition from Amsterdam for the re-admission of the Jews into England in collaboration with her son, Ebenezer Cartwright, their voices molded into one. William Jarvis not only fits the countess of Kent’s manuscript collection of medical remedies for the press and writes a preface touting her abilities, but also adds remedies by a handful of male doctors, advertising the addition of “several experiments . . . by a Professor of Physic” on the title-page. He thus mixes manuscript and print, nonprofessional female with professional male authorship. The heavy involvement of men in women’s works couples intertextual debate with intratextual dialogue: in these texts, women write, represent themselves, and are represented by men. The above men are examples of what Maureen Bell, George Parfitt, and Simon Shepherd have called gatekeepers: “guardians of access not only to the institutions of study but also to those of publishing” (278). For the above historians, however, this term stresses men’s role in containing women’s authority: women’s texts were “manipulated and appropriated by the men whose interests were involved” and even aided “the wider social conventions and pressures which made women reluctant to expose themselves as ‘fools in print’ ” (283, 281). These wider social pressures have been well-documented: a variety of texts

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and popular practices worked to keep women chaste, silent, and obedient throughout the century.45 Too great a stress on male discipline and containment of women’s public writing, however, misses the anxious oscillation between praise and prescription, facilitation and critique, that exists in much of men’s writing to, for, or about women— let alone men and women’s collective textual counterhegemonic activity. The prefatory poems to Weamys’s book may shape the reader’s response to her work, but in doing so they dramatize an admiring audience of men, passive male consumers of the product of a female pen. The Baptist Henry Jessey not only praises Mary Cary’s prophetic powers in his preface to The Little Horns Doom and Downfall, but also cites them as inspiration to publish his own prophecies as a companion text (a6v). Cary’s prophecy is dedicated to three prominent women from the ruling Independent party— Elizabeth Cromwell, Bridget Ireton, and Margaret Rolle—but the three prefaces following those dedications belong to Independent men: Jessey, the New England preacher Hugh Peter, and prominent Fifth Monarchist Christopher Feake. Inscribing a loose circle of sectarian readers and writers into her pamphlet, Cary creates not an embattled female community, working to subvert patriarchy, but a cross-gender counterpublic of millenarian aspiration, working to envision a godly revolution. And though in general men introduce works by women rather than vice versa, these roles can be reversed. In her preface to James Naylor’s 1657 How Sin Is Strengthened, for example, Sarah Blackborow takes responsibility for ushering his book into print, and Quaker women Mary Booth and Rebecca Travers both wrote prefaces for two more tracts by Naylor.46 This sort of collaboration easily extends to group-authorship: though Wing’s Short Title Catalogue attributes O England; Thy Time Is Come to Martha Simmonds, three other Quaker writers—Hannah Stranger, William Tomlinson, and James Naylor—made equally large contributions to the pamphlet.47 Rather than stressing male gatekeepers, then, I focus on some of the non-normative aspects of seventeenth-century men and women’s collaborations within specific communities, their willingness to bracket or subvert the usually hierarchical relations between the sexes and engage in moments of cross-gender identification.48 The Royalist prefatory epistles and poems to Weamys’s continuation of Sidney’s Arcadia, for example, employ gender-bending images of transformation and the transmigration of souls to trace the metamorphosis of Sidney’s text into Weamys’s romance. The bookseller Thomas Heath quips, “In brief, no other than the lively ghost of Sidney, by a happy

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transmigration, speaks through the organs of this inspired Minerva” (4). In this short passage Weamys is both powerful goddess and inspired empty vessel, Sidney is both reincarnated genius and ghostly utterance. These images are particularly suited to a woman writing an addition to a male-authored romance, but Weamys’s book is not alone in presenting cross-gender identification as a condition of authorship. Sarah Jones, dedicating her sectarian pamphlet to “D. Gouge,” evokes his relation to her dead father, only to displace this paternal function to herself: “Remembering your ancient acquaintance with me and my Father long since at rest, I presume to father this naked child without scholastic phrases” (A2). Doing so, she inverts the common male poetic practice of appropriating maternity as a figure of authorship. Jones goes on to identify her writing with the voices of Old Testament prophets, Ezekiel and Jeremiah, perhaps one of the most common forms of cross-gender identification in the period. The epigraphs of Cary and Chidley, for example, simultaneously associate them with male and female worthies: the title-page to Chidley’s 1641 The Justification of the Independent Churches of Christ identifies her with the Old Testament figures of David and Jael, Cary’s Twelve Humble Proposals with Solomon and Deborah. Hilda Smith, in her analysis of the falsely universal language of seventeenth-century religiopolitical writings, has called these kinds of identifications with male figures “homocentric” (All Men and Both Sexes 21), and certainly they indicate that even for the female-dominated genre of prophecy, paradigms of public authority could be male. However, women could reverse the gender poles: the prophet Elizabeth Poole characterizes almost everyone involved in her pamphlet (with the notable exception of Charles I) as female: Parliament, the army, and England are all wronged and dutiful wives and laboring mothers. Moreover, women’s identification with male figures demonstrates a facilitating fluidity of gender in terms of authorial personae and textual address that is missing from most other positions of public authority during this period.49 This kind of gender fluidity enables women’s adoption of public personae within manuscript and print culture when they cannot become judges, lawyers, or Members of Parliament—all roles that, as we have seen, were defined exclusively and unbendingly as male. This emphasis on fluidity is not to suggest that women wrote in a utopia of discursive free play. Satire, invective, moralizing didacticism, and silence were all deployed to discourage women’s public, political activity and to mark women as inferior and subject to patriarchal rule, sometimes even within the political communities they embraced and enabled. However, strategies of patriarchal containment did not so

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much foreclose women writers’ public activity as invite it: Speght answered Swetnam’s misogyny with biblical exegesis; Chidley treated Edwards’s disdainful refusal to enter into a direct dialogue with her as motive for another polemical attack; Trapnel refuted scurrilous rumors about her character and virtue by moving from the genre of prophesy to that of self-vindicating autobiography.50 The above examples of gender fluidity suggest that women’s authorship is not just social, rather than individual, in the early modern period: it is heterosocial. Women perforce write in collaboration, competition, and even cross-gender identification with men, creating counterpublics in which men and women form ideological alliances over political opposition and the revision or transgression of traditional gender norms. Whereas men, that is, can still choose largely homosocial literary relations, women rarely have the luxury of imagining a separatist female public.51 Indeed, until the Restoration, there is little evidence of a selfconscious separatist female tradition in these texts, either in the texts themselves—which rarely privilege other women writers above men as interlocutors—or in the way they were circulated or published. A survey of the printers and booksellers recorded in Smith and Cardinale’s Women and the Literature of the Seventeenth Century, for example, indicates that most English publishers dealt with only one or two books by women. When they published more than two, it was either because like Giles Calvert and Thomas Simmons they were publishing texts by men and women from a particular sect, such as the Quakers, in which women were very active, or because like Jane Underhill they published more than one work by the same woman author.52 These findings, confined as they are to a limited search, are by no means final, but they do suggest both that women authors were popular enough, and taken seriously enough, to encourage a wide range of book sellers to risk money on their works, and that early modern publicists had very little interest in cultivating a specifically female authorship or readership. Rather, any literary community that publicists establish tends to be political, men and women who voice similar views published in tandem. The range of women’s publications in the seventeenth century, therefore, presents not a self-consciously separatist diachronic tradition but a synchronic set of cross-gender counterpublics.53

Women and Counterpublics If women do not yet often self-consciously call on a separatist female tradition, however, they do present themselves as pivotal figures around which group identities cohere. Each of my core chapters highlights a

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different quality of the counterpublics women help forge. I treat the counterpublic as (1) an emergent phenomenon, (2) a full-fledged site of radical activity, (3) a paradoxically elite sphere of political engagement, and (4) a means of transnational opposition. Given their differing generic and ideological commitments, the women I analyze in the body of this book situate themselves in a variety of heterosocial circles of print and manuscript. Dorothy Leigh was a member of the lesser gentry in the English counties, part of a mobile community of AngloCalvinists active in godly reformation long before the Civil Wars broke out. Sarah Wight lived in the thick of the urban artisan class responsible for much of the social foment and sectarian agitation of the Revolutionary Period of the 1640s. The English Royalist Katherine Philips and New England Congregationalist Anne Bradstreet occupied very different positions on the political spectrum and lived on opposite sides of the Atlantic, but both were married to rich and powerful local landowners, and both belonged to social networks with investments in the Cromwellian government’s compromises of the 1650s. The counterpublics each of these writers inscribes are groups temporarily thrown into opposition, which form sites for collective communicative action and political agency at odds with shifting dominant orders. These multiple counterpublics become spheres for new or renewed cultural practices, political ideologies, and, most important in terms of this study, new modes of public identity that rely on galvanizing female figures. Writing at the intersection of the public and private, these four women plot convoluted routes between the personal and the political, politicizing personal roles or personalizing political structures. In chapter 1, I chart the inscription of an Anglo-Calvinist counterpublic of pious reading and writing, centered on the figure of the mother, in Dorothy Leigh’s The Mothers Blessing (1616). Leigh is the only preRevolutionary writer I investigate, and her critical response to the patriarchal politics of James I’s Basilicon Doron reveals the counterpublic as an emergent form: a nascent sphere of critique born out of contradictions and lacunae in the very patriarchal rhetoric that would seek to contain it. Countering James I’s textual monuments and imperial style with a vision of a metaphoric family of godly readers and writers, Leigh presents maternity as a role that overruns its own borders, spilling into the public realm as a figure of moderate religiopolitical dissent. This figure returns in later works published in both London and Amsterdam, so that the counterpublic activity imagined and inspired by The Mothers Blessing begins at home but expands to

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include an extended family of Anglo-Calvinist reformers in England and abroad. Chapter 2 analyzes the development of a sectarian counterpublic in the polarized context of the First Civil War and its aftermath. Henry Jessey’s transcript of the prophet Sara Wight’s fast and trance, The Exceeding Riches of Grace (1647), shifts Leigh’s politicized privacy to a more radical forum, dramatizing the Independent conventicle— with its emphasis on biblical exegesis, experiential testimony, and spiritual advice—as the basis for counterpublic opposition to a rising Presbyterian power. This counterpublic unites around the prone but articulate body of Wight, as visual and aural centerpiece. Wight and Jessey’s pamphlet, like Leigh’s book, leaves a textual legacy that extends her public role of afflicted femininity: her own later publications and another pamphlet published by William Allen publicize the circulation of private letters between members of different sects in Britain and the Netherlands. In doing so, they disrupt national borders, figuring women as central to a global conversion narrative that ushers in a transnational priesthood of all believers. Chapter 3 moves from the centrifugal force of the works by Leigh and Wight, which both broaden private spheres into oppositional publics, to the centripetal force of Katherine Philips’s poetry written during the Interregnum and its aftermath. With Philips, I investigate women’s key role cohering even elite counterpublics. Philips’s published and manuscript poems of the 1650s draw on the ideals and practices of the exclusive coterie to create a rhetoric of substitution that helps formulate a corporate identity for displaced male and female Royalists. This Royalist counterpublic is both key to Philips’s rising public profile at the Restoration of monarchy in 1660, and aids in the invention of a newly dominant monarchal public culture from the geopolitically marginalized locale of Ireland. Writing in Restoration Dublin, Philips expands her 1650s Royalist circle of “the knowing few” to consolidate her pivotal role in a fluid and expansive multi-kingdom public of elitist affiliation. Chapter 4 fleshes out the idea that counterpublics can extend beyond national borders by focusing on Anne Bradstreet. In contrast to those who focus on her American context, I argue that Bradstreet’s earliest book, The Tenth Muse (1650), not only occurred in London, but explicitly addresses Revolutionary changes in Old England. In this chapter, I show Bradstreet interweaving public and private genealogies, evoking figures such as her blood relation Sir Philip Sidney in Old England alongside her father in New England, in order to create

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a neo-Elizabethan circle of interlocutors composed both of her private family and of an extended public family of militant Protestant reformers. By evoking a belated Elizabethanism and drawing our attention to a wide geopolitical horizon, Bradstreet illustrates the key role women could play in counterpublics that exceed neat borders of geography and history. My conclusion on the Quakers Katherine Evans and Sarah Cheevers turns to the repressive context of the Restoration of monarchy to complicate and reframe this argument about women’s key role in transnational counterpublics. Evans and Cheevers’s This Is A Short Relation (1662) envisions women and intermittently feminized men as the shapers and bearers of an oppositional public culture that begins in private spheres of dialogue but impacts a geographically dispersed cluster of Anglican and Catholic publics and sectarian counterpublics. The assimilative dynamic of their pamphlet, however, illustrates both the power and potential costs of transnational debate. This reading of Evans and Cheevers lays the groundwork for a summary of some of the broader conclusions of my book on women writers, nationhood, and narratives of transnational contact. Throughout these chapters, I analyze women’s distinctive role transforming historically specific private spheres into a complex constellation of local and transnational counterpublics. These private spheres are temporary and dynamic; in fact, the term “sphere” is itself a schematization of a messy social phenomenon that is always in process—this book traces not the opposition of two fixed spaces of private and public but the dynamic interrelation of two differently marked and experienced social modes. The word sphere, along with Fraser’s “counterpublic,” may seem perversely late modern for a book on early modern culture, especially given recent calls for scholars to embrace the terms of the past, constructing models of “publicity that adhered to categories available to contemporaries” (Raymond, “Describing Popularity” 128). However, as Colin Davis has argued, we live “in a diachronic relation with our [historical] material,” understanding and communicating it of necessity from our own historical moment (203). It is out of the clash or intercourse between our language and the language of the past, our categories and the categories available to the historical agents we study, that we create history at all—even (or perhaps particularly) literary history. This schematized language of private spheres allows me to articulate a common dynamic visible across a number of diverse literary texts and geographic contexts. The analytic category of Fraser’s postmodern counterpublic enables new critical insights into the historically specific ideas and practices of

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private and public in an earlier period. Both help reveal women’s shaping force in a contestatory public culture in a way comprehensible to modern readers. For, as the following chapters argue, if these private spheres are particularly crucial to the formation of female public identities, then women in particular imbue them with counterhegemonic significance. These women writers prove that, far from being relegated to a domestic periphery, they were imagined and imagined themselves as crucial to the counterpublics that characterized the internally fragmented and externally extended public culture of seventeenth-century Britain.

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Chapter 1

The Zealous Mother: D orothy L eigh and the G odly Family

And first it is cast up by diverse that employ their pens upon apologies for rebellions and treasons, that every man is born to carry such a natural zeal and duty to his mother; that seeing her so rent and deadly wounded, as whiles it will be by wicked and tyrannous Kings, good Citizens will be forced . . . to put their hand to work for freeing their commonwealth. —James VI and I, The Trew Law of Free Monarchies

I

n 1616 two important books of family advice hit the shelves of early modern booksellers. The first was a republication of James I’s Basilicon Doron, originally published in England in 1603 and immediately, as Jenny Wormald puts it, a “best-seller” (51). This earlier edition was published at James’s accession to the English throne, and was geared toward introducing the Scottish King to his English subjects; such was its popularity that it ran to as many as 16,000 copies that year alone (Wormald 51). It was republished in 1616 both in the ornate edition of James’s Workes put together by James Montagu, and in a popularized version titled The Fathers Blessing, a spin-off edition that expanded on key points from James’s text to create a book of general paternal counsel. The second 1616 book of family advice that concerns us was Dorothy Leigh’s The Mothers Blessing.1 Leigh’s book is a 270-page prose work of maternal advice, broken into forty-five chapters. Like the father in James’s Basilicon Doron, Leigh’s maternal narrator

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advises her sons on religious practices, marriage, and household economy. The Mothers Blessing was so popular that it went through at least nineteen editions before 1640, an extraordinary publication history that marks Leigh’s book as an important work for seventeenth-century literature and culture.2 Yet, whereas Basilicon Doron has become part of the literary historical canon, receiving attention from historians of political discourse and literary critics alike, The Mothers Blessing has been largely ignored or treated as domestic—a woman’s foray into the limited field of conduct literature.3 This desire to circumscribe Leigh’s book as domestic, however, underestimates the political engagement of her work in projects of reform and dissent that self-consciously exceed the bounds of the private sphere of the household. As Jonathan Goldberg has shown us, James’s Basilicon Doron, like The Trew Law of Free Monarchies, is political, forming part of the Jacobean government’s attempt to create a royal patriarchal icon at the center of the English church and state (85–94). Like James, busy exporting the familial authority of fathers into the public realm to shore up monarchal authority, Leigh exploits the analogies between private families and public commonwealth to extend maternity as a form of public, religio-political authority. Leigh’s title recalls the popularized version of James’s book and three editions of The Mothers Blessing were bound with different editions of The Fathers Blessing, indicating that publishers, readers, and perhaps Leigh herself saw them as engaged in dialogue.4 Leigh’s book is not just a supplement to Basilicon Doron, however, but a critical answer to James that replaces the image of the patriarch king with that of the zealous mother and her metaphoric family of middling-sort, godly readers and writers. Challenging the language of monarchal patriarchy with an emotive rhetoric of maternity, Leigh’s text turns a position of maternal care into a figure of moderate religio-political dissent, one that resurfaces in later works published in London and Amsterdam by both women and men to critique royal policy. In this way, The Mothers Blessing helps create an emergent counterpublic that centers on the figure of the mother but expands to include an extended family of Anglo-Calvinist reformers at home and abroad.

Patriarchy, Maternity, and the Conduct of Ideology One reason that Leigh has been largely ignored until recently is that her book does not fit traditional critical paradigms for dealing with conduct literature. Critics from Goldberg to Lawrence Stone have

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argued that the accession of James I installed an oppressively patriarchal regime of family and state governance in England, one that contained dissent through paternal rhetoric and structures. Although this assumption of an all-encompassing patriarchal power has been challenged by Barbara Lewalski, Margaret Ezell, and even Goldberg himself, it continues to influence discussions of the conduct literature of the first three decades of the seventeenth century, which follow two divergent paths.5 On the one hand, Nancy Armstrong and Leonard Tennenhouse, citing what has by now become an almost canonical list of maleauthored conduct manuals, have stressed the way Jacobean conduct literature disciplines women as subjects within the family and reproduces royal, paternal rhetoric in the home through analogies of public and private. Despite their argument that conduct literature after the late 1630s pressed for political change, Armstrong and Tennenhouse set these later explorations against the foil of Jacobean literature, which functioned as “a miniature version of the aristocratic state,” in which Puritan and noble fathers alike “st[and] in relation to their household as the king to his people” (165–66). Thus, these critics connect male-authored conduct books to ideologies of public power, but only insofar as these books provide the analogical basis for an emerging monarchal rhetoric of absolutism. In this critical model, the Jacobean sexual ideology of domestic relations is homologous to the ideology of patriarchal power that shores up James’s rule.6 On the other hand, critics of the number of female-authored conduct books of this period, which are not so clearly patriarchal in structure, focus on the ambiguities and contradictions within Jacobean sexual ideology, critiquing an oversimplified view of women’s subservience to familial patriarchal authority. However, in doing so, they divorce these ambiguities over women’s authority from the ideology of public patriarchy that is so central to the early Jacobean government. Those critics and anthologists who address The Mothers Blessing, for example, most often treat it as domestic or familial: Valerie Wayne presents Leigh’s book as primarily concerned with issues of private piety, moral conduct, and authority within the family; Charlotte Otten includes it in her chapter on “Women Writing about Love and Marriage” (168–72); and Betty Travitsky places an excerpt in her chapter of “Familial and Personal Writings” (55–57). Elaine Beilin and Kristin Poole come closest to situating Leigh in a more extended political context and, more recently, Edith Snook has analyzed Leigh’s investment in a cultural politics of reading. However, Leigh’s deployment of maternity as a political figure to self-consciously engage controversial projects of religious and social dissent still goes unexplored.

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Despite recent attempts to reconnect women writers to political culture, therefore, the above divergent approaches to male- and female-authored conduct manuals are still in danger of excluding Jacobean women writing conduct literature from the arena of public, political debate, while also helping to perpetuate a sense of James’s patriarchal hegemony as relatively free from alternative or oppositional texts and practices. Only male-authored (patriarchal) conduct literature is relevant to Royalist (patriarchal) political discourse. The Mothers Blessing, however, does not comfortably fit either of these approaches. As a conduct book that puts the mother, rather than the father, at the center of a domestic private sphere, it does not simply replicate royal, patriarchal authority in the home, but it does directly address questions of public, political import. Indeed, those critics who focus on the domestic aspects of Leigh’s work have had to ignore or cut substantial chapters of her work that address what are, even by modern standards, specifically public concerns: critiques of the greed of the Anglican ministry, for example, or defenses of the controversial Puritan practices of Sabbatarianism (the strict observance of Sunday as a day of worship) and gadding (the practice of leaving one’s official parish for a more godly minister). Though it is helpful to stress Leigh’s basis in the contradictory discourse of family matters, we should realize that this discourse has public-political implications. In the seventeenth century, saturated with the language of family politics and political families, maternity operates as a political category that may shape not only domestic relations of power and authority, but also (as James’s epigraph to this chapter suggests) the rhetoric of state power and its discontented reformers. Just as critics such as Wendy Wall explore the relation between cookbooks and representations of politic order, so we should complicate and extend our analyses of women’s conduct discourse by attending to the ambiguities and contradictions inhering in public, as well as private, patriarchy.7 Leigh’s somewhat anomalous position in contemporary critical approaches to conduct literature suggests in particular that we need to explore conduct literature’s potential as a form of godly political engagement that can offer the family as a model for public opposition to the royal hegemony of even the early reign of James I. In this chapter, I will first address both domestic and royal ideologies of gendered familial power in two of Leigh’s main sources; I will then focus on Leigh herself and her inscription of a counterpublic of godly dissent within the tense climate of James’s reign; finally, I will consider a handful of later writers influenced by the model of politically engaged motherhood fashioned in The Mothers Blessing.

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Source Texts: The Mother’s Blessing and the King’s Gift Far from simply replicating monarchical rhetoric within the domestic, or remaining divorced from ideologies of public power, conduct literature often registers a breakdown of public and private ideologies of patriarchy. William Perkins, for example, one of the most influential seventeenth-century Puritan writers in England, and author of one of the many books on godly family government, is unable to hold the household to any single political logic—tyrannical, Royalist, or republican—when faced with the multiple duties of the domestic master, father, and husband: “the master of the family exerciseth (after a sort) a power tyrannical over his servants, a power regal over his children; because kings are the fathers of their commonwealth; but in respect of the wife, he exerciseth a power aristocratical” (126). In Perkins, the primary referent of Royalist patriarchal power is not the wife, as twenty-first-century readers might expect, but the son, and royal ideology operates in competition with other models of family and state governance. Perkins suggests both that forging a homologous relationship between public and private patriarchy takes strenuous ideological work (work that does not always succeed) and that the paternal rhetoric of Jacobean domestic and political structures experiences some gender trouble when faced with the position of women within the home. Indeed, as Catherine Belsey argued some time ago, even Jacobean conduct literature is not homogeneously patriarchal but rather articulates a number of contradictions regarding paternal power, contradictions that become most visible in relation to women (150–60).8 Thus while Puritan writers begin to stress an ideology of separate spheres and the wife’s proper subservience to her husband, they simultaneously present mothers as powerful agents in the spiritual reform and moral discipline of their families, Perkins himself elaborating an authoritative didactic position for women within the godly household. He enjoins both parents to care for the religious education of their children, but a woman’s specific duty consists in “ordering her children and servants in wisdom, partly by instruction, partly by admonition” (174). He even approvingly cites Gregory Nazianzen, who claims “his mother was not only an helper, but also a teacher or instructor, and guide unto his father in matters of religion and godliness” (174), indicating that in things spiritual, rather than temporal, the mother may instruct her head and master, the father.

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Belsey concludes that the contradictions in early conduct literature serve to deny early modern women “a single or stable place from which to define themselves as independent beings” (150). However, we could argue that it is the very holes and anomalies in patriarchal discourse that enable women—and men masquerading as women—to forge independent public roles for themselves. In this regard, Nicholas Breton, author of his own The Mothers Blessing in 1602, and, as Kristin Poole notes, one of the earliest sources for Leigh’s The Mothers Blessing, is instructive. Breton was a politically agile character: associated in his early years with the militant Protestant faction of Sir Philip Sidney, Edmund Spenser, and the countess of Pembroke, he later courted James’s favor with pamphlets urging continental peace and criticizing opposition to royal will.9 Breton’s The Mothers Blessing was originally published toward the end of Elizabeth’s reign, during Breton’s association with the Pembroke circle, and it partakes of their vaunted militant Protestantism, here domesticated as pious maternal advice. The body of the text consists of an act of literary transvestism, in which Breton adopts the persona of a concerned mother who advises her son on those very issues of private piety and household habit stressed as a mother’s province in male-authored conduct manuals.10 His second dedication to gentlemen readers works to contain this advice even further, locating it within an explicitly homosocial debate over the proper nature of poetry and turning the mother into an object of exchange between men: “Gentlemen, there are so many idle Pamphlets under the abused name of Poetry, abroad in the world, that matter of good worth, either moral or divine, if it be handled in verse, it is almost as ill as virtue, it will not sell almost for anything” (A3). However, this conservative inscription of maternal authority does not foreclose its political uses by women, for there is a certain ambivalence in Breton’s project, if not in intention, then in effect. Breton’s cross-gender performance takes the private didactic function of godly motherhood and turns it into a published role, widening the compass within which the mother’s advice traditionally operates. The first dedication is addressed to “Mr. Thomas Rowe [Roe], son of Lady Bartley” (A3), a description that locates Roe within a matrilineal rather than patrilineal scheme of descent, and foregrounds maternity’s vocational role in literally multiplying the number of the saints. In the body of the pamphlet the presence of maternal authority is expanded to encompass moral and theological instruction, as Breton’s mother-figure advises on significant spiritual issues. The dominance of this public maternal voice, which occupies the better part of the pamphlet, causes a certain slippage of the referent: if, in the prefatory material, the “I”

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of the enunciation refers to Breton, for the rest of the pamphlet it refers to the phantom mother who speaks his words: “Mine Own dear son, I am no deep divine, / but what my God hath taught me, that I teach thee, / Beseeching him to bless that soul of thine” (8). The contradictions implicit in conduct literature, between female power and patriarchal containment, manifest themselves in a more extreme form here. In a sense, the ventriloquism can work in reverse: Breton speaks in the voice of a woman, and, as such, is gradually erased from the text and replaced by the persona of public maternal concern.11 It is this vexed foregrounding of the female voice that enables Leigh (or her publisher) to recall Breton’s work in the choice of Leigh’s title: Breton, perhaps unwittingly, opens a space for a public, gendered authorial presence. If Breton’s pamphlet forms a precedent for Leigh in terms of gender role, it is the King himself who provides the political subtext for Leigh’s work. The fact that conduct literature is of political importance is nowhere more apparent than in Basilicon Doron, which works hard to turn conduct discourse into political polemic, mystifying royal prerogative over ecclesiastical and governmental structures as “fatherly love” (Basilicon Doron 31). In Basilicon Doron this paternal power consolidates the position of the godly prince as Supreme Governor, who is not “mere laicus [layman],” as the Papists and Puritans would have him, but the culminating point in a strict ecclesiastical hierarchy—an identification of royal authority with Church order that turns on the same image dominating James’s secular selffashioning: the king should be “a little God” and “a loving-nourish father to the Church” (12, 27). Like Perkins, James presents the primary referent of patriarchal power not as the woman but as the son, writing out the problematic mother/wife to create a purely patrilineal vision of royal power that extends from father-king to loving sonsubject. This paternalistic, one-head rhetoric creates a somewhat ambiguous role for mothers in James’s texts, who are subsumed into his own role as nurturing king, or marginalized as powerful, subversive forces. Basilicon Doron, for example, contrasts James’s godly, figural nurturing with the corrupting literal milk imbibed by rebellious nobles, who “drink[] in with their very nourish-milk” their vices of injustice and feuding (26), thus mapping the difference between rebellion and monarchy onto the difference between the idealized paternal body and its devalued maternal counterpart. James and his supporters envision his entry onto the scene of publication as a kind of printed masque, in which the royal father subsumes publicness as his prerogative, his very presence quelling the

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anti-masque of religious dissent and debate. Despite James’s textual efforts to turn himself into a spiritualized paternal icon, however, even his own works evince a fear that his textual presence, circulating in a wider public of readers and writers, may actually serve to invite, rather than ameliorate, conflict. Indeed, the publishing history of Basilicon Doron is itself a lesson in the fact that royal books, however conservative their ideological intentions, can have quite different effects once they are out of royal control. Basilicon Doron was originally written in Middle Scots for limited consumption as a royal version of the popular genre of father’s advice book aimed at James’s son and heir, Prince Henry. It was released for a popular readership only because Andrew Melville, the King’s Presbyterian nemesis in Scotland, got hold of one of the seven copies first printed privately by James and condensed it into eighteen propositions, which he widely circulated, describing them as “Anglo-pisco-papistical” (Melville 444). Once printed for a general audience in English, the book was even used to curb royal prerogative, as readers put James’s words to their own—sometimes quite radical—uses. Godly activists quoted the King’s text back at him in an attempt to influence religious and political policy: the Family of Love appropriated Basilicon Doron’s characterization of the King as national physician in its 1603 petition for toleration, for example, and the 1604 Parliament pled for Parliament’s traditional rights using words from the King’s own book (Doelman 4–5). Even James Montagu, who wrote the preface to the 1616 edition of the King’s Workes, indicates no little anxiety that James’s intervention in published debate intensifies opposition rather than quelling it. Montagu presents the King’s texts as discursive “Monuments” and “stately edifices,” and conflates the power of royal genealogy, iconography, and discourse in typical Jacobean fashion, but he also admits a fear that James’s ventures into public culture, far from monumentalizing him as the ultimate figure of public representativeness, actually render him more vulnerable to attack. Identifying the King with his book, Montagu anxiously wonders whether James’s dissemination within print culture will paradoxically damage his public image, leaving him open to opposition writers who will take this opportunity “to make a scar on the face of the King” (d). When it comes to “polemicals,” therefore, Montagu advises James to remain silent, for, in debate, “the person of the King is more exposed and lies more open, than the person of a poor scholar can do; for as he is a far greater mark, so he may far more easily be hit” (d). The attempt of Workes to create a textual royal icon is thus matched by a fear that, as Milton will later attempt to prove, even artifices of eternity can be broken. It is

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this embattled image of the royal patriarch, circulating in a public beyond the control of royal authorial intention, that enables Leigh’s critical response as the reforming mother. Leigh’s two source texts suggest we should be wary of assuming that conservative writers can contain potentially dissenting positions, either in conduct literature or political polemic: the inability of public and private patriarchal ideologies to obscure the contradictions and ambiguities on which they are founded makes them not only the sites for powerfully eloquent defenses of the royal government but also for the formation of a new rhetoric of dissent.

Feeding on the Seed of the Woman Leigh’s The Mothers Blessing was first published in 1616, a year that historians characterize as riddled with religio-political tension. The King’s preference for Calvinist doctrine and his policy of dividing Catholic and Puritan extremists from their more moderate brethren, and assimilating the latter into the Church of England as conformists, helped to contain opposition. However, a series of political crises and court scandals reverberated through government circles and beyond in the years leading up to Leigh’s publication. The disappointing death of the young militantly Protestant Prince Henry in 1612, the political and economic conflicts that fueled and followed the spectacular failure of the “Addled Parliament” of 1614, the public scandal surrounding the death of Thomas Overbury in 1613, and the subsequent arrest for murder of a court favorite in 1615 all created a climate of anxiety, rumor, and debate.12 In terms of religion, Parliament repeatedly pushed for laws on the stricter observance of the Sabbath, the abolition of pluralism and the oath ex officio, and the reinstatement of nonconformists expelled early in James’s reign (Janson 97, 127; Sommerville 213–15). As Peter Lake has argued, James’s assimilation policy actually produced divisions within the Anglican hierarchy, as one group attempted to protect the hegemony of the state church through a focus on set prayers, sacraments, and hierarchical order, while another stressed preaching and active piety, a mode of church discipline that could easily lead to more independent collective models of ecclesiastical government (“Calvinism and the English Church” 42–44).13 The Essex divorce case of 1613 caused these divisions to surface, rendering visible the split between AngloCalvinists, led by Archbishop Abbott, and an early Arminian party, led initially by Richard Neile (Fincham and Lake 191).14 The divorce, coupled with the subsequent trial of James’s favorite Somerset for

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Overbury’s murder, opened up the court to charges of popish corruption and sexual license, which had far-reaching consequences, initiating rumors of treason and popish plots and marking the Jacobean court as a potent source of ungodly or even anti-godly beliefs and practices (Bellany, The Politics of Court Scandal 210–11). Leigh therefore responds to James at a time when the disaffection with the monarch and his court that was to become more open opposition in the ruptured international context of the 1620s was taking root. The information we have about Leigh, like that about many women writers of earlier periods, is sketchy, but what little we do know about her links her to a community of Puritans who became increasingly radical as the religio-political situation polarized, first under James and later under Charles and Laud. She was born and raised the daughter of Robert Kempe, a gentleman from Essex, “the most strongly Protestant county in England,” according to William Hunt (Puritan Moment 87). Essex had a reputation for an active and godly citizenry (cases of nonconformity, including gadding and opposition to churching women, more than doubled between 1602 and 1619) and a zealous, militantly apocalyptic preaching ministry (the number of lecturers also increased substantially, from eighteen in 1609 to forty-four in 1629) (Hunt, Puritan Moment 89, 111). Leigh’s father supported at least one of these militant preachers: he was patron of the rectory of Finchinfield, where he beneficed Stephen Marshall, the Puritan lecturer who later preached to Essex’s Parliamentary troops during the Civil Wars and who was instrumental in trying to establish Presbyterianism in the 1640s. Her son, William, one of the dedicatees of her book, may have become rector of Groton Suffolk, which was in the hands of the Winthrop family before they emigrated to New England and joined the Congregational church there.15 Her family members therefore appear to be zealous Anglo-Calvinists, who may have moved toward Presbyterianism and Congregationalism as the century progressed. The title-page of The Mothers Blessing indicates that Leigh’s book was published after she died, and thus, as Valerie Wayne has pointed out, it draws on both the rhetoric of the female legacy and the ars moriendi tradition (Wayne 70–71). The fact that this is a postmortem text, however, also serves to connect real families and maternity to the wider spiritual community of the saints: in death, Leigh evokes her Anglo-Calvinist family circle as grounds to engage in questions of public religio-political significance. Leigh’s title associates her authorial persona with Breton’s mother figure, an act of cross-gender identification in which Leigh mimics a maternal subject position established by a male writer. The complexities

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of gender relations continue in her text: like Breton’s The Mothers Blessing, Leigh’s book manifests the contradictions implicit in conduct literature between a strict gender hierarchy and limited maternal power. Leigh does not foreground a male community, but she does evoke the trace of an absent father-figure to legitimate her project in one of her prefaces. In the dedicatory epistle to her sons she puns on the word “will,” presenting her book both as a fulfillment of her dead husband’s “Will” or legacy and as the satisfaction of paternal desire: Leigh seeks “to fulfill his [her husband’s] will in all things” (A6v). Leigh’s book therefore both needs the absence of a paternal authority who might otherwise have written the book and to bear the trace of the father’s will that legitimates her project with its command. As in Breton’s pamphlet, however, this absent patriarchal presence becomes ever more invisible as Leigh’s text develops. Echoing other domestic manuals that men are the heads of their wives, Leigh advises mothers “to give men the first and chief place, yet let us labor to come in second” (17). Her own husband, however, disappears entirely after the prefatorial material, so that Leigh’s book does not so much supplement as usurp the father’s will, replacing it with a maternal authority that she likens to the spiritual motherhood of Saint Paul: And could he, I say, write unto them, My little children, of whom I travail again in birth, until Christ be formed in you? And can any man blame a mother (who indeed brought forth her child with much pain) though she labor again until Christ be formed in them? (11)

Paul could be invoked by conservative Puritans and Anglicans alike in order to silence women in spiritual matters: his injunction, “Let your women keep silent in the churches,” served to prop up a misogynist tradition that attempted to keep women out of positions of authority within the church (1 Cor. 14.34). Leigh circumvents this restriction, characterizing spiritual power as a maternal labor of love in which her literal ability to bear children easily translates into a metaphoric ability to give birth to Christ in them, an incestuous rebirth that positions Leigh as both laboring mother and inseminating father to her spiritually pregnant sons. This shift to Pauline maternity locates spiritual authority outside the state church, within the bosom of a godly family that becomes increasingly extended as Leigh’s text progresses. For, although The Mothers Blessing is initially addressed to Leigh’s sons, it soon becomes clear that her imagined audience is far wider, as she advises men and women, masters and servants on godly conduct.

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Indeed, unlike other writers of maternal advice books, Leigh claims that she actively sought publication of her text in order to preserve it for her sons: “setting aside all fear, I have adventured to show my imperfections to the view of the world” (A7v). The preface to Elizabeth Jocelin’s The Mothers Legacie to her Unborne Childe, in contrast, claims that her book was written in secret while she was pregnant, and only discovered in a desk drawer after her death during childbirth. Jocelin’s text, a “twin-like sister” for the expected baby (n. pag.), is therefore reborn to the public through authoritative male intervention: in Jocelin’s case that of her husband and the writer of the preface, Archbishop Abbott’s chaplain, Thomas Goad. Leigh, however, broaches print culture alone, writing her own preface and justifying her publication in terms of public testimony: “that herein I may show myself a loving Mother, and a dutiful Wife” (A4). In this way, she extends maternal duty beyond the household: while repeating pious emphasis on maternal and spousal care, Leigh presents this private, domestic responsibility as necessitating public performance. She even codes her writing as a form of civic duty in her prefatorial poem to her sons, in which she offers the example of the “laborous bee” who works to “do her Country good” (A8r–v). Implying a community of readers before whom the mother must bear public witness, she facilitates publication through the very patriarchal injunctions to domestic duty that might strive to keep her in the home. If James contrasts his ecclesiastical prerogative as a “loving-nourish father to the Church” to the corrupt maternal bodies of the nobles’ mothers in order to separate good and bad nurturance, spiritual and material food, order and rebellion, then Leigh’s reliteralization of Paul’s spiritual labor erases this distinction, turning the maternal body itself into a site of spiritual succor. Leigh’s book contains a number of prefaces to her sons and wider audience, and seven early chapters dedicated to “cause[s] of writing” (3). This early material is in part defensive, justifying her need to “write them the right way to heaven” (A2v), but it is also polemical, establishing the lay mother’s right and duty to intervene in issues of public doctrine and discipline. Mobilizing seventeenth-century medical theories regarding mother’s milk as a concoction of the blood, Leigh creates continuity between the role of the mother and that of spiritual guide, conflating heart and breast, soul and body: The holy Ghost sayeth by the Prophet, Can a mother forget the child of her womb? As if he should say, Is it possible that she which hath carried her child within her, so near her, and brought it forth into the World

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with so much bitter pain, so many groans and cries, can forget it? Nay, rather, will she not labor now till Christ be formed in it? Will she not bless it every time it sucks on her breasts, when she feels the blood come from her heart to nourish it? (9–10)

Leigh’s detailed gloss on the short passage from Isaiah 49.15 both embodies maternity as painful experience and dematerializes it as spiritual work. The rhetorical fluidity of this gesture, which slides between spiritual and material, literal and figural, suggests that maternity itself is a position that overruns borders. A little later Leigh writes: “Therefore let no man blame a Mother, though she something exceed in writing to her Children, since every man knows that the love of a mother to her children, is hardly contained within the bounds of reason” (13). Here Leigh constructs motherhood as an ambivalent excess of enthusiasm—whether of faith or madness—for which the earlier description of the maternal body operates as a model. Just as the mother exceeds bodily closure through childbirth and nursing, she exceeds the reasonable limits of private duty through love. Maternity is then presented as an overflow of the private into the public, and as a site where Leigh’s literal domestic motherhood becomes figuratively political maternity. For the passage Leigh chooses is taken from the same chapter of the Bible as James’s references to himself as a nursing father to the Church: Isaiah 49. Leigh’s choice of scriptural authority, however, allows her to replace James’s figural royal suckling with a more complex model of maternal succor. Other Anglo-Calvinist writers stress maternal nursing as a powerful, vocational act, equal to the king’s authority over the church: Elizabeth Clinton, the countess of Lincoln, for example, berates mothers who do not nurse infants who may be “one of God’s very elect, to whom to be a nursing father is a King’s honor” (17). That this maternal nurturance may operate in conflict rather than concordance with royal power is indicated by Lincoln’s own history: her son, the fourth earl of Lincoln, refused to contribute to the Forced Loan and sided with Parliament during the Civil Wars (Tyacke, “Puritanism” 137). Unlike Clinton, however, Leigh does not mention royal nurturance; instead, she makes it clear that nursing, both literal and figural, is a woman’s prerogative. Mary’s role in salvation is to redeem the damage caused by Eve’s apple, replacing poisoned food with maternal nourishment, an act of redemption that excludes men entirely: “men claim no part in it: the shame is taken away from us, and from our posterity forever” (35). Leigh also indicates that it is this same soul food that she supplies for her readers, as she attempts to

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“make you labor for the spiritual food of the soul” (4). The Word is then presented as passing through a laywoman to her spiritually starving readership: “the woman brought me a Savior, and I feed on him by faith and life” (35). This maternal reproduction of the Word means that, as Kristin Poole has argued, Leigh engages in a kind of “public preaching” (74). We could go further and say that Leigh’s method and focus characterize her book as a kind of published sermon, a popular commodity during this period, and one that influenced the emerging genre of conduct literature. Gertrude Noyes has argued that the seventeenth century witnesses a new product for the British presses in the “merging of the sermon and courtesy book into a curiously amphibious product,” and she documents at least fifty examples of this generic hybrid (8). Leigh’s book crosses the generic divide in a similar way: in The Mothers Blessing, religious instruction on issues such as the proper method of private prayer (it should have no set form), meditation, and public worship far outweighs domestic counsel; biblical exegesis overshadows practical advice; and the author goes so far as to compare herself to Paul—whom she herself labels God’s “chief Preacher” (269). Leigh’s connection to sermons also extends to her publishers: her earliest publisher, John Budge, dealt “chiefly in theological literature” (McKerrow 54), and he and two of her later publishers printed a wide variety of Calvinist sermons and theological books (a few by nonconformists and exiles) throughout the 1610s and 1620s.16 Thus both generically and in terms of its publication history, Leigh’s book is as close to sermonizing as a woman could get at this early stage in the seventeenth century. Within the text, too, she shapes maternity to fit the traditionally male role of public spiritual leader speaking to and for a newly imagined community of godly readers. Central to this expansion of maternity into a site of public authority is a rehabilitation of the Virgin Mary, herself a model for the role of mother-as-redeemer that Leigh adopts. Leigh rescues Mary from anti-Catholic invective through an appeal to Mary’s name, which replaces the idolatry of those who “make images of Saints” and “make a God of Mary” (39, 44). This name, Leigh argues, is a combination of five female types of the Old Testament: “some godly reverent men of the Church have gathered this, that there were five women of great virtue in the time of the Law, the first letters of whose names do make her whole name to show that she had all their virtue wholly combined” (41). Leigh goes on to briefly characterize the virtue of each of these women (Michal, Abigail, Rachel, Judith, and Anna), which ranges from the political intervention of

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Michal, “who saved her husband David from the fury of Saul, although he were her father and her King,” to the spiritual fervor of Anna, “patient and zealous in prayer” (42). Mary is thus both a means to justify women’s roles as spiritual activists and a vehicle of a kind of textual iconoclasm that replaces idolatrous image with word—or in this case, with the Word. For in Leigh’s description, Mary’s name condenses the biblical narratives of the five heroines, becoming a book of female worthies writ small, a miniature acrostic that testifies to a wide sphere of female activity and public piety. Like the maternal role itself, Mary’s name expands beyond its own limits, each letter evoking a biblical master narrative that condones godly activism and female spiritual authority. Focusing on the mother as preacher and redeemer, The Mothers Blessing quietly begins to erase not only the domestic patriarch, but also the father-king from the scene of public power, both of whom would operate as more traditional spiritual authorities (as indeed they do in Basilicon Doron and The Fathers Blessing) if they were not excluded from her book. Leigh’s choice of patron, Elizabeth of Bohemia, takes this erasure of the “nourish-father” one step further. Elizabeth was widely viewed as inheriting the role of her militant brother, Prince Henry, who had been the focus for what William Hunt calls England’s “Protestant vocation” as a militant, anti-Spanish force for continental reform (“Spectral Origins” 313). According to Hunt, Henry’s early death from typhoid created a significant ideological vacuum in England, suddenly frustrating Henry’s court of zealous Protestant politicians and clergymen in its vision of England’s glorious and militant future (308). It followed the assassination of another neo-chivalric Protestant champion, Henry IV of France, and the two deaths deprived England of two images of the godly prince, ready to do battle with the forces of the Antichrist. Militant Protestants needed a champion, and James’s Workes, introduced by the Calvinist James Montagu, may have been an attempt to fill that gap, casting James in competition with his dead son. Montagu certainly tries to emphasize James’s militancy, defending James from the charge that “little it befits the majesty of a king to turn clerk, and to make a war with the pen, that were fitter to be fought with the pike” by stressing the virulent anti-Catholicism of the King’s texts (b2v). Leigh, however, dedicates her book not to James, but to his daughter Elizabeth, already married to Frederick V, Elector Palatine and head of the League of Protestant Princes. The first publication of Leigh’s book occurred before the Bohemian crisis elevated Elizabeth to the status of the Winter Queen, a representation of the woman of the

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apocalypse, fleeing into the wilderness, but Elizabeth was already a highly ambivalent figure in seventeenth-century politics: at her wedding ceremonies she was praised simultaneously as “an emblem of Jacobean order” and as “a prophetic symbol of Jacobean hopes” (Lewalski 51). Court writers celebrating her wedding as a realization of the Jacobean government’s diplomacy presented the marriage in terms of court spectacle and pacifism. In John Taylor’s description of the nuptial festivities, for example, courtly pastimes unite contraries in a concordia discors that displaces war: “Thus mighty Mars these triumphs doth increase / At Tilt, with peaceful war, and sweet contentious peace” (All the Workes 123). In contrast, courtiers who identified Elizabeth with prophetic hopes for a militant anti-Spanish policy concentrated on her position as a spiritual leader and biblical heroine, associating her with a nostalgically pined-after Elizabeth I. A masque originally to be presented by Grey’s Inn on this occasion (but replaced by a less radical one after Prince Henry’s death) was to show Atlas handing the globe to Truth, modeled on the woman clothed with the sun in Revelation.17 Employing apocalyptic imagery, this masque identified Elizabeth with a reformist Protestant vision of the coming conflict in which the saints would triumph over the forces of the Antichrist, linking her to a militant Protestantism that increasingly opposed James and his pursuit of peaceful compromise. Leigh’s husband, Ralph Leigh, fought under the ill-fated second earl of Essex, in the popular anti-Spanish expedition to Cadiz in 1596, and Leigh’s brother-in-law, Urian, was knighted there (Schleuter and Schleuter 291; K. Poole 84). Thus her family was involved in the very kind of godly militarism increasingly associated with Princess Elizabeth during James’s reign, and it is hardly surprising that her positioning of Princess Elizabeth draws on the apocalyptic tradition, rather than the courtly one. Elizabeth appears in a kind of ecstatic dream vision in Leigh’s dedication to her, where Leigh adopts the voice of the prophet in Revelation, who looks up to see a heavenly throne (Rev. 4.1–5). In the preface, Elizabeth is both a sympathetic maternal presence and a “mediatrix,” a substitute Virgin Mary: . . . [A]nd looking up, I saw a most angelical throne of Princely Peers, and peerless Princes prepared for Heaven . . . then I saw humility looking downward, while the sweet slips of her virtue grew upward: then, even then, Princely Lady, I beheld your mild and courteous countenance: which showed your heart was bent to do good to all. (A4)

Elizabeth’s Palatinate “court” is not the center for masques and pastimes created around James’s English courts, but conforms to a

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more zealous ethic of apocalyptic alliance, a fact emphasized by Leigh’s depiction of Elizabeth’s “posterity” not as an extension of James’s much-vaunted and politically crucial genealogical line, but rather as a fulfillment of maternal desire and Reformation hopes: Elizabeth’s children will give their mother “joy and comfort” and aid in the defense and enlargement of “God’s Church and true Religion” (A5). If James’s Workes is an attempt to style himself defender of the faith, then Leigh passes him over in favor of his potentially reformist daughter. James only appears once in the dedication to Elizabeth, in order to situate her as “daughter to the High and Mighty King of Great Britain” (A2); having used James to establish Elizabeth’s lineage, Leigh drops him. Like her own husband, who becomes an absent presence once Leigh has established the legitimacy of her sons and her text, Leigh’s evocation of Elizabeth as the focus of apocalyptic hopes turns James into a present absence, ostentatiously missing from the British political scene and Leigh’s vision of the true religion. Leigh’s expansion of her own role in spiritual reform, coupled with her presentation of Elizabeth as mother of reformation and her rehabilitation of Mary, marks maternity as a site where a form of female authority that exceeds the domestic and redeems the curse of Eve intersects with a tradition of apocalyptic hope, gentle iconoclasm, and moderate religious dissent. It also signals the return of the political repressed, the problematic mother-figure that James must efface in order to keep his one-head analogy of state governance intact. The pressures of censorship and the context of tense compromise within the Anglican Church mean that Leigh’s challenge to Basilicon Doron is moderate: James’s book is never overtly criticized and Leigh is careful to offer occasional deference to royal authority.18 However, this extension of maternal authority onto a political and even international scene enables Leigh both to redefine her own power and to reconstitute the Christian community around the body of the lay mother rather than that of the royal father: “and except they feed on the seed of the Woman they have no life” (36). In this way Leigh figures the lay mother at the center of a church envisioned as an extended family of hungry readers and writers. This family goes beyond her three named sons to include not only the productive and busy household of the seventeenth-century middling sort (where servants and masters, grandparents and parents, children and apprentices mix) but also the wider household of the invisible church, which stretches diachronically to include future generations of Abraham’s “children and his children’s children” (25–26), and synchronically to comprise Elizabeth and the reformed community Leigh refers to as “the children of

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God” (114). Though this wider household remains shadowy, and for the most part unnamed, from the very beginning of the book the ostensible evocation of a particular family blurs into and is superseded by a more general, godly counterpublic that stands in opposition to James’s hierarchy culminating in the paternal icon, centering instead on the militant figure of the zealous mother. In their differing visions of church and commonwealth, James and Leigh each stress an opposing strand of the national narrative of the Anglican Church elaborated most forcefully by John Foxe. Both Peter Lake (“Presbyterianism, the Idea of a National Church”) and Jane Facey have argued that, in constructing the official history of the Church of England, Foxe failed to resolve a central contradiction between a religion based in a godly laity, often violently persecuted by a corrupt and iniquitous church and state, and the centralized ideology of the Elizabethan settlement, firmly established within the Church of England and overseen by royal authority. This contradiction structures the differences between Basilicon Doron and The Mothers Blessing: where James conceptualizes the Church of England as imperial, an ordered hierarchy in which ministers “reverence their superiors, and their flocks them” (27), Leigh locates authority in what James, in Basilicon Doron, disparagingly refers to as mere laicus: in her readers and in her own position as spiritual mother, excluded by gender from any clerical or state office, but not from publication. Thus, whereas James argues that scriptural secrets, like secrets of state, are not to be trusted to popular discussion, and goes so far as to suggest that reading the Bible is itself another branch of the royal prerogative: “And most properly of any other, belongeth the reading thereof unto Kings” (13), Leigh stresses popular literacy and locates spiritual edification not in a hierarchical church order but in literate groups of the godly.19 She advises that even servants and women should be taught to read (24, 58), emphasizes the power of the naked Word as the only source of spiritual sustenance (6), and even goes so far as to encourage all her readers to take up the pen and publish: “I will tell you what writing of good books doth; it makes the way to Christ easy to those that desire to go in it” (94). This emphasis on her readers learning to write suggests that one of the aims of the book is the active dissemination of reformed culture, as Leigh encourages her audience to take up the mechanical reproduction of books. She envisions herself as one of a throng of pious voices issuing from the seventeenth-century presses: she notes that there are “so many good books in the world” that they “mould in some Men’s studies while their masters are marred because they will not meditate upon them” and attacks those

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“who are angry with the writing of books” as “enemies of God” (4, 94–95). Evoking a tradition of private piety and popular publication, Leigh matches James’s textual monuments and imperial style with a vision of a busy counterpublic, in which lay reading and writing within the Anglo-Calvinist household both models and enables broad godly engagement in public religious discussion and reform. From dealing with issues of household governance, then, Leigh’s book extends its scope to address such public, political issues as church discipline and the authority of the Anglican hierarchy. Leigh takes the anti-clerical strain in Foxe’s stories of Marian martyrs and manifests it with a vengeance in her chapters on clerical abuses. In pointed contrast to the reverence for ministers vaunted by both Basilicon Doron and The Fathers Blessing, Leigh attacks “negligent Preachers” and “ministers stained by worldliness” (238, 240). Whereas The Fathers Blessing, therefore, urges conformism and political quietism, warning its readers, “invert not the course of nature by judging your Superiors” (8), Leigh challenges ecclesiastical hierarchy through her insistence on judging the inadequacies of those church authorities who “darken the glorious light of the Son of God, and eclipse his glory; whereas they should draw many unto Christ by their liberality and true preaching, they drive many from Christ, by love of their own (as they say) and by their idleness and negligence in preaching (as I say)” (267). In the context of these criticisms, literacy and the spiritual household compensate for the paucity of the Anglican ministry, who either do not preach, or preach badly. Invoking Isaiah 56.10, Leigh states: “What doth the Holy Ghost call negligent preachers but dumb dogs, that will not bark?” (213), citing the same passage used later by Milton in a more radical condemnation of prelacy.20 Leigh’s focus on preaching is important, for despite James’s ostensible support for a preaching ministry, the King still preferred those who defended the status quo, and ensured that they would via the canons of 1604.21 In her capacity as maternal preacher, therefore, Leigh both criticizes the ministry and substitutes for the negligent preachers she attacks, doing the public work of biblical exposition that they fail to do, and using it against them. Ministers are not the only authority figures Leigh attacks, however, for her book is full of the industrious sort’s distaste for the “unthankful” rich (101), a distaste that reaches its peak in her chapters on prodigality, which come close to attacking the conspicuous consumption for which James and his court became so famous. The “prodigal” is a figure who wastes away his household economy: he is “a disobedient man and will not keep holy the seventh day. . . . Whilst he is idle,

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or using some vain pastime out of his calling, his children and servants disobey God, and misspend their time, and weaken his estate” (223–24). The prodigal’s indulgence in pastimes or Sunday sports puts him at odds with Leigh, a vehement defender of Sabbatarianism. It also links him to court culture, for, as Leah Marcus has shown, even before the King’s Declaration of Sports in 1618, James identified royalty with traditional pastimes, supporting country sports as an extension of court ceremony and patronizing writers such as Jonson who satirized Puritans in their plays (Marcus 49–50).22 As early as Basilicon Doron, James rejected the Puritan emphasis on Sunday worship as too extreme and defended traditional holidays as a means of social control: he advises his son: “as the unjust railers may be restrained with reverent awe . . . certain days in the year would be appointed for delighting the people with public spectacles of all honest games, and exercise of arms” (31). Leigh makes this link to the court explicit, arguing that the prodigal’s idleness and excessive expenditure at home easily translate into broader problems of public economy and court patronage: “Neither will they [the prodigal] be thankful to the king, nor a worthy noble Prince or Peer; for if they spend a little prodigally in their service, they think they are indebted to them, though all of it were by the Prince liberally bestowed on them; but indeed, such are not to be about Princes or Peers” (228). Leigh is careful to divorce her criticisms from the King, but the above confusion of pronouns is symptomatic of the difficulty she encounters trying to separate the courtly wheat from the chaff in those passages where she launches into vehement attacks on the “covetous” rich, who “spend wastefully for the vain-glory of the world” (217, 224), while trying to maintain respect for “our Peers and Princes” (227). The prodigal is the product of this strained dialectic between veneration and critique, a figure that bears the weight of Leigh’s disdain for the wasting of domestic and royal economies, yet remains at a safe distance from the unnamed James. Implicitly in these passages, however, Leigh contrasts two households: the godly household of the Sabbatarian mother, busy laboring spiritually and literally to increase the number of the saints, and the corrupt, courtly household of the prodigal son, busy sporting and spending with reckless profligacy, a man who is “worse than an infidel because he provideth not for his household” (225). Leigh’s criticisms are by no means the open critique of corrupt favorites leveled at Charles I’s favorite, Buckingham, and the Caroline government, but they do foreshadow these later points by associating pastimes, prodigality, and corrupted domestic and court economies in a potent mix that is

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highly topical given the popular interest in the powerful favorite Robert Carr, involved in the scandalous Essex divorce, arrested for murder, and even linked to rumors of treason.23 Her association of pastimes and profligacy became even more potent when her book was republished later, during the 1620s and 1630s, controversial periods of Stuart defenses of pastimes and unpopular favorites. Leigh’s book was republished at each issuing of the royal Declaration of Sports, suggesting that The Mothers Blessing may have been brought out to counter this defense of monarchal authority and ceremonial popular culture with a militant and critical Protestantism centered on the lay collective.24 Leigh’s engagement with questions of church discipline that bear directly on a conflict between royal power or the Anglican hierarchy and godly conscience continue with her support of the controversial Puritan practice called “gadding.” Gadding was fairly widespread among the godly community, but it could lead to state investigation and prosecution: individuals who chose to roam in search of preaching clergy were subject to heavy fines, and communities suspected of large-scale gadding were the object of official concern (Hill, Society and Puritanism 67; Zaret, Heavenly Contract 119). Conformist ministers preached against gadding, attempting to persuade local congregations to “reverence and attend the ordinance of God in the ministry of their own pastors” and not to “go about preposterously and saucily” to hear preachers of their own choice (qtd. in Collinson, Religion 245–46). More conservative Puritan ministers advocated gadding only when there was no preaching minister in the parish, but Leigh goes beyond this, advising her readers to exercise choice over the quality of preaching they find: “if you cannot get the people to provide a Preacher, which may dispense the Word truly and sincerely, remove you to where you may have, and hear the word so preached: for, where the Word of the Lord is not truly preached, the people perish for want of knowledge” (234–35). Both in its implied criticism of the state church, and its emphasis on lay judgment and mobility, gadding opposed the ideal of a hierarchical order, inscribing an emergent form of voluntary association within the very structure of the church. The practice of congregations engaging in de facto choice of their pastors worked against the conformist idea that pastors should be appointed by the Anglican Church hierarchy and ultimately, in the temporal realm, by the godly prince (Lake, “Calvinism and the English Church” 214). This is an idea reiterated in Basilicon Doron, where James counters “Democratic” Puritans by presenting a top-down system of ecclesiastical patronage as his ideal.

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He advises Henry to defend church government against Puritan “pests” by “seeing all the Churches within your dominions planted with good pastors” (26), and installing only godly and modest men to “Bishoprics and Benefices” (27).25 Leigh proposes a collective model of lay patronage, one not focused on a powerful individual (as would be more usual) but on the needs and demands of the local community; she advises her readers to agitate collectively for a suitable, preaching minister: “Although there be but a poor company of you gathered together, move the people to provide themselves a Preacher, tell them of their wants, speak to the Magistrates, mourn to see the Alehouses full and the Church of God empty” (233). Thus although Leigh is no radical, no proponent of Separatism or even Independency, she presents a more democratic mode of church government working within the interstices of the existing structure. Like the maternal role, which operates within the family and yet extends beyond it, the practice of gadding works within the existing ecclesiastical structure and yet overruns borders, going beyond the customary geographic boundaries of the local parish to form a wider community of true believers. The Mothers Blessing rests on the structure of the spiritualized household and the Anglican state church, yet ultimately aims to erase boundaries of genealogical and geographic affiliation in order to create a mobile counterpublic of voluntary association, godly activism, and lay literacy that undermines patriarchal hierarchies from within. Producing her religio-political points within a narrative of maternal concern, Leigh politicizes motherhood in an extended critique of Jacobean power and policy. This critique is moderate, but she presents a tellingly different vision of both the godly commonwealth and the problems and abuses that beset it than James. Richard Cust has argued that during the period of the Forced Loan, from 1626 to 1628, the conflict between the royal government and the House of Commons developed two “alternative conspiracy theories”: Parliament and the popular press blamed England’s problems on corrupt courtiers and the growth of Catholicism, whereas the King and his councilors located disruptive forces in popular dissent and an anti-monarchical Puritan party (Cust, Forced Loan 328). Similarly, Basilicon Doron and The Mothers Blessing offer alternative versions of England’s troubles, James locating England’s problems in threats to monarchy from popular Puritans and deposing Papists, whereas Leigh emphasizes the corruptions of greedy clergymen and parasitic courtiers, corruptions that must be countered through a concerted effort of critical reading and writing. If, then, as scholars argue, the Jacobean church contained divisions over issues of church governance, The

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Mothers Blessing indicates that debate regarding these divisions was not confined to a ministerial elite, and that Anglo-Calvinist stress on active piety, even for domestic mothers, enabled lay intervention in questions of doctrine and discipline.26 In Leigh, godly reformation may begin at home, but it is not confined to that sphere, as the contradictions in sexual ideology, which allow her to speak as a mother, become a platform for her wide-ranging intervention in the public patriarchy of James’s rule. Transforming the trope of maternity into a public figure of moderate dissent, Leigh figures herself as the central proponent of an emerging Anglo-Calvinist counterpublic that will reproduce and disseminate the godly reformation through pious activism and published book.

After Life: Mother’s Blessings, Mother’s Tears It is important, particularly with a book as popular as Leigh’s, to briefly trace the way a rhetoric of dissent, however mild, can outlive an individual text or historical moment, contributing to the formation of new ideologies and communities of opposition at times of crisis. The Mothers Blessing is no exception to the rule that, once disseminated to a wider public, a book can take on a life and effect of its own, for despite her moderate intentions, Leigh leaves a legacy of maternity as a galvanizing figure for counterpublic activity. The republication of her book during the religio-political conflagrations of the 1620s foregrounds the anti-courtly and anti-clerical aspects of her writing, and her role of concerned motherhood is used by at least one Caroline writer to voice opposition to royal and Arminian policies. The years leading up to the Revolution see the development of Leigh’s mother figure into a popular public role, increasingly identified with the voicing of oppositional politics by both men and women in England and abroad. The Mothers Blessing was republished at least five times during the Bohemian Crisis, which pitted Elizabeth and her husband Frederick against Hapsburg forces on the continent. A cluster of editions survive from this period: two from 1618, and one each from 1621, 1622, and 1623. These were difficult years for England in terms of domestic and foreign policy, when James’s peace policies drew fire from press and pulpit alike. The crisis began in 1618 when the Hapsburg Ferdinand II, recently elected to the Bohemian crown, refused Bohemian Protestants their traditional freedom of worship, igniting a revolt. In response to Ferdinand’s action, Elizabeth’s husband,

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Frederick, accepted the Bohemian Crown in an alternative election, touted as part of a pan-Protestant mission to counter the forces of Catholicism in Europe. This led to war: in 1620 Protestant forces lost Bohemia and the Palatinate to the Hapsburg army. English AngloCalvinists saw the war as part of an apocalyptic battle against the Antichrist, but James refused to become engaged on his daughter’s behalf, and, even worse in the eyes of critics, intensified marriage negotiations for his son, Charles, with the Spanish.27 In 1620 and 1621, in response to vocal opposition to government policies, James issued proclamations ordering that subjects “take heed how they did intermeddle by pen or speech with causes of state” (qtd. in Bromham and Bruzzi 38). Despite this crackdown, support for Elizabeth and Frederick as Protestant champions grew, as did criticism of the King. Some authors responded to this crisis by curbing potentially sensitive statements to fit the new climate of conflict and censorship. Republications of both The Fathers Blessing and Breton’s The Mothers Blessing register the strains of the conflicted international scene in revisions to the original texts that stress silence and obedience in the face of royal displeasure. The 1624 The Fathers Blessing, for example, adds a paragraph that distinguishes between republican and royal political structures in order to emphasize a royal subject’s duty of obedience to the prince—a duty that, in absolutist fashion, takes precedence over even the law. It warns: “Be obedient to the Edicts and Ordinances made by Princes; with this opinion notwithstanding, that there is no Law which hath so much strength and efficacy as their lives: for as it is very requisit for those that are governed by a popular Estate to honor the people; so it behooveth him that liveth under a Monarchy to admire and reverence his Prince” (82). Similarly, the second edition of Breton’s The Mothers Blessing, published in 1621, bears a new warning against the dangers of open critique: “With Kings and great men ’tis ill making sport / For the Star-chamber is a dangerous court” (C2v)—perhaps a response to the imprisonment of a number of clergy and Parliamentary men who spoke out at this time (Bromham and Bruzzi 85–87). Breton also cut a passage proclaiming the monarch’s subjection to the whim of the divine from the new edition, a potentially controversial subject given that opposition writers privileged zealous war over royal foreign policy.28 In addition, he dropped the dedication to Thomas Roe that preceded the 1602 version. His earlier reference to the Star Chamber suggests that these cuts were preemptive acts of self-censorship: as Roe had become an adamant supporter of the Bohemian cause, and even helped draft a petition defending Parliamentary liberties in the Commons that same

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year (Strachan 132), he had become too dangerous a figure to head the book.29 In contrast to these additions and suppressions, Leigh’s The Mothers Blessing was published in its original form, the dedication to the newly controversial figure of Elizabeth of Bohemia remaining intact. The book’s retention of Elizabeth as patron in these later editions allies it with a militant Protestant opposition to James’s attempted peace settlement, putting it more clearly at odds with royal policy than her earlier editions. At her coronation in 1619, Elizabeth was proclaimed a nursing mother of the church, and was increasingly seen as a Protestant heroine who combined maternity with militant anti-Catholic struggle. In contrast, James’s unwillingness to join the anti-Hapsburg alliance was presented as failure of paternal duty, particularly after he banned celebrations of the birth of Elizabeth’s son in 1620 (Lewalski, Writing Women 57). The Prince of Orange, for example, declared that James “is a strange father that will neither fight for his children or pray for them” (qtd. in Lewalski 57). By the reign of Charles I, one parson, Thomas Rous, even recorded that discontent with the Caroline government caused his parishioners to look to Elizabeth of Bohemia as a replacement for her brother: “Our King’s proceedings have caused men’s minds to be incensed, to rove and project . . . looking towards the Lady Elizabeth” which is “fearful to be thought of ” (qtd. in Hill, Nation 46). In light of the increasing polarization and internationalization of Stuart intra-familial struggle, Leigh’s appeal to Elizabeth as “wife to the illustrious Prince, the Count Palatine of the Rhine” and bearer of the “continual defense and propagation” of “God’s Church” takes on a newly oppositional resonance (A2, A5). She replaces the father-king with the militant mother-figure of the Winter Queen. The textual effects of Leigh’s book go beyond her many republications, however, and beyond the borders of England. In 1627, one of the years when Leigh’s book was printed yet again, a pamphlet called A Mothers Teares over Hir Seduced Sonne was also published, first in Amsterdam under a slightly different title, then in London.30 Because of the anonymity of A Mothers Teares, it is not clear that it was written by a woman, and the many Latin tags and references to classical authors in the enlarged London edition may suggest it was written or revised by a man, now adopting the role of motherhood Leigh herself adapted from Breton. Nevertheless, both editions of A Mothers Teares capitalize on the position of politically engaged motherhood created by Leigh, and the London version cites The Mothers Blessing as a precedent for its dramatization of maternal concern and female

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authority.31 The names of bookseller and printer are absent from both editions of A Mothers Teares, indicating that the material covered in the book is controversial enough for everyone involved with it to remain anonymous, but the publisher of the Amsterdam version was the widow of Dutch printer Joris Veseler and later married another Amsterdam publisher, J.F. Stam. Both Veseler and Stam printed controversial corantos, Veseler’s covering news from Bohemia, while Stam’s were imported into England even after the government banned English publishers from covering foreign news in 1632.32 Stam also later published a number of anti-Episcopal tracts by the imprisoned William Prynne between 1636 and 1637.33 A Mothers Teares was therefore published alongside highly sensitive news and religious polemic, and engages in topical and dangerous religio-political issues from within an extended European community—much of which was embroiled in religious war. Both versions of A Mothers Teares are similar, ostensibly written by a Protestant mother in England in response to a letter from a wayward son who has converted to Catholicism and moved to the continent. They address two delicate and related topics of this period: the question of the nature of the Church of England’s relation to Rome and the fear of Catholic plots within England, both caused by the rise of Arminianism in the mid-1620s.34 One of the least popular aspects of the Arminians was their refusal to identify the pope as the Antichrist, a politically crucial change in doctrine given the war-torn European context.35 The anti-papal rhetoric James had embraced early in his reign, as a political force uniting the Anglican Church against foreign enemies, became in this period a signal of division between those, like William Laud and Richard Montagu, who supported theories of royal absolutism and those, like Sir John Eliot and John Pym, who formed a Protestant opposition supporting Parliamentary liberties. Toward the end of James’s reign, and from the beginning of Charles’s accession, the royal government favored clergy who rejected pan-Protestant militancy and expressed doubt regarding the pope’s role as the Antichrist. This produced what Christopher Hill has called “a crisis of confidence, first in the bishops, then in the monarchy” (Antichrist 65). Fears of imminent apocalyptic crisis and Popish plots became so rife that even Buckingham’s Rhé expedition, touted by the government as a resurgence of internationalist Protestant zeal against Bourbon France, was viewed as part of a Catholic plot to detract from the real battle with the forces of the Antichrist in the Palatinate, and to weaken the French Huguenots at La Rochelle.36

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The epigraphs to the Amsterdam edition of A Mothers Teares are therefore crucial to its religio-political position. They evoke first the apocalyptic imagery of the whore of Babylon found in Revelations: “And in her forehead was a name written, a mystery, Great Babylon, the mother of Whoredoms,” and then the injunction to separate from this corruption found in Corinthians: “Be not unequally yoked with the infidels” (title-page). Although these epigraphs are cut from the second, London edition, the apocalyptic references continue, framing the personal battle within a master narrative that turns the Protestant mother’s attempt to reclaim her son from Catholicism into a struggle for the soul of the nation, in danger of converting to the forces of the Antichrist. The London edition contains repeated references to the pope and the Catholic Church as the “beast,” the “whore,” and the “mystery of iniquity,” and juxtaposes these to the true church, “which hath the moon under her feet” (8). What begins as a family narrative, with details of place, dates, and a reproduction of the son’s letter from the continent, very quickly becomes emblematic, as the mother engages in violent anti-Catholic debate with the “whore” herself. For some of the time, the text operates like a closet morality play, the son positioned between two figures of good and evil who verbally battle it out for his immortal soul—with the added twist that in A Mothers Teares they are both female. This slippage between literal and figural recalls the fluidity of Leigh’s authorial position, but situates it within a more international and militant anti-Arminian rhetoric of confrontation with the Satanic forces of Catholic iniquity at home and abroad. Both versions of A Mothers Teares mobilize familiar tropes from Protestant polemic, identifying the mother with “truth,” the besieged maternal type of Revelation, and citing emotive examples of Protestant martyrdom from Foxe’s Acts and Monuments in order to identify the personal story of a mother and her converted son with a political narrative of wide-spread English religious battle and persecution that counters the irenic position of the Caroline church. The son’s letter purportedly comes from Douai, a center for British Catholics in Flanders from the Elizabethan period on, with a number of colleges dedicated to preserving the Catholic faith for English, Scots, and Irish exiles. However, the pamphlet’s criticisms do not just focus on exiled British Catholicism, but also look homeward at backsliding English Anglicanism. For the context of Arminian reform and Catholic plots means that both books locate the narrative of persecution increasingly within, rather than without, the English godly state, taking Leigh’s anti-clericalism to an extreme, and doing so in terms that would evoke a disturbingly violent biblical subtext for any

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seventeenth-century reader. In the Amsterdam edition, the rejection of Anglican ministry occurs in such vehement terms that the passage is shortened in the second, London edition. The Catholic son exclaims: “why your very lights seem to be darkness: your Seers see not . . . for pleasure is their God, their belly their shame. And which is yet more, their heads and rulers, who Lord it over the rest, are Chief in this Trespass, can here be truth (Mother) can here be truth?” (9). Even with this potentially seditious sentence on rulers cut from the London edition, both versions present an English mother who accepts her son’s criticisms of the Anglican Church and uses the opportunity to make further critiques while defending a minority of the “elect.” The mother tells her son: “we have a holy people, though but like two little flocks of kids, whereas the Aramites fill the country,” and assures him that godly ministers remain, but: These are the Micaiahs though there be 400 against him that will not daub with untempered matter, and so build a mud wall, but deal plainly to turn away ruin from the King and people, if they might be heard; though they be smitten on their cheeks, and fed with bread of affliction. (10)

Through a web of biblical allusions, both editions of A Mothers Teares describe a nation divided from itself and its Protestant vocation, a godly community persecuted by the very government that should be readying itself for the final battle. The “two little flocks” of 1 Kings appear just before they slaughter the Aramites, who vastly outnumber them, in a seven day battle (20.27–29); Micaiah is an unpopular prophet because he prophesies that the King will be slain in an ungodly war (1 Kings 22; 2 Chron. 18.7). Given the context of the debacle of the Isle de Rhé, the biblical allusions warn against the foolishness of Buckingham’s French expedition, and its potentially disastrous consequences for the King, at the same time that they argue for a more general, apocalyptic struggle to come. The notes to the Geneva Bible in particular interpret Micaiah’s story as a narrative of the true prophet surrounded by false ones and persecuted by an evil government, glossing it as: “Yet the true ministers of god ought not to cease to do their duty, though the wicked magistrates can not abide them to speak ye truth” (2 Chron. 18.7). Casting the godly English in the role of Micaiah also covertly positions the Caroline government as the apostate King Ahab, one of the biblical tyrants that Presbyterians in particular later identified with Charles.37 Indeed, the more openly oppositional Amsterdam edition (in a section significantly cut from

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the London edition) defends uncorrupted members of the Protestant Church in terms of the very biblical and classical tyrants that so troubled both James and Charles: “(my child) the Lord can preserve him a seed, even where Satan’s kingdom is, he can have his Saints in Nero’s house, and an Obadiah in Ahab’s court” (11). A Mothers Teares thus presents an anti-tyrannical typology that sets the reforming mother and her extended family of Anglo-Calvinists against both Catholics abroad and a wayward hierarchy at home. In this way, the pamphlet takes Leigh’s position as maternal redeemer and develops it into a role of militant, pan-Protestant, apocalyptic significance: the loving mother presents herself as a synecdoche of the True Church, at the same time that she becomes the most vehement spokesperson of a godly counterpublic—the true prophet of imminent national and international crisis. This public position of reformed and reforming maternity does not stop at A Mothers Teares. As Leigh’s moderate book fell out of print during the extreme religio-political upheavals of the Revolutionary Period, more radical writers took up the trope of maternal concern. The short pamphlet, England’s Thanks, published in 1642, at the very start of the First Civil War between Parliament and Charles I, for example, purports to be “from our Mother England to all her true hearted Children that have been any way assistant to the Parliament” (title-page). Thanking her readership for taking revenge on the “ill affected Cavaliers,” Mother England exhorts them to further militancy, evoking a mother’s blessing as the catalyst for political action against supporters of King Charles: “she upon her blessing commands those that have been hitherto backward to let them see how they relish their Mother’s affronts” (3). This figure of maternal opposition promises not just a return of the repressed but the very nightmarish maternal triumph over royal patriarchy feared by James earlier in the century, when he counseled against those rebels who carry “such a natural zeal and duty to [their] mother” that they will overthrow “tyrannous Kings” (Trew Law 78). Women writers and speakers of this period adopt a similar strategy of putting maternal solicitude to radical ends, deploying figures of maternity to legitimate their entry into public, political life, even when they are not mothers themselves. The public prophecies of childless prophets such as Anna Trapnel, Elizabeth Poole, and (as we will see in chapter 2) Sarah Wight, for example, are performances of the authorial position of the reforming, zealous motherhood imagined by Leigh: all three women position themselves as giving birth to the Word, and as mother figures symbolically and literally central to the redemption of their communities

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and the country at large. The Leveller leader, Katherine Chidley, literalizes Leigh’s conflation of Pauline preaching and maternal solicitude, combining the roles of mother, preacher, and opposition writer to offer radical critiques of conservative religious leaders and Cromwell’s government.38 Unlike A Mothers Teares, the above Parliamentary pamphlet and women writers do not refer to The Mothers Blessing as a precedent, but they do indicate the development of domestic maternity into a widespread means of female public activity and oppositional rhetoric during the Revolutionary years, one that both facilitates the emergence of women into political life and aids iconoclastic attacks on the King’s power.39 Nicholas Tyacke has argued that, in the years leading up to and during the Civil Wars, leaders of the opposition were often from families containing “formidable Calvinist matriarchs” (“Puritanism” 136). Dorothy Leigh, A Mothers Teares, and their followers indicate, however, that the Calvinist matriarch is not confined to a position of private piety, directing political action from the wings, but becomes a central role within political debate, a speaking position that can be occupied by women and men to oppose the royal, patriarchal rhetoric of the dominant ideology with a vision of an expanding counterpublic of private piety and public critique.

Chapter 2

At “Liberty to P reach in the Chambers” : S arah Wight, H enry Jessey, and the New- Modeled C ommunity of Saints

Sarah Wight’s prophetic utterances were transcribed by the Baptist

minister Henry Jessey from April to July 1647, in the midst of the violence of the Civil Wars, and published later that year as The Exceeding Riches of Grace. Wight prophesied from her bedroom in a trance, and the transformation of this household space into a public theater recalls Leigh’s fluid movement out of the domestic into the public, prophesy transforming private residence into public spectacle/publication. However, in Wight and Jessey’s book, it is not the family but the conventicle or private religious meeting that forms the basis and model for counterpublic debate. The years 1646–47 saw what one historian has labeled the “counter-revolution,” when London Presbyterians gathered forces to impose uniformity of worship, take over Parliament, and disband the New Model Army.1 In opposition to this religious and political backlash, Jessey and Wight present a millenarian ideal of democratic conference, evoking truth not as a product of stateimposed uniformity but as a process of repeated dialogue and revision. Wight’s prone but articulate presence draws together a diverse group of sectarians, from Baptist ministers to New Model Army chaplains, and helps extend this group’s influence beyond one book to related publications in England, Ireland, and the Netherlands. From within

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the autonomy of the sectarian conventicle, Jessey and Wight rewrite traditional narratives of affliction and conversion to create a female speaking position that emerges out of and vindicates an expansive newmodeled community of saints. The dialogical thrust of The Exceeding Riches of Grace, its adaptation of the collective privacy of the conventicle as public opposition, rests in part in its collaborative authorship. Jessey and Wight’s joint involvement in producing the publication poses a problem for bibliographers trained with a post-Romantic attachment to the individual author. As Susan Wiseman has astutely put it, the shifting nature of authority in prophetic utterance, its movement between female prophet and male amanuensis, earthly vessel and God-the-author, forces us to ask, “where, if anywhere, is the authority, or the voice of authority, in seventeenth-century prophetic discourse by women?” (“Unsilent Instruments” 176). The instability of this circulation of voice and authority has led to the bibliographic erasure of Wight as coauthor of The Exceeding Riches of Grace, despite the fact that Wight’s words take up almost half the text and that the original titlepage displays both Jessey and Wight’s names, presenting Wight as a vessel of grace and Jessey as merely the publisher and “Eye and Earwitness.”2 This modern bibliographic privileging of text over voice, of publication over performance, forecloses the very issue of authorial instability Wiseman points to in prophetic texts—the sticky question of who is speaking and for whom. In doing so, it effaces the book’s ties to a popular oral culture in which pious word and preacherly performance blend, and its collaborative nature, in which ministerial authority is complemented, even undercut, by lay prophetic power. The desire for a univocal authority this bibliographic privileging of Jessey presents is continued in a more subtle critical splitting: critics of The Exceeding Riches of Grace rarely broach the issue of the text’s complicated pattern of authority head-on. Instead they divide their focus to deal with either Jessey or Wight: feminist critics such as Diane Purkiss and Phyllis Mack rightly emphasize Wight’s acts of selffashioning and appropriations of gendered subject-positions, but treat Jessey largely as the transparent medium for her public prophesies. Historians such as B.R. White and David Katz mention The Exceeding Riches of Grace as part of Jessey’s prodigious religious output during the Revolutionary Period, but leave Wight in the background as the object of his book. More recently, Mary Fissell directly addresses the relation between prophet and amanuensis, yet despite the prominence of Wight’s speeches, Fissell’s focus on the reproductive body tends to cast the book as divided between female body and male

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word: “Jessey serves as a kind of interpreter of Wight’s actions” (121). Diverging from this critical split, this chapter extends the insights of those scholars who interweave the political and gendered context of The Exceeding Riches of Grace, such as Barbara Ritter Dailey, Carola Scott-Luckens, and Katharine Gillespie by focusing on the way the book foregrounds the collective, dialogical means of its own production as a large part of its oppositional millenarian agenda.3 Wiseman settles the question of prophetic authority through the concept of circulation: women writers put “the authorizing voice of their text into perpetual motion in between—between speech and writing, between an agent and an instrument” (“Unsilent Instruments” 193), and certainly The Exceeding Riches of Grace functions in this way. However, Jessey and Wight’s book throngs with voices: Wight’s speeches combine with Jessey’s framing commentary, prefatory material by John Saltmarsh, and multiple dialogues, spontaneous prayers, and even extempore preaching from the crowd that visits her during her fast. In The Exceeding Riches of Grace, the circulation Wiseman proposes is itself a product of the cross-gendered competition and collaboration of the historically specific community of the private religious conventicle. Ultimately, the book’s authority is generated by myriad participants in a sectarian community united around Wight, and in this way it offers a condensed dramatization of women’s potentially key role in mobilizing the collective oppositional identities and ideas that create counterpublics. Both Jessey and Wight had strong ties to the London conventicles and gathered churches under attack by Presbyterians during this period, and both evinced a conflicted relation to authority—public or private—that facilitated their emergence as joint authors. Jessey had become a Particular Baptist, baptized by Hanserd Knollys in 1645 (White, “Great Rebellion” 137), and thus joined one of the Separatist groups targeted by the counterrevolutionary forces: a House of Commons Committee, headed by Colonel Leigh, called in Knollys and another associate of Jessey’s, William Kiffin, for questioning in February 1647 (Tolmie 138). Unlike both Knollys and Kiffin, however, Jessey practiced open communion, allowing Baptists and non-Baptists into his church together and retaining strong links to the Independent community also under fire at this time—in particular to Thomas Goodwin, Walter Cradock, and Richard Saltonstall, all of whom visited Wight during her ordeal (Tolmie 138). Whereas sectarians like the Baptists insisted on a radical break with the state church, these Independents had a more moderate view of reform: they believed in voluntary church membership, yet retained links to the postwar parish

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structure (Tolmie 93). By accommodating both communities, Jessey took up a contradictory position that structured his career: he was an ordained minister who yet supported lay preachers, a member of antitithe sects who yet became a Trier in 1654. In the polarized situation of 1647, however, this ability to draw together diverse religious communities proved a useful counter to Presbyterian ascendancy. If Jessey’s background ties him to the London congregations, Wight locates herself very much in the private dialogue of the gathered church that the sectarian Chidley evokes as the basis of public debate in my introduction. According to The Exceeding Riches of Grace, Wight was both part of a private household, speaking from her bedroom (where she was tended to by her twice-widowed mother and her maid, Hannah Guy) and a member of a loose and mobile congregation that visited her bedside. She lived in Laurence Poutney parish, one of the poorer London areas, with a tradition of supporting Puritan clergy before the wars (Liu, Puritan London 31, 134). Steeped in the literate culture of activist Puritanism, she studied her Bible from an early age and gadded through the multitude of sermons and lectures filling Revolutionary London (6, 11). This preparation in godly literature and preacherly performance matured into public prophecy after a period of spiritual torment. It is this tormented performance and the community it unites I will turn to next. To analyze the pivotal role female figures play in developing the conventicle as a base for counterpublic activity, I will explore first Wight’s source texts, then The Exceeding Riches of Grace, and finally the displaced form of an epistolary conventicle imagined by Wight and others in the more oppressive context of the Protectorate.

Divine Tragicomedy: Conventicles and the Development of Godly Closet Drama Formed beyond, and in opposition to, state structures such as the Church of England, and often within domestic spaces, conventicles offered private sites for the development of the very kind of oppositional performance and publication Wight and Jessey’s book develops. Separatists and semi-Separatists gathered in conventicles and private congregations even before the wars, marking out houses and lodgings as particular sites of collective religious activity, but at the start of the First Civil War the private meetings of the gathered churches proliferated (Tolmie 125). These gatherings could take many forms: the saints associated in experience meetings or conferences, to share personal

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testimony about conversion and backsliding; they came together before and after church to pray, expound on scripture, and discuss sermons; and they gathered to worship, separated from the corruption of the Anglican Church. Sects developed the habit of meeting in private houses, particularly under Archbishop Laud, in order to avoid state persecution: Jessey, for example, ejected from his living as an Anglican minister, became pastor of the semi-Separatist Jacobs Church, which was forced, in 1640, to split in two due to persecution. One half went with the lay preacher Praisegod Barebone, while the other met at Jessey’s lodgings (White, “Great Rebellion” 149). The role women played in these conventicles was uneven and is still hotly debated: though women made up the majority of the sects, they were prohibited from administering sacraments and rarely encouraged to preach (Laurence 349). They did, however, prophesy, pray, and testify to their experiences, and in churches that emphasized gifted extempore speech over formal sermonizing, this put them in positions of public spiritual authority wholly absent from the all-male hierarchy of the Church of England or the Presbytery of elders. As Katharine Gillespie and Patricia Crawford have persuasively argued, therefore, the movement away from institutional churches could prove useful to women and laboring class men (Domesticity and Dissent 69–73; Women and Religion 119–59). Critics of the sects were quick to point out the potentially more inclusive nature of these private churches. From the very start of the Civil Wars, Anglicans launched a propaganda campaign aimed at attacking conventicles for their potentially leveling nature. Satirical pamphlets, such as John Taylor’s The Brownists Conventicle, for example, linked the growth of women speakers and “mechanic preachers” within conventicles, combining anxiety over usurpation of class privilege with fears over gender equality (2). Taylor presents the “Felt-maker” preacher of his conventicle as wishing to thank: all our she fellow-laborers in this our holy and good work, I mean those blessed and fruit-bearing women, who are not only able to take any Text but search into the deep sense of Scripture, and preach both in their own families and elsewhere. Whom though Saint Paul forbade to preach in the Church, yet he left them liberty to preach in the chambers . . . (6)

Taylor depicts women as, like Leigh, having found a loop-hole in Pauline law, one that enables them to take advantage of the displacement of prayer and preaching to “private meetings” to gain a critical voice and to engage in the public, performative art of preaching (2).

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He criticizes the move from public church to private chamber as symptomatic of Separatist disrespect for established social and religious structures, a collective form of gentle iconoclasm that creates a scandalously heterosocial sphere of theological equality, a church structure that rests in individual access to grace as much as ministerial discipline, bottom-up dialogue as much as top-down doctrine. Jessey’s experiences as a sectarian leader showed him this structure’s potential for enabling women’s words as part of the dialogue. In the records of the semi-Separatist Jacob’s Church of which Jessey later became pastor, the anonymous author (who may be Jessey himself) notes that the 1632 imprisonment of many members of that church creates a flourishing oppositional rhetoric: “In that time the Lord opened their mouths so to speak at the High Commission and Pauls, and in private even the weak Women, as their Subtle and malicious Adversaries were not able to resist but were ashamed” (qtd. in Burrage 2:297).4 The gendering of speaking-positions in this quotation splits men and women into separate spheres of suffering. However, this private oppositional speech could become public, as is evidenced by Sarah Jones, a member of the same congregation who may have been one of Wight’s visitors later mentioned in The Exceeding Riches of Grace (Wight and Jessey 9). The author goes on to note that Jones had her “Grievances given in and read openly at the Commission Court” (Burrage 2:298), and mentions Jones’s “Chronicle of god’s remarkable judgments and Dealings that year”— the title of what sounds like the kind of compilation of God’s providence later collected by Jessey, and perhaps an early manuscript or lost publication (Burrage 2: 298). Jones may even have gone on to publish two surviving works of religio-political critique, the first in 1644 just a few years before The Exceeding Riches of Grace.5 These allusions to female speech and writing suggest that women sectarians used withdrawal into the politicized enclosure of the persecuted conventicle as the opportunity for engagement of a wide audience, recasting disgruntled private dialogue as counterpublic address. Women were not only aided by this movement from church to chamber, as contemporaries bemoaned, however; they also became central figures around which private communities united and through which these communities were publicized. This sense of women as central to both the devolution of state church hierarchy and the evolution of counterpublic activity is illustrated by one of the main source texts Jessey alludes to in his transcript. The Exceeding Riches of Grace refers to a Mrs. Drake, a Protestant woman who died in 1625 (Williams 118), but whose spiritual trials and deathbed ecstasy,

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Trodden down Strength, were published in January 1647, a few months before Jessey and Wight’s book.6 Like Leigh’s book, Trodden down Strength turns Drake’s household into a site for women’s participation in critical debate and oppositional public performance. However, rather than expanding maternity through analogies with public power, Drake’s pamphlet, which is part ars moriendi and part conversion narrative, deploys female affliction as a decentering force that brings the church home to her. After an unwanted marriage and difficult childbirth, Drake becomes convinced that she is damned and refuses to pray privately, go to church, or take the sacrament. The prose narrative describes her early anti-godly scoffing and spiritual trials, in preparation for the glorious deathbed outpourings at the end of the text. To facilitate her conversion, a number of big-name AngloCalvinist ministers visit Drake, her temporary separation from the Anglican Church gathering these men to argue with her on topics ranging from sin and salvation to church attendance. These ministers include the New England Congregationalist Thomas Hooker, who may have sent her pamphlet to the press;7 John Dod, a dissenting preacher deprived of his living and silenced by Archbishop Abbott in 1611; John Preston, an Anglo-Calvinist who penetrated court circles (becoming chaplain to Prince Charles) but who protested the Spanish match, Arminianism, and Buckingham’s expedition to the Isle de Rhé; and John Forbes, a Scots minister with close connections to Hooker and other Independents in the Netherlands, who had been exiled for treason in 1605.8 As this list of ministers suggests, unlike later, more radical, conversion narratives and deathbed prophesies, Trodden down Strength foregrounds the role of male pastoral care in Drake’s reversal of fortunes. However, in doing so, the 1647 publication not only offers Drake as a symbol of final triumph for the “stormbeaten” saints, but also vindicates a loose tradition of oppositional ministry, which perhaps accounts for the twenty-year delay in publication. As a powerful member of the Surrey gentry, whose husband is lay patron of Esther rectory, Drake can surround herself with what are, for the most part, nonconformist preachers, transforming the private sphere of her household into an arena of reforming religious debate of which she is the center. In part, the pamphlet effaces Drake’s role in disputes with this impressive list of ministers by presenting her as a passive vessel for competing male authorities: in her opposition to their counsels she is a mouthpiece for Satan, spouting the “Devil’s rhetoric” (Hart 22), just as in her final moments she is a mouthpiece for God. Nevertheless, through these acts of cross-gender ventriloquism, the pamphlet

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presents her as no mean theological adversary: Forbes churlishly refuses to come back after one visit (Hart 72), Dod leaves after three years, “being toiled out in body and spirit” (115), and Hooker’s arrival is presented as something of an intellectual coup for the ministers— being “newly come from the University,” he will be able to slake her thirst for dispute (120). Indeed, in the intervals between those moments that emphasize her speech as religious ventriloquism, Trodden down Strength constructs an intermittent subject position for Drake, born of a desire for knowledge and debate: Hooker has “a new answering method (though the same things) wherewith she was marvelously delighted, and being very covetous of knowledge, was pleased with new disputes and objections to fasten further upon herself those aforementioned things; still further and further sifting into the same old Truths” (120). This emphasis on dispute means that much of the text is reported dialogue, Mrs. Drake bemoaning her damned state while various ministers attempt to comfort her. To her assertion that she “was assuredly a reprobate and cast away” (49–50), Dod “bent in the next place all his strength this way, Denying unto her that it was possible for the devil or any other creature to know the decree of God ” (51). These dialogues showcase the ministers’ pastoral abilities, but they also offer the reprobate congregant a fleetingly independent voice. In Trodden down Strength, heterosocial discussion and theological collaboration turn Drake’s home into a domestic church and alternative university. The pamphlet fights shy of sectarianism, but its focus on Drake’s withdrawal from the state church and its celebration of nonconformist ministers offers us a glimpse of the collaborative and competitive structure of the conventicle emerging around the voice of an afflicted woman, temporarily separated from the orthodox state church. Drake then becomes the protagonist in an anti-courtly closet drama. The author refers to himself as “an eye-witnessing Actor in all her Tragicomedy” (4), likens the narrative turn to her death to a “Scene change” (159), and refers to her deathbed ecstasy as “the Catastrophe”—in dramatic terms the reversal or overturning that leads to the final event in a play—which in this case results in a “Comical conclusion” (131). As Lois Potter has pointed out, tragicomedy was extremely popular at the Stuart court and with later Royalists (83). Offering romantic solutions to knotty political problems, it is generically and ideologically close to the masque, and could thus potentially feed the same Stuart ideology of royal resolution of conflict without debate. However, Trodden down Strength presents a reformed version of the genre, returning the comedic ending to its

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divine roots: God, not a disguised prince or princess, resolves Drake’s internal battle and the romance that drives the plot is not pastoral but prophetic. Drake dresses in bridal white on her deathbed (153), and adopts the ecstatic voice of the Spouse: “O, he is come, he is come, he is come” (141). The text contrasts this godly theater with drama supported by the court: one of Drake’s satanically inspired errors is to identify Dod with the character Ananias, “one whom at a play in the Blackfriars, she saw scoffed at, for a holy brother of Amsterdam” (26). This alludes to a character in Jonson’s comedy, The Alchemist, performed by the King’s Men at Blackfriars sometime in 1610, and so pleasing to the court that it was put on there in 1613 and then 1623.9 The intersection of theological and domestic privacy thus gives birth to a paradoxically anti-theatrical and anti-courtly dramatic form, as the afflicted woman’s spiritual withdrawal is textually reproduced as godly closet drama. If anti-sectarian pamphlets attack “private meetings” for encouraging a gentle iconoclasm that opens up opportunities for women, then Trodden down Strength vindicates women as enabling focal points for “private meetings” of the godly and their transmutation into nonconformist print and anti-courtly performance. In these works, withdrawal into a site of ideological and spatial privacy becomes the pre-text for the formation of public oppositional identities and ideas. Drake in particular, however, takes center stage in a way denied nonaristocratic women in both the public and private theaters of the time, and, in the very act of doing so, becomes a pivotal figure around which a moderate counterpublic of nonconformist religion is forged. In Drake’s case, this counterpublic is temporary: Trodden down Strength ends with Drake’s reintegration into a reformed Anglican Church, and the 1654 edition distances the author from radical groups such as the Quakers.10 The author of Trodden down Strength is a moderate reformist writer; however, the adoption of withdrawn female suffering and private dialogue as the ground of oppositional debate serves as inspiration for Jessey and Wight’s more radical prophetic performance. The Exceeding Riches of Grace repeats and revises the more orthodox godly genres of ars moriendi and conversion that structure Drake’s narrative, recasting them to revolutionary ends.

A Barebones Performance Drake’s more muted performance occurred in the mid-1620s, but her text and The Exceeding Riches of Grace were both published during a period when the radical elements of the Revolution, and a conservative

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backlash against them, were in full swing. Sarah Wight began her prophetic trance and fast during a period of extreme political turbulence in London, when the Independent community of which she and Jessey were a part came under attack. According to the book, Wight fell into her trance on April 6, 1647 (A5), and stayed in her bedroom fasting, prophesying, and offering spiritual advice until June 26, when Jessey held a service of thanksgiving for her at her home (143). The exact publication date is difficult to pin down, but it was sometime between the end of July and the beginning of September.11 This situates it at a crucial moment for British politics, when the defeat of the Royalists put an end to the anti-Episcopal alliance set up by Presbyterians, Independents, and Separatists in 1641, and there was a conservative attack on the busy gathered churches that had proliferated during the war (Tolmie 88–119). Presbyterians came to dominate the London city council, the Westminster Assembly dropped its policy of accommodation with Separatists and semi-Separatists, and even Parliament seemed to reject the Independents’ ideology of limited religious liberty: in December 1646, a 1645 ban on lay preaching was renewed, and an Independent-led motion to allow gifted congregational members to preach in private houses or conventicles failed (Ashton 164; Liu, Discord in Zion 55). By the spring and summer of 1647, tensions between the New Model Army and the Presbyterian city were coming to a head. By early June the army had seized the King and was marching to London (Ashton 179). On July 26, a Presbyterian and Royalist mob attacked Parliament, forcing Independent MPs to seek shelter with the New Model Army, and what was left of Parliament issued an invitation to the King to return (Ashton 137, 175). In response, on August 6, the army, welcomed by a large, cheering crowd, entered London, and escorted the Independent MPs back to Westminster (Ashton 86). This prolonged and volatile power struggle was by no means only about religion. The Presbyterians sought a conservative political settlement and speedy peace with the King, while even the moderate Independents and members of the army wanted to institute regular Parliaments and to safeguard religious liberties (Woodhouse 15–19). Moreover, in turning on their former Independent allies, the Presbyterians joined the Anglicans in singling out conventicles for particular attack. Presbyterian petitions throughout the year identified Independents as schismatics, and harped on the need to dispel conventicles: one petition of January 1647, for example, attacked private meetings, preaching women, and “other ignorant persons” (qtd. in Lindley 362). In response, the Commons ordered the investigation of

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women preachers (Lindley 362), and, on March 10, 1647, just a month before Wight’s own trance and fast, declared a day of fasting and humiliation against schism and heresy. Of the two Presbyterian divines invited to preach to the Commons that day, the first, Richard Vines, criticized the New Model Army, the Independents, and “the liberty of prophesying and preaching” embraced by sectarians (26, 23). The second speaker, Thomas Hodges, did not name the Independents as the object of his vehement oration, but combined neo-Spenserian images of the monstrous products of a popular press with generalized attacks on all sectarians, claiming that they believe, “Christ is not to be found except in a wilderness or in a chamber” (A4, 51). In response, the Separatists and Independents allied to cast the Presbyterians as Anglicans after the fact: the Leveller Richard Overton denounced them as “Presbyterian prelates,” for example, and even a moderate like Jessey, in a 1648 letter to John Winthrop Sr., characterized the summer of 1647 as a period of “great alterations” in the army, Parliament, and nation, “when all had like to have been enslaved again, after the Cavaliers were subdued” (qtd. in Lindley 382, 384; “To Mr. Winthrop, Gov. of Massachusetts Bay” 465–66). Wight and Jessey’s book intervenes in this heated ideological battle, promoting Wight as a pivotal figure who gathers and vindicates the embattled community of saints in the face of this post-Cavalier attack. It is a long piece, which begins with prefaces by Jessey and the radical army chaplain John Saltmarsh, moves on to record Wight’s background, her long fast and prophetic utterances, and ends with her healthy restoration to the London sectarian community. The dialogues that take up the last two-thirds of the book record her conferences with the visitors who gather at her bedside. Throughout, the book mobilizes traditional tropes of conversion narratives and ars moriendi: like John Saltmarsh, whose own story of conversion was published in 1645, Wight is tempted to commit suicide and seized by trembling fits before her trance (Saltmarsh, Free Grace 46, 12; Wight 14, 11). Like Drake (who actually attempts suicide), she is afraid to eat before her conversion and gains prophetic voice through extreme illness (Hart 14; Wight 71). However, The Exceeding Riches of Grace also revises both these genres: unlike Saltmarsh, her tremblings culminate in a trance that lasts ten days, confinement to her bed for sixty-six days, and what is purportedly a seventy-six day fast (56, 139, 138). This confinement, like Drake’s withdrawal, helps cast Wight’s fast as an intimate and personal act, carried out in her home, where she is at first surrounded by only friends and family. Jessey gives a detailed account of Wight’s physical state, as she hovers between life and

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death: she is initially struck blind, deaf, and dumb, and she lies on her bed, with her face covered and her hands and feet clenched tight (15). This physical enclosure is replicated by her speech, which both Jessey and Wight characterize as private conversation. Wight couches religious devotion in erotic terms to figure herself as the Bride of Christ. “My beloved is mine and I am my beloved’s,” she states, echoing the Song of Solomon and a long tradition of devotional literature, “As an Apple tree is among the Trees of the wood, so is my beloved among the sons” (30). Jessey characterizes her speech somewhat differently, as a self-directed verbal act: he describes her as “talking very low, to herself” and as speaking “ex tempore, in Soliloquies” (A6). But both describe a closed verbal circuit that combines with physical closure to produce a realm of spiritual liberty for the prophet. The public identity of Wight as coauthor and prophet is therefore based on her initial withdrawal into a realm of spatial, physical, and spiritual privacy. It also, to a far greater extent than Drake’s text, rests on the privacy of the separated church. Though Jessey and Wight are careful not to wander too close to the total repudiation of ministerial authority later proposed by sects such as the Quakers, they reject the hierarchies of Presbyterianism and even undercut the power of the ordained ministry in general. Jessey himself goes so far as to proclaim that Wight’s salvation occurs “by faith in his son, without any means” (A3v). In this focus on grace over means, Jessey and Wight follow more radical preachers like Saltmarsh, whom Presbyterians attacked for preaching dangerously democratic principles. In his preface to The Exceeding Riches of Grace, Saltmarsh implicitly likens Wight’s conversion to his own, in traditional terms, as a passage from a “legal” to a “gospel” condition (a2v), and Wight’s trance echoes Saltmarsh’s anti-legal sentiments. She is converted, she tells one visitor, by a vision of Christ’s passion (54), and while in her trance she evokes this vision in erotic terms: “Now I have my desire; I desired nothing but a crucified Christ, and I have him. I desired nothing but a crucified Christ and I have him” (22).12 In contrast to the Presbyterian insistence on a uniform church under the surveillance of elders and ministers, Wight, Jessey, and Saltmarsh offer the private individual’s intimate relation to God, forged at its strongest beyond a hierarchical church structure, in the autonomous sphere of the believer’s home. All three, therefore, work together to present Wight’s affliction and restoration as a decentering force that devolves the power of God’s word from public pulpit to “private meeting.” Withdrawal into Wight’s private household then becomes a basis for reconstructing female public identity and oppositional community, as

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her spectacular prophetic performance operates as a recentering force that coheres a sectarian counterpublic. For the spectacle of Wight’s fasting, suffering body draws quite a crowd, and once the visitors begin to arrive the privacy of Wight’s speech is translated into public act, first for the spectators at her bedside and then for the readers of the published book. Jessey enumerates over eighty members of what can only be described as an audience, a veritable who’s who of the London sectarian community, including doctors, MPs, ministers, and members of the New Model Army, all of whom flock to Wight’s bedside to see her miraculous fast and recovery, and to hear her ministerial words of advice.13 When asked for her advice on the best means to “compose” differences among this diverse group (87), Wight replies that what is needed is “The beholding a reconciled God, seen by all” (88). This sense of the current need for the Word made spectacular flesh is answered in part by Wight’s ecstatic reiteration of Christ the bridegroom/crucified lover, a repetition that holds him up as an erotic object passed between Wight and her listeners/readers. But more than this, Wight presents herself as a sectarian focal point in an act of cross-gender identification that casts her as an imitation of the suffering Christ. She even interposes herself into her own conversion vision of the passion: “I lay in visions. And in that time, the spirit of God was poured upon me. And Jesus Christ was presented to me, as crucified for my sins. I saw it: and myself crucified with him” (54). The visual nature of this moment, and her simultaneous role as spectator and martyred object, both cast Wight in a leading role in biblical history and demonstrate the complex layers of spectatorship/ spectacle folded into this textual performance. Wight watches herself watching the crucified Christ, and is in turn watched by an audience who are then displayed for the reader. This nested series of spectacles depicts an audience forged in part through scopic identification: Wight is both the desiring subject and desired object of a collective gaze. In some senses, then, Wight presents herself simultaneously as the bearer/imitator of a much-needed living icon, one that unites those around her in opposition to both the conspicuous consumption of early Stuart spectacle and the idolatrous structures of the Anglican Church that Presbyterians seemed in danger of reinstating. James Holstun, writing of the Fifth Monarchist Anna Trapnel’s fast outside Whitehall, has called it a “millenarian counter-masque” (Ehud’s Dagger 285). Trapnel is mentioned in the list of Wight’s visitors (a1v), and Jessey even notes that in June 1647, as Wight’s performance waned and the political situation heated up, Trapnel went into a similar fasting trance, later recalled in her The Cry of a Stone (Jessey

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and Wight 139–41; Trapnel 5). The close timing of Wight and Trapnel’s copy-cat fasts suggests the growth of prophetic, afflicted femininity as a central figure for sectarian activity in the mounting tension of these months.14 Following Holstun, Gillespie has argued that Exceeding Riches of Grace performs a similar “strategic appropriation of the court masque,” one that democratizes royal spectacle (185–86). These spectacular sectarian counter-spectacles, like Drake’s earlier conversion, are opposed to the theatrical modes epitomized by the court masque, in which extravagant expenditure, complicated visual effects, and stylized language work to manifest social hierarchy. Wight’s fast is almost literally a “barebones” performance, one that is significant for what is not done, what is refused, conspicuously not consumed, and which moves toward undoing social hierarchy in its occasional espousal of the General Baptist position that all sinners may be saved, even an “empty nothing creature” like herself. In the context of 1647, the drama of Wight’s suffering body and Jessey’s transcription of this into an organized theological “pattern” counter Presbyterian attacks on the local, London sectarian community with a vivid embodiment of its endurance and regeneration. To this end, The Exceeding Riches of Grace foregrounds the busy, informal practices of the sectarians’ gathered churches. The largest crowds gather at Wight’s bedside on Sundays, after church, and Tuesdays, traditional Puritan lecture days. Separatist and semi-Separatist churches encouraged their members to prophesy after sermons, gifted members of the congregation engaging in biblical exegesis and personal testimony (Nuttall 76), and Wight’s own prophecies fit this pattern. The first big crowd of “diverse neighbors and loving friends,” a dozen or so witnesses from Ab Church and Laurence Poutney parish, visits on Tuesday, April 20 (35). A small crowd gathers on the following Sunday, April 25 (39), and then again on Sunday, May 2 (49). Visitors and conferences occur almost daily in May, but the largest crowds still gather on Sundays, Tuesdays, and Wednesdays. Wight uses these opportunities not only to pray and relate her conversion experience, but also to give expert commentary on biblical passages and even on sermons: on June 8, “being Tuesday, the Lecture day there,” she is asked two questions relating to a sermon by one of Jessey’s friends, Edward Richardson, and provides full answers (130–31). As her fame grows, therefore, Wight’s prophecies and advice become supplements to and extensions of the busy and mobile schedule of sermon and lecture attendance in radical London, as godly Londoners gad from their separating churches to Independent ministers’ parish sermons, to informal conferences, to Wight’s bedroom.

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A living icon of the London gathered churches, she thus becomes another stop on the road to perfection of the saints. The Exceeding Riches of Grace serves to vindicate not only these gathered churches but also the New Model Army, which, as Wight’s ordeal reached its culmination, began its march on London with the aim of halting the Presbyterian ascendancy. Barbara Ritter Dailey has argued that Jessey published the book as a petition for a peaceful reconciliation of Presbyterians, sectarians, and the New Model Army. However, as the above suggests, the book demonstrates the very kind of autonomous spiritual authority so feared by the Presbyterians and conservative Parliamentarians of the counterrevolution of 1646–47 (450). Jessey’s text does name a wide range of visitors,15 but the majority of those that can be identified are drawn from the Independent and sectarian section of London forced into coalition by the Presbyterian counterrevolution: he mentions such prominent Independent and Baptist ministers as Thomas Goodwin, Nicholas Lockyer, John Simpson, Walter Cradock, Mathew Barker, and Robert Bragge. His list of visitors also includes a number of army radicals, including Joshua Sprigge, an antinomian army chaplain who served under Fairfax, and whose account of the army’s campaigns, Anglia Rediviva, was published in 1647; Edward Harrison, a Particular Baptist, Leveller sympathizer, and captain to the later Fifth Monarchist Major-General Thomas Harrison’s regiment; and Hugh Peter, another army chaplain and future regicide.16 In his account of the events of July and August 1647 to Winthrop, Jessey casts the army’s intervention in national politics as an act demanding popular gratitude: “what changes in Parliament, and what thanks offered afterward to the Army, for their good service in such proceeds” (“To Mr. Winthrop, Gov. of Massachusetts Bay” 465). Jessey’s choice of Saltmarsh to contribute a preface is therefore significant. Saltmarsh was renowned as a radical army chaplain and, in June 1647, just as Wight was miraculously recovering from her ordeal, he published A Letter from the Army, in which he stressed the New Model Army’s role as a vehicle for peace and as the protector of the people’s liberties: “There is a mighty spirit raised up in the army for Justice and Righteousness” (A Letter 2). Given Jessey’s foregrounding of his links to the London Independents and army radicals such as Saltmarsh, the spectacle of Wight’s fast and recovery functions less as a bid to heal divisions than as an act of counterpublic polemic. The army too presented itself as neutral: the second rendezvous on June 5 produced A Solemn Engagement of the Army, which described the army as an independent

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political agent that supported no “faction,” but rather sought “to promote such an establishment of common and equal right and freedom to the whole, as all might equally partake of ” (qtd. in Gardiner 281), and Saltmarsh’s letter claims it will “indulge and cherish the Presbyterians who have any appearance of god equally with any other” (A Letter 3). The very defense of limited religious tolerance and the civil liberties of “the whole,” however, put both documents at odds with the London Presbyterians’ agenda. In a similar way, The Exceeding Riches of Grace evokes a range of Separatist and Independent visitors to a polemical end. Wight herself emphasizes their diversity, likening the saints to a posy in a kind of condensed, godly pastoral: “The flowers are all fragrant and some are more fragrant than others, they have different colors and different smells; and all come out of the earth. So are the Saints, they are all in Christ” (59). Her fast thus acts, in effect, as a personal counter-fast to the Parliamentary day of fasting and humiliation against schism and heresy mentioned above, a self-denying act that draws the diverse company of the London gathered churches together into a single spiritual body around her. The printed book of The Exceeding Riches of Grace repeats this self-denying act as a divine closet drama, offering concentric circles of readers/spectators access to the private revelations at the center of the spectacle.

A Nation of Prophets Despite this element of spectacle, however, The Exceeding Riches of Grace is not just a court masque writ small, a devolved and de-centered stage for personal power. For, as Susan Wiseman has argued, prophetic performance differs formally from courtly theater, both in its claims to authenticity and, most tellingly, in the role of the audience as witnesses who must “tell in turn of the manifestation of God’s grace” (“Margaret Cavendish among the Prophets” 100). As witnesses as well as spectators, the long lists of visitors recorded by Jessey are much more than James I’s passive “beholders,” an awed and wondering audience for displays of sovereign prerogative. Rather, the crowds of busy gadders who visit Wight are inscribed as agents who actively shape the divine drama played out in her bedroom through the dialogues that fill the last two-thirds of the book. Dramatizing the interactions of the prophet, her amanuensis, and the men and women who visit, The Exceeding Riches of Grace inscribes a busy sectarian counterpublic of dialogue and debate emerging around Wight as visual, aural, and textual centerpiece. This dialogue is built into the form of the text. The fact that Wight (unlike Drake and her ars moriendi brothers and sisters) does not die

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challenges not only generic boundaries but also the position of authority taken up by Jessey. As an amanuensis, Jessey looms large in the text, framing Wight’s experience into a methodical narrative, complete with extensive biblical references, moral lessons, and a table of contents. The sheer weight of the number of Jessey’s words— twenty-nine pages of prefatory material, and constant commentary throughout—means his authorial presence acts as a large and bulky framework for Wight’s words. However, Jessey is far from the sole shaping force of the publication, for, as Carola Scott-Luckens has noted, there is “a striking degree of mutual reinforcement between prophetic performance and the developing printed text” (224). Indeed, from the book’s outset, Jessey is clear that Wight has outdone the traditional plot-structure he had in mind. The text seems to have been initially set to be print on April 27, 1647—the date of the first prefatorial letter, when, as Jessey explains, he went to press believing that Wight was “then most likely to return to earth in a few days” (A8). As Wight continues to live, however, Jessey is forced to keep revising his earlier text, enlarging it “one day after another,” adding and amending right up until July 16 (A8v). What in April promised to be a fairly straightforward ars moriendi piece, of “two sheets or three” (a8), by July has quickly outgrown its generic bounds to become a full-fledged prophetic performance. Jessey’s prefaces create a palimpsest effect, as he refashions material to match Wight’s continuing utterances: “[Since the former was fitted for the Press, she then not being likely to live, unless the Lord should work a miracle, He raised her wonderfully]” (A3v). Writing beyond the ending, Wight— intentionally or not—transforms the art of dying into an art of living, prolonging the liminal moment of public, spiritual authority and prophetic power that Drake enjoys for her short, fifty-page pamphlet into a 160-page book. This formal movement, in which Jessey shapes a narrative that is in turn enlarged and expanded by Wight, is symptomatic of the tense circulation of authority in the book. Throughout, Wight and Jessey jointly produce a religio-political agenda, while jostling for a position of ministerial privilege. Jessey, for example, sporadically casts himself in the role of zealous congregant, who copies down Wight’s words, “writing, transcribing and often perusing hereof ” (A3), while admiringly reporting Wight’s ability to wield the impressive range of rhetorical devices employed to such effect by Puritan preachers: “so drawing out the Gospel-marrow, and pith thereof, that was folded up therein; so amplifying it by illustration, and making such applications, as if it had been some ancient, experienced minister of the Gospel and not a

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Child” (A6). However, Wight’s teaching can modulate into childlike catechistical subservience during those moments when Jessey or other authority figures examine her on points of doctrine. At one point Wight states: “The Law was a Schoolmaster; by types it is led out to Christ, but when Christ is come, we are no longer under the Schoolmaster and Tutor and Governor” (93). Wight’s variation on Paul’s rejection of the Law is significantly coded as a repudiation of positions of public authority that would have been occupied by men in the seventeenth century.17 Jessey intervenes to set her on a more doctrinally acceptable track. “Have believers no need of the Law?” he asks, adding, “The Apostle exhorts believers to the DUTIES of the first and second Table of the Law” (93). Wight immediately modifies her position in response: “I believe the best saints that are, have need of the Word, of the Law and Gospel, of the Exhortations, because there’s want in them” (93), thus steering between the Scylla and Charybdis of idolatry of the means and antinomian radicalism. This emphasis on dialogue, on the competition and collaboration between preacher and congregant within the “private meetings” of the saints, extends to include Wight’s many visitors—both male and female. Wight addresses afflicted women, like herself, who come to her for emotional comfort. She is visited by women of all walks of life, including the publisher of The Exceeding Riches of Grace, Hannah Allen, a sectarian bookseller with later links to the Fifth Monarchists;18 Mrs. Wilson of the Nags-Head Inn, a well-known meeting place for religious radicals (Dailey 453); Lady Ranelagh, herself the center of a rather different circle of intellectuals, educational reformers, and millenarians;19 and even the poet Katherine Philips’s mother.20 Given the large numbers of women who visit Wight, Scott-Luckens has argued that the female-dominated rituals surrounding childbirth are central to the book (222), and certainly Wight presents herself, like Leigh, as a spiritual mother. She also casts herself as a midwife, the person who is, literally, with the wife: she presides over the metaphysical “pangs” of other women and exhorts visitors to “labor in the thing that is good” (109). If The Exceeding Riches of Grace utilizes the scene of social childbirth, however, it does so in order to foreground godly female dialogue and even dispute. In one conference between Wight and an anonymous gentlewoman, for example, the two women vie for the position of worst reprobate, mirroring and modifying each other’s statements: Gentlew. I am fit for nothing, I can do no work. Mris Sarah. I oft could do none: and it terrified me, that I did none, when I could do none; yet it terrified me night and day.

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Gentlew. I am not troubled, though I have no faith. Mris Sarah. . . . When [God] creates peace, there will be peace. Gentlew. That to his people he creates it. (71)

In this way, The Exceeding Riches of Grace inscribes a community of godly women, jointly questing—in proper Calvinist fashion—for signs of individual salvation and reprobation and in doing so collectively generating new forms of public identity and religious truth. Through these intimate dialogues, the book extends the circle of collective authority: Wight bridges class barriers, so that a “Noble Lady” stoops to sit on her bed, a phenomenon that astonishes some present (119). She also bridges gender barriers: men other than Jessey act as advisees and speakers, and often Wight’s interlocutors are described with the gender-neutral terms “one” or “another.” Sprigge, for instance, asks Wight a number of questions, including how she would counsel those in spiritual trouble (89); one anonymous speaker adds biblical support to her conversion narrative (52); another corrects her speech on the efficacy of prayer, objecting that “Without Faith, it’s impossible to please God” (95). Visitors interject during Wight’s conferences, one listener interrupting her advice to an afflicted woman to ask, “Do you think Christ is willing you should believe?” (100). Prophetic authority is not even limited to Wight: in his preface to Jonathan Vaughan, Wight’s half-brother by her mother’s first marriage, Jessey reproduces a private “Consolatory Letter” from Vaughan to his sister, using it to credit him with prophesying Wight’s own prophecies: “This in his letter is now fulfilled and fulfilling” (5). The book thus presents a heterosocial space, in which private dialogue forms the basis of a widening counterpublic of discussion, prophetic performance, and publication. These dialogues address not only questions of private salvation, but also sensitive public issues of religious doctrine and discipline. During a discussion of the thorny problem of general redemption, for instance, Wight is asked for her opinion on the matter and answers in a way that echoes the egalitarian theology of the General Baptists, whose fundamental tenet was “Christ’s dying for all” (Tolmie 72). She says, “The Gospel is to be held out to all the world, to the chiefest of sinners. And this is the Gospel: that Christ was sent of God to them . . . God is not willing that any should perish” (96). Her speech is not the end of the matter, however, but rather acts as the catalyst for an impromptu, anonymous sermon that builds on her argument: Jessey notes, “Another added as follows,” and then records a highly organized, three-point disquisition on redemption, Christ, and the coming iconoclasm of the last days: “When the stone in Daniel that

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smites the feet of the mighty image, shall become a MOUNTAIN, and fill the whole earth” (98). If Wight’s prophecies act as an “ex tempore” revelation of personal contact with God (A6), an improvised spiritual lesson in which public presence is molded out of private conversion, they also create a public forum for multiple voices, generating a self-consciously collective authority that presents meaning as produced through an ongoing process of conference. Male and female voices compete and collaborate to decide the fate of the sectarian community and even of England. Dramatizing this ever-widening circle of visitors and reaching beyond them through publication, The Exceeding Riches of Grace imagines the private conventicle as the ground for a sectarian counterpublic of discussion, communal selfvindication, and apocalyptic opposition to Presbyterian hierarchy and uniformity. For, as the above extempore sermon suggests, this collective authority takes on a specifically apocalyptic and millenarian cast from the start of the text, as both Jessey and Wight evoke a biblical master narrative that would take the leveled spirituality of the conventicle to a national or even global level. Jessey frames Wight’s prophesies with millenarian meaning: he exhorts his readership to pray that God will establish “his kingdom (that fifth monarchy) that shall stand for ever (Dan. 2.35–44)” (A4–A4v) and then presents Wight’s trance as a sign of the fast approach of an apocalyptic overturning: Jessey refers to Christ, “who shortly will bring down every high thing” (A7). These two quotations present a time when spiritual revolution will become material, offering a leveling vision of the reversal of social and political hierarchies when “The kingdoms of this world are become our Lords, and his Christs; and he shall reign to the ages of ages” (A7). Wight shares this emphasis on the apocalyptic coming of a wider leveled community, presenting a more material millennium inscribed within her individual conversion. On the April 25 meeting, in front of one of the first big gatherings at her home, for example, she chooses a biblical reading that combines thanksgiving for personal conversion with an apocalyptic sense of public-political reversal—one that is particularly appropriate given her authoritative position in the aftermath of Royalist defeat. She asks one of the visitors to read Psalm 107, which includes the verses: “He poureth contempt upon the princes, and causeth them to wander in the wilderness, where there is no way. Yet setteth he the poor on high from affliction” (40–41). Jessey was never a radical, but his millenarian convictions later led him into conflict with both the Cromwellian regime and Restoration government. Indeed, Jessey later became a Fifth Monarchist, as did at

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least ten of Wight’s named visitors.21 This group developed from disillusionment over the lack of substantial reform of church and state that occurred after the final defeat of the Royalists in 1651, and was dedicated to ushering in Christ’s millennial reign on earth through social and political change. In the earlier context of 1647, Wight and Jessey’s invocation of a millenarian master narrative to frame the fast and trance puts them at odds with the forces of the counterrevolution. For, as Tai Liu has argued, the millenarianism that had united the Presbyterians and the sects against the common Antichristian forces of the Anglicans broke down after the First Civil War. On the one hand, Presbyterians emphasized gradual reform and the need for a national church to implement this, whereas on the other, sectarians stressed violent apocalyptic overturning and the role of the gathered church in hastening this spiritual revolution (Liu, Discord 32–39). The focus of The Exceeding Riches of Grace on an apocalyptic future as a sign of and bulwark against the present trial and persecution sets the book in conflict with Presbyterians such as Thomas Hill, who argued that the perfection of the church could only be achieved in heaven, and Thomas Case, who argued that godly reformation had gone quite far enough (Liu, Discord 46). As the New Model Army began its march on London, Wight and Jessey embrace a vision not of peaceful Presbyterian reform, but of apocalyptic religious and political reversal. In keeping with the book’s emphasis on the collective creation of truth, however, Wight’s strongest statement about the future of the saints is unfolded in dialogue. On May 19, Wight is visited by Mrs. Fiennes (wife to the Parliamentarian Lord Saye’s eldest son), Mrs. Brigs, and Sprigge, the antinomian army chaplain whose father had been in service at the Fiennes’ household (Greaves and Zaller 3: 196). Sprigge asks her about a passage from the biblical book of Joel also evoked by Jessey, and presses the point when Wight gives too elusive an answer:22 Quest. We have some drops of his Spirit now, but are the pourings now? S. Ans. There are many that love him now: and why do they love him? It’s not said because of some drops; but because thy name is an ointment poured out: Therefore it is that any soul loves him. Quest. But do you not think there will be a time, when God will pour out more of his Spirit upon his sons and daughters, then now is usual? S. Ans. Though his love is poured out into the hearts of his people by the Spirit now, or else we could not love him; yet this is personal, to a few: but I do verily believe, it will be more general to many, and in a greater measure. This is but a taste now of what shall be. (90)

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In their identification of the holy individual and the holy community, or the holy few and the holy many, through the passage of time, Wight and Sprigge jointly transform the personal into the political. In both form and content, this exchange imagines not only ecstatic performance but rational dialogue as a proleptical synecdoche of the reign of the spirit and a dominant millenarian public, in which a majority of godly men and women will speak. From within the loose, private conventicle gathered around Wight, they model the kind of prophetic exchange they imagine happening on a larger, public scale in the future. Indeed, personal conversion narratives like Wight’s fit neatly into prophetic and millenarian schemes, and in doing so gave personal spiritual trials a potentially global reach and relevance. Independents in particular stressed the role of conversion in the last days: John Owen, in 1652, wrote that one sure sign of the millennium would be “Multitudes of converts” (qtd. in Toon 39), and Jessey was busy through the 1650s documenting the conversion of East Indians and Jews.23 As David Katz points out, Wight herself is called to hear a sermon regarding the conversion of the Jews (believed by philo-semites like Jessey to be a crucial, final stage in the millennium) and is given comfort in her own state by it. Jessey even notes that Wight is visited by “Dinah the Black,” and he proudly touts this woman’s baptism in his 1650 A Storehouse of Provision (Exceeding a1v; Storehouse 126). As Peter Linebaugh and Marcus Rediker suggest, given the different national origins of many of Wight’s visitors, The Exceeding Riches of Grace presents London as an early modern cultural melting pot, combining Irish, African, Welsh, English, and American visitors (90). At certain points in the text, therefore, Wight’s personal conversion and prophecies allegorize a public political upheaval across national borders, becoming one episode in a potentially global conversion narrative that collapses the wider world into the sectarian counterpublic, exploding it from within in a moment of apocalyptic glory. This moment, increasingly actively pursued by Jessey and his millenarian contacts throughout the 1640s and 1650s, would assimilate all national and cultural difference into a homogeneous perfected Christendom and, in doing so, would transport the leveled community of the private conventicle onto a transnational, even international, public stage.24 Wight’s conversation with Sprigge and the above extempore sermon on Daniel took place on May 19 and 24, respectively, in the midst of a particular crisis between Parliament and the army. On May 16, officers signed The Declaration of the Army, insisting on soldiers’ right to petition Parliament, while on May 18, Charles agreed to accept the

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Presbyterian settlement for three years and asked to be allowed to return to London as king (Gardiner 253). On May 19, the House of Commons finally appointed a committee to effect the disbandment of the New Model Army, while the agitators circulated a letter to the regiments accusing the Commons of trying to divide the men. By May 29 the army’s Council of War, threatened by an imminent alliance among the Presbyterians, the Scots, and the King, ordered a General Rendezvous and the regiments began their march toward Newmarket (Gardiner 248–63). The particularly apocalyptic and millenarian focus of these two meetings, therefore, may be a direct response to the imminence of army occupation and renewed war. Jessey entered The Exceeding Riches of Grace in the Stationer’s Register on May 20, and Maureen Bell has linked this date to Wight’s deteriorating physical state (“Hannah Allen” 17). It can more easily be seen as a reaction to the context: Wight and Jessey’s support of New Model Army leaders and visions of violent overturning counter the Presbyterian compromise with the King. At a moment of mounting tension, The Exceeding Riches of Grace vindicates a community of saints that, it predicts, is on the verge of short- and long-term triumph, with the aid of God’s spiritual “pourings”—and the New Model Army. Unlike Drake, Wight both articulates her own position in millenarian history and does so through the process of a dialogue that demonstrates the gathering of the saints as it is being recorded, inscribing an already-existing sectarian counterpublic into the very text that prophesies its full fruition into a dominant public. Wight herself is well aware of the reach of her speech and actions. She leads those present in prayer, and quotes from Psalm 145, emphasizing the way her authority stretches across a spectrum of class positions: “I desire high and low, rich and poor, to magnify the Lord, and to praise his name in my behalf: that he hath looked on the low and base estate of his handmaid” (52). Jessey also happily advertises her growing fame, noting that thanksgiving services have been offered for Wight’s recovery not only at her own parish but elsewhere in London (35), and that her audience arrives from Yorkshire, Norfolk, Oxford, and Southampton (9–10). Though the book emphasizes a community of local, metropolitan visitors, therefore, Jessey is also careful to promote Wight’s importance to a translocal circle of radicals that extends well beyond London’s little shop of war. Publication self-consciously widens this circle of judgment, as Jessey invites his readers “As you read, consider; admire the Lord in his surpassing Grace to ungodly ones” (A3). In both the form and content, therefore, The Exceeding Riches of Grace evokes the loose conventicle gathering around Wight’s bedside as the

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model of a collective church government that transcends the limits of the gathered church, the boundaries of parish or city, and even the borders of nation to embrace a geographically expansive counterpublic of spectators, speakers, and readers. The book’s creation of collective authority continues to its close, the tense collaboration and competition between Jessey and Wight never fully resolving itself. Wight’s authority is, to a certain extent, governed by her physically passive, prophetic mode: once she has eaten and gained strength enough to rise in late June, she becomes more marginal to the text, as Jessey turns his textual attention to the lessons to be learned from her afflictions and miraculous cure. In fact, once Wight has been restored to health she loses her voice in the book. However, her role as spiritual advisor does not end there. In his list of visitors, Jessey notes that more than half of them came “since her much prayed- and hoped-for deliverance” (9). Her very resurrection, carried out as the New Model Army drew closer to London, is couched in the language of Pauline ministry: God tells her that, like Paul, “now she must testify and minister that Grace of God that she had received, unto others” (135). Indeed, later publications of The Exceeding Riches of Grace and related works show Wight’s influence continuing, even expanding. One of the effects of the influence of feminist literary history is that much recent discussion of seventeenth-century prophetic activity has focused solely on women.25 However, Wight’s example suggests that men, too, could participate in prophetic performance. Jessey continued to produce prophetic texts for a long time after The Exceeding Riches of Grace, and Nigel Smith has even argued that Jessey’s own 1663 death—which became the occasion for a large, political funeral— “echo[ed] Sarah Wight’s tribulations” (Perfection Proclaimed 46).26 Similarly, Jessey and Wight’s prefatory writer, John Saltmarsh, convinced the New Model Army grandees were betraying their mission and the common soldiers, went into his own prophetic trance in the winter of 1647, shortly before his death. Having left London sometime after June, he was reported to have been commanded by God to bring threats of divine disfavor to the backsliding army leaders Cromwell and Fairfax, which he did first by letter and then, in December 1647, in person. The 1648 Wonderfull Predictions Declared in a Message that records his actions echoes the language of Wight’s trance and miraculous resurrection from death, claiming that Saltmarsh appeared at army headquarters “as one risen from the grave” (1), and noting that he told his wife “he had been in a trance, and seen a vision” (2).27 Thus Trapnel may not have been the only

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sectarian figure to be influenced by Wight’s oppositional prophetic performance. Like Trapnel, Saltmarsh does not mention Wight, but his use of this particular form of authority relatively late in his career, and so close on the heels of his association with Wight, suggests he adapted her public role, itself modeled on male and female biblical and historical precedents—including, perhaps, Saltmarsh’s own conversion narrative. The publication history of The Exceeding Riches of Grace also suggests the expansion of Wight’s public profile beyond this one edition and beyond England. As the most successful publication with which the prolific Jessey was involved, it was republished at least seven times before 1660, in 1648, 1652, and 1658.28 In the second 1648 edition, Jessey mentions another thanksgiving service for Wight’s miraculous recovery, carried out on April 14, 1648, a fact that suggests both that Wight was still a prominent figure, and that her role as a central religious force was being ritualized by the gathered saints (A2v). The 1658 edition promises a second part, showing “her conferences and letters to some afflicted and to others” (A4v), and complains that Wight is not only visited by “sincere, gracious Christians” but also by those that “admire and exalt the creature” (A7). Although no record of this second part survives, the note indicates that even by this late date, Wight is still something of a celebrity: she stays confined to her house, due to her own continuing physical weakness and an unspecified affliction of her mother’s, and continues to receive visitors seeking spiritual advice (A7v). Indeed, by this publication, her stature seems to have reached continental proportions: Jessey advertises that Wight has been corresponding with “P. Serraxius of Amsterdam,” an English-born minister and philo-semite, living in Amsterdam, who became a spokesperson for millenarian calculations on the continent in the late 1650s.29 Peter Serrarius translated The Exceeding Riches of Grace into Dutch and published it in the Netherlands in 1648 (van der Wall, De Mystieke Chiliast 126). This advertised correspondence, translation, and publication link Wight to a wide and influential circle of Anglo-Dutch millenarians, as Serrarius was busy working with figures such as Jessey, John Dury, and Samuel Hartlib on educational reform and the conversion of the Jews in preparation for Christ’s second coming. Indeed, Serrarius’s translation of The Exceeding Riches of Grace may have been part of this conversionist effort aimed at Dutch Jews, as he wrote to Dury that the Jews would not convert until they first had “some lively and most sensible experiences of some Soul-quicking Excellency in those, that came from the Lord” (qtd. in van der Wall, “The

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Amsterdam Millenarian” 87)—evidence, that is, of the very kind of riches of Christian grace Wight and Jessey supply. If this circulation in the Low Countries falls far short of the global conversion imagined at Wight’s moments of greatest millennial fervor, it still hints (as the last chapter and conclusion of this book will show more clearly) that women’s print reputations depended on and helped shape oppositional publics that transcended local and even national borders. Despite her humble and silent descent into the congregation on June 26, 1647, then, Wight’s reputation as a religious authority and prophet grew over the course of the Revolutionary Period to include a transnational public of zealous reformers and millenarians.

Letters Written on the Heart Like Leigh’s book, therefore, The Exceeding Riches of Grace leaves a legacy that extends Wight’s role of afflicted femininity and the sectarian counterpublic it enables. This continues even in the embattled context of late 1650s England, when the Protectorate government again seemed in danger of enslaving the sects. In this repressive atmosphere, the collaborative unveiling of millenarian truth becomes more muted and attenuated, based not on the dramatic gathering of an ever-widening new-model community, but on the more obviously textually mediated circulation of private letters made public. Like the published letters promised in later editions of The Exceeding Riches of Grace, Wight’s only other extant publication, A Wonderful Pleasant and Profitable Letter (1656), evokes an epistolary community, replacing the privacy of the bedroom fast and gathering conventicle with the intimacy and exclusivity of the letter. It reproduces the format of a letter; the title-page advertises that it was written “To a Friend”; and the anonymous prefatory writer, “R.B.,” even apologizes for printing part of his ongoing personal correspondence with Wight without her permission (A3). Given that this ostensibly private letter is eighty-one pages long, “R.B.”’s apology rings a little hollow, but it does serve to emphasize the generation of the pamphlet in an act of intimate exchange. Alongside a similar and related pamphlet by William Allen and Deborah Huish from the same period, The Captive Taken from the Strong (1658), Wight’s second book publicizes the passage of private letters between the saints to cement an expansive sectarian counterpublic that again centers on the figure of a woman.30 Publishers on all sides of the conflict of the Revolutionary Period capitalized on the titillating currency of private correspondence exposed to the reading public. Charles I’s correspondence with

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Henrietta Maria was published by Parliament in 1645, in order to reveal his duplicity in negotiation (although Royalists reread his epistles as evidence of his romantic heroism) (Potter 60); a collection of letters from Parliamentary soldiers to their wives was also published in 1642, as witness to the soldiers’ patience and piety in the face of war (E. Clarke 60). In 1655 a number of ostensibly private letters were printed, ranging from epistolary satires on aristocratic culture, to bids for law reform, and even vehement justifications of tyrannicide against the Protector.31 Wight’s letter, therefore, is part of a flourishing genre that takes advantage of the autonomy, authenticity, and even anonymity of personal correspondence, in order to mold textual intimacy to political ends. However, her pamphlet also partakes of a slightly different tradition of published letters. Jessey’s Storehouse reprints a number of his letters addressed to gathered churches outside London. These letters, interspersed in his didactic text, serve as evidence of personal conversion and as witness to inter-congregational dialogue on matters of theological import to Baptist churches. In a similar way, Wight’s letter demonstrates correspondence between saints separated by geography but joined by theology. Jessey’s letters mimic Pauline epistles in their introductions, opening by identifying the recipients and wishing them peace and grace. This apostolic authority is less obvious in Wight, who does not follow the formula of address used by Jessey and Paul, but her letter is couched in the same language of salutation, friendship, and love that permeates the Pauline epistles: “Precious Christian friend, much beloved in the Lord of all love, in him I kindly salute you, wishing you and your dear Relation, with myself and all saints, an heavenly increase of knowledge in the mystery of our Lord, Jesus Christ” (Wight 1).32 The style of A Wonderful Pleasant and Profitable Letter fluctuates, as Wight combines rational advice, biblical exegesis, ecstatic revelation, and lessons (drawn from personal testimony) on the centrality of suffering to godly perfection. It reproduces some of the themes of her previous book in displaced form. There is another four-year period of affliction, culminating in another deathbed scene; however, this time it is Wight’s brother, Jonathan Vaughan, who is the object of concern, literally re-placing the role Wight occupied in The Exceeding Riches of Grace by transforming her from prophet to commentator. Compared to the centrality of Wight’s performance in the earlier book, Vaughan has only a minor (and silent) role in A Wonderful Pleasant and Profitable Letter, and he does not fare so well as his sister: before Wight has even put pen to paper, he has succumbed both to spiritual

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“Temptations” and to death (30–31). Vaughan’s less dramatic repetition of her earlier trials then acts as a catalyst for Wight’s letter, which is an extended lesson on the temptations of despair and the promise of saving grace, and which enables her once again to adopt the role of advisor to the spiritually afflicted. This role again flourishes at a time of religio-political crisis. Wight’s letter was published by Richard Moone, working in conjunction with the printer James Cottrell in a partnership that produced almost exclusively radical mystical or antinomian texts. They printed pamphlets by John Biddle, the Unitarian imprisoned for denying the divinity of the Holy Spirit; John Spittlehouse, a Fifth Monarchist who defended the dissolution of the Rump parliament but later criticized the Protectorate regime; and Thomas Tany, a millenarian and pantheist who criticized secular government and who—armed only with a sword—attempted a single-handed attack on Parliament in 1654.33 The publication of Wight’s pamphlet followed a period of Fifth Monarchist activism against what was seen as Cromwell’s recapitulation of a monarchical state structure after the dissolution of the Parliament of Saints in 1653. This activism led to a series of highly visible arrests and imprisonments of the more radical Fifth Monarchy leaders such as John Simpson and Vavasor Powell; some of the above authors also faced jail for religious or political radicalism. Biddle, Spittlehouse, Tany, and even the publishers Moone and Cottrell were all imprisoned for short spells during the period 1653–55.34 Given this tense political background, and growing discontent with the Protectorate government, the preface’s description of a readership deserted by “Man” (A3), and existing in a theological void, hints at the embattled position of religious radicals during this period, shorn of the hope for a godly commonwealth that seemed so near to being realized during the lead-up to the Parliament of Saints. In the vacuum left by the government’s fall from grace, “R.B.” offers Wight’s letter: “I judged with others . . . the printing it might be of exceeding use, especially now, to the many bewildernessed ones, to whom it might serve as a Witness, they have none left them (as to Man) in this cloudy and dark day, to lean upon, save only their dearly beloved Lord; and he neither always manifest” (A3).35 Wight’s letter then stands in not only for the lack of earthly witnesses, but for the relative absence of the divine, who appears only “in the true and alone Messiah in them [the ‘bewildernessed ones’]” (A3–A3v). A laywoman’s personal correspondence and the intimate indwelling of Christ thus substitute for the failure of prudently unnamed public structures of state and church.

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In place of these unnamed structures, Wight’s pamphlet works to create a heterosocial community of suffering to a polemical end, as she codes spiritual trials and private afflictions as the sign of wider public upheaval. A Wonderful Pleasant and Profitable Letter is a less obviously collective venture than The Exceeding Riches of Grace, lacking the latter book’s throng of voices, but “R.B.” does evoke a loose community of “like afflicted” souls, defined through affective identification (A3v). The pamphlet is dedicated to Lady Fleetwood, Cromwell’s eldest daughter Bridget, who had married Charles Fleetwood in 1651, and who was renowned for both her humility and her godliness.36 Charles Fleetwood worked closely with Cromwell, becoming a Major-General in 1655 and taking a seat in the reconstituted House of Lords, but he was also notorious both in the New Model Army and at his post in Ireland (where he was Lord Deputy until 1655) as a patron and protector of radical sects, in particular the Baptists (Greaves and Zaller 1: 288; DNB 7: 262). “R.B.” casts both Fleetwoods as in “Sympathy” with the “afflicted of all sorts,” a position that makes them particularly apt recipients of Wight’s pamphlet, which in turn functions as a “looking-Glass of solace and delight, to your inward Man” (A3v). The preface thus draws two potentially powerful allies into the circle of “bewildernessed ones,” portraying the patrons as both the beginning and the end of a mirrored circuit of pathos, in which—in typical conduct book rhetoric—Wight’s text reflects back their ideal selves. The letter moves between intensely private moments of introspection and pronouncements on the political significance of these moments that evoke a wider public of suffering readers and writers. Without the word of an orthodox minister to reign her in, the antinomian moments of Wight’s earlier book extend here to a claim that the Spirit alone is the means by which “the Soul comes to know, observe and undertake the ways and words of God in the deeps” (15), and that we should sever all earthly ties, even those to ordinances (those pillars of church structure and pastoral prerogative). Her reader must resign up “all Relations, Ordinances, Gifts, Desires, Hopes” to God, she advises (29). Wight advocates a quietism at odds with the activism of the Fifth Monarchy movement, perhaps, like Jessey, taking up a more moderate position in relation to the Protectorate. She counsels withdrawal in the face of oppression: “Sir, in our winter-season of affliction, I find it a Christian’s crown of rejoicing, to retire in the Spirit . . . In this retirement of the Spirit, or silent waiting upon God, we shall be able to see and say with the prophet David that God is good of a truth [sic], to his purified, sincere, single-hearted Israelites, in the midst of

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all troubles; under Pharaoh’s bondage, at the Red-sea, in the wilderness, in the fiery furnace” (2). However, this withdrawal into an introspective contemplation of God “in the secret closet of the heart” (60) is complicated both by its situation within a Providential narrative of God’s ultimate salvation of the saints en masse, and Wight’s reading of her own afflictions as inscribed with political meaning. She complains that her brother’s death, for example, has “cut us to the heart . . . by opening the mouths of the ungodly, to cause them to stumble at the way of God, saying, What profit is it to serve God? And are these they that made the Lord their trust?” (32). Perhaps in part because of her own continued high profile, Wight is aware of Vaughan’s death as a sectarian tragedy as well as a personal loss, one that potentially undoes the ideological work of her own 1647 miraculous resurrection. Later, she advocates a godly stoicism in the face of public power struggles: “what is of God shall and will stand all winds and weather, against all the many tempests and violent storms of all principalities and powers of spiritual wickedness in High places” (64–65)—perhaps a dig at the Protectorate, or a more general repudiation of political power as corrupt and corrupting. Private salvation then very quickly becomes the model for public restoration, and her advice that readers withdraw in the face of oppression is followed by a generalized message of widespread hope: “When the Lord is pleased to make bare his holy Arm for the deliverance of his people out of troubles, he first lays them very low, that his work may be the more admirable” (3). Wight’s quietism is thus nested within an inexorable biblical narrative that awaits the restorative hand of God, and the language of monarchy, soon to be circulated in relation to Cromwell’s potential adoption of the crown, is in Wight appropriated as an interiorized coming of “King Jesus” in the hearts “of his sanctified ones” (70). This disseminated vision of leveled, indwelling royalty exists uncomfortably at odds with the increasing centralization and ostentation of Cromwell’s government. The moment of exclusive theological correspondence then becomes the basis of a vision of a dispersed sectarian community. Wight’s spiritual lessons are at once directed toward herself and “R.B.,” and aimed at an implied, sometimes articulated, wider readership. In a reflexive discussion of her role as author, for example, Wight modestly denigrates her rhetorical abilities, miniaturizing her role as a writer, at the same time that she evokes the kind of community of suffering named by “R.B.”: “I am not so much a worder as an admirer, and little writer of the wonders of God in the deep of affliction, to some of my fellow sufferers, who have been bewitched in their spirits as

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I have been” (23). Her letter is offered as a model for sectarian dialogue. Wight claims she is repeating a comment by “R.B.” when she justifies her duty to write: “As the rich ones of the world visit one another, opening their treasures to each other, so much more should the saints declare the goodness of god to each other” (77–78). She thus situates her letter as part of a discursive exchange that compensates for and competes with the exclusive and purely material mutuality of the economically privileged: words substitute for goods to create the alternative economy of the sectarian counterpublic. Given that Wight is not only counseling withdrawal during this period, but (according to the biographical notes inserted into later editions of The Exceeding Riches of Grace) is herself under a kind of enforced enclosure, due to her mother’s illness and her own weakness, writing enables Wight to traverse the boundaries of her private, withdrawn state, to open up the closet of her heart to a wider audience. The result of this is a privatized vision of individual readers and writers, at home in the intimacy of their reading closets and closeted hearts, bound into an oppositional community by the private and then public circulation of the letter. In a similar way to The Exceeding Riches of Grace, Wight’s most intimate revelations become the objects of a more general gaze and exemplum for all to follow. Wight, like other women writers analyzed by Wendy Wall, puts the mangled body of Christ on display as an object that passes between her and her reader, knitting up the saints through an erotics of martyrdom: “O how lovely was he when he lay in a Manger; when he lay on the ground, and sweat Water and Blood; when he was scourged and crowned with thorns, when he hung on the cross between two thieves; when he lay in the grave!” (42).37 The greater descriptiveness of this, compared to The Exceeding Riches of Grace, indicates that Christ, like Vaughan, is substituting for Wight’s spectacular trance in this text: the erasure of her body evokes a foregrounding of theirs in a more striking form of the complex, almost circular, cross-gender identification that occurred with Saltmarsh. The afflicted, passive and/or prone condition of Christ and Vaughan repeats the physical stasis of the female prophet, itself a repetition of Christic suffering. Thus, in those brief moments when Wight evokes them, these men offer feminized, male icons for oppositional identification and political bonding by both men and women, while also recalling Wight’s own cross-gender performance. More centrally, Wight’s revelation of her own close relationship with the “Desire of Desires” then becomes a romance plot for all to follow: “He is a certain Sweetness above all Sweetness; no perfumes,

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Ointments, Spices, Milk, Honey or Manna, is comparable to this sweetness . . . above and beyond all, for ravishing, pleasant, and satisfying: and such an embracing is Christ our soul lover” (58; my italics). The privacy of Wight’s letter both heightens the titillating intimacy of the Spousal imagery and, through publication, implicates the reader in that very intimacy, as she moves through a series of sublimatory superlatives toward the first person plural. Like the lists of visitors and later editions of The Exceeding Riches of Grace, A Wonderful Pleasant and Profitable Letter witnesses the extension of Wight’s advisory role beyond London, creating the effect of an epistolary conventicle, in which the practices of personal testimony and spiritual advice are mediated through the letter. In Jessey’s Storehouse, with its reprints of inter-congregational letters, and Wight’s A Wonderful Pleasant and Profitable Letter, a flourishing sphere of private theological correspondence is both advertised and extended for public consumption and counterpublic bonding. That women like Wight can become pivotal figures around which this sectarian counterpublic unites is evidenced most dramatically by a related text of the same period, Allen and Huish’s The Captive Taken from the Strong (1658). This pamphlet, which records the afflictions and conversion of Deborah Huish, combines the communal performance of Wight’s first text with the epistolary address of her second to forge an oppositional community that centers on the female flesh made word. Huish and the man responsible for publishing her narrative, her brother-in-law William Allen, were members of the same religio-political and publishing circles Jessey and Wight helped cohere. Like Jessey and Wight they were both Particular Baptists, and Allen, like Jessey, became part of the Fifth Monarchist movement.38 In 1659, Allen, Jessey, and four out of the five prefatory writers to Allen and Huish’s pamphlet cosigned An Essay toward Settlement, a republican document attacking the Protectorate and rejecting government by a single person. John Owen, another of the prefatory writers for The Captive Taken from the Strong, was working on a new translation of the Bible with Jessey, and his wife had visited Wight in 1647 (Jessey and Wight 9).39 Even the publishers of the two texts were connected: Livewell Chapman, who published The Captive Taken from the Strong, was another well-known Fifth Monarchist. He had married Hannah Allen, the original publisher of The Exceeding Riches of Grace, and had himself published an edition of Wight and Jessey’s book in 1652.40 Thus, when Allen urges his readers to “admire the Riches of god’s infinite Grace” in Huish’s trial and salvation (A5), and other prefatory writers, Owen, Parson, and Hill, collectively

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describe her as filled with “the exceeding Riches of the grace of God” (b7), they may be going beyond biblical allusion to recall the title of Wight’s more spectacular performance for a godly readership familiar with her first, popular book. Like Wight’s letter, The Captive Taken from the Strong was also published in the wake of a series of arrests. Allen had been recalled from his military post in Ireland because of alleged speeches against the Protectorate and in 1654 was put under house arrest in the home of his father-in-law, James Huish, for spreading seditious rumors against Cromwell (Brown 78; Greaves and Zaller 1:11). He was released only after the intervention of Lord Fleetwood (Hardacre, “William Allen” 302). After a brief return to Ireland, in December 1656 he and another prefatory writer, John Vernon, resigned their army commissions, reportedly because of dissatisfaction with Cromwell, and they both, along with Huish, returned to England. In 1657, Allen was again in trouble with the authorities when Edward Sexby’s defense of tyrannicide against the Protector, Killing No Murder, was attributed to Allen’s authorship.41 Vernon had also married into the Huish family, and was also under scrutiny for possible sedition during this period. In 1655, Thurloe reported that Vernon told his Baptist congregation in Ireland that rulers might pretend to be on the side of the saints, but really they were as “Pharaoh was for Joseph, and Herod for John the Baptist, only to serve their ends upon them” (qtd. in Hardacre, “William Allen” 302). In 1655, Huish’s father was arrested, reportedly for calling the Protector a rogue, and Cromwell continued to keep the family under surveillance, sending spies to the church they had founded in Dalwood, Dorset (Hardacre, “William Allen” 307). Even Chapman, the publisher, was in and out of prison during this period: in 1654 he was arrested for publishing John Spittlehouse’s defense of Fifth Monarchist critiques of the government; in 1655 he was arrested for publishing Vavasor Powell’s A Word for God, which accused the Protectorate of betraying the good old cause; and he was investigated in 1657 and 1658—perhaps, in the latter case, because of the publication of The Captive Taken from the Strong (Rostenberg 217; Greaves and Zaller 1: 136).42 Thus when Vernon writes, in his prefatory letter, that the mercy shown Huish in her spiritual captivity can extend to the “poor Prisoners for Righteousness sake” (b1v), he may be talking quite literally. He likens Huish’s private spiritual trials to those of Joseph, as preparation for public duty: “For behold the hand of the Lord, who led Joseph through imprisonment, slanders and many difficulties, and thereby fitted him for special public relief and benefit . . . is not yet

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shortened, but here showed gloriously in the ransom of this sometime poor hopeless prisoner . . . and surely this may help to succor the whole Zion of God; though she be ready to say, My God hath forgotten me” (b1v). The slippage between male biblical type, female prisoner, and feminized national Zion presents Huish’s metaphorical captivity and release at the hands of Satan as an allegory for a body of saints held captive literally and figuratively to a backsliding, tyrannous government and to slanderous “public reproach” (b1v). The pamphlet’s readers, whom Vernon initially addresses in the erotic language of the Song of Solomon as “Beloved” (A8), are then all identified with Huish in her figuratively imprisoned state in an abrupt direct address that collapses distinctions between text and context, writer and reader, to create an extended community of captives: he and Allen “recommend this token of good from God our Father and yours, unto you, towards the support of your sinking souls, in this cloudy and gloomy hour . . . earnest of releasing drooping, dying captives” (a5). Given Vernon’s dedication of Huish’s pamphlet to “the Churches of Christ in Ireland” (A8), and Allen’s references to the falling off of God’s “public works” in “these Nations” (A5v), this widespread oppositional community reaches beyond England’s borders, to include a multikingdom context of godly expansion, government persecution, and sectarian opposition.43 The habit of reading personal affliction as a sign of God’s displeasure modulates very easily into political critique, Huish’s spiritual state inspiring commentary on general backsliding and oppression by the present government. Allen alludes to Cromwell’s desertion of the cause of the saints: “Yea, some of Zion’s pretended lovers raised and lifted up (it’s to be feared too highly) by her, are dealing unkindly with her, and that under highest pretenses of real affection to the name and cause of God, and interest of his people, . . . all so much involved in our late public transactions, but now almost given up into the hands of those that hate, reproach and scorn them” (A6–A6v). Vernon, too, contrasts the good old days of Parliamentary victory at the Battle of Naseby, when God was clearly on side of “his people,” with present divine wrath in the face of a British Isles obviously “declining from him” (a6v). Both men present Huish simultaneously as a beacon of hope in dark times and as a foretaste of future triumph. The prefaces’ construction of public meaning out of private affliction therefore moves from mourning as a mode of critique to gentle threat: Allen in particular evokes Isaiah’s cup of trembling and God’s promise that he will remove it from the suffering Israelites and “put it into the hands of them that afflict thee” (A7).

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Huish presents her conversion narrative as a slow, halting process of moving back and forth between faith and despair. Her first-person testimony contrasts her literal marginality and mobility, as she moves between England and Ireland and back, and through a succession of friends’ and relatives’ houses, to the spiritual centrality of her afflicted soul, as she becomes a battleground for God and Satan and the object of widespread concern in the dispersed communities she visits. By recalling similar episodes of spiritual trial that occur in Dublin and London, and conflating the many households she moves through as she suffers, Huish both maps her spiritual journey onto a geographic tale of displacement and return, and collapses distinction between politically and culturally distinct regions to evoke a specific community that keeps its identity intact even as it crosses the borders of kingdom. She is well aware of her status as public exemplum and mouthpiece for this extended, mobile community. Indeed, she describes joining the Baptist community as an act that threatens to make her notorious, choosing the Baptist Church “although by doing so I were a reproach and scorn, minding David’s words . . . I am a wonder unto men: but thou art my strong refuge” (59). Drawing on a variety of scriptures, Huish justifies baptism as the sign of a voluntary community that overrides other allegiances and possessions: “no man that hath left house or Brethren, or Sisters, or Father, or Mother, or Wife, or children, or Lands for my sake, and the gospels, but he shall receive an hundred fold” (57–58). Her conversion narrative therefore becomes the means to a specific polemical end—the vindication of the alternative family of the multi-kingdom Baptist Church that she depicts as “condemned and despised” by a general populace (57). In a similar way to Wight and Jessey’s first book, therefore, The Captive Taken from the Strong presents Huish’s trials, carried out in the privacy of a variety of households, as propaganda for the Separatist cause. It also similarly roots Huish’s geographically expansive public identity in a local, private congregation. Indeed, the last preface by the men introducing her work is signed by three members of the very Baptist church at Dalwood under Cromwellian scrutiny during this period. They testify that they heard her story “out of her own mouth in the midst of the congregation to which we belong” (b6v), and that she was afterward accepted into that church (b8v). The conversion narrative’s birth in an act of confession before the private congregation is thus dramatized in the text, in a way that recalls—in a condensed and individualized form—the collections of confessions made before gathered churches published by men like the Independent John Rogers, as well as Wight’s own outpourings.44 The three congregants

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detail Huish’s tone and the rhythms of her speech, dwelling in particular on the dramatic moments of silence that would be absent from a printed text: “she was so filled with admiration at the exceeding Riches of the Grace of God in her deliverance, that it many times stopped her Spirit, for a considerable season, and she could in all appearance have dwelt long between sentence and sentence in a secret, inward silent lighting up of her soul to God” (b7). The prefatory materials, all by men, both authorize the woman’s voice at the center of the text and reproduce the effect of a single speaker addressing an exclusive audience: the men are passive witnesses as well as powerful licensing support. Reproducing the conditions of her initial performance opens up the moment of action before a specific audience to the general reader, expanding private dialogue to public debate, local congregation to multi-kingdom community. If this pamphlet dramatizes an act of performance before a specific community for a wider audience, then it does so in large part by turning that performance into the Word. Allen, disavowing the apparatus of the prefatory letter even as he engages in it, writes that “the matter herein contained needs not Epistles of commendation,” and then displaces the form of the prefatory letter onto the text itself: “And indeed the whole is an Epistle that may be seen and read by all discerning Christians, to have been written on her heart by the spirit of the living God”(A2–A2v). This recasting of Paul’s address to the Corinthians conflates the body of the woman and the body of the text, presenting the text as a message passing directly from God-the-author to the “Christian reader” (A2). Figuring Huish’s published narrative as an embodied letter, Allen presents another kind of epistolary community as a sectarian counterpublic, this time quite overtly inscribed across the body of a speaking woman.45 The image of a private, embattled female frantically scribbling out letters may seem familiar to readers of the eighteenth-century novel, but in Wight and Huish the introspection and intimacy of epistolary exchange helps to establish not a bourgeois republic of letters but a sectarian counterpublic. Their texts present politicized captivity narratives, in which the privacy of a spiritually and/or physically enclosed state becomes an allegory of public oppression and an opportunity for imagining a specific, transnational community of speaking, reading, and writing saints. The conflation, in Allen’s preface, of Huish’s body and her text, merely emphasizes the way all these texts put female bodies and female voices at the center of this expansive counterpublic, though in ways that stress the collaboration and even cross-gender identification of women and men. Even in Wight’s letter, the afflicted

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female voice ultimately upstages the feminized male bodies, displayed in cameos that are well-placed but secondary to her central epistolary performance. If Leigh counters James’s imperial self-representation with an image of a literate public constituted around the lay mother, in the above pamphlets we see the development of female speaking positions as central to a global conversion narrative that disrupts national borders, promising a transnational priesthood of all believers that stretches from London to Amsterdam to Dublin.

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Chapter 3

T he K nowing F ew: Katherine Philips and the C ourtly Coterie

J

ohn Berkenhead, writing in 1651 on the Royalist divine and playwright William Cartwright, makes Cartwright’s wit the “blood of verse,” which “like a German Prince’s title, runs / Both to thy eldest and to all thy Sons” (“In Memory” [B1]). Berkenhead’s fantasy of the dissolution of primogeniture into a leveled fraternity of Royalist poets seems to exclude women, yet the multi-authored collection of prefatorial poems in which his elegy appears did include one woman writer: Katherine Philips. Philips’s poem to Cartwright, her first published poem, promoted her as a pivotal figure for a group of Royalist writers, many of whom had been expelled from Oxford University by a Parliamentary commission in 1647. Indeed, Philips’s published and manuscript poetry of this period figures her as a proxy poet who substitutes for decentered royal power and panegyric by helping to forge this group into a paradoxically elitist counterpublic. Ironically, given Philips’s own Royalism, it is this very decentering that sanctions the emergence of the nonaristocratic woman writer as a privileged member of the group. From within the exclusivity of the post-courtly coterie, Philips and her interlocutors imagine a thriving public culture of Royalist opposition that hinges on the figure of a woman writer. Philips’s example indicates that the upheavals of the Revolutionary Period enable even Royalist women to participate in the creation of counterpublics, which, while they are always politically oppositional, need not always be “virtuous,” as Nancy Fraser puts it, but can be

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both “antidemocratic and antiegalitarian” (“Rethinking” 124). Philips marks off Royalists from the wider public through the circulation of discourses of commendation and love, creating a community she refers to as “the knowing few,” defined by its elitism in terms of political commitments, aesthetic tastes, and status. Countering radical and republican visions of political culture, these knowing few both hold themselves apart from public debate and offer themselves as an oppositional corrective to Parliamentary power, addressing and even attempting to assimilate a broader readership into their homogenous and hierarchical vision of Royalist culture. As Philips wrote from Wales, at a distance from many of her interlocutors, she used coterie exchange to unite a scattered group.1 The poetry of Philips and her fellows presents itself as simultaneously exclusive and potentially infinite, the private coterie of like-minded “friends” functioning metonymically as a part that aims to reform and ultimately replace an expansive and volatile public whole. This public includes readers and writers scattered throughout the British Isles, and Philips’s position within it changes with the fortunes of the monarchy she supports. As a number of commentators have noted, Philips experienced what one critic has called an “apotheosis” at the Restoration of monarchy in 1660 (Beal, In Praise of Scribes 147). Unlike Wight and Leigh, therefore, Philips moves from counterpublic to dominant public toward the end of her career, as her fame grows after the reestablishment of royal power. Her example suggests the relational nature of public identities in such a turbulent period: conflicts between competing communities led to the emergence of new cultures of political and literary dominance and opposition that were mutually defined in shifting and asymmetrical relations of power. In Philips’s case, however, this newfound literary dominance occurred not in a smooth trajectory from the political margins of Britain to the center but via the geopolitically distant viceregal court of Dublin, where Philips translated, staged, and published Pierre Corneille’s neoclassical tragedy, La Morte de Pompée, in 1663. Dublin was particularly significant to Philips’s career as a place from which she supplemented her continued coterie practices of manuscript circulation with the public performance and printing of her play, and, in doing so, facilitated an expanded version of the elitist circle of the knowing few she had already established during the 1650s in England and Wales. If Philips’s career begins by uniting Royalists displaced politically by military defeat, therefore, it ends by forging links between supporters of the monarchal Restoration displaced geographically by their location in the neighboring kingdom of Ireland. Her writings of the Restoration

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thus consolidate her pivotal role in a fluid, multi-kingdom public culture of elitist affiliation. Modern criticism on Philips, like that on Leigh, at first suffered from a critical bifurcation that was in danger of divorcing her from the collective politics of Royalism. On the one hand, critics of coterie discourses and practices charted the centrality of collective poetic culture to the formation of political communities among men, but, in doing so, failed to relate these political communities to the construction of public female identities within the Revolutionary Period.2 On the other hand, those scholars who addressed Philips rarely discussed the public-political aspects of her verse. Instead, they focused on her homoerotic verse and even presented Philips’s poetry as separate from political concerns, defining it as “apolitical” or focused on “private themes” (Moody 329; Mermin 336).3 A few scholars worked to complicate this bifurcation from the start: Margaret Ezell analyzed Philips’s participation in overlapping networks of manuscript and print (Patriarch’s Wife), and Patrick Thomas and Carol Barash mounted complex explorations of the connections between representations of gender and political power in Philips’s texts.4 As Philips’s popularity has grown within the academy in the last five years, criticism has increasingly reconnected her to seventeenth-century political culture. Since part of this chapter was published in 2002, for example, Mark Llewellyn and Hero Chalmers have both explored her complex religious and political affiliations, Chalmers in particular investigating Philips’s impact on collective Royalist identity.5 To advance work on the politics of Philips’s writing, this chapter demonstrates Philips’s pivotal role connecting and transforming interlocking circles of intimate affiliation and expansive—even multikingdom—political association. For, if Leigh relies on the domesticity of the family and Wight on the autonomy of the conventicle to imagine counterpublics of debate, Philips bases her vision of Royalist oppositional public culture on the intimacy and exclusivity of coterie exchange. Thomas, Barash, and Chalmers all relate Philips’s poetry to the préciosité of the seventeenth-century French salons, because of her use of the pastoral names and ideals of platonic love so favored by Henrietta Maria, Charles I’s French wife (Patrick Thomas, Collected Works 1:10; Barash 70; Chalmers 74). However, the salons were structured groups who met regularly to engage in elaborate poetic games of formal complexity and archaic diction, the rondeaux, bouts rimés, and riddles of the French nobility—none of which Philips’s group seems to have done (Maland 55).6 Instead, Philips, geographically isolated from most of her interlocutors, engaged in much less

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structured, largely written, relations with the other writers, exchanging poems or complimentary dedications to create a politically marked community across a dispersed area. As Philips’s main literary models were Cartwright, a member of “the knot of the choicest Oxford wits” (qtd. in G.B. Evans 11), and John Donne, involved in his early years in an Inns of Court coterie, it seems logical to see her as influenced by the continental salon, but more indebted to a looser tradition of the British coterie, with its culture of manuscript circulation and, increasingly, of collective publication. During the Revolutionary Period, as part of this circulation, Philips exchanged poems and complimentary dedications with moderate Royalists such as Sir John Berkenhead, Sir Edward Dering, Henry Vaughan, Henry Lawes, and Francis Finch.7 Indeed, some of Philips’s love poetry to women was imitated and circulated among these men: Sir John Berkenhead and Sir Edward Dering both wrote love plaints to Philips’s beloveds “Lucasia” (Anne Owen) and “Rosania” (Mary Aubrey), and Sir Edward Dering even explicitly masqueraded as Philips’s poetic persona “Orinda” in his verse.8 One of Philips’s poems to Lucasia, “Friendship’s Mysterys,” was set to music and published by Henry Lawes in 1655 (Lawes, Second Book of Ayres 26); Lawes also wrote music for two of her other homoerotic poems: “A Dialogue between Lucasia and Orinda” and “To Mrs. M.A.” All three of these songs may have been performed at the Royalist gatherings at Lawes’s London house that occurred during the Interregnum.9 These publications and performances indicate that the poems of love to women on which modern critics of Philips initially focused were not only private expressions of homoerotic desire, but also formed part of a public performance of cross-gender identification, one that helped create an elite culture of heterosocial collectivity opposed to Parliamentary rule. To explore the making of this elite culture or counterpublic, I will investigate first the public group of poems prefacing Cartwright’s Comedies, then Philips’s commendatory poems to the private circle of wits with which Comedies is connected and its relation to Philips’s most intimate poems to her female friends, and finally, her extension of these interlocking circles of affinity in Restoration Ireland.

Royalist Oxford and the Poetry of Loss Philips becomes a key figure for Royalist counterpublic activity in the mourned absence of traditional homosocial institutions and royal representatives of publicness. The start of the Civil Wars saw the

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beginnings of a cultural and geographic dislocation of royal power, its movement away from its traditional base in the London courts and spectacular expression in forms such as the court masque. Charles I’s abandonment of London and later move to Oxford in 1642 was just an early instance of a series of geopolitical displacements of the King and his supporters. The choice of Oxford was no accident, however, for, particularly after Laud’s installation as chancellor, Oxford University had become closely identified with royal policies. At Oxford, Laud brought education, religion, and even architecture into conformity with Caroline religio-political ideology, installing stained glass windows, ensuring orthodoxy through visitations and revised statutes, and moving communion tables altar-wise (Mallet 314). In terms of poetry, as James Loxley and Raymond Anselment have argued, Oxford became a font of Royalist panegyric during the Personal Rule, issuing ten volumes of commendatory verses to the royal family between 1633 and 1643 alone (Anselment, “Oxford University Poets” 181; Loxley, Royalism and Poetry 21). The University’s strong tradition of manuscript production and exchange found a counterpart in the volumes of mostly Latin poems printed to commemorate royal births, deaths, and triumphs for the educated elite. The same men and even the same poems that participated in the witty exchanges of the college coteries appeared in these official miscellanies. The group patronized by Bishop Duppa at Christ Church, of which Cartwright was a part, was particularly important as the base for collective publication that, within university circles, heightened Charles’s role as the embodiment of public power and ideal virtue (Anselment, “Oxford University Poets” 184; Loxley, Royalism and Poetry 19). After the defeat of the Royalists at the siege of Oxford in 1646, however, the University ceased to be a base for Royalist politics and culture: Parliament sent down seven divines with authority to preach in any of the churches (Marriott 134), and stipulated that the Oxford press could print nothing without the approval of two or more of them (Madan 430). In 1647, the House of Commons appointed a commission of twenty-four members to visit and restore the University (Marriott 135); they expelled 350–400 members of the colleges (Burrows 571). Royalist panegyric thus moved to London and, deprived both of the institutional framework of Oxford and, after 1649, the anchoring strength of Charles I and his court, turned to loss as one of the structuring forces of Royalist poetics.10 Cartwright’s posthumously published work, Comedies, Tragi-Comedies, with other Poems, highlights this loss. The book, a collection of Cartwright’s poems and plays, most of them written during the Personal Rule, was

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published by Humphrey Moseley, a Revolutionary Period publisher who specialized in writers with strong connections to the prewar Caroline court or the Royalist cause, such as Beaumont and Fletcher, Denham, Suckling, and Vaughan.11 Cartwright’s Comedies reaches a pitch of collective Royalist literary engagement, however, its fifty-four commendatory poems rivaled in number only by the thirty-four poems prefaced to Moseley’s publication of the works of Beaumont and Fletcher in 1647. Its date of publication is equally significant: Moseley entered the volume in the Stationer’s Register in 1649, but did not publish it until June 1651, after months of preparation for renewed war. All delinquents were ordered out of London in March, 1650; Cromwell entered Scotland in June; and between then and 1651 he raised more regiments to fight Charles II and the Scots (Underdown, Royalist Conspiracy 36), including a number under Major-General Harrison in Wales (Firth and Davies 186), where Katherine Philips was living at the time. In this tense climate, Comedies displays its political colors in part by foregrounding Royalist Oxford as a lost geopolitical and cultural ideal. The sheer number of commendatory poems to Cartwright recalls the collective acts of panegyric offered by Oxford before the wars, especially as all but one of the contributors to the Cartwright volume who were later associated with Philips were Oxford men who wrote for the earlier Oxford volumes: John Berkenhead and Francis Finch both wrote for a collection of Royalist panegyric, Musarum Oxoniensium Epibathpia, and Berkenhead also contributed to a volume on the Royalist hero Sir Bevill Grenville; Henry Lawes set poems in an Oxford collection to Henrietta Maria to music and Henry Vaughan contributed to an Oxford volume celebrating Charles’s return from Scotland in 1641.12 Cartwright himself—a staunch Royalist appointed to the King’s Council of War who died an unheroic death of camp fever in 1643—contributed to all but one of the ten volumes of Oxford panegyric published since 1633, including the one on Grenville (Anselment, “Oxford University Poets” 184). Indeed, of the fifty-three men who wrote prefatorial poems for Comedies, at least thirty-eight attended Oxford University, and of the nineteen still at Oxford during the Visitation, fifteen were either expelled or refused to submit to the authority of the Parliamentary Visitation.13 Moseley emphasizes the connection between Comedies and Royalist Oxford by presenting Cartwright as both an Anglican Divine and “a late student of Christ Church” (title-page), mocks the “Oxford Visitors” (A4), and even dedicates the volume not to a great patron

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but to the University, nostalgically evoked in all its past glory: “To the most renowned and happy mother of all learning and ingenuity, the (late most flourishing) University of Oxford” (frontispiece). This dedication draws attention to the breakdown of traditional patterns of career in a period when the exile of the court, financial burdens of sequestration and compounding, and the exclusion of Royalists from public office all meant that the system that had sustained public advancement for male Royalists was greatly undermined. It also heightens the book’s political commitments, for Oxford was still an evocative space in 1651, its association with the King strengthened by the University’s transformation into a Royalist garrison during the First Civil War.14 Comedies therefore functions to foreground a collection of displaced Oxford wits gathered to mourn the loss not only of Cartwright but of Oxford as a base for elite male public identity and monarchal culture. Moseley presents the publication as the performance of a coded and ideologically inflected community, an exclusive poetic group or coterie. According to Arthur Marotti, during the 1640s and 1650s Royalists used manuscript collections as a form of “social and political bonding” (Manuscript 126), and Comedies suggests that this bonding can extend to print. At the start of the preface, Moseley claims that “the Book in your hand, were the author living, should say nothing to the Reader” (A1), an odd opening that gestures toward a realm of Royalist writers who greet the wider public with silence, and marks Cartwright as a member of an elitist space of nonprofessional literary activity: “You will do him wrong to call these his Works; they were his Recreation” (A1). The opening reference to Henry Lawes as setting “The Ayres and Songs” to music, two years before Lawes’s first publication of his songs, also points to a collective artistic production that happens off-stage. The preface then presents a book forced into publication by a series of accidents—Cartwright’s death, plagiarism of his works, and the fall of Oxford—all shaped into a narrative of loss that licenses the move to print. Unlike the earlier Oxford publications, however, Comedies is aimed at a broader—and thus perhaps partly popular or female—London audience, familiar with reading English rather than Latin, an audience no longer necessarily loyal to the court. The book both acknowledges and even welcomes this broader audience, and offers strident defenses against it, as Moseley works to situate the volume as much as possible within an elitist sphere of Royalist production and consumption. Despite his assertion that the book is now “every Reader’s,” for example, he aims it at a politically identified target audience, claiming it was

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not published in the folio version it deserves for the sake of the readers: “’tis for your own sakes; we see it is such weather that the most ingenious have least money,” an allusion to sequestrations or perhaps to the expelled sons of that very “mother of all . . . ingenuity,” Oxford (A2; my italics). He even defends the number of commendatory poems in terms that cast the prefatory poets as Cartwright’s friends and force the readers either to identify with them or see themselves as outsiders: “if you think He hath too many Commenders, it is a sign you knew him not” (A2). Constructing the text in terms of exclusivity even within his appeals to a wider public, Moseley’s preface juggles the dual aims of political retrenchment and conversion, or, in Fraser’s terms, withdrawal and engagement. The book inscribes a private circle of the knowing few within the wider public, then works to broaden this elitist group into a counterpublic of Royalist opposition through a process of identification and assimilative expansion. It also offers a series of substitutions for the defeated monarchal order, presenting Cartwright himself as a synecdoche not only for lost Oxford, but also for its lost symbolic center, Charles I. For although Charles rarely appears in the poems to Cartwright, he haunts the edges of the verse. Berkenhead, figuring the shame of being a survivor of the Royalist defeat, says of Cartwright: “Thou liv’st after Death, We die before” (“In Memory” [B3]), turning Cartwright’s death into a heroic martyrdom that outshines those unlucky enough to be left alive under Parliament. These lines, however, echo an anonymous elegy in Monumentum Regale, one of the books of elegies published after Charles’s execution: “We only died, he only lived that day” (45). Francis Finch presents Cartwright as the central spectacle of Royalist ideology, one that, in the absence of court and masque, becomes a powerful oxymoron of dark glory drawing the gazes of the Royalist community, even those (like Mildmay Fane) ordered by Parliament to stay within five miles of London:15 Thy Friends who five-mile Prisons do confine And those that breath within the larger Line, Will joy to see thy glorious Shadow move, The Object of their Wonder and their Love. (2v)

Finch’s poem again echoes an elegy for Charles from Monumentum Regale, one that presents the book as “The living Emblem of glorious shade” (1). In the Cartwright volume, therefore, the poetic martyr, like royal elegy itself, becomes a dark reflection of the lost epitome of representative publicness, the unspoken of the texts and their doubled

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mourning for Cartwright and the former Oxford: the King. William Creed’s description of Cartwright’s book as a condensation of the multiple losses his death incurs, could serve as a epigraph for the wider relevance of Comedies to the dispossessed Royalists in the absence of King, court, and Royalist university: “So we sum up our loss by this thy Book” (5). It is, however, into this very series of absences that Katherine Philips steps.

Philips and the Oxford Wits Philips herself has a complicated political background: she was brought up as a Puritan in London, and educated at an all-female school in Hackney, run by a Presbyterian, Mrs. Salmon, but most of her connections were with Royalists. At school, she befriended Mary Aubrey (daughter of a Welsh Cavalier) and Mary Harvey (later married to Sir Edward Dering, also a moderate Royalist) and, in 1646, she moved with her mother to Wales, a center of support for Charles I. However, once there, in 1648 she married James Philips, a landowner and member of the Parliamentary Army Committee, who increased his estates as a commissioner of sequestration—a role he performed with such gusto that he apparently gained quite a reputation (Souers 27–28). In 1650, when the Propagation Act was passed, James Philips was appointed by the Rump Parliament as a member of the Commission for the Propagation of the Gospel in Wales, which was, according to A.H. Dodd, “the real government of Wales,” not only ejecting Anglican ministers, but filling local administrative posts: “treasurers, militia commissioners, receivers of taxes and the like” (148). Thus Katherine Philips at sixteen married a powerful member of the military gentry that ran Wales during the Revolutionary Period. Despite the fact that James Philips was a moderate, in conflict with radicals and on friendly terms with Royalists, Philips’s contribution to Cartwright’s Comedies declares a political affiliation at odds with her husband’s Parliamentarianism, particularly given the precarious political situation of 1650–51. Toward the end of June 1651, during the week that Cartwright’s Comedies was published, against the backdrop of war in Scotland and imminent invasion by Royalist forces, newsbooks reported a Royalist revolt in Cardiganshire, Wales.16 Among those who “distinguished” themselves in suppressing the revolt, in which twenty-eight Royalists were killed and sixty taken prisoner, was James Philips (Rev. James Phillips 513). Philips was too young to have known Cartwright as an adult (she wasn’t born until 1632) and her inclusion in the volume relies on the

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very absence of the university structure that organized the earlier collections. As universities were all-male provinces in the seventeenth century, sites of homosocial competition and preparation for careers unavailable to women in the state and the Anglican Church, she can only emerge as the sole female member of the group after Parliamentary divines began regulating the Oxford press in 1646, and many of the Royalist poets moved to London. In a later poem, Philips celebrates the liberating effects of this loss of traditional institutions of publicness, particularly for women: praising Francis Finch as “himself an University” she says he helped free a feminized knowledge “from the tyranny and pride of Schools, / Who had confined her to pedantic rules” (“On Mr. Francis Finch” lines 26, 21–22).17 These liberating effects extend not only to Philips’s inclusion in the volume but to her placement: her elegy to Cartwright is the first of the fifty-four that preface his volume, and thus occupies a position of importance. In the collections of verse panegyrics published in Oxford before 1646, the order of writers reflects social status: as Anselment has noted, university officials and nobles “claim the privileged place at the beginning, while the lesser academic and social ranks vie to succeed them” (“Oxford University Poets” 183). In a volume dedicated to Oxford and contributed to largely by Oxford men, Philips’s prominence is significant, and may reflect an attempt by the other writers to gain the favor of a Royalist woman married to an influential member of the Parliamentary forces who had himself graduated from Oxford in 1610 (Dictionary of Welsh Biography 754). Whatever the motives for her position, Philips’s poem’s privileged placement at the head of the book casts her as a powerful centering force for the multiple prefatory poets who follow. Playing on Philips’s privileged yet anomalous identity as a woman and the wife of a Cromwellian, her poem begins as a rude interruption, the opening lines simultaneously casting Cartwright as a substitute royal and holding him at bay: Stay, Prince of Fancy, stay, we are not fit To welcome or admire thy Raptures yet; Such horrid ignorance benights our Times, That Wit and Honor are become our Crimes. (“To the Memory of the Most Ingenious and Vertuous Gentleman” A4v)

The abrupt apostrophe to “Stay” and following caesura and enjambment emphasize the verse’s function as a break with, rather than a continuation of, poetic history, particularly as Philips usually writes in regular heroic couplets. The metrical disarray mimics the banishment

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of Cartwright, a banishment that is even more indecorous due to Cartwright’s role as “Prince”—it is as if Philips had suddenly stopped the inexorable descent of a masque figure with the warning that the audience is not ready to receive him. This gesture of deferral signals Philips’s odd place within a volume that is struggling to come to terms with its debt to the past and its place in the present. As many of the contributors—such as Berkenhead, who had been the editor of the official Royalist newsbook, Mercurius Aulicus, until 1646, or Lawes, who had been a prominent court musician until Charles I’s move to Oxford in 1642—had lost their livings as well as their King with the Royalist defeat, they show ambivalence about their cultural genealogy. Often this ambivalence reveals itself in a sense of Cartwright’s poetry as his only progeny. The volume couples poems on Cartwright’s resurrection of Royalist wit with poems on him as the end of the Caroline aesthetic line: Dering writes, “I’ll only tell / The World when Wit and pleasing Fancy fell; / They died with thee” (“On the Incomparable Poems” [A6]). The writers in Comedies appear as walking anachronisms, a role that enables them to critique the present political context as a fall from Caroline grace and to articulate their own ambivalent relation to a genre of panegyric cut loose from the powerful systems of patronage that sustained it. In contrast to the nostalgia of the other poets, and distanced from Berkenhead’s image of the poets as Cartwright’s “Sons” by her gender, Philips casts Cartwright as a symbol of future Royalist possibilities— possibilities that might include the loyalist wife of a moderate Cromwellian within their scope: But when those happy Powers that guard thy Dust, To us and to thy Memory shall be just, And by a Flame from thy blessed Genius lent, Shall rescue us from this dull Imprisonment, Unsequester our Fancies, and create A Worth that may upon thy Glories wait; Then shall we understand thee, and descry The Splendor of Restored Poetry. (A4v)

Philips’s poem becomes an exercise in prolonged deferral, a gesture toward a futurity not elaborated in a logical procession of historical events but condensed into a mythic reversal of present political relations, one as sudden and unconflicted as the court masque’s banishment of the anti-masque. The shift from politics to poetry, however, not only elevates Cartwright to the status of prince, but also enables Philips to

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identify herself with the Royalist “us” who have suffered under the present regime. Whereas writers such as Berkenhead and Lawes had suffered with the Royalist defeat,18 other contributors to the Cartwright volume, such as Francis Finch, who came from a “moneyed family of prosperous lawyers,” and Edward Dering, whose composition fee was removed in 1644, had not suffered financially under the wars (P.W. Thomas 196; Souers 67). Philips herself benefited, if only vicariously, from her husband’s sequestrations of at least eleven estates (Green 2180, 3239). Given the proximity of Charles II— across the border in Scotland, readying his invasion—and her husband’s activities for Parliament, Philips’s self-presentation as an ardent Royalist may be politic as well as political. By claiming that Cartwright will “Unsequester” fancies, she situates herself as culturally, if not materially, impoverished by Commonwealth policies, and flattens out the differing economic hardship suffered by the group to represent a political community that suffers ideologically even when its estates remain intact. Furthermore, the deferral of Cartwright’s presence enables Philips’s own performance. By implication, Philips herself only comes into being as a poet because the real Royalist poet is not only dead but politically and aesthetically beyond the understanding of “our Times.” If the “we” of this poem, which extends beyond the circle of gathered poets to the general readership, are not yet ready for Cartwright, they are ready for Philips, who acts as a stand-in, a poet whose public appearance depends on the vicissitudes of the political context she disparages. Philips presents her poetry as built round the shrine of Cartwright’s writing, a standard metaphor taken up by the other poets in Comedies who describe his book as an “Epitaph,” a “Legacy,” and “thy Monument” (b2v, 4, [A6v], [B3]). Though Philips’s gesture of deferral stands in contrast to the nostalgia of the other writers, then, the repetition of the trope of the text as shrine or monument presents a Royalist counterpublic bound together through mourning, structured around a series of central absences—Oxford, Cartwright, the King—which, while they rob the male poets of place and preferment, enable them all to present poetry as ideological commitment to the Royalist cause, and allow Philips in particular to become a leading proponent of that cause, despite her status and her gender. In this poem, Philips’s very exclusion from homosocial public institutions marks her as a key figure for heterosocial counterpublic activity. Philip’s second published verse, also a prefatory poem, strengthened her public positioning as a centralizing force for the knowing

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few. This time she appeared in Henry Lawes’s Second Book of Ayres and Dialogues, a more openly collective effort than Cartwright’s Comedies, comprising verses by thirty-three different writers, most of them set to music by Lawes. Hero Chalmers has identified Philips with Lawes and his London circle (19–20), but does not note how much this book echoes both the Cartwright volume and its Oxford predecessors. Lawes’s book, published by John Playford, is a much shorter, less ambitious project than the Cartwright volume, but the writer and songwriter are strongly connected in both books, as they were in life. Contributors to the Lawes collection who wrote poems for Cartwright include Berkenhead, Dering, Francis Finch, and Lawes himself, and one of Cartwright’s verses is also included.19 The titlepage highlights Lawes’s political allegiances by touting him as: “Henry Lawes, Servant to His late Majesty in his Public and Private Music”— a description copied exactly from the title-page of Comedies, where Lawes’s involvement in setting Cartwright’s poetry and dramatic songs to music is advertised. These intertextual repetitions extend the community forged on the pages of the Cartwright volume beyond the boundaries of one book to advertise a wider group of actively writing and publishing Royalists. The structural repetitions of the Cartwright book even extend to Philips’s privileged placement as the first author of the five prefatory poems, though this time she is joined by another woman, the singer Mary Knight. Lawes also dedicated his Second Book of Ayres to a woman—Lady Dering (Philips’s old school friend Mary Harvey). Philips is identified by her initials in the Cartwright volume, but her full name is revealed in the Second Book of Ayres. This revelation of her gender alongside the inclusion of two other women creates a more obviously heterosocial community in the Lawes volume, a counterpublic whose closed ideological commitments and courtly ethos enable a certain openness in terms of gender. Lawes’s book was printed in 1655, when Parliamentary experiments with limited republicanism had given way to the more centralized government of the Protectorate, and in the wake of a political upheaval that may have again involved James Philips. For James Philips was later accused of being a member of the High Court of Justice that condemned two Royalist plotters, John Gerard and Peter Vowell, to death after their failed attempt to assassinate Cromwell in May 1654 (Woolrych 424). Katherine Philips’s poem again helps to cement an oppositional Royalist community that compensates for her husband’s stickier Cromwellian allegiances, while steering clear of the dangerous activism of the Royalist plotters. To aid this project of cohering opposition, her panegyric to Lawes, like her elegy to

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Cartwright, simultaneously both recollects and defers royal presence. Unsurprisingly in a poem to a musician, Philips draws on the neoplatonic concept of harmony as the organizing principle of man and the universe: And as some King conquering what was his own, Hath choice of several Titles to his Crown; So Harmony on this score now, that, then, Yet still is all that takes and governs Men. (“To the Much Honoured Mr. Henry Lawes” b1)

As Philips’s reference to Kings indicates, the poem’s moral philosophy of human concord is also a political philosophy of ideal rule, one that was popular during the Personal Rule of Charles I, when court masques presented the marriage of Charles and Henrietta Maria as a harmonic principle that would restore peace at home and abroad. Lawes planned and directed music for at least two court masques, and was even instrumental, along with Cartwright, in importing masque elements into drama at Oxford University, so that Philips here recalls his role in the opulent performances of the Personal Rule.20 She ends by casting Lawes as a substitute harmonizing force, one that will “repair” present Revolutionary troubles: Then (like those Ancients) strike, and so commend All nature to obey thy generous hand: None can resist, but such who needs will be More stupid than a Fish, a Stone, a Tree: Be it thy care our Age to new create, What built a World, may sure repair a State. (b1)

The reference to Lawes as Orphic architect may allude to Charles I, famously praised in Waller’s “Upon His Majesty’s Repairing of Pauls” as Amphion, and presented as Orpheus in manuscript poetry after his death.21 However, here Lawes dons the mantle of prime mover/ musician, filling in for the absent monarch, just as Cartwright did. Philips is both a member of Lawes’s adoring audience and herself the prime mover of the inspirational musician. Her imperative “Live then,” which operates in such contrast to the apostrophe to Cartwright to “Stay,” nonetheless still places her in a powerful position: if Lawes is the alpha and omega of the Royalist panegyrists that surround him, Philips is the motivating force that commands him to step into Charles I’s place.

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If a series of displacements and deferrals of royal and Royalist power enable Philips to join the loose group of poets who gather to praise Cartwright and Lawes, then, as the above poems suggest, her own writing helps to transform this group into a politico-aesthetic community of which she is a central force, one bound by its identification with the Caroline court and universities, but shifted to the post-courtly context of Revolutionary London and, in Philips’s case, Wales. Philips’s manuscript poetry, much of it written around the time of the two publications, continues this ideological work, its circulation and poetic repetitions binding together a group of Royalist writers as an elitist counterpublic. As Margaret Ezell has warned, we should read manuscript poetry as an alternate route for public identities, one that complements or competes with print culture (Patriarch’s Wife 70). In Philips, the coterie is cast as exclusive and private—a circle of likeminded “friends” who reject the Parliamentary settlements of the 1650s—yet it is simultaneously the model for ever-widening circles of readers and writers. It is also the means for reaching a varied audience: in addition to the men already mentioned, her manuscript poems were read by (among others) Anne Owen, Mary Harvey, Mary Aubrey, another ex-Oxford man named Nicholas Crouch, the third earl of Bridgewater, Jenkin Jones (a radical Approver under the Propagation Act), the Royalist divine Jeremy Taylor (who had also attended Oxford), John Davies, the republican Robert Overton, and Andrew Marvell.22 The surviving autograph manuscript from the 1650s forges links with a number of Royalist writers already mentioned in connection with the Cartwright and Lawes volumes, all clustered around the two publications. In 1651, Philips wrote verse epistles and panegyrics to Sir Edward Dering, who adopted the coterie name “Silvander”; Sir John Berkenhead, or “Cratander”; and Henry Vaughan. In 1653–54 she wrote two verses on Francis Finch, whom she addressed as “the noble Palaemon,” and who had himself dedicated a book to her and another friend, Anne Owen, in 1653.23 The proximity of these poems to the publications suggests that they were written largely to smooth her entry into the projects of collective publication, the commendatory verses functioning to work herself into and unite a group of loosely affiliated Royalist writers. The poems to all four male writers differ in address and, to some extent, imagery, but all are praised in terms of the Royalist virtues so prevalent in her other two poems. As in the poems to Cartwright and Lawes, each writer in turn comes to occupy center stage, substituting for the absent court and King. In her poem to Henry Vaughan, for

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example, his poetry takes on the role of royal martyr; like the death of Charles I, his verse expiates for the present sins of the nation, but does so in the infinitely repeatable form of the poetic text, reborn at each reading: “For each birth of thy muse to after-times / Shall expiate for all this age’s crimes” (“To Mr. Henry Vaughan, Silurist” lines 7–8). In Philips’s poem to Berkenhead, where she praises one of his anonymous publications, the style that betrays Berkenhead’s authorship to Philips is likened to the overpowering visibility of royalty that breaks through disguise: “As when some Injured Prince assumes disguise . . . Yet hath a great betraying mien and air” (“To Mr. J.B., the noble Cratander” 1–3).24 Echoing Charles I’s infamous escape from Oxford disguised as a servant in 1646, Philips here rewrites publication as a romantic/heroic act. In this way, Philips constructs a series of interchangeable literary heroes, Royalists who show their commitment to the cause not through the military exploits from which she would be barred as a woman, but through the very poetic production she deploys to create them. In a poem to Francis Finch, Philips even suggests that the fall of the monarchy has elevated writing to new heights of loyalist heroism that paradoxically transcend the monarch’s nobility: Finch’s discourse on friendship proves, “ ’Tis greater to support then be a Prince” (“To the Noble Palaemon” 20). Philips is rarely alone in her veneration of her interlocutors: though she orchestrates the action, most of her poems emanate from the first person plural, as Philips invokes a collective audience in part created out of their emulation of each poet. This audience revolves around a constantly changing center, as Philips elevates each poet to prominence in a dizzying series of quick-changes that makes the men she is addressing seem infinitely substitutable. The substitutability extends to the form of the poems, which, though they distinguish each writer’s individual work, also echo each other in terms of rhetoric and imagery, most obviously in her repeated use of the trope of light breaking through darkness, but also through the reiteration of other key images. Her poem to Vaughan, for example, anticipates the later harmonic ordering of her panegyric on Lawes: “All truths of use, or strength, or ornament, / Are with such harmony by thee displayed, / As the whole world was first by number made” (“To Mr. Henry Vaughan, Silurist” 34–36). These repetitions do not indicate Philips’s lack of poetic talent but rather signal her attempt to rework conventional terms of royal panegyric within a new, displaced context for Royalist writers. The reiteration of conventional terms of address, like the interchangeability of each poet she addresses, marks the participation of each individual and each individual poem in a collective project.

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The pastoral names adopted by some members of the group are another inscription of a shared cultural investment, the transformation of individual writers into ideal characters from Royalist plays and romances.25 The repetition of tropes and romantic/heroic personae serves to construct a exclusive community through identification, condensing each verse and each addressee into a single space of homogeneous politico-aesthetic value defined by the presiding Philips. Even Philips herself sometimes takes part in the interchange of identities. Her poem to Dering, in particular, implicates her poetry and her poetic persona “Orinda” in the system of substitution that so pervades her commendatory verse. Philips’s poem is a response to the manuscript poem mentioned above in which Dering masquerades as Orinda addressing one of Philips’s poetic beloveds, Rosania. As a selfconscious answer to his verse, it highlights the poetic dialogue that constitutes coteries: it follows a copied-out fragment of his poem and recalls its content.26 The exchange is dramatized as a game of literary cross-dressing in Philips’s poem, for Dering can only descend to join the poetic community once he is disguised as Orinda: “You must descend within our reach and sight, / (For so divinity must take disguise, / Least mortals perish with the bright surprise)” (“To the truly noble Sir Ed: Dering” 10–12). Six lines later, however, Philips reverses this dichotomy of divine masculine interior, sartorial feminine exterior, turning her earlier trope inside out: “My thoughts with such advantage you express / I hardly know them in this charming dress” (19–20). Both versions put Philips in a position of power—as the vehicle for Dering’s divine presence or the intellectual inspiration he refashions—but the poem enacts a confusion of inside and outside that is ultimately a confounding of poetic origin: is Dering the originator of poetic creativity, or is Philips? The poem resolves the potentially infinite reversibility of poetic identity in a closing couplet that makes Dering his own original: “For you (god-like) are so much your own fate, / That what you will accept, you must create” (35–36). Philips’s poem thus works to transform Dering into master of his own destiny—a gesture of compensation that puts a defeated Royalist on top, even if it is only on top of his own fate. The couplet echoes Marvell’s description of the Fairfaxes, written around the same time, who “make their destiny their choice” (Complete Poems 745). Unlike Fairfax, the ex-leader of the New Model Army, however, Dering does not demonstrate active virtue through voluntarily fulfilling his divinely appointed role in prophetic history, but instead must bend history to his own “will.”

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Thus, Philips’s poetry is busy filling up the empty space left by Royalist defeat not with present debate and political experiment, but with the cultural and political artifacts and idealized identities of her Royalist friends. The multiple Royalist revolts of 1651, 1654, and 1655; Parliamentary experiments with republicanism and a Parliament of Saints; even the authoritarian government of the Protectorate and Parliament’s offer of the crown to Cromwell are all largely absent from her poetry, which crowds out historical events to replace them with narratives of poetic heroism, recasting literary production as an act of loyal chivalry at once more stable and nobler than the royal heroes it replaces. In her commendatory poetry, Philips does not, as does Marvell in his odes to Cromwell, attempt to fashion a form of panegyric that assimilates the violence of recent events into its aesthetic;27 instead she constructs auto-telic heroes who give birth to themselves in a void, current events appearing only intermittently, in vague references to “this sullen age,” “this age’s crimes,” and “rude malice.”28 Each figured as what Catherine Gallagher might call a “moi absolu,” the objects of her panegyric are thus left with only themselves and each other as referents in a poetic world that mimics the enclosed court as a space not so much of retreat but of withdrawn and privileged subjectivity that attempts to change history from within its own like-minded community.29 Philips is careful not to become totally absorbed into this community, however, positioning herself as both a part of and apart from the coterie. Her coterie name Orinda has proved difficult to trace: Barash has speculated that it is shortened from Clorinda, a character from Tasso’s Gerusalemme Liberata (74), but Dorindas and Clorindas abound in seventeenth-century pastoral literature,30 and orin was the sixteenth-century French word for golden, popular in French poetry of the period that Philips, who read French and was influenced by the précieuses, knew well. The fact that Philips’s pastoral name may be a foreshortened version of another, better-known name, however, is suggestive of her desire to differentiate herself while still remaining part of the group. She creates an enigmatic stub, perhaps a “golden” refinement of common pastoral sobriquets, a name that alludes to a plethora of pastoral heroines without settling on a particular one. In her commendatory poems, Philips distinguishes herself with similar subtlety. She takes on the traditional pose of lauding her peers while bemoaning her own lack of ability. This conventional (and, in these poems, often genderless) denigration of her authorial power allows her to step outside the “we” that addresses most of her male objects of praise, in a movement to first person singular that marks Philips as an

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author in her own right. Her poem to Vaughan, for example, perhaps literally recalling her relative proximity to him in the Cartwright volume, says of her name: “Nay I have hopes that standing so near thine / Twill loose its dross, and by degrees refine” (“To Mr. Henry Vaughan, Silurist” 31–32). Playing on the French meaning of her name, and turning to first person singular, Philips distinguishes herself at the very moment she distinguishes the object of her praise. Philips thus elevates herself on the wings of her own panegyric. In both her published and manuscript poetry to male Royalists, then, Philips’s coterie in some senses revolves around an empty center, the absence of the King, court, and Oxford producing a Royalist poetic that presents itself as an effect of its own performance. The interchangeable nature of the group blurs differences of degree between them, the fact for example that the Finch family seem to have become Berkenhead’s patrons after a political favor he did them in 1656 (P.W. Thomas 194–96). It also blurs differences of gender, Philips’s initials in the volume to Cartwright in particular keeping her identity a secret open to a select few. Finally, the substitutability smoothes over sticky questions about political affiliations: Dering’s absence on the continent during the crucial war years of 1643–44, and the removal of the composition fee on his estate (Souers 67); Berkenhead’s role as a Royalist agent and spy (P.W. Thomas 165) and his simultaneous connection to the notorious Royalist traitor Isaac Berkenhead, his brother (Underdown, Royalist Conspiracy 46); and, of course, Philips’s own problematic political relations, married to a Cromwellian but affiliated publicly with a group of moderate Royalists. These complex and varied sociopolitical positions are suspended by the circulation of an ideal Royalist identity in Philips’s poetry. In Philip’s panegyric the lost object of the King is internalized as a series of cultural and political ideals that turn each friend into a “glorious shadow,” an eikon basilike, in a dissemination of the spectacular public power of the royal father to the group, who act as public performers for—and reformers of—the age. In this way, she reworks the intimacy and exclusivity of the coterie as the basis of counterpublic commitment to the Royalist cause, and stands in herself as the stabilizing force at the empty center.

Between Women: Alternative Erotic⁄Political Affiliations This image of an idealized community poised over a cultural and political void reaches its apex in Philips’s homoerotic and pastoral

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poetry, in particular her poems to Mary Aubrey and Anne Owen. For, embedded within the already exclusive circle of the coterie, Philips constructs an even more exclusive private sphere of poetic bonding, inhabited by Orinda and the objects of her poetry, Lucasia and Rosania, and often situated within a pastoral idyll. Earlier critical assumptions about Philips’s political neutrality stemmed from misreading her homoerotic verse as retiring from the upheavals of the Revolutionary Period. However, as Barash has shown, Philips’s homoerotic poetry is intertwined with her politics: “Women’s friendship provided a model of political loyalty” (56). This politics of female friendship inflects Philips’s use of John Donne’s images of an erotic private sphere that repudiates, but at the same time reinscribes, the public world beyond the bounds of the lovers’ embrace. Arlene Stiebel and Harriette Andreadis have focused on Philips’s debt to Donne’s language of love, but he was also useful to Philips as a model of religio-political alienation. The two poems she most clearly revises, “The Sunne Rising” and “A Valediction: Forbidding Mourning,” were both written after Donne’s ambitions for public office were thwarted by his secret marriage to Anne More, the niece of his patron’s wife, an act that caused him to be dismissed from his post of secretary.31 Donne’s subsequent “implosion of epic aspirations” into the little rooms of his songs and sonnets (Norbrook, “Monarchy of Wit” 13), is useful to a writer like Philips, busy inscribing politics within the narrowed sphere of the coterie and imagining the coterie itself as the basis for public reform. As Llewellyn has argued, Philips “portrays a friendship which is based upon and works within High Anglican, even Catholic iconography” (451). This allows her, like Donne, to transform public-political narratives of religious dispute and state power into gender-political images of love. If Donne remodels his rejected Catholic faith as an iconography of secular love, Philips appropriates the godly’s renewed faith in narratives of providence and millenarian wonders for her religion of friendship: Come, my Lucasia, since we see That miracles men’s faith do move By wonder and by Prodigy, To the dull, angry world let’s prove There’s a religion to our Love. (“Friendship’s Mysterys” 1–5)

In this way, Philips turns religious controversy into post-courtly conceit, recasting theological debate over election, for example, as

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witty, erotic paradox: “But our election is as free / As Angels, who with greedy choice / Are yet determined to their joys” (“Friendship’s Mysterys” 8–9). This reinscription of religious controversy as a lexicon of love between women suggests that Philips’s relationship to Lucasia operates as a corrective to the emphasis placed on theological reform by the godly Commonwealth. Philips’s focus on the homoerotic stands in contrast to the Cavalier creation of a libertine anti-Puritan sexuality, one that takes Donne’s incipient Ovidianism to an extreme. More important, her transformation of Donne’s stridently heterosexual language of love into a homoerotic discourse of female friendship allows her to reject the Anglo-Calvinist emphasis on chaste and fruitful marriage as productive godly vocation that is so central to militant Protestant ideology.32 If Spenser’s sonnets reform the golden “fetters” of petrarchan “bondage” into the sweet “bands” of the “sacred bower” of marriage (English Sixteenth-Century Verses 14, 4, 5, 14), Philips transforms them into courtly ornament: “T’were banishment to be set free, / Since we wear fetters whose intent / Not bondage is, but Ornament” (“Friendship’s Mysterys” 18–20). Philips’s female friendship does not threaten marriage but transcends or transforms it, rescuing marriage from a godly discourse of spiritual vocation by relocating it within a homoerotic and heterosocial network of voluntary but elitist affiliation: Nobler then kindred or marriage band, Because more free; wedlock felicity Itself doth only by this Union stand And turns to friendship or to misery. (“A Friend” 13–16)

Like the poetry to her male friends, Philips’s poetry to her female objects of devotion works toward homogeneity and substitutability, as she rewrites the patriarchal hierarchies of Donne’s secular poems to emphasize the similarity between the women. As Kathleen Swaim argues, Philips replaces the masculine persuasive force of Donne’s heterosexual lyric with equality (95). Thus his famous conceit of lovers as the legs of a compass, in which the still center of the female half anchors her male partner’s public wanderings, becomes a more equal relation of mutual support in Philips, where: “Each follows where the other leans, / And what each does, the other means” (“Friendship in Emblem” 27–28). The parity envisioned here contrasts not only with the gendered asymmetry of Donne’s poem, but also with the absolutist rhetoric on which it is founded.33 Donne’s mimicry of political

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hierarchy within his private sphere and Philips’s rejection of this can be seen most clearly in his “She’s all States, and all Princes I” (“The Sunne Rising” 21), which Philips rewrites as “And all our titles shuffled so, / Both Princes, and both subjects too” (“Friendship’s Mysteries” 24–25). This is the interchangeability of the coterie taken to its logical extreme, one that threatens to undo Royalist hierarchy altogether. In the poems that revise Donne, then, Philips rewrites his private sphere as a space that mimics not so much the Royalist logic of her commendatory poetry, but the reshuffling of titles that accompanied the rise of a new political elite and class of landowners such as James Philips during the sequestrations and Parliamentary reconstitutions of the 1640s and 1650s. Certainly, this particular image was acceptable to another writer who mimiced her poetry, the Republican Robert Overton. Overton revised other conceits of Philips to fit his politics, but he left these lines intact.34 Philips’s revision of these two central images of Donne indicates that Royalist solidarity, taken to its limit, enables a defense of women’s equality, allowing them to join the coterie circle: “If souls no sexes have, for men t’ exclude / Women from friendship’s vast capacity, / Is a design injurious and rude / Only maintained by partial tyranny” (“A Friend” 19–22). Here, Philips appropriates the anti-tyrannical rhetoric increasingly used by Royalists against Cromwell and puts it to use in a war of the sexes.35 This sense of women’s equality—with each other and with men—may stem from Royalist emphasis on class rather than gender as the primary marker of power, articulated in the idealizing discourse of love prevalent at the Caroline court. The source for Anne Owen’s name, Lucasia, is William Cartwright’s tragicomedy The Lady Errant, for example, which was probably written and performed sometime between 1633 and 1635, but first published in the Comedies of 1651. Cartwright presents his heroines as philosophers and paragons of virtue. With all the men at war, the Princess Lucasia and her lady Eumelia discuss love and friendship, duty, and honor in high rhetorical mode, while simultaneously saving the court from a female plot and solving the off-stage international conflict through marriage (a favorite trope of Caroline drama since Charles I’s marriage to the French Henrietta Maria). However, the very context for this female empowerment limits it. Both Lucasia and Eumelia evoke a democracy of love that licenses Eumelia to contradict her mistress, their mutual participation in an elevated discourse of ethics and sentiment temporarily erasing privilege and power. Lucasia, for example, claims: “Love’s kingdom is / Founded upon a parity; Lord and subject, / Master and Servant, are names banished thence”

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(3.4, 1150–52). Yet this courtly leveling does nothing to alter the material and political differences between the two women and is set in contradiction to the comic subplot in which a group of women attempts to steal real political power from the absent men—a plot that culminates in the very kind of parliament of ladies later used by Royalist writers to satirize the Commonwealth parliaments.36 Given Philips’s war-torn context, Cartwright’s elevation of women to positions of erudition and moral heroism in time of military battle may have been part of what attracted Philips to Royalism in the first place. However, in The Lady Errant gender parity is sanctioned only insofar as it supports monarchal state power. Indeed, the circulation of the rarefied discourse of platonic love becomes a marker of membership in court culture in the play, as it did in the Caroline court under Henrietta Maria. In Philips’s poetry, the democracy of love functions in a similar way, as an exclusive coterie game, the idealized prerogative of a like-minded cultural and political elite. The mutual support of the compass image suggests that female parity enables women’s forays into the coterie and then the wider public, as champions of Royalist cultural ideals, “To teach the world heroic things” (“Friendship in Emblem” 40), but it also operates as a trope of mutual regulation, the inscription of a closed circuit. Philips ensures that the parity of poetry and friendship is ostentatiously cut off from the “multitude” where their utopian equality might have more radical implications: “For vulgar souls no part of friendship share: / Poets and friends are born to what they are” (“A Friend” 65–66). If Philips’s poetry mimics some of the rhetoric of political mobility shared by republicans such as Milton then, it does so in order to resituate this mobility within the charmed circle of poetic production, where men and women’s equality of virtue and affect become signs of a decidedly elitist ideological affinity. In this way, Philips’s poetry blends personal and political, imbuing private affiliations with public political meaning, yet opposing these affiliations to the larger public or “multitude.” Her homoerotic pastoral poems continue this dynamic of Royalist counterpublic withdrawal and engagement by collapsing political alienation onto country retirement. Though they take her anti-historicism to an extreme, their ostentatious rejection of the Revolutionary context operates as an obvious form of political commentary. As the site of retirement is most probably Wales, her depictions of peaceful country idylls fly in the face of fact: as Chris Fitter has argued, most of Wales at this time was occupied by Parliamentary forces, riddled with sequestered estates and ejected ministers (“Henry Vaughan’s Landscapes” 123, 139)—hardly

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a landscape unproblematically given to otium.37 The pressure and proximity of the historical context makes itself felt through her pastoral poems’ construction (even more insistently than most poems of retirement) round a series of vehement negations. “A Retir’d Friendship to Ardelia,” for example, dated August 23, 1651, creates a “bower” of bliss, in which there is “no quarreling for crowns, / Nor fear of changes in our fate” (5–6). However, in this poem and others like it, the banishment of war, debate, fear, treachery, plots, danger, power struggles, and changes in fortune, enacted with almost ritualistic fervor, both foregrounds the vicissitudes of the very political context Philips rejects and leaves her persona occupying an amorphous pastoral landscape, largely devoid of those descriptive details of either ornamental or realist countryside so favored by writers such as Cowley and Vaughan.38 The tendency of Philips’s pastoral to mutate into the political subjects she repudiates is intensified intertextually by the strong thematic and chronological links between her pastoral and homoerotic lyrics and her openly political poems. The most striking example of this overlap occurs between “A Countrey Life,” one of her earliest adult poems, and “Upon the Double Murther of K. Charles, in Answer to a Libellous Rime made by V.P.” “A Countrey Life” celebrates the golden age innocence of the countryside idolized in many a Cavalier lyric: Secure in these unenvied walls I think not on the state, And pity no man’s case that falls From his ambition’s height. (45–48; my italics)

A clearer statement of pastoral retreat and stoic self-sufficiency could not be found. However, as Paula McDowell has noted, Philips repeats one of the above lines at the opening of “Upon a Double Murther,” one of her most explicitly political poems of this period (“Consuming Women” 234): I think not on the state, nor am concerned Which way soever that great Helm is turned, But as that son whose father’s danger nigh Did force his native dumbness, and untie The fettered organs: so here is a cause That will excuse the breach of nature’s laws. (1–6; my italics)

“Upon a Double Murther” is Philips’s response to a poem by the radical Welsh preacher Vavasor Powell, who had commanded

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Parliamentary troops at Worcester, that vindicates Charles I’s execution (Woolrych 11). Powell was an approver on the Commission for the Propagation of the Gospel in Wales of which James Philips was a member, but Powell was active in the radical Fifth Monarchist movement, which increasingly rejected Cromwellian rule after 1653. Powell interprets the death of Charles through the same millenarian emphasis on King Jesus as the sole rightful monarch that we saw in Wight and Jessey.39 Philips replies by casting Powell’s verse condemnation of Charles as a second regicide, murdering in word what Parliament has already murdered in the flesh: “Oh! to what height of horrors are they come, / Who dare pull down a crown, tear up a Tomb” (“Upon a Double Murther” 33–34). The poem’s opening denial of political engagement, therefore, lifted directly from a poem of pastoral retreat, stands in direct contradiction to the rest of the poem, which addresses quite significant matters of state—the King’s execution and its defense by a religious radical like Powell. Moreover, in presenting her movement out of silence toward protest, as a “son whose father’s danger nigh” induces him to speak, Philips draws on the same Royalist mystifications of the king as the father of his people, his subjects bound by the natural law of filial obedience, that Leigh’s book counters. Part of the reason for this emphasis on the king as father was to ban subjects from questioning royal right and interfering in those state matters that both James and Charles considered the monarch’s prerogative: for example, Henry Vaughan’s “The King Disguised,” written in 1647, plays on Charles’s hidden state to proclaim: “Secrets of State are points we must not know” (Complete Poetry 37). The fluidity of Philips’s gender position in her poem to Powell (female writer, breaking gender decorum or “nature’s laws”/loyal, silent son impelled to speak despite his “native dumbness”) indicates ambivalence over just what her duty as a female writer or subject/son consists of in the face of an attack like Powell’s. Philips dramatizes her poem’s origin in contradictory impulses, both Royalist, to defend her king and to avoid the arcana imperii traditionally off-limits for women and obedient subjects alike. The poem is thus born in a moment of disavowal, the contradictory nature of her desire to defend a royal icon that should theoretically be self-sustaining resolving itself in the paradoxical image of loyal transgression, the natural breach of nature’s laws. The question for Philips becomes how to engage public matters without compromising her Royalist distaste for leveled debate, how to steer between the Scylla and Charybdis of religio-political discussion (the very existence of which questions royal right) and disloyal silence

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in the face of Royalist defeat. For while the radical sects and the Independents celebrated the move from courtly flattery to public discussion,40 Royalists bemoaned the fall from poetic panegyric to public tumult; as Berkenhead says of Lawes’s singing: “ ’Tis heaven hath voices, hell hath clashing votes” (“To the great Master of His Art” b3v). Philips’s answer is to aestheticize politics as a harmonic, natural order and personalize Royalism as a loving, intimate relation. Her praise of retirement and male and female friends such as Lawes, Finch, and Owen can then be commended as disengaged from matters of state, even as they celebrate the ideals and beliefs of the Royalists in displaced form. The coterie, and the intimate sphere of female friendship embedded within it, both do double duty as the means of separation from popular debate, and the grounds for oblique counterpublic engagement of it. Philips’s discourse of female friendship, then, repeats on a more intensely intimate scale the homogenizing impulse of the panegyric to her male friends, aiding her inscription of an elitist counterpublic within the wider arena of debate. Her own vexed relation to this arena is dramatized by her poem “To (the Truly Competent Judge of Honour) Lucasia, Upon a Scandalous Libell Made by J. Jones,” which responds to Jones’s threatened publication of her poem to Vavasor Powell on the King’s execution. Jones, like Powell, was a radical approver on the Commission for the Propagation of the Gospel in Wales, and he went north to fight Charles II with Harrison in 1650. He was also responsible for threatening Thomas Vaughan (Henry Vaughan’s brother) and his friends, refusing to let them preach (F.E. Hutchinson 111–19). The possibility that Jones might publish her politically sensitive verse leads Philips to assert defensively that “honor is its own reward and end” (37). She mocks those who seek public approval, “beg[ging] the suffrage of a Vulgar tongue” (39), then links this elitist attitude to monarchical arguments for divine right: “from a Clown / Would any Conqueror receive his Crown?” (43–44). However, she also notes that the scandal surrounding her poem has “advantage in’t: for gold uncoin’d / Had been unuseful, nor with glory shin’d” (55–56). This contradictory relation to a wider public presented as both a demeaning, democratic devolution of poetic power and as a minting of texts that are otherwise devoid of use value is partially resolved by Philips’s final appeal to a Royalist readership, embodied by Lucasia, that will vindicate her political poem: “Yet I’ll appeal unto the knowing few, / Who dare be Just, and rip my heart to you” (65–66). It is this loose group of ideal writers and readers that Philips’s poetry works to unite.

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In her published and manuscript verse of the Revolutionary Period, then, Philips reinscribes royal authority and public display as poetic prerogatives, paradoxically celebrating a monarchical political structure at the same time that she devolves royal power as a principle of the community, open to ex-Oxford men and ex-London women alike. In doing so, she helps invent a corporate public identity for Interregnum Royalists out of the practices of the coterie of friends. Philips’s dissemination of the public power of the royal father to a group of publishing poets marks the shift from royal to Royalist, from monarchy as a matter of fact, to monarchy as matter of public debate—a political ideology that must be defended in print, even when the very terms of divine right deny the importance of that debate to its claim to power. It also marks the female poet as central to this new group, a pivotal force that helps invent political and literary communities in the absence of traditional institutional structures and their patriarchal heads. Indeed, mobilizing traditional tropes of private commendation and intimate commitment within a wholly new context, Philips presents herself as the head of an elitist counterpublic that can remake itself in the absence of its primary referent, the King, and in opposition to the heroic or prophetic self-fashioning of Republicans and radicals alike.

Courtly Pompey This counterpublic is both key to Philips’s rising public profile at the Restoration of monarchy in 1660, and aids in the invention of a newly dominant public culture from the displaced context of Ireland. Two editions of Philips’s poetry were published in England in the 1660s: an unauthorized edition of 1664, which was quickly withdrawn, and an authorized edition published posthumously in 1667.41 However, these were preceded and motivated by Philips’s much-acclaimed translation of Corneille’s La Morte de Pompée, written, published, and performed in Dublin in 1663 as Pompey. Philips circulated poems in manuscript in Ireland, and three of her verses were published in a Dublin miscellany, Poems by Several Persons the same year, bringing her poetry as well as her drama to an Anglo-Irish audience.42 This audience was stressed when Philips’s translation was first imported into and then published in England (also in 1663) and her Dublin acquaintances contributed the majority of the prefatory poems to the authorized English edition of her work in 1667. The privileging of these Anglo-Irish contacts and contexts throughout Philips’s publications of the 1660s suggests that, at the Restoration, her earlier affiliation to a politically oppositional public dispersed across England and Wales

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enabled new ties to a geopolitically peripheral public in Ireland. Indeed, in the context of her Dublin circulation and performance, Philips’s Pompey reflects on and helps cohere an Anglo-Irish elite, while also thematizing that elite’s relation to continental culture and royal hegemony in England.43 Bringing together old acquaintances such as Dering with new acquaintances such as James Butler, the most powerful man in Ireland at this time, Philips expands her pivotal role uniting a heterosocial network of private affiliation and public politics beyond Britain’s shores. In the changed context of Dublin, however, the coterie practices and language of amorous friendship that mediated a post-courtly counterpublic help imagine a neo-courtly, dominant public of multi-kingdom monarchy. Philips went to Ireland motivated, she claimed, by love and money. She accompanied one of her female friends Anne Owen (Lucasia), recently married to an Anglo-Irish peer, in her move from Wales to Rostrevor (Souers 149). Less romantically, she also went to represent her husband’s interest in the bitter legal struggles over Irish land that occurred at the Restoration of Charles II. Philips and her husband had inherited their Irish interest as Philips’s marriage portion from her father, an Adventurer who had invested money in 1642 to aid the English government’s suppression of the 1641 Irish Rebellion in return for lands in Munster.44 Once settled in Dublin—the cultural and military center of Anglo-Irish power in Ireland—Philips imported her pastoral names and her poetry of refined affection to help define a new branch of her coterie, now incorporating powerful leaders and aristocrats attached to the Irish viceregal court. These leaders included old English friends in Dublin, such as John Jeffries (or “Philaster”) and Dering—the latter now established as chairman of the very Land Settlement Commission set up to adjudicate Irish land disputes like that of Philips. It also included new contacts, drawn from a diverse group who yet shared a commitment to Protestantism, English culture, and restored monarchy: Butler, the duke of Ormonde, was a powerful Old English Protestant who led Royalist forces in Ireland and who was rewarded for his loyalty to Charles with the post of lord lieutenant. Another new contact, Roger Boyle, the earl of Orrery, was a New English leader who had supported Cromwell in the 1650s but welcomed Charles II’s return with such sudden enthusiasm that he was rewarded with the position of lord president of Munster at the Restoration. A third prominent new acquaintance, Wentworth Dillon, the earl of Roscommon, was a Protestant member of a longstanding Old English family, and nephew of Thomas Wentworth— Charles I’s leading councilor who had been executed by Parliament in 1641 (Souers 155, 166; Widmann x–xi).

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These powerful men, their acquaintances, and families became the subjects and interlocutors of Philips’s writing. Indeed, the manuscript circulation, publication, and performance of her works quickly developed into a means to unite a sometimes internally conflicted circle within Ireland and to affiliate it with English writers and readers as an elite multi-kingdom collective. In Dublin, Philips exchanged verses with the English army captain, Nicholas Armourer, for example, as well as the Anglo-Irish Orrery and his nieces.45 The Dublin miscellany in which Philips’s poetry was published, Poems by Several Persons, included commendatory poems on Philips’s Pompey by both Orrery and the English writer Abraham Cowley alongside other verses by this pair and by the English lawyer Peter Pett. Pompey’s publication contained a prologue by the Anglo-Irish Roscommon and an epilogue by the English Dering. In 1662, as Philips was still completing her work on Corneille’s play, five London court wits began collaboration on a rival version of the same play, and Orrery’s own debut heroic drama— purportedly written at the request of Charles II himself—was performed publicly in Dublin just eight days after the performance of Philips’s translation, in the same theater.46 As a French play, translated in Dublin in tandem with a London translation, therefore, Philips’s Pompey engaged in cross-cultural imitation and rivalry that crossed the English Channel and the Irish Sea. In doing so, it helped situate Philips and her Dublin circle in a broad and culturally elevated network of political affiliation and artistic production. As in Philips’s earlier writings, this circle hinged on the figure of a woman writer who operated as a stand-in for an absent royal patriarch— though in Restoration Dublin the group’s marginal status was determined by both religio-political conflict and geographic distance from the London government. During the 1640s and 1650s, Ireland developed its own variation on the theme of civil war, one that combined civil conflict with imperial violence, particularly under Cromwell’s rule (Beckett, The Making of Modern Ireland 82).47 After the Restoration in 1660, peers such as Ormonde and Orrery attempted to smooth tensions within Ireland while also managing the legacy of the Irish Catholic rebellion that had helped kick-start England’s Civil Wars.48 Traveling back and forth from England, both men worked to influence the new London government’s settlement of the perennially vexed issues of Irish politics, religion, and land. This travel to England was essential, as the Dublin viceregal government was dealing with a British king who ruled in absentia in Ireland even after he was restored: though there had been royal visits in the 1180s and 1390s, no early modern British king visited the island until 1689 (Morrill,

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“Fashioning” 15). To address this absent monarchal center, and in an attempt to strengthen the Anglo-Irish Protestant interest that had come to dominate Ireland economically and politically in the 1650s, both Orrery and Ormonde stressed Ireland’s importance to British history and culture.49 In a 1662 speech to the largely Anglo-Irish Parliament, for example, Ormonde placed Ireland squarely at the heart of the history of the British Civil Wars: “it may also be worth the observing, that as the first most bloody eruption from peace to rebellion, took birth in this kingdom, so from hence came the first overtures to peace and submission” (35). It is this fantasy of the Anglo-Irish as the alpha and omega of British royal power and culture that Philips’s translation takes up. The plot of the play follows the aftermath of Rome’s civil wars, when Julius Caesar defeated the republican leader Pompey, and the latter fled to Egypt for military aid. It begins as the Egyptian King Ptolomy debates with his councilors whether to help the Roman Pompey or to kill him, thus ingratiating himself to Caesar. Ptolomy decides to have his followers assassinate Pompey, and the ensuing action presents the main characters’ high-minded disputations on love, revenge, and duty, alongside their horrified responses to Ptolomy’s act. Cleopatra, Pompey’s widow Cornelia, and even Julius Caesar, all condemn Ptolomy’s action, leading ultimately to Ptolomy’s own fall, and the accession of his sister Cleopatra as queen in his stead. The play offers no clear-cut allegory of relations between Ireland and England in this period. However, in Corneille’s original and Philips’s translation, Egypt is both financially and politically dependent on Roman power, and a crucial player in the future of the Roman Empire—even, according to Ptolomy, in the future of world history. In a dramatic apostrophe to Rome, Ptolomy imputes global consequences to his decision to turn against Pompey: “To the Worlds Tyrants, let’s a Tyrant give . . .” (1.1.198).50 In the aftermath of Britain’s own turbulent Revolutionary Period, the play demonstrates that, particularly in an imperial or proto-colonial setting, civil war is never entirely civil. Rather it is always implicated in and influenced by client kingdoms and colonies like Egypt—or, perhaps, in this instance, Ireland. More important for our purposes, particularly in light of Philips’s revisions to the French original, Pompey demonstrates that client kingdoms can become central to the circulation of courtly ideals of love and honor that help define an elite public culture. In particular, the character of the royal Cleopatra is crucial as a figure for the courtly sensibility that marks all of the main characters, turning them into the

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almost interchangeable heroic ideals of Philips’s earlier poetry. In one of the most sophisticated readings of Philips’s play to date, Andrew Shifflett identifies the republican widow, Cornelia, as the play’s key figure and argues that, in Pompey, Philips vindicates “republican ideals and Stoic modes of preserving those ideals” (75). However, Cleopatra is equally important as a bearer of ideals, ideals that crucially differ from Cornelia’s politics of revenge and Roman liberty. Indeed, both Philips and her contemporaries aligned Philips’s poetic persona, Orinda, not with Cornelia but with Cleopatra. John Davies, for example, dedicated his 1659 translation of the French heroic romance Cléopâtra to Philips in terms that hint at Cleopatra as a figure for royal suffering and exile, terms repeated in his 1665 republication two years after the printing of Pompey: “reflecting on your great affection and respects for the excellent Cleopatra, your particular enquiries after her welfare and adventures, and the tenderness which makes you wish the misfortunes of so great a Princess were at a period, I can think it but just, that the person, from whom she had, unknown, received those great Civilities, should accordingly be returned the particular acknowledgements thereof” (Hymen’s Praeludia Ar–v). Similarly, Roscommon’s prologue to Philips’s play identifies Cleopatra’s love and Philips’s verse as twin feminine forces that conquer the masculine conqueror, Caesar. Addressing the women in the audience he wittily quips, “By the just Fates your Sex is doubly blest, / You Conquered Caesar, and you praise him best” (29–30). Indeed, as the above conflation of romance and poetry suggests, of all the play’s characters, it is Cleopatra who echoes the elevated language of pastoral withdrawal and refined love that pervades Philips’s betterknown lyric poetry. As one of her revisions to the French original, Philips wrote five songs, which are performed onstage before different main characters at the end of each act. The song played before Cleopatra at the end of Act 4 imagines a golden age disrupted by ambition: When men their quiet minutes spent Where Myrtles grew and Fountains purl’d, As safe as they were Innocent: What angry God among them hurl’d Ambition to undo the world? (4.44–48)

The language and rhythms of this lyric recall Philips’s 1650s pastoral poetry, with its repeated rejections of worldly ambition for the innocent safety of an enclosure characterized by traditional pastoral symbols.

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“A Countrey Life,” for example, begins: “How sacred and how innocent / A country life appears” (1–2), and goes on “[I] pity no man’s case that falls / From his ambition’s height. / Silence and Innocence are safe” (47–49). “Invitation to the Countrey” assures Rosania that “Conquerors, whose Laurels pressed their brow, / Have changed it for the quiet Myrtle bough” (13–14).51 Cleopatra is initially associated with the vice of ambition and does not take the song’s advice on retirement. However, as in Philips’s earlier poetry, this kind of pastoral verse aims not so much to produce an action, but to circulate elite cultural and political values associated with the Caroline court, here revived for Philips’s displaced Carolean context. In this metadramatic moment, as Cleopatra becomes an audience within the play, Philips displays English pastoral lyric as decorous courtly entertainment in a way that both affiliates these values with the Egyptian Cleopatra and disseminates them for the wider, Dublin audience. This scene presents Philips’s verse as fit for royal consumption and identifies Cleopatra with the Dublin theatergoers, defining them as part of a newly dominant, courtly public through their appreciation of the very English genres Philips imports. This sense of Cleopatra as a bearer of English courtly value, both within the play and for the audience, is strengthened by her association with the language of love and honor. Unlike her brother, Ptolomy, Cleopatra will not countenance an attack on Pompey, demonstrating a high moral conscience in her refusal to put her desire for Caesar before her duty to his rival: I love him, but a flame so much refined, How bright soever, dazzles not my mind For Virtue makes my inclination know, What Caesar’s mistress does to Pompey owe: And none dares own a passion so sublime, But she that scorns the shadow of a crime. (2.1–6)

Philips’s language of refinement and sublimity in this speech goes far beyond that of Corneille’s original and the rival translation by the London wits. Corneille characterizes love’s flame as “belle” or “beautiful” rather than refined, and uses the phrase “une âme trop haute,” or “too high/elevated a heart” where Philips refers to “a passion so sublime” (2.1 356, 361), and these lines in the rival London translation are relatively devoid of descriptive language.52 If Philips’s language departs from the original and her rival London translators, however, this rhetoric of refinement echoes her homoerotic verse of

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the 1650s where amorous friendship is a “noble flame, / ’Tis love refined” (“A Friend” 7–8) and “A wonder so sublime, it will admit / No rude Spectator to contemplate it” (“To My Lucasia” 13–14). Cleopatra’s speech transports the elevated iconography of love constructed by Philips’s earlier verse to a heterosexual and imperial context. Doing so affiliates her character with the very politically nuanced ideals of refined affection Philips inscribes in her coterie poetry of the 1650s, and translates these ideals onto a wider, multi-kingdom stage—both within the play and (given its circulation across Britain and Ireland) in terms of its first readers and audiences. In its very conventionality, its repetition of the rhetoric of Philips’s other poetry and its allusion to tropes and ideas typical of Caroline literature and Cavalier verse, these images cast the royal Cleopatra not as a tawny or barbaric Other to the polite culture of civilized Rome, but as herself a bearer of elite commitments and courtly sensibilities. A final song Philips adds to the play at Act 5 even exonerates Cleopatra from the charges of ambition that plagued her earlier: “One who ambition could withstand, / Subdue revenge, and Love command, / On Honors single score” (5.5.62–64). Thus the figure of Cleopatra suggests that client kingdoms like Egypt and Ireland can function not only as centers of power—as crucial players in world history—but as geographically displaced centers for the revival and circulation of public images of elite culture and royal power. This is not to argue, however, that Cleopatra is the central character of the play, but rather that Cleopatra’s equal importance to Cornelia suggests that this play is not dominated by any single figure. The same closing song that exonerates the Egyptian Cleopatra, for example, lauds the Roman Cornelia in similar terms of aristocratic honor, as one whose grieving “exalts her Honor more, / Then if she all the scepters bore, / Her Generous Husband gave” (5.5.80–83). Julius Caesar and Pompey are also praised in this song, in the language of heroic nobility and glory, so that the four main characters receive two verses of encomium each. This symmetry of form and content has the effect of suppressing some of the drama’s tense differences of gender, politics, and culture, and of offering instead a quartet of characters defined by a shared elitist code of honor, virtue, and heroism. The slippery nature of political allegory during Britain’s Civil Wars partly accounts for this identification between republicans, royals, and emperors: the imperial Caesar was associated with the increasingly monarchal rule of Cromwell’s Protectorate, while, as a number of critics note, the republican Pompey could be identified with Royalists.53 Philips herself associates the fallen Pompey with the defeated and

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exiled Stuarts, using him as a figure for Charles II both before and after the Restoration.54 As exemplary tragic or heroic ideals, then, these classical figures were available to competing political sides in the Civil Wars and their aftermath, and Philips plays on their shared values and stature. If Philips’s revisions water down political differences, however, they do so to the Royalist end of defining a dominant multi-kingdom public centered on images of displaced and renewed monarchy. Chalmers has argued that Philips’s Pompey rejects the partisanship of her 1650s writings for political reconciliation (87), but it is worth asking who is reconciled to whom and with what aim in this play. For the royal Cleopatra’s language of love is just one aspect of a wider dynamic in which Philips’s revisions increasingly contain political struggle within a frame of elevated courtliness that extends to all its main characters—even those characters such as Cornelia, Pompey, and Caesar who are not monarchs or courtiers themselves. In contrast to the continuing historical conflict stressed by Lucan’s Pharsalia, the play’s classical source, for example, and in the face of the play’s earlier development of political tension, the end of Act 5 moves toward a grand spectacle of harmony that again alludes to the Stuart court. Recalling the Restoration coupling of public grief for the executed Charles I with celebration of the crowning of Charles II, Caesar’s closing speech evokes mourning and coronation as the twin supports of a unifying ceremony: Prepare tomorrow for a glorious day. When all such Noble Offices may own Pompey t’appease, and Cleopatra Crown. To her a throne, to him let’s alters build, And to them both Immortal Honors yield.

(5.5.54–58)

Corneille’s version ends at the above lines, on a note that anyone who knows just a little of Roman history would characterize as wishful thinking. The emphasis on unification is, however, more accurate for recent British history, so Philips realizes Caesar’s desire by adding the final song and “a Grand Masque” (90), directed in the Dublin performance by none other than John Ogilby—who had designed the triumphal arches and masques for Charles II’s ceremonial progress through London at his coronation in 1661 (W.S. Clark, Early Irish Stage 44–45). As Nancy Maguire has argued, Philips’s revisions push Corneille’s dark tragedy toward light tragicomedy (37, 65); they also gloss the vicissitudes of history with courtly spectacle. This importation

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of spectacular comedic concord assimilates the antagonists into an ethic of heroic virtue and grand display that celebrates a top-down version of history and politics, one firmly focused on an elite strata of great men and singular leaders who are lauded regardless of their location or past political commitments. In the absence of characters that might stand for Irish Catholics, the difference that counts in this play emerges as social status. The royal Ptolomy may regain “restored Virtue” with a heroic death (5.3.32), but his advisors are left as the play’s only real Others: “base flatterers,” according to Cleopatra, whose “souls the baseness of their Birth confess, / And who in vain great Dignities possess: / For Slavish Spirits cannot guide the Helm” (2.2.140, 4.2.15–17). In distinction from these politically active “base” characters, Philips’s songs emphasize the ideological harmony of the play’s powerful elite—the consolidation of a ruling power bloc across the frontiers of kingdom, politics, and gender—displayed at the end of the play in the pre-Revolutionary form central to royal power: the court masque. The play thus promotes a vision of power and culture dispersed across a multi-kingdom context but centered on courtly values and royal forms. In Pompey, the ideals and identities circulated in Philips’s post-courtly verse to sustain a 1650s Royalist counterpublic come to underpin a vision of a powerful pro-monarchial public embodied by a geographically dispersed political elite. By embedding anachronistic Caroline values within the emerging Carolean form of the French heroic drama, Philips offers herself in her Irish context —in a similar way to Cleopatra in the play—as the bearer of English courtly values, old and new. Roscommon’s prologue in particular emphasizes her importance in this respect. It both imagines a proper royal heritage for the fallen Republican leader, Pompey, and offers Philips’s translation as a substitute for the coronation of the absent British king. Addressing the duke of Ormonde as ideal spectator, it requests: “and on that Pompey’s Brow / Who gave so many crowns, bestow one now” (35–36). Ormonde, in his capacity as lord steward, carried the crown before Charles II at his London coronation (Beckett, Cavalier Duke 75). The prologue’s witty allusion to this event links courtly theater and the theater of the court to cast Pompey as a displaced replay or dissemination of monarchal ceremony, one presided over by the Anglo-Irish duke of Ormonde and scripted by Philips herself. Roscommon goes on to define Ireland in opposition to England as an autonomous isle that historically escaped imperial Roman rule, telling his Dublin audience “you alone may Boast, you never saw / Caesar ’till now” (11–12). However, he also casts the English Philips

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alone as up to the task of translating classical culture into this autonomous Irish context, suggesting that though Ireland may have escaped the rigors of the Roman Empire, classical themes and characters are still the index of its European heritage and ties to English civility. Addressing the women in the audience, he counsels, “And hear a Muse, who has that Hero [Caesar] taught / To speak as gen’rously as ’ere he fought. / Whose eloquence from such a theme deters / All Tongues but English, and all pens but Hers” (25–28). The prologue to the London wits’ translation situates it in a rather straightforward translatio studii, “From Greece, the place where Wit and Learning grew, / To Conquering Rome the banished Muses flew” (Waller et al. 1–2), and, as Christopher Wheatley argues, may even mock the performance of classical themes in an Irish backwater as a rude interruption of this inexorable flight toward England (21). In contrast, Roscommon offers a more circuitous route for the migration of learning: Philips retroactively educates her male classical forbears via the theater in Ireland. This routing suggests, however, that if the Roman Empire foundered before it ever reached Ireland’s shores, the educative empire of English poetry did not. Addressing Ormonde, Roscommon goes on: “And you (Illustrious Sir) receive as due, / A Present Destiny reserved for You. / Rome, France, and England join their Forces here, / To make a poem worthy of your Ear” (31–34). His prologue therefore ends by presenting Philips’s English verse as an agent of cultural synthesis and apotheosis, one that situates Philips and her displaced Anglo-Irish audience at the center of a historically and geographically extended network of European art and politics, as purveyors of a newly dominant public culture. The prefatory poems written for Pompey similarly elevate Philips as an agent of cultural apotheosis. The earl of Orrery, for example, argues that if Corneille could read Philips’s verse “he like us would call, / The Copy greater than th’ Original” (“To Orinda” 58–59). He goes on to characterize Philips’s translation as a triumph of the English language: “You English Corneil’s Pompey with such flame / That you but raise our Wonder and his Fame” (56–57). Orrery’s poem multiplies cultural competition, pitching female copier against male original, English translator against French writer, to praise Philips as expert in a French style that was increasingly important to English royal culture’s self-definitions. In doing so, he lauds Philips for revealing Dublin as the center of a revived and triumphant Englishness. His poem suggests that the Dublin production and reception of Philips’s translation marks the Restoration Anglo-Irish— who referred to themselves as “the English in Ireland”—as copies

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who are greater than their originals: subjects whose location in Ireland signals not their “degeneration” into foreign Catholic ways, nor even their hybridity, but their status as displaced but renewed exemplars of English court culture. The prologue and commendatory poems, that is, figure the Anglo-Irish elite as examples not of a melting-pot Britishness, but of a disseminated English courtly identity they are in the process of helping to reinvent. The Anglicized emphasis of this public was politic as much as political: the perennial fear that English settlers in Ireland were fated to “go native” had been exacerbated by the mixed allegiances of the Civil Wars, when England’s earliest wave of colonists, the Old English, chose to side with the rebelling Irish Catholics.55 When Philips’s translation was circulated and published in Dublin then in London, with commendatory matter by Roscommon, Orrery, and other members of her coterie, it helped portray the Anglo-Irish (even those with as vexed a past as Orrery) as Anglicized courtly loyalists. More important, it presented Philips and her interlocutors as ostentatiously beating the English at their own game of reinventing royal power and culture in the aftermath of the Revolutionary Period.56 Jonathan Sawday, Nancy Maguire, and Paula Backscheider have shown that Restoration Royalists were busy re-mythologizing the Stuart monarchy in this period. Charles and his advisors deliberately deployed spectacle to rewrite the immediate past and reinstate the monarch as an embodiment of public power. In the lead-up to his coronation, Charles told Edward Hyde to study past royal ceremony, because he wanted “the novelties and new inventions, with which the kingdom hath been so much intoxicated for so many years together . . . discountenanced and discredited in the eyes of the people” (qtd. in Backscheider 5). This deployment of a revived representative publicness, however, was matched with a new sense of the need to manage the press that had helped create a debating public. Restoration publications of monarchal theory and the government’s attempts not just to censor but to control the press demonstrate that monarchal supporters were acutely aware they could not erase public debate, so they combined coercion with persuasion, disseminating pro-monarchal arguments to strengthen their position.57 Philips’s own work shifts court spectacles like the masque to the public theater and printed page, thereby acknowledging their function engaging a wider, potentially unruly, audience of writers, readers, and viewers. Her work also presents geopolitical displacement as a source of powerful cultural renewal, thereby indicating that the task of remythologizing the Stuarts, analyzed by the above critics, relied on a

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geographically dispersed community. As a central figure in this community, Philips’s tactics for maintaining cohesion during the difficulties of the Revolutionary Period could be put to new use establishing cultural dominance from a distance at the Restoration. The particular form Philips’s “apotheosis” takes shows, that is, that the reinvention of monarchy, on which the dominant public of the Restoration centered, was carried out in an expansive archipelagic context, one in which women could play key roles reinventing court culture from the geopolitical margins. Philips and her Dublin interlocutors, then, cast their exclusive circle as the basis of a renewed, multi-kingdom public culture that celebrates a restored and reinvented court and King. Over the extended trajectory of Philips’s career, the post-courtly coterie forms the model for a 1650s Royalist counterpublic that in turn helps pave the way for a 1660s dominant public culture reaching across the British Isles. Philips’s example reveals that we should attend not only to the politics of women’s writing but also to its geopolitics: in this instance, its embeddedness in the asymmetrical discursive exchanges of archipelagic Britain, and its willingness to imaginatively reshape these interactions to cement a particular, ideologically inflected community. Philips’s revisions to Pompey in particular, with their equal celebration of each character, offer a vision of postwar ideological and geopolitical harmony—the consolidation of a ruling bloc across the frontiers of kingdom. Her later London publications repeat this elevated multi-kingdom harmony as their object of address. The 1667 authorized edition of her verse in particular resurrects poems first produced in Dublin: four of the seven prefatory verses to this edition had been written or published in Dublin, and one more was composed by an author with strong Anglo-Irish connections.58 This 1667 edition also included a reprint of Pompey, complete with the prologue by Roscommon, references to the Irish context of production, and a dedicatory poem by Philips to the earl of Orrery’s sister-in-law, the countess of Cork. The sense of multi-kingdom address was intensified by the body of the book, which interwove poems to English, Welsh, and Anglo-Irish interlocutors. Placing poems to Berkenhead and Finch next to verses to Ormonde and the Boyles, the 1667 Poems synthesizes Philip’s coterie of the Revolutionary Period and her Restoration connections to help to imagine a geographically expansive public of elite writers and readers that hinges on the figure of “the matchless Orinda.”

Chapter 4

New Engl and B ecoming O ld: A nne Bradstreet and the C oterie of Ghosts

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nne Bradstreet was a New England poet who wrote her first major poem in 1638, during a period of some crisis in the Massachusetts Bay Colony’s self-definition. In 1637, New Englanders consolidated their prominence in trade in part by massacring Pequot Indians, setting light to their villages and routing out survivors who were subsequently enslaved or put to death. In 1638, the Puritan Fathers secured the boundaries of orthodoxy in the new colony by banishing the Antinomian Anne Hutchinson and her followers, putting an end to a heated theological discussion and two trials that had lasted at least two years.1 Yet Bradstreet’s poem, composed the same year as the Hutchinson trial and only a year after the war against the Pequots, steadfastly ignored both these formative events punctuating early American history. Instead of celebrating Massachusetts Bay victories or meditating on the New England mission, Bradstreet chose to write an elegy to Sir Philip Sidney, that consummate Elizabethan courtier, poet, and neo-chivalric hero—who, by the time of Bradstreet’s composition, had been dead for over half a century. The fact that this elegy to a long-dead British hero was no fluke, but part of a consistent poetic project, is shown by Bradstreet’s next poem, an elegy to a similar Elizabethan poetic hero, the French Huguenot Guillaume du Bartas. This in turn was followed two years later by an elegy to Queen Elizabeth herself. Continuing this commitment to Old World themes, Bradstreet’s earliest publication, her 1650 The Tenth Muse, not only occurred in London, but explicitly addressed Revolutionary changes in Old England: Laudian oppressions,

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Parliamentary revolt, and the Civil Wars all feature prominently in her verse.2 This rejection of contemporary New English events in favor of commentary on the British Revolution combined with a particular brand of Elizabethan nostalgia cannot be excused by distance from either the Pequot war or the Hutchinson controversy. Bradstreet’s father, Thomas Dudley, was a member of the Standing Council that considered the Pequot threat in the spring of 1636 (Jennings 203), he was appointed lieutenant colonel of one of the three regiments mobilized for defense in the fall (A. Jones 232), and he was elected deputy governor during the month of the attack itself.3 Both he and the poet’s husband, Simon Bradstreet, were at the General Court’s examination of Anne Hutchinson in November of 1637, and Dudley accused Hutchinson of recalling the political sedition of the Münster radicals and being “deluded by the devil” (Hall 343). Bradstreet’s proximity to these events and her geographical and historical distance from the European figures she eulogizes demonstrate that though local readings may be invaluable in building a sense of the ideological and material conditions of any textual production, sometimes the local must give way to the global—or at least, in this instance, the transnational. For, to an even greater degree than the previous three authors, Bradstreet positions herself as part of an ideologically specific community whose shared interests and discursive norms reach beyond the bounds of a single nation. In the seventeenth century, these kinds of extended discursive horizons were partly a result of the influence of a pervasive millenarianism that was, as Achsah Guibbory puts it, “transnational and transcultural” in nature (212). As we saw in chapter 2, writers of this period were encouraged by biblical narratives of conflict and change to see themselves as actors in religio-political transformations that occurred (or would occur) on an international scale. In Bradstreet’s case, these extended horizons were also partly a result of New England’s status as a recent colony. As Crystal Bartolovich argues, the history of colonialism in particular means “we should view [Fraser’s] ‘counterpublics’ transnationally, and not simply with respect to the ‘internal politics of particular states’”(17). New England’s print culture was particularly reliant on Europe: New Englanders took Old World books with them, imported them after they had settled in the New World, and even wrote for British audiences and published in London.4 The complex cultural and material dependence of New England on Old in the seventeenth century, coupled with its influence on the mother country in matters of godly reform, means that in the case of early New Englanders, we should be especially attentive to transnational lines of political affiliation and family relation.

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In Bradstreet’s case, these lines are clearly drawn: in The Tenth Muse, her elegy claims Sidney as a blood relation as well as a Protestant hero, as her father may have shared an ancestor with Sidney’s mother.5 By noting this common ancestry, the Sidney poem—the first of her elegies—uses family relations to imagine a ghostly coterie in which ties of blood and ideology ultimately mix. Evoking figures such as Sidney and Queen Elizabeth in Old England alongside her father in New England, Bradstreet recasts the kinds of private and familial relations that could create coteries as the basis of an oppositional public of militant pan-Protestants. Through these figures, Bradstreet’s work evokes the Elizabethan revivalism of the pre-Revolutionary Period, which reached one peak in heated discussions about the continental Thirty Years War, and another when English Parliamentarians sought to legitimate and lend narrative coherence to their actions against Charles I. Interweaving a public genealogy of neo-Elizabethan pan-Protestantism with private bloodlines, the poems of both Bradstreet and her male interlocutors figure her as a corrective addition to an Old World tradition of poetry and politics. In doing so, they position her at the center of a transnational counterpublic of renewed critique and expansionism—one that exceeds neat borders of geography and history. Bradstreet had a transatlantic upbringing: born and educated in Old England she moved with her family to New England in 1630 (E. White 108, 117). In England, both her husband and father worked for Presbyterian peers who were active in opposition to crown policies: Bradstreet’s father, Thomas Dudley, was steward to the earl of Lincoln, while her husband-to-be, Simon Bradstreet, became steward to the countess of Warwick (E. White 77), and tutor to the countess’s stepson, Robert Rich, the earl of Warwick (Morison, Founding 368). Once in New England, the Dudleys and Bradstreets joined the Congregational Church, the middle-way structure that rejected the corruption of the Church of England without fully separating from it. They also became part of the governing elite. Although they were not peers, in the foreshortened social hierarchy of the New World, the families occupied positions of wealth and importance. Dudley was Massachusetts governor four times, and deputy governor in between, with strong ties to the Winthrops, perhaps the most powerful family in Massachusetts (E. White 158). Simon Bradstreet was a permanent member of the Court of Assistants, traveling all over the colony settling disputes (157). In England, Bradstreet had been educated on Lincoln’s estate and then had moved to the busy center of Boston, Lincolnshire, with the rest of her family (73). In New England, her

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life was equally peripatetic: the Dudleys and Bradstreets first settled in Boston, Massachusetts, then moved to Ipswich—an economically influential commercial outpost—and finally Bradstreet and her husband settled as the most prominent family in the new frontier town of Andover in 1645–46 (E. White 113, 130–31, 221–22). Thus Bradstreet was part of an influential, busy, and mobile Anglo-Calvinist community that spanned the Atlantic. By evoking such a broad internationalist scope in her poetry, Bradstreet extends and complicates some of the assumptions informing my previous chapters. Like Katherine Philips, the changing power structures of the seventeenth century mean that Bradstreet’s early oppositional militancy becomes useful for a newly powerful group at her first publication, a move from counterpublic to dominant public that helps consolidate her fame. Whereas Philips’s profile rises with the return of the monarchy in 1660, however, Bradstreet’s fortunes match the climb to dominance in the early 1650s of the Parliamentary alliance she supports. She also, like Philips, associates with a loose group of ex-university male writers, as at Ipswich, where she did much of her early writing, she was surrounded by an educated and powerful group of men, some of whom, such as Nathaniel Ward and Samuel Woodbridge, would later be instrumental in publishing her book and would publish themselves (E. White 130–31). These men and her immediate family may well have read and commented on her verse, but this possible coterie as yet remains shadowy. For, with the exception of her father, Bradstreet—unlike Philips—does not mention any of her university-educated peers in the poetry included in The Tenth Muse.6 Instead, she evokes an even more shadowy coterie of ghosts as her main interlocutors, interweaving public and private affiliation to create an ambitious geopolitical vision. Indeed, as a writer that moved from Old England to New, who wrote in one country and published in another, and who engaged a geographically broad militant Protestantism, Bradstreet epitomizes the key role women could play in transnational public culture. Thus, though like Leigh and Wight she engages in an ongoing dialogue over the place of the True Church in prophetic history, Bradstreet situates both that church and her own poetic persona within a more clearly articulated vision of international militant reform. Bradstreet’s early published poetry is also more explicitly political than the writings of Leigh, Wight, and Philips—a fact, however, that has not stopped her being subjected to the same kinds of domestic critical readings that initially denied their public-political commitments. Indeed, as a number of recent critics have pointed out, the modern critical tradition has been unkind to Bradstreet’s earliest

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published verse, preferring to praise the later, more obviously gendered and “American” devotional lyrics and domestic writings, while denigrating the neo-Elizabethan and political verses privileged in her Tenth Muse.7 Thus, critics as diverse as Adrienne Rich and Samuel Eliot Morison (“Mistress Anne Bradstreet”) have argued that her early published verse is stilted and derivative. At the same time, Jane Donahue Eberwein and Patricia Caldwell (“Why Our First Poet”) have focused on Bradstreet’s development of a uniquely American voice in her New England context, Elizabeth Wade White going so far as to dub her “the founder of American literature” (ix). And if some scholars have domesticated Bradstreet through confining her to New England as an emerging national home, others have domesticated her writing by focusing on her gender. Critics as diverse as Caldwell, Ivy Schweitzer, and Timothy Sweet have all emphasized Bradstreet’s thematization of the plight of the woman writer in a male-dominated society. Though this work on gender is invaluable, it inadvertently helps divorce Bradstreet from both the British Revolutionary context that features so prominently in her early verse and from the neoElizabethan ideology on which she draws. It is this specific political context I aim to restore. This chapter extends the work of those few scholars who take Bradstreet’s role in transatlantic imperial exchange seriously, such as Phillip Round and Katherine Gillespie (“This Briny Ocean”), by focusing on her poems’ creation of an ideologically specific community in large part through the retroactive reconstruction of a series of militant Elizabethan heroes. I will chart the movement of Bradstreet’s poetry along the axis of the historical and the geographical, tracing—to borrow Paul Gilroy’s pun—both the roots and the routes of her transnationalist vision. To this end, I will address three distinct moments in the genesis of her poetry: first, the development of neo-Elizabethan panProtestantism in England during the Jacobean and early Caroline period when Bradstreet and her family still lived there; then, the moment of poetic production, as Bradstreet engaged this neoElizabethan literary scene in the late 1630s and early 1640s from her new home in New England; finally, the changed meaning of her poetry at its publication in Old England under a renewed Presbyterian–Congregationalist alliance.

The Ghostly Counterpublic Bradstreet’s transatlantic neo-Elizabethanism recalls an older tradition of seventeenth-century Elizabethan heroics, one that flourished most vehemently during the period of the Thirty Years War, when she was

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growing up in England. As Patrick Collinson argues, the idea of Protestantism as a foundational moment in the development of nationhood, stressed by historians such as William Haller, is complicated by militant Protestants’ eagerness to disperse nationality in an international primitive church that would dissolve boundaries of country (Birthpangs 8–20). Collinson argues that John Foxe in particular, still popular on both sides of the Atlantic in the seventeenth century, created a prophetic history that privileged England as a paradigm of the True Church at the same time that it evoked a mystical body of the elect scattered throughout the world (Birthpangs 14).8 Thus Protestant claims to national election—whether in Old England or New—were always complicated by a proto-imperial master narrative that would subsume the national within the international, a contradiction that, according to Collinson, intensified during the Thirty Years War, when militant Protestants urging English interventionism on the continent emphasized both England’s special role as a redeemer nation and the ties binding Protestants across Europe in opposition to internal, national corruptions (Birthpangs 17). During this period, this contradiction was mediated by the ghosts of Elizabethan heroes, who represented an elegiacally evoked transnational counterpublic while simultaneously touting England’s potentially exceptional role in European regeneration. Critics such as Wade White and Caldwell have often traced Bradstreet’s belated praise of Elizabeth back to her father’s upbringing during the Queen’s reign (208; 9). Thomas Dudley was briefly involved in the kind of European interventionism characterizing Elizabethan panProtestantism: his father was killed fighting Spain under the French King Henry IV in 1590, and in 1597 Dudley himself set off as a captain in the same cause (A. Jones 3, 19–20).9 However, Dudley was also politically active during the very period of the Thirty Years War that Collinson singles out as a high point of internationalist activism, when a lively trade in manuscript letters and newsbooks, soon banned by the Caroline government, kept Englishmen informed of Protestant successes and defeats on the continent. Richard Cust has argued that, from 1620, a series of political crises at home and abroad led to the flourishing of manuscript and printed news in England that strengthened ties between the local and the national level—and, we could add, the international (“News and Politics” 69). The Swedish Intelligencer, for example, banned in 1632 but still imported into England in 1633, not only kept Englishmen informed of the heroic exploits of the Swedish champion, Gustavus Adolphus, in Germany but was also later taken to New England, stretching an already pan-European news network into a transatlantic one.10

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Many of the people later connected with New England and Bradstreet’s publication were involved in the oppositional activism of this period. A petition started by Thomas Roe to bring about the union of Protestant churches all over Europe, for example, was ignored by the King and prelates, but signed by John Cotton, the Dudley’s preacher for much of the time in Old England and New, and Stephen Marshall, a moderate Presbyterian closely connected to the man who would later publish Bradstreet’s book (Bremer 44). Boston, Lincolnshire, the area in England where the Dudleys lived during this period, and from which many of the New Englanders emigrated, was a center of nonconformity and opposition to crown policy, focused on the charismatic figure of Cotton, particularly during the period of the Forced Loan, when Charles attempted to raise government funds without Parliamentary consent (Cust, Forced Loan 295). Even Bradstreet’s father was briefly involved in a scheme to send soldiers to Germany and his employer, the earl of Lincoln, was appointed colonel of a troop of men raised in an abortive attempt to aid the Palatinate (A. Jones 34–35). Thomas Dudley was most active, however, against the Forced Loan of 1627. As steward to a leading opposition peer, Dudley was part of what Cust has called “one of the most effective protests against Crown policy in the entire pre-Civil War period” (Forced Loan 171). While the earl of Lincoln was in the Tower for disrupting one of the loan commissioners’ meetings, Dudley continued to organize dissent in Lincolnshire (Forced Loan 171). He was accused of harboring one of the earl’s servants wanted for distributing an anti-government manuscript (E. White 85), and he may have helped Lincoln draft anti-government propaganda at this time (A. Jones 35). Thus, while Anne Bradstreet was still a teenager living with her family, her father was active in a domestic version of the very international news-mongering that so offended the Stuart monarchy. This news-mongering took a distinctive, elegiac form. A third part of The Swedish Intelligencer contained ten elegies for Gustavus Adolphus, and as Thomas Dudley owned at least one copy of this newsbook, this perhaps forms one inspiration for Bradstreet’s later elegies (¶1–¶¶¶4; Wright 39). However, a tradition of political critique couched in terms of revivalist recollections of dead Elizabethan heroes flourished during the 1620s when Bradstreet’s family and acquaintances were so embroiled in politics. Published from the continent, or in London with disguised continental place names, a series of prose pamphlets and poetic texts urged a pan-Protestant alliance, depending for much of their impact on the creation of a particular version of the Elizabethan past of which Thomas Dudley had been a part.11

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Opposition writers such as Thomas Scott and John Reynolds evoked the ghosts of Elizabethan heroes such as Raleigh, Essex, and Elizabeth herself to critique the pacifism of James and Charles, and urge war rather than marriage alliance as the cure to European ills.12 These ghosts form a heroic counter-genealogy to the Stuart line— almost literally in those pamphlets arguing against Prince Charles’s proposed marriage to the Spanish Infanta. The vehemently antiSpanish Sir Walter Rawleighs Ghost, published by Thomas Scott in 1626, for example, idealizes Raleigh as the embodiment of a neochivalric militancy that has all but died under the Stuarts: he is “A Noble, Famous Englishman and a renowned Soldier” (10). The Spanish agents to whom Raleigh’s apparition appears fear a resurgence of a widespread epic vocation in the British nation, presently kept dormant by corrupting idleness: Count Olivares cries out “What will the English do, every child will be a Hercules and kill a serpent in his cradle” (4). The neo-Elizabethan pamphlets thus create a golden age of heroism and expansive national endeavor to contrast with present sloth: the Spanish diplomat, Gondomar, confesses to Raleigh’s ghost that he used bribery to further corrupt a state already decayed through James’s twenty-two-year rule: “I looked into your Commonwealth and saw that two and twenty years ease had made her grow idle” (20). In presenting this golden age, these pamphlets eradicate the stickier relations between Elizabeth and her leading courtiers. They erase conflicts between the Queen and her more militant peers over English military involvement abroad and Elizabeth’s own reluctance to become embroiled in continental war to create an emotive national and transnational myth.13 In Scott’s 1624 Robert Earle of Essex His Ghost, even Essex’s failed 1601 rebellion against the Queen and his subsequent execution for treason are tactfully omitted from the pamphlet, which substitutes a united front of international heroism for national tensions, giving a potted and rose-tinted history of Essex’s military exploits in Spain, France, and Ireland (6–8), and attributing his fall to the machinations of court “enemies” (8). The pamphlet can then present the Elizabethan period in the crystallized perfection of a neo-Spenserian ideal, as Essex bemoans, “Oh, the flourishing state of your Fairy Land in the days of yore, whiles I lived on earth, under the government of that glorious Queen of eternal memory” (13). The political tensions of Elizabeth’s rule are smoothed into a single strand of anti-Catholic endeavor epitomized by the 1588 defeat of the Armada—an event retold with such frequency that it becomes a kind of ideological trope, a condensation of

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the whole neo-Elizabethan project, rather than the description of an actual historical event.14 The emphasis on heroism is thus placed firmly within a panEuropean perspective, so that neo-chivalric Englishness emerges only within a commitment to transnational politics and a critique of internal backsliding. Gerald Maclean has noted that courtly writers of the 1620s and 1630s habitually presented England in Virgilian terms as an isolated ideal (7). In contrast, the neo-Elizabethan pamphlets emphasize England’s role in an apocalyptic reformation that involves an international Protestant alliance against Catholic iniquity at home and abroad. Sir Walter Rawleighs Ghost, for example, presents a specifically transnational perspective for its myth of neo-chivalric Englishness. Ostensibly published in Utrecht, about occurrences in Madrid, it chronicles the very anti-Spanish Elizabethan ventures under Henry IV that involved Dudley, alongside the wars in Germany and Spanish ventures in the West Indies. Robert Earle of Essex His Ghost goes further, its chronicle of Essex’s service abroad for foreign powers concluding with a plea to its readership to perform similar feats of pan-Protestant activism: “go forth against the Romish wolves and Spanish Foxes” (17). The pamphlets contrast this nostalgically evoked international service with a litany of present pastimes and abuses at home. Vox Coeli, a very similar pamphlet by John Reynolds (often attributed to Scott), presents the ghost of Elizabeth who bemoans that the “Combats, Wars, and Victories” of her halcyon days have been replaced by the “Masques, Revels, and Carousing” of the Stuart reigns (36). In these pamphlets an elegiac historical narrative of the Elizabethan period mediates a series of geopolitical conflicts across England and the continent, a recursive structure in which neo-Elizabethanism becomes both a hermeneutic for understanding the long-term roots of European troubles in Spain’s ongoing imperial ambitions and a justification for interventionist action. The transnational scope of these pamphlets constructs a pan-Protestant oppositional community out of a specific version of the past. Through intertextual allusion, they weave the sense of a far-reaching counterpublic, reborn in the Elizabethan figures conjured up to critique present national problems. Robert Earle of Essex His Ghost, for example, mentions “a piteous petition to that glorious Queen, my now fellow saint Elizabeth, lately received from your Commons of England” (13). This is a reference to a series of three verses, circulated in manuscript during the 1620s, which present two mock petitions by the Commons, one to “the Blessed Elizabeth of Famous Memory” and one to “the great Chancellor of

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Heaven,” followed by Elizabeth’s reply.15 Anne Baynes Coiro has called these “Eliza” poems cynical, even satiric, in part because of their adulation of Elizabeth as a kind of Catholic saint or Virgin Mary (274). However, their mention in Robert Earle of Essex His Ghost, and the prevalence, during Elizabeth’s reign, of Marian iconography surrounding the Queen means that, at least in certain contexts, we may have to take the poems at face value as nostalgic evocations of a bygone age and bitter critiques of the Stuart rule as encouraging “upstart parasites” and devouring “Skipp-jacks, cavaliers” (Farmer 157). As these poems progress, Elizabeth’s saintly role modulates into a prophetic one, so that the Commons’s petition is followed by Elizabeth’s “prophetical conclusion” that predicts immanent national destruction. The iambic pentameter of Elizabeth’s reply builds to a series of esoteric biblical images: From forth the Northern plains is come at last The Lion roused from den, that shall lay waste Your Towers and cities: who stands up alas To stop the gap, where such his wrath should pass.

(Farmer 169)

This passage combines images of God’s vengeance from Ezekiel, where he promises to bring a King of Kings from the North to destroy Tyrus, with the prophesy in Numbers that the people will rise up like a lion, in order to present that dark and rebellious corner of England, the North, as the source of popular revolt and apocalyptic doom (Ezek. 26.7, 22.30; Num. 23.24). Elizabeth warns that Catholicism once again threatens England’s pristine borders: “Babylon’s proud whore [shall] once more defile / Albion’s White cliffs” (Farmer 169). She thus adopts the voice of the True Church, still struggling against the Antichrist, and Elizabeth’s position as a saintly Virgin Mary becomes that of Truth, the woman of Revelation, just as it does in posthumous portraits of the Queen in the 1620s.16 This prophetic voice emerges within, and inscribes the conditions of, a collective culture of opposition. As Coiro points out, this manuscript poem is included in a miscellany associated with the University of Cambridge, copied in a number of different hands, that engages the spread of oppositional news: poems satirizing Robert Cecil, commenting on the Essex divorce scandal, and attacking Charles’s favorite the duke of Buckingham appear alongside transcripts of the predivorce examinations and letters from Virginian colonists (Corio 272; Farmer 5–15). After the manuscript was filled, copies of Scott’s Vox Populi and Sir Walter Rawleighs Ghost were appended to it (Coiro 272),

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so that the manuscript not only mixes different hands and genres, but also blurs the line between print and manuscript, elite and popular circulation. In the “Eliza” poems themselves, this collectivity is inscribed as the voice of the Commons. With its collective plaint and dialogic format, the verses both register and participate in counterpublic debate and critique. They thus create a poetic version of the militancy of Scott that wakes the Elizabethan dead in order to condense national history into a prophetic narrative of revivalist glory. Bradstreet, therefore, grew up in an England where, in both her family and the larger community, oppositional rhetoric in poetry and prose was haunted by a specific historiographical project. This project deployed a nostalgic pan-Protestantism to critique the Stuarts and imagine a brave new world of heroic action just over the horizon. The energy and clout of this oppositional vision, which could easily be pitched against creeping domestic Catholicism and internal religious corruptions, was long-lived. Early in the Civil Wars, at a time when Bradstreet was most productive, the revivalism of the earlier seventeenth century was again revived in Old England. In 1642, on the eve of the First Civil War, the “Eliza” poems were published with some changes as The Humble Petition, and The Earle of Essex’s Ghost contains “A Post-Script to a Second Part,” also printed in 1642. In addition, a number of Elizabeth’s speeches were printed during this period, sometimes anonymously, and the Presbyterian preachers Cornelius Burgess and Stephen Marshall both opened the Long Parliament with nostalgic recollections of Elizabeth’s reign.17 These publications and allusions historicized the British Civil Wars as the culmination of a long-term struggle begun after Elizabeth’s death, and reiterated Gloriana’s glory days to mobilize militant Protestant feeling against the feared popery of Charles I. Recalling the already belated Elizabethan militancy of the early Stuart reigns, the Civil War pamphlets are déjà vu all over again: a politically strategic reconstruction of a politically strategic reconstruction—and one that became influential as a paradigm for understanding the need for ongoing poetic militancy and war for at least one New England poet.

Eliza’s Babes After the great migration, as Francis Bremer, Philip Gura, and David Cressy have shown, the circuit of news begun in the continental Thirty Years War continued across the Atlantic, helped by both family and economic connections between Old and New England. Cressy has estimated that it took approximately two months for news to

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reach New England, although winter weather, which hampered the passage of ships to and from England, could slow down the steady trickle of information (237). Travel narratives and New World descriptions, such as William Wood’s New England’s Prospect, circulated in England, while passengers to New England brought with them letters, political gossip, and books—some of them the very corantos that described events in the Palatinate and, later, the Civil Wars. Scott’s Vox Regis made it over to New England, along with works from the 1620s and 1630s by William Prynne, George Wither, and Henry Burton. The Winthrops, Dudleys, and other members of the governing elite in particular kept up with transatlantic developments, and Dudley was personally involved in both the epistolary and printed relations between Old England and New: at least one transatlantic letter of his survives, and he received printed news at Boston from Herbert Pelham, sharing it with other settlers (Dudley 36–47; Cressy 245).18 Dudley’s connection to the international news trade means that the neo-Elizabethanism of prewar England was readily available to Bradstreet. It is no surprise therefore that much of her early poetry echoes the concerns and even the language of the earlier pamphlets in a new historical and geographical context. In her “Quarternions,” a series of four long poems on the four elements, humors, ages, and seasons set at the front of The Tenth Muse and probably written between 1643 and 1646, she recalls both the bygone militancy of the British exploits abroad under Elizabeth and the corrupting sloth of the Cavaliers so denigrated in the 1620s “Eliza” poems. In Bradstreet’s poem on the four ages of man, the section on “Youth” characterizes wasteful young age as a “British, brutish Cavalier,” who plays at a litany of pastimes associated with Stuart rule in earlier critiques: “Cards, Dice, and Oaths, concomitant, I love; / To masques, to Plays, to Taverns still I move” (48). This Cavalier decadence is contrasted not with New England promise but with the very Old England past created in Scott’s pamphlets and the “Eliza” manuscript. Near the end of Bradstreet’s poem on the four ages, “Old Age,” the chronicle of Elizabethan militancy abroad constantly reiterated in the neo-Elizabethan pamphlets reappears alongside nostalgic praise for that “Celestial She” (Elizabeth, here in her Astrean mode), and lamentations over the fall of the “poor Palatinate” (53). The allegorical figures of a Renaissance set-piece on the ages of man thus become vehicles for neo-Elizabethan political critique and for a digressive mini-history of Britain that culminates in commentary on the events leading up to the Civil Wars.

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More important than these piecemeal allusions, however, is Bradstreet’s attempt to create a transatlantic version of the neoElizabethan counterpublic based in an imagined coterie of interlocutors who are, for the most part, ghosts. Evoking the public and private figures of Sidney, du Bartas, Elizabeth, and her own father as her poetic ancestors, Bradstreet follows in the footsteps of Scott and Reynolds. Though she does not write polemical prose, her poetry’s revival of pan-Protestant poetry and heroism both opposes Stuart culture and politics and imagines a new starring role for New England in prophetic history. Her imagined coterie begins with the figure of Sidney, for her 1638 elegy to him not only comes before the other elegies in the published book but was written first. In fact, Bradstreet dates its composition to a time of mounting crisis in Old England and New. The poem was written on the eve of Charles I’s abortive war with Scotland (precipitated by his attempt to impose the English Prayer Book there)—news of which was greeted with days of fast and thanksgiving in Massachusetts (Bremer 108). Reports of the Caroline persecution of Puritan nonconformists such as Burton, Bastwick, and Prynne reached the New England governors in 1637.19 Archbishop Laud, as chairman of the new Commission for Foreign Plantations, even attempted to slow the exodus of nonconformists to New England in the 1630s, and in 1638 there were plans to revoke the Massachusetts Bay patent, which gave Massachusetts relative religious and political independence from the mother country (Cressy 134–39; Hill, Century 32). In contrast to these encroachments by a seemingly ever more papist English government, Bradstreet lauds Sidney as an anti-Catholic hero and the epitome of pan-Protestant honor, largely by emphasizing the very military exploits abroad celebrated in the 1620s pamphlets and poems. Sidney is firmly situated within the Elizabethan golden age, as part of Britain’s “Halcyon days”; Bradstreet’s title proudly recalls his death in Zutphen, the Netherlands, in 1586 (191), where he was killed fighting in the very kind of pan-Protestant, anti-Catholic alliance later evoked in the pamphlets of the 1620s. Echoing an elegy for Sidney by Sir Walter Raleigh, she even presents him as a type of Scipio, the republican military commander who defeated Hannibal in Spain and then Africa, thereby consolidating Sidney’s position as potentially both an anti-monarchical soldier and a proto-imperial force: “Where is that envious tongue, but can afford / of this our noble Scipio some good word?” (193).20 Through this praise of Sidney as the epitome of anti-Catholic heroism, Bradstreet begins to present Old England radicalism and

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New England experiment as linked forms of pan-Protestant militancy. However, this ideological link is complicated by Bradstreet’s gendered and geographical distance from the figure she eulogizes. In an anxious attempt to justify a woman writing about such a heroic figure, for example, Bradstreet puts herself and her subject through a series of gender reversals in which she acts the man’s part: she is Phaeton in her overweening poetic ambition, and plays Vulcan to his Venus in her inability to do his memory justice (194).21 Her national claim on Sidney is similarly vexed: she both embraces and rejects the British identity she emphasizes in Sidney through the ambivalent use of pronouns: he is both “an Honor to our British Land” and, in a direct address to the poet, beloved by “thy country” (191, 192; my italics).22 The poem resolves these more problematic affiliations by privileging the tenuous ties that may have joined them as members of the extended family of Dudleys: “Let then, none disallow of these my strains, / Which have the self-same blood yet in my veins” (192). The private, family connection supersedes anxious relations of gender and geography to create a pan-Protestant, poetic genealogy of which Bradstreet is the heir: as Gillespie argues, Bradstreet casts herself as “the latest legitimate daughter of the Sidney tradition” (“This Briny Ocean” 103). Private lines of blood, that is, bolster and flesh out public ties of pan-Protestantism, underwriting and blurring into the ideological link she begins to forge between them. Through these complex lines of public and private affiliation, Bradstreet creates Sidney as a key interlocutor for her writing despite their geographic and historical separation. Much of the poem is direct address: “In all records, thy Name I ever see, / Put with an Epithet of dignity” (192). Like the neo-Elizabethan pamphlets of the 1630s, Bradstreet’s apostrophe to Sidney wakes the dead to present the British poet as not only a precursor but also one of her contemporaries. That other New Englanders interpreted their position in equally transnational terms is evinced by a day of Thanksgiving held the same year as the Sidney elegy, in which Massachusetts Bay conflated events at home and in Europe to give thanks for “subduing the Pequots,” for the “success” of the church trial of Hutchinson that culminated in her banishment, and for “good news from Germany,” still embroiled in the Thirty Years War (qtd. in A. Jones 235–36). In Bradstreet, the emphasis on the fate of international Protestantism is filtered through a revival of the neo-Elizabethanism of the 1620s. Blurring the lines between New England and Old, past and present, private affiliation and public commitment, her elegy celebrates Sidney as kin and companion to her own emergent pan-Protestant poetics.

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Sidney’s militant masculinity, however, only emerges through and beyond the threat of his effeminating, potentially shameful, courtly writing. As a reformer of this courtly side of Sidney, Bradstreet revives Sidney, and indeed a whole Sidneian poetic tradition, in order to supersede them. She treats the Arcadia with a good deal of ambivalence, for example, first arguing that the romance condenses the “nine-fold wit” of the muses and then disavowing this praise to call it shameful: “I praise thee not for this, it is unfit, / This was thy shame, O miracle of wit” (192). Bradstreet’s distrust of Sidney’s romance is not surprising: militant Protestants such as the English William Prynne specifically attacked “Arcadiaes and fained Histories” as part of the corrupting influence of Caroline degeneracy (Histrio-mastix 913).23 Prynne’s 1633 attack came in large part because, as Annabel Patterson has argued, during the 1630s when Bradstreet’s poem was written, the Arcadia was revived by the Caroline government in an act of “cultural revisionism” that assimilated Sidneian romance into the politics of peace-time England (171). Sidney’s newfound popularity with the Caroline court makes Bradstreet equally ambivalent about his other courtly erotic writings. Her elegy presents the heroine of Sidney’s famous sonnet sequence, Stella, as threatening to reverse Sidney’s ability to “compact” the “nine-fold wit” of the muses by constricting the expansive Sidney himself. Bradstreet bemoans, “O Princely Philip . . . / How could that Stella so confine thy will?” (192, 194). Sidney is only rescued from this effeminating presence by his comparison to a series of martial heroes, such as Mars and Hercules, who were themselves enslaved to women, so that his love poetry can be wittily glossed as just one episode in a history of epic masculine endeavor: “But Omphala, set Hercules to spin, / And Mars himself was ta’en by Venus gin” (194). This effort to recuperate the more troubling aspects of the Sidneian inheritance to a narrative of militant Protestantism continues throughout the poem. In lauding Sidney, Bradstreet puts herself in good poetic company, mentioning both the French du Bartas and his English translator, Joshua Sylvester, as writers equally in awe of the poet (193, 194). Her allusions to these men help her bridge the gap between the wife and daughter of respected officials in a busy New World town and an Old World tradition of pan-Protestant poetics. However, her elegy also corrects past elegiac focus on the courtly, erotic aspects of Sidney’s poetry to emphasize the very heroics that link him to the neo-Elizabethan project of transnational militancy. As part of this correction, Bradstreet presents good and bad readers of the Sidney myth. Sidney’s own rhetoric is as potentially effeminating

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as Stella: recapitulating the terms of sonnets, which habitually present the female beloved as a witchily seductive trap, Bradstreet likens his poetry to a Venus-like potential snare for the unwary: “Who knows the Spells that in thy Rhetoric lurks? / But some infatuate fools soon caught therein, / Found Cupid’s Dam, had never such a Gin” (192). In contrast to these foolish readers, caught in the erotic entanglements of his love poetry, Bradstreet offers the historical figure of Sidney the hero and his military exploits under Elizabeth: O brave Achilles, I wish some Homer would Engrave on Marble in characters of Gold What famous feats thou didst, on Flanders coast Of which, this day, fair Belgia doth boast. O Zutphen, Zutphen, that most fatal City Made famous by thy fall, much more’s the pity. (193)

Here, Bradstreet presents Sidney—one of the most written about figures of the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries—as the site of poetic lack: no verse monument exists to celebrate his feats in the cause of international Protestantism. Her poem begins by celebrating him as the perfect combination of arms and arts, but it increasingly moves away from the latter to praise the former. Given the breadth of writing existing at this time on Sidney as both soldier and poet, some of which Bradstreet echoes, her creation of this poetic gap seems like an ideologically and poetically astute ploy: cataloguing those exploits she claims have been relegated to silence, she can work to fulfill the very desire she creates.24 In doing so, Bradstreet casts herself as a corrective extension to a pan-Protestant public culture Sidney epitomizes, positioning herself not just as Sidney’s daughter, but as the heir to an expansive tradition of counterpublic poetry badly in need of revival and reformation. Both Sweet and Schweitzer read the poem as a parable of the woman writer’s difficulty fitting herself into a male literary tradition, and Bradstreet certainly thematizes her ambivalent role as a female poet in her works. However, she also dramatizes desire to reform the Sidneian elegy to fit a militant Protestant agenda. Bradstreet moves from the humilitas topos, where she characterizes her poetic presumption as “error,” to the witty claim toward the end of her poem that the only muse that will own Bradstreet as a poet is “Errata”—the name for the printer’s corrections that appeared at the front or back of early modern books (195). Bradstreet’s muse therefore functions as both an erring/ errant addition to the list of muses she mentions at the start of the

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poem in relation to Sidney’s compacting wit, and a corrective to their focus on his purely literary talents.25 More specifically, Errata functions as a revision of the one muse most often associated with the very erotic poetry for which Sidney was famous, and which she omits from her list of muses celebrating Sidney: Erato. 26 By adding a new muse, Errata, to the traditional nine, Bradstreet may even pre-figure the tenth muse evoked in the title of her later printed book, The Tenth Muse, Lately Sprung Out of America. As such, Errata/Bradstreet becomes a supplementary figure: a New England addition that points out a poetic lack, filling the gap Bradstreet created in the Sidneian elegiac tradition. Bradstreet humbly offers herself as a New World reformer of Old World courtly love poetry into pan-Protestant poetic, and in doing so positions herself at the forefront of the very counterpublic of neo-Elizabethan poetry she revives for a new historical and geographic context. The elegies to du Bartas and Queen Elizabeth, written as the situation in Old England worsened and war approached, add these figures to the coterie of ghostly, neo-Elizabethan Protestants. As both Elizabeth and du Bartas are mentioned in the elegy to Sidney, these later poems would seem to have grown out of her meditation on this distant family member who was also the epitome of an expansive Protestant poetics. The elegy to du Bartas is dated 1641 in the published version and the elegy to Elizabeth is dated 1643, but they both engage in nostalgic reinscriptions of Elizabethan heroes as interlocutors for the New England poet. By 1641, the conflict between the King and Parliament was already known in New England, as fishing vessels in the winter of 1640 brought news of the Scots invasion and consequent hope for a reformation in the Church of England (Bremer 97). Bradstreet’s husband and father had ties to Presbyterian peers who fought for Parliament in the First Civil War: Dudley’s employer, the earl of Lincoln, sided with Parliament in 1642, and Simon Bradstreet’s one-time student, Robert Rich, was both a leading investor in the colonies and another Parliamentary supporter (Cust, Forced Loan 334; E. White 77). Congregational leaders expressed sympathy with Parliament’s plight in the months leading up to the outbreak of hostilities. In particular, they supported their Independent brethren and the anti-Episcopal Presbyterian alliance in a series of sermons and fasts for the Parliamentary cause, beginning in September 1641 with a day of thanksgiving for what Winthrop characterized as “the good success of the parliament in England” (qtd. in Bremer 101). Bradstreet’s poem does not mention these specific events; nevertheless, it does offer a vision of an expansive reformist culture she

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renews in the New World. Du Bartas was a French Huguenot, like Sidney he was renowned as both a poet and a soldier, and he served, like Dudley, as a member of Henry IV’s forces on the continent (Snyder 1.1; Holmes 11–12). In particular, he gained a reputation for recuperating an epic classical tradition for divine purposes, elevating the genre in the eyes of Protestants through both his evocation of Urania, the muse of astrology, as a Christian muse, and his focus on biblical topics. His position as a militant Protestant was helped in France by the publication of the poem to Urania alongside his first epic, Judith, read by contemporaries as a justification of tyrannicide, shortly after the Saint Bartholomew Day Massacre (Holmes 13). In England, he became famous for his longest project The Divine Weeks and Works, an encyclopedic verse account of Creation that mixed theology, natural philosophy, and moralizing, which Bradstreet seems to have known through the seventeenth-century English translation by Sylvester.27 Du Bartas’s reputation as embodying the divine poetry Sidney does not quite grasp makes Bradstreet’s relation to du Bartas’s Christianized epic less ambivalent than her relation to Sidney’s romance and sonnet cycle. However, her unqualified veneration of du Bartas’s “Saint-like mind in grave Divinity” and “sacred works” is couched in the same errant and circuitous terms as her veneration of Sidney (197, 198), this time structured around a series of paradoxes that again mediate a relation between New World female poet and neo-Elizabethan interlocutor. Like the poem to Sidney, the elegy to du Bartas is an apostrophe to the dead: “Amongst the happy wits this Age hath shown, / Great, dear, sweet Bartas, thou are matchless known” (196). This elegy thus again collapses time to make du Bartas both a precursor and an interlocutor, yet in images that take the humilitas topos to a paradoxical extreme. Bradstreet frames her relation to du Bartas’s poetry as an exercise in the sublime that mimics his elevated style: Oh pregnant brain, Oh comprehension vast: Thy haughty style, and rapt wit sublime, All ages wondering at, shall never climb. Thy sacred works are not for imitation But monuments for future admiration. (198)

Bradstreet’s poem is both a rapt response to his abilities and an effort to exceed her own limits by writing about du Bartas’s work. Bradstreet couches her relation to the French poet in a series of grotesque images that draw on conventional terms of humility and praise, but takes them

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to the limit through repetition and amplification. Edmund Spenser’s modest claim in The Ruines of Time, for example, that, in the face of Mary Sidney’s elegy to her brother Philip, he is “Robbed of sense, and ravished with joy” (The Poetical Works 137), in Bradstreet’s hands becomes a series of conceits of almost baroque masochism. She describes “my ravished eyes and heart” (196), and later adds: A thousand thousand times my senseless Senses, Moveless, stand charmed by thy sweet influences, More senseless than the Stones to Amphion’s Lute, Mine eyes are sightless, and my tongue is mute. (197)

Unlike Katherine Philips’s decorous allusions to the Amphion myth, these images, in which Bradstreet articulates with some flair her inability to speak, evoke an exaggerated paradox that stresses not harmony but the New England woman poet’s sublime effort to situate herself within an expansive tradition of praise. In doing so, she adds du Bartas to the ghostly coterie that enables her militant poetry, depicting him, like Sidney, as the primary producer of the transnational pan-Protestant poetry she emulates. For in Bradstreet, du Bartas is not only more famous than any other French hero, including Henry IV, but he has also earned a global reputation: “Thy fame is spread as far, I dare be bold, / In all the Zones, the temperate, hot and cold” (198). The literal militancy of Sidney is sublimated into a form of epic vocation in Bradstreet’s praise of du Bartas, to render him a purely poetic hero: “Immortal bays, all men to thee allows / Who in thy triumphs (never won by wrongs) / Leadst millions chained by eyes, by ears, by tongues” (198). This expansive image of du Bartas leading a world chained to his words echoes a passage from Sylvester’s translation of Divine Weeks, which having described the fall of a common language in Babel, evokes a dream vision in which the figure of Eloquence binds together a diverse, multilingual list of poets and rhetoricians drawn from Hebrew, Greek, Italian, French, German, English, and even Spanish sources into a reformed and renewed linguistic community:28 . . . from his golden tongue Grow thousand chains, which all the mead along Draw worlds of hearers with alluring Art, Bound fast by the ears, but faster by the heart. (Sylvester 1: 436)

Thus, despite her assurance that du Bartas’s poetry is not for imitation, Bradstreet writes herself into his company in part through mimicry of

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his elevated internationalist vision and its far-reaching effects. The above passage from Divine Weeks goes on to imagine a monument to the rebirth of language from biblical to Elizabethan times, ending in Sylvester’s translation with homage to both Sidney and Elizabeth as two pillars of the English language. In her reiteration of this prophetic passage, Bradstreet depicts du Bartas as the source of a poetic revival, the prime mover in an anonymous and extended chain of readers and writers. If du Bartas as interlocutor is a personal inspiration for Bradstreet, therefore, he is also a public figurehead for a potentially global audience. He is the ultimate reformed poet, the sublime harmonizing force of a transnational counterpublic that, through homage and mimicry, Bradstreet revives and extends in the New World. The elegy to Elizabeth, which followed two years after this, continues this evocation of a ghostly coterie of neo-Elizabethans, taking praise of the dead Queen to the prophetic level of the “Eliza” manuscript. By 1643, the First Civil War was in full swing in England, and from 1642 onward the New England pulpits produced what Bremer has characterized as “a swelling barrage of prayer against the Royalist forces” (106). A fast day was held in June 1643, and that May the Massachusetts magistrates struck the King’s name from the oath of allegiance (Cressy 243; Bremer 123). Pledging the patriotic allegiance of her “loyal brain” to a pre-Stuart ideal of monarchy in the elegy to Elizabeth, Bradstreet presents the old Queen as the long-dead epitome of regal power, whose own glory ultimately negates the claims of all previous and following rulers: “From all the Kings on earth she won the prize” (200). She then goes on to characterize the Queen as the epitome of the internationalist militancy celebrated in Sidney, who proves her worth through the litany of exploits abroad evoked by Scott and the like. In homage to the revivalism of the 1620s, the Armada makes its obligatory appearance, “She racked, she sacked, she sunk his Armadoe,” as do exaggerated versions of Elizabethan military aid to Henry IV and the Low Countries: “She frankly helped Franks (brave) distressed King, / The States united now her fame do sing” (201). Indeed, Elizabeth is presented as condensing the heroic countergenealogy evoked in Scott’s pamphlets against the Stuarts, so that New World adventures and anti-Spanish war are combined under the Queen’s expert guidance, to conjure up a short list of those heroes who were left out of Bradstreet’s previous two elegies: Her Drake came laded home with Spanish gold, Her Essex took Cades, their Herculean hold

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But time would fail me, so my wit would to, To tell of half she did, or she could do. (201–02)

As in Robert Earle of Essex His Ghost, this counter-genealogy exists only through the careful omission of internal problems like the Essex rebellion, which exert their own pressure on Bradstreet’s narrative of epic Elizabethan endeavor, so that at the mention of Essex, Bradstreet must quickly cut herself short as if under the pressure of what must be left unsaid. What remains after this historical editing is the same neoSpenserian celebration of “our dread Virago” and her vehemently anti-Catholic rule depicted in the 1620s pamphlets (201). If Bradstreet humbly presents herself unable fully to account for Elizabeth’s history, as in the elegy to Sidney she again puts herself in good poetic company. A perfect combination of the sublime and the heroic, Elizabeth has both the god-like reach of du Bartas and the soldiering instincts of Sidney in Bradstreet’s poem. Elizabeth “raps [enraptures] every human sense” and outdoes all literary efforts to contain her heroic action: No Phoenix, Pen, nor Spenser’s Poetry No Speed’s, nor Camden’s learned History Eliza’s works, wars, praise can e’re compact, The World’s the Theater where she did act. (200)

Elizabeth is thus positioned beyond the reach of the literary giants Bradstreet evokes in her name, and Bradstreet hints at her own militant project and literary ambition by pitching herself in competition with poets such as Spenser and historians such as Camden. Bradstreet’s membership in this broader literary community is again forged through an errant and circuitous line of affiliation, this time mediated through a belatedness that is thematized in the poem as a collective condition: “Thousands bring off’rings, (though out of date) / Thy world of honors to accumulate” (200). In this way, Bradstreet’s membership in a revival of a revival is written into the poem: the elegy evokes a transatlantic community of Elizabethan celebrants that is self-consciously anachronistic. The elegy inscribes Bradstreet in a double anachronism, though, as it views Elizabeth through the twin lenses of nostalgia and prophecy, the golden age history of the beginning of the poem modulating into hopeful futurity by the end. As in the “Eliza” manuscript, Bradstreet starts by recollecting the Elizabethan assimilation of Marian iconography as a “fleshly deity” (200). Toward the end of the elegy, however,

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Elizabeth pre-figures an apocalyptic reversal and renewal of the presently corrupt political order: Full fraught with honor, riches, and with days: She set, she set, like Titan in his rays, No more shall rise or set such glorious Sun, Until the heavens great revolution; If then new things, their old form must retain, Eliza shall rule Albion once again. (203)

As Ivy Schweitzer has argued, “implicit in this comparison, and in the imagery of setting and rising, is the image of the self-creating phoenix, the fertilizing sun, and Christ, the glorious son of God” (306). If the “Eliza” manuscript ends on a note that prophesies apocalyptic doom, Bradstreet’s elegy to Elizabeth, written as Parliament set its own agenda to renew Britain’s political structure through war, concludes with a prophetic vision that promises Revelatory rejuvenation. The “Old Age” section of Bradstreet’s “Quarternions,” begun at about this time, ends its catalogue of Elizabethan virtues with an attack on the Stuarts’ notorious favorites and their fall, followed by a hopeful depiction of the Civil Wars as the foundation of future reformation: “I’ve seen it [England] shaken, rent, and soaked in blood, / But out of troubles, ye may see much good” (54). In the elegy to Elizabeth, this vision of reformation is centered on the figure of the Queen, who becomes an embodiment of a new/old anti-Stuart order. With this circular depiction of revolution-as-political-return, Bradstreet is simultaneously both belated and precocious, a neo-Elizabethan poet who supplements the out-of-date community venerating the Queen in order to chronicle Elizabeth’s central role in Old England’s rebirth.29 As the ghostly coterie is fleshed out with figures of increasing public importance, Bradstreet appropriates an expansionist political agenda for a vision of national and international revolutionary renewal. As in the poems to Sidney and du Bartas, the poem to Elizabeth begins as direct address: Bradstreet starts with a proem to the Queen, perhaps recalling the proems prefacing Spenser’s Faerie Queene, addressed to his “Goddess” and “dearest dread” (Spenser, Faerie Queene 1.4). In Bradstreet’s context, however, this direct address is shorn of hope for regal patronage. Instead, for Bradstreet, Elizabeth is a Britomart figure, a female version of the epic militancy celebrated in du Bartas and Sidney, and she therefore focuses on her regal power and military leadership in addition to her learning: “She hath wiped off th’aspersion of her Sex, / That women wisdom lack to play the

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Rex” (200). Pitching herself in a witty battle of the sexes with “Masculines,” Bradstreet uses Elizabeth in a defense of women, depicting the Queen as the rule rather than the exception when it comes to women’s potential: “Nay Masculines, you have thus taxed us long, / But she, though dead, will vindicate our wrong” (203). She thus counters a Spenserian tradition that—with some exceptions— uses gender binaries to polarize religio-political differences by depicting male neo-chivalric Protestant heroes tempted into idle luxury by female courtly figures.30 While this gendered tradition inflects some of Bradstreet’s discussion of Sidney and Stella, the elegy to Elizabeth assimilates a female figure into the ideology of militant pan-Protestantism. In this way, Bradstreet carves a space for a female hero, while simultaneously evoking the Queen as another precursor and ghostly companion to the author’s renewed pan-Protestant project. Bradstreet’s apostrophe to a female figure with whom she can identify, coupled with the prophetic conclusion, turns Elizabeth into another strand of the private and public genealogies she weaves into a renewed panProtestant poetics. Like the republished neo-Elizabethan pamphlets of the 1640s, Bradstreet’s elegies are also a reconstruction of a reconstruction, a New England version of an already belated Old England nostalgia for an Elizabethan age that never was. In all three poems, this elegiac narrative mediates gender difference and geographical distance, recasting New England as home for militant revivalism. By affiliating herself with a circle of ghosts, Bradstreet imagines her role in a transnational counterpublic that transforms a heroic pan-Protestant past into an equally heroic future. The only other figure Bradstreet directly addresses in her early published poetry is her father, who is the subject of a long dedicatory poem, written at around the same time as the elegy to Elizabeth and prefacing the “Quarternions” in the published version.31 This dedicatory poem to her “most Honored Father” fills out the neoElizabethan coterie with a living member from Bradstreet’s New England family, who had his own debt to Old World politics and poetry (1). Bradstreet momentarily erases the ghosts of Sidney, du Bartas, and the other Elizabethans conjured up in the elegies, and casts herself in direct competition with Thomas Dudley as the creator of poetry of transnational scope. She alludes to a lost poem by Dudley, which the 1650 edition of Bradstreet’s poetry glosses as a verse “on the four parts of the world” (1). Bradstreet’s dedication is a form of competitive homage, in which her self-deprecating veneration teeters repeatedly on the verge of boastful out-doing. Describing

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the reach of Dudley’s four poems and her own, longer “Quarternions,” she writes: I bring my four; and four, now meanly clad, To do their homage unto yours most glad, Who for their age, their worth, their quality, Might seem of yours to claim precedency; But by my humble hand thus rudely penned They are your bounden handmaids to attend.

(1)

Here Bradstreet is both a serving maid and/or biblical prophet faithfully reproducing Dudley’s words, and a competitor whose potential multiplication of Dudley’s four into the perfect square of sixteen threatens to give Bradstreet the “precedence” over her father. Either way, the expansive nature of his poetry is expanded further in his daughter’s imitative and ambitious project, and Dudley joins the coterie of neo-Elizabethans who are the main companions for Bradstreet’s poetry. Indeed, having dropped her neo-Elizabethan references at the start of the dedication, Bradstreet returns to them at the end, claiming, “Something of all (though mean) I did intend, / But feared you’d judge, one Bartas was my friend, / I honor him but dare not wear his wealth” (2). The daughter’s mimicry of the father, which she fears is also an imitation of du Bartas, suggests that Dudley himself was involved in the neo-Elizabethan project of recursively recreating these pan-Protestant heroes. This reference to the subject of one of her elegies presents a congruence between French and colonial poets, who are part of a single tradition of poetry stretching across the Atlantic, and who both offer models for Bradstreet’s own transnational vision. As the poem to Dudley comes at the start of The Tenth Muse, long before the elegies, the book privileges Bradstreet’s private patrilineal inheritance of poetic talent in her transplanted father. However, the fact that the poem was written at around the same time as (or even a little after) the poems to the English figures of Sidney and the others, suggests that Bradstreet saw New World and Old, public and private, as mutually reinforcing elements in a circle of poetic and political affiliation that she could draw on and draw out in her own pan-Protestant poetry. Read together, these poems blur the lines between familial and political affiliation, blood and ideology, to offer the (over-determined) heir of revived and revised pan-Protestantism a privileged place at the head of a transnational counterpublic.

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Old England Becoming New Like Philips, Bradstreet constructs a poetic community for herself in large part out of elegy and commendation. Yet whereas Philips’s poetry converts public issues into the lyric intensity of personal affiliation, Bradstreet spins her identification with an imagined neoElizabethan coterie into a celebration of a thriving oppositional culture that spans the Atlantic. The transnational counterpublic Bradstreet evokes both legitimates her own poetry and catalogues a pan-Protestant vision of the past and future that originates in, but does not stop at, Old England and New. The militancy and epic reach of this vision are most clearly articulated in one of Bradstreet’s other poems of this same period, in which the neo-Elizabethan personae of the elegies are replaced by personifications. At around the same time Bradstreet was working on her elegy to Elizabeth and her dedication to her father, she also wrote “A Dialogue between Old England and New,” which Wade White speculates was probably finished in the spring of 1643 (253). In “A Dialogue” the public heroes of the elegies are replaced by an allegory which is, as both White and Gillespie have pointed out, maternal in nature (159; “This Briny Ocean” 110–12). Mother “Old England” asks for sympathy and help from daughter “New England” on the newly embarked-upon British Civil Wars, and is given extensive advice. Like Dorothy Leigh, therefore, Bradstreet replaces literal motherhood with figural maternity, although this time the political force of the figure reaches all the way from England to the Massachusetts Bay Colony. In this way, Bradstreet constructs a genealogy of the two nations, embodied as an expansive matrilineal connection, to complement her poetic genealogies of the relations between Old World and New, adding two more figures to her expanding circle of pan-Protestants. For the matrilineal relation is also a regal one: New England addresses her mother as “fairest Queen, and best,” suggesting that Old England itself has been transformed into a neo-Elizabethan trope (180). As such, Old England promises the very rebirth delineated at the end of the elegy on Elizabeth, but this time one clearly projected onto a transnational context and bloody historical narrative. The history recounted in “A Dialogue” is so far from the golden age ideal of the elegies as to be its nightmarish flip-side. In opposition to the Caroline poetic myth of prewar England as a realm of peace and plenty, and even to her own emphasis on an Elizabethan idyll, Bradstreet here depicts a kingdom of violable borders and internal divisions that includes the pre-Tudor warfare famous from Shakespeare’s

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first tetralogy. This long-term history of violence concludes with a litany of sins from the Stuart rule and then righteous Parliamentary struggle. The sins include crypto-Catholic Stuart abuses at home— such as preferment of “stinking, stigmatizing, Romish Clerks” and persecution of “Prophets” such as Burton, Bastwick, and Prynne (184)—and non-interventionism abroad. Old England admits: I saw sad Germany’s dismantled walls. I saw her people famished, Nobles slain Her fruitful land, a barren heath remain . . . I saw strong Rochelle yielding to her foe, Thousands of starved Christians there also. I saw poor Ireland bleeding out her last, Such cruelty as all reports have past. My heart, obdurate, stood not yet aghast. (185)

The interventionist heroics of Bradstreet’s elegies stand in contrast to this ad-hoc confessional, in which Old England watches Catholic threats abroad with perfect equanimity, shirking her duty as the bearer of international Protestantism. One of the main charges leveled at Charles I during the British Civil Wars was that he had failed to come to the aid of Protestants in Ireland (Wilding 119); here that failure is presented as just one episode in a long history of Stuart pacifism and withdrawal from the pan-Protestant scene. As “A Dialogue” was probably written near the start of the First Civil War, Bradstreet does not openly criticize Charles I, but she does attack royal policies and is clear about her Parliamentary allegiances, calling Parliament Old England’s “better part” and claiming, “Had they not held law fast, all had been gone” (186). As in the “Old Age” section of the “Quarternions,” she celebrates the fall of powerful Stuart favorites under righteous Parliamentary wrath: “They took high Strafford lower by the head, / And to their Laud be’t spoke, they held i’th Tower, / All England’s Metropolitan that hour” (186). Thus, in contrast to Philips, Bradstreet builds her poetry directly out of the conflicts of the contemporary English scene, incorporating the violence of recent history into her poetry through a series of wittily grotesque puns on the punishment of Strafford and Laud, Charles I’s two main counselors during his Personal Rule. The militancy of the neo-Elizabethan elegies then mutates into a new, full-fledged call to arms. Like Scott’s and Reynold’s pamphlets of the 1620s, the retelling of a certain history reaches a crescendo in the justification of violent anti-Catholic military action, although this

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time one focused on the crypto-Catholic reforms of Stuart England. Bradstreet couples Church of England practices, resented by the Puritans since James’s accession, such as the clergy’s wearing of vestments, with allusions to the 1640 anti-prelatical Root and Branch Petition, which attacked Anglican ministers and the Episcopal structure to create a new center for heroic action, in which the Essex of the elegy to Elizabeth is born again in his son: These are the days, the Churches foe to crush, To root out Prelates, head, tail, branch, and rush. Let’s bring Baal’s vestments out, to make fire . . . And let their names consume, but let the flash Light Christendom, and all the world to see, We hate Rome’s whore, with all her trumpery. Go on brave Essex, show whose son thou art, Not false to King, nor Country in thy heart . . . (188)

Parliament had appointed the third earl of Essex as captain general of the Parliamentary army in July 1642 (Greaves and Zaller 1: 227), and Bradstreet thus here signals her support for an anti-Catholic purge of the Church of England, led by the very kind of Presbyterian peers her husband and father had served in England. As the “we” of “We hate Rome’s whore” suggests, this anti-Catholic militancy is presented as a collective effort of Old England and New in the poem, but one in which New England plays a specific role. Indeed, the dialogue could be seen as offering as much of an answer to the question of the part Massachusetts Bay should play in the British Civil Wars, as advice to England itself. By the 1640s, news of war had enticed a number of leading clergy and politicians back to Old England: Cressy and Harry S. Stout have estimated that nearly half the colony’s intellectual leaders left New England for Old between 1640 and 1660, high points of the exodus coinciding with news of Parliamentary successes in 1641–42, 1644–47, and 1650–51 (199–200; 151, 157–59). This back-migration led to a crisis in New England’s vision of itself. As Philip Gura argues, in the 1630s New Englanders were confident they were setting up the perfect churchstate, but by the 1640s they feared their exile westward had led them away from rather than toward the New Jerusalem (286). Encapsulating this growing feeling that Massachusetts might no longer be the center of Protestant renewal, one commentator would later remark, “while Old England is becoming new, New England is become Old” (Clarke, title-page).32

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Bradstreet was writing fairly early in this process of back-migration and her family’s relative power and wealth would have insulated them from some of the harsher economic problems the colony faced during the wars. However, the slowing of emigration to the New World by even the start of the conflict resulted in money shortages in Massachusetts, and prices fell to less than one half of their former level (Stearns 193). “A Dialogue” drives home the colony’s material dependence on the mother country when Old England ominously asks her daughter, “If I decease, dost think thou shall survive?” (181). Written in 1642–43, the poem coincides with one of the early highpoints of returns that Cressy and Stout describe, and Bradstreet’s brother-in-law, Benjamin Woodbridge, left for England in 1642, soon to be followed by a number of people involved in the publication of Bradstreet’s manuscript (DNB 21: 856). Bradstreet’s references to Old England rather than New as “sacred Zion,” coupled with her focus on revolutionary England as the center of anti-Catholic action, hint at an emergent anxiety over New England’s role in prophetic history. Indeed, in the above passage, the reference to a “flash” that will “Light Christendom, and all the world to see” may allude to Foxe’s Book of Martyrs, in which Latimer comforts his fellow Marian martyr, Ridley, on the stake, by telling him “We shall this day light such a candle, by God’s grace, in England, as I trust shall never be put out” (470). Bradstreet’s version replaces Foxe’s tale of English martyrdom with a celebration of anti-Episcopal violence to depict the British Civil Wars as the iconoclastic spark that will set the world on fire. However, like Foxe, she still puts Old England, not New, at the center of a rapidly unfolding divine drama. If the Massachusetts Bay Colony began by seeing itself as a city on a hill, a grand experiment of reform that drew the eyes of the whole world, these passages hint that it is in danger of being displaced as the origin of global reformation by its formerly back-sliding mother country. “A Dialogue” resolves this problem over New England’s role in prophetic history through an emphasis on the colonies as intercessors on Old England’s behalf. In the “Eliza” manuscript, Elizabeth is called upon as a divine mediator to ease the sufferings of the Commons; here, the mantle of mediatrix passes to the New England daughter. In the medico-political metaphors common to body politic rhetoric, Old England tells her: “This Physic-purging-potion I have taken, / Will bring Consumption, or an Ague quaking, / Unless some Cordial thou fetch from high” (181). As the verse progresses, this “Cordial” turns out to be prophetic poetry itself: if Old England asks for a community of sentiment, begging New England’s “love” and “pity”

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(187), she gets instead a community of militant opposition, in which the daughter teaches the mother to read revolution not as tragedy but as millennial fulfillment. Situating Old England’s troubles in the long history of abuses recounted above, and the even longer history of the “latter days” of the end of times, Bradstreet evokes the very return of the son/sun Christ through national rebirth that ends the elegy to Elizabeth of the same period: Your griefs I pity much, but should do wrong, To weep for that we both have prayed for long, To see these latter days of hoped for good, That Right may have its right, though’t be in blood; After dark Popery the day did clear, But now the Sun in’s brightness shall appear. (187–88)

In “A Dialogue,” history once more modulates into prophecy, and Bradstreet positions herself and, indeed, the whole New England experiment, as again supplementary: she is a much-needed addition, correcting Old England’s reading of the Civil Wars by reforming tragedy into biblical epic. Instead of tears she offers preaching, exegesis, and even curses: “And shall I not on those with Meroz’s curse, / That help thee not with prayers, arms, and purse . . . let miseries abound” (188). This reference to Judges 5.23, in which the people of Meroz were cursed for remaining neutral and not coming to the aid of the Lord, was popular with pro-Parliamentary preachers such as Stephen Marshall, who was said to have preached on this chapter up to sixty times, most extensively in a recruiting sermon to the House of Commons on the eve of the First Civil War (Collinson, Birthpangs 127–28). In Bradstreet, however, this call to arms does not remain confined to the British Isles. Instead, the poem suggests that the time is ripe for the rebirth of the grander pan-Protestant militancy and international reform associated with the neo-Elizabethanism of her other poetry and the pamphlets of the 1620s. In a vision of a postwar Second Coming, New England prophesies that Parliamentary reformation is merely the start of a global battle against the Antichrist, a transformation that will end with the conversion of the Jews—an event that, as we saw in Wight, was supposed to precede the millennium in seventeenth-century interpretations of Revelation: When thus in Peace: thine Armies brave send out, To sack proud Rome, and all her vassals rout . . . Bring forth the beast that ruled the world with’s beck, And tear his flesh, and set your feet on’s neck,

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As this passage suggests, “A Dialogue” recasts a neo-Elizabethan family relation as the basis of collaborative religio-political opposition and millennial fulfillment. As in the elegy to Sidney, affiliations of blood and ideology blur, though here it is a cozy mother-daughter chat that models public dialogue on the fate of expansionist panProtestantism. In the violent master narrative that closes the poem, a nation of prophets instructs a nation of soldiers on its proper vocation, and the counterpublic Bradstreet imagines in her other poetry becomes the inspiration for a militant Protestant New World order.33 If Philips circulates idealized Royalist identities to elevate her elite community above the horrors of a war that directly impinged on her in Wales, Bradstreet celebrates revived Elizabethan heroes to collapse the distance between militancy in England and the Massachusetts Bay Colony. Indeed, Bradstreet’s role as corrective extension extends to the colony itself, which becomes the proper place to revive and renew an Old Englishness associated with Elizabethan figures. To restore a back-sliding mother country to its proper vocation, then, New England becomes old. By imagining her role as a catalyst for a reformation of arms and arts that reaches beyond colony and mother country, Bradstreet casts herself and her New England home in key roles in apocalyptic history. The ambitious scope of this project is complemented by another neo-Elizabethan project of this period, the section of the “Quarternions” called “The Foure Monarchies.” Drawing on Sir Walter Raleigh’s ever-popular The History of the World, Bradstreet condenses in verse those sections of Raleigh’s ambitious project that deal with the four monarchies popularly read as preceding the millennium in the seventeenth century, according to the book of Daniel. 34 As Anne Stanford argues, where Raleigh begins with Palestine and Egypt in his history, Bradstreet focuses only on the Assyrian, Persian, Grecian, and Roman empires (66–67). At the same time, she revises his synchronic format, in which he skips across continents to describe events occurring simultaneously, to deal with the events in historical order (Stanford 67), thus fitting the successive monarchies more easily into a linear scheme of apocalyptic development. This development concludes with the rule of “Tarquin the proud,” the

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tyrant famous from stories of the rape of Lucretia, whose attack licensed the republican militancy of Junius Brutus, so that in the “Quarternions,” global history ends on the line, “And people swear, ne’re to accept of King” (179). In the prologue to this work, Bradstreet claims, “To sing of Wars, of Captains, and of Kings, / Of Cities founded, Commonwealths begun, / For my mean Pen, are too superior things” (3), words that allude to The Aeneid’s “Of arms I sing and the hero, destiny’s exile” (Virgil 7). This disavowal of the themes of The Aeneid is not necessarily a denial of epic scope, however, for instead of a Virgilian celebration of the forging of an Augustan empire, Bradstreet offers a militant chronicle of what Anna Beer has referred to as “the death of monarchy” (152). In this sense, the fallen kings celebrated in “The Foure Monarchies” form another anti-heroic opposite to the heroes revived in the elegies, and Elizabeth becomes the monarchal exception that proves the rule—one virtuous monarch in a history of backsliders. Bradstreet’s revision of Raleigh again shows her taking a dead Elizabethan hero and writer as the inspiration for the creation of pan-Protestant poetry, this time one that offers the lesson of regal impotence before the power of prophetic history. Emulating Raleigh, Bradstreet secures her own place at the forefront of a revival of pan-Protestant poetics that, in the 1640s when she writes, legitimates anti-Stuart sentiment and action. With their visions of a millennial future, the four monarchies and “A Dialogue” set this anti-Stuart action against a wide historical and geographic horizon. As elegy and history modulate into prophecy, her poems imagine the expanding coterie of neo-Elizabethans as the basis of a transnational counterpublic poised for ideological and military triumph.

The Tenth Muse, Lately Sprung Up in England This triumph seemed close at hand in the Old England of the 1650s, when the Royalists were defeated and Parliament set about religious and political reforms forged in part in dialogue with the New England colonies. In light of Parliament’s victory, Bradstreet’s role at the forefront of a neo-Elizabethan counterpublic was extended and modified at her 1650 publication in London. In particular, the dedicatory poems appended to The Tenth Muse expand Bradstreet’s imagined coterie of ghosts into a real community of mobile and interconnected Old and New World readers and writers. In doing so, they link her poetic militancy to the conciliatory politics of the emerging Commonwealth

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regime and so to a newly dominant public of Parliamentary compromise. The printing of her work was the result of the busy traffic in news, books, and people that characterized relations between Old England and New. Bradstreet’s manuscript was probably brought to Old England and published by John Woodbridge, Bradstreet’s brother-inlaw, who had married her sister Mercy in 1638 (E. White 158). Woodbridge had, with Simon Bradstreet, been one of the founding members of the colonial town of Andover, but sometime in 1647 friends persuaded him to return to England, so he followed in the footsteps of his brother Benjamin (DAB 10: 48; DNB 21: 856). Both John and Benjamin Woodbridge contributed dedicatory poems to Bradstreet’s published book, as did Nathaniel Ward, another colonial who returned to Old England in 1647 (E. White 260; DerounianStodola 134). The other dedications that can be identified with any certainty are by Nathaniel Holmes and Henry Stubbes, both of whom had stayed in England during the Personal Rule of Charles I, but who maintained contacts with New England (E. White 264–65; Derounian-Stodola 136).35 Thus the printed version of Bradstreet’s poetry presents her at the center of a transatlantic coterie, the members of which, moreover, were tied to the more conservative forces directing the Rump Parliament in the early 1650s. The Tenth Muse was published during a period of increasing compromise in the English government. In November 1648, the events of 1647 surrounding the publication of Sarah Wight and Henry Jessey’s prophetical book seemed to be repeating themselves: in an effort to halt Parliament’s negotiations with Charles I, the New Model Army marched on London, and began a short occupation that culminated in Pride’s Purge of December 6 (Gentles 279–82). The Purge, which ousted those MPs who had accepted Charles’s conditions for peace, promised radical reform, particularly as it was followed by the speedy trial and execution of the King in January 1649. But this promise quickly led to a backlash, in which conservative Independents and Presbyterians closed ranks against radicals (Underdown, Pride’s Purge 258–69). In the spring of 1649, Cromwell crushed army mutinies at Burford, and the government began appeals to moderates, emphasizing slow reform and a prolonging of Parliamentary power in the face of calls for sweeping change from the sects (Pride’s Purge 267–68). Stephen Marshall, a moderate Presbyterian who consistently worked for compromise with the Independents, was sent to negotiate with the more recalcitrant London Presbyterians, urging conformity to the Commonwealth, and Cromwell persuaded Parliament to invite back members of the House expelled at the Purge (Worden 191).

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These conciliatory moves toward Parliamentary conservatives and moderate Presbyterians were so successful that by November of 1649, Robert Rich, Simon Bradstreet’s old student, who had lost his Parliamentary naval command in February after siding against the Purge, was back in the Commons for a sermon by his client Marshall (Worden 218). Francis Bremer argues that this period of compromise was the beginning of the strongest cooperation between Old England and New, and that the newly strengthened anti-radical alliance of Independents, Presbyterians, and their New English Congregational brethren found its proof text in the Act against Blasphemies and Heresies, passed in 1650 (310, 172–74). The men who wrote prefatory verses to The Tenth Muse represented the very alliance Bremer analyzes. For the most part, they were Congregationalists and Independents connected to moderate Presbyterians, who made their peace with the Commonwealth only after the radical threat of the Purge and its aftermath were diluted into the conciliatory policies of 1650. Even the publisher, Stephen Bowtell, known for his political pamphlets, was busy printing pamphlets against the New Model Army or in favor of Presbyterianism during this period. He published at least seventeen sermons by Marshall, busy forging ties between proParliamentary moderates, and his publications leading up to the one by Bradstreet are anti-radical in the extreme: The Armies Remembrancer, for example, printed in January 1649, accused the purging army of sedition and heresy (7) and likened them to Jack Cade (24).36 The other men involved in Bradstreet’s publication were similarly affiliated with anti-army propaganda, part of a loose circle of writers and preachers connected through Old England Presbyterians such as Rich and Marshall and New England Congregationalists such as Cotton. In 1649, Bowtell also republished a sermon by Nathaniel Ward, who had known Bradstreet as pastor at Ipswich and who had, like Marshall and Simon Bradstreet, also been one of Robert Rich’s clients before emigrating.37 Ward, an anti-sectarian with some Presbyterian sympathies, had on his arrival in England taken the opposite side to Jessey and Wight in the army intervention of 1647. The sermon Bowtell republished was one Ward delivered to Parliament on June 30, 1647, which accused the New Model Army then marching on London of being “mounted upon . . . saddles of John a [of] Leyden’s make” (22). Like Ward, Benjamin Woodbridge began publishing anti-sectarian pamphlets once he was back in England. In 1648, for example, he published Church-Members Set in Joynt, which argued against lay-preaching and women prophets (30)

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and attacked the army radical and Agitator, Edmund Chillenden, throughout. John Woodbridge had, along with Marshall, been one of the chaplains to the Commissioners of Parliament whose negotiations with Charles had so disturbed the New Model Army in the autumn of 1648. On his return to New England at the Restoration, he and his uncle Thomas Parker were investigated by the Massachusetts authorities for allegedly setting up a prelacy at Parker’s Newbury church, and eventually both were dismissed (DAB 10: 481). Even Holmes and Stubbes, both English Independents, participated in the compromises of 1649–50. Holmes, who like John Woodbridge attended Magdalen College at Oxford, was an ally of the Presbyterians throughout his career (Greaves and Zaller 2: 1). Stubbes, certainly the most radical writer of this group, was a protégé of Henry Vane’s— himself ex-governor of Massachusetts and sometime-friend of the Antinomians, who had, by 1648, come to the less radical position of participating in negotiations with the king, and who also came out against Pride’s Purge in 1649 (Underdown, Pride’s Purge 112). Given the ideological and social affiliations of these men, the prefatory poems to The Tenth Muse present an alliance of witty, pro-Parliamentary moderates, forged around the figure of a woman. In the 1650 context of publication, Bradstreet’s neo-Elizabethanism stressed the transatlantic connection this group embodied. It also offered a continuity of pan-Protestant anti-Catholicism that could now serve as an argument for Independent and Presbyterian forces to unite under the Rump Parliament, as they had done in 1642. The prefatory verses foreground Bradstreet’s role in creating a revived pan-Protestant poetry, although they also work to take the sting out of some of the more radical, anti-monarchal implications of her verse by situating it within a mock-heroic battle of the sexes. Ward’s poem, for example, depicts a comic competition between Bradstreet and du Bartas, both of whom are brought before the ultimate arbiter of poetry, Apollo: “Mercury showed Apollo, Bartas’s Book, / Minerva this, and wished him well to look, / And tell uprightly, which did which excel” (A2). In a similar vein, “R.Q.”’ s poem stages an equally mock-heroic battle, in which female “Soldados” arm themselves against Royalist writers who “vent their plots in Verses; / They write of Monarchies, a most seditious word” (A5v). On a slightly more serious note, John Woodbridge presents Bradstreet as replacing Queen Elizabeth’s role as the vindicator of her sex: “You have acutely in Eliza’s ditty / Acquitted women, else I might with pity, / Have wished them all to woman’s Works to look, / And never more to meddle with their book” (A4). This emphasis on

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Bradstreet’s gender and on a witty battle of the sexes deflects from any potential ideological differences within the group and readership, thus aiding the atmosphere of fraternal compromise promoted by Parliamentary moderates in this period. As John Woodbridge’s poem suggests, however, this vindication of women is couched in Bradstreet’s own terms, to place her at the head of the very transnational community her poetry invokes. As suggested earlier, Woodbridge’s choice of the title The Tenth Muse may draw on Bradstreet’s addition of Errata as a muse in her elegy to Sidney, and his dedicatory poem presents Bradstreet—as she so often presents herself—as a necessary supplement to the European tradition: “and if the Nine vouchsafe the Tenth a place, / I think they rightly may yield you that grace” (A4). The other prefatory writers follow suit in imitating Bradstreet’s strategies of commendation. If Sidney encompasses the nine muses in Bradstreet’s elegy, in Benjamin Woodbridge’s verse Bradstreet engrosses not just these nine female figures but the “Muses, Virtues, Graces, Females all,” whom she proves “one unity” (A5). If Bradstreet venerates du Bartas’s “wit sublime” as a unifying force for transnational eloquence, “C.B.” praises Bradstreet, whose “sublime brain’s the Synopsis of Arts” (A7). This complimentary rhetoric is in part conventional, but the writers consistently put her in the company she recalls in her poetry, naming Elizabeth and du Bartas with the greatest frequency. Recapitulating her terms of praise, they present her as the ultimate neo-Elizabethan, a substitute figure who is not a proxy poet like Philips, but a full-fledged replacement for the coterie of ghosts she conjures up as her poetic precursors and interlocutors. The mock-heroic tone of the prefatory poems therefore often modulates into the more straightforwardly heroic. Even Ward, who never loses his mocking edge, shows Bradstreet competing in an elevated international literary scene, a fact compounded by his references to Chaucer, the father of English letters for neo-Spenserians, and Homer, master of the epic, as her competitors. Having read Bradstreet’s poetry, the “old Don,” Apollo, “chode by Chaucer’s boots, and Homer’s Furs, / Let men look to’t, lest women wear the Spurs” (A2). Spurs were symbols of knighthood, so that Ward’s occasionally snide piece ends by suggesting that Bradstreet herself has become a kind of Britomart figure, who challenges male poets to join her in a new era of English poetry in which the neo-chivalric emphasis of Sidney and Spenser will be taken up by women. In perhaps the most straightforwardly admiring poem of the group, Nathaniel Holmes commends the epic scope of Bradstreet’s poetry, which like that of du Bartas

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chronicles natural, human, and divine history: she writes of “Heaven’s, Earth’s admired wonders, noble acts / Of Kings, and Princes most heroic facts” (A6v). He depicts Bradstreet as the morning star, a figure associated not only with rebirth but with Christ (Rev. 22.16): “What golden splendent star is this, so bright, / One thousand miles thrice told, both day and night, / (From the Orient first Sprung) now from the West” (A6–A6v). Shifting the star from Old World East to New World West, Holmes evokes a literary back-migration in which Bradstreet becomes the precursor of a new dawn of English heroic poetry. Coupled with the other poets’ emphasis on her allusions to Elizabethan Protestants, the poem hints that a revived and transplanted neo-Elizabethanism has come home to offer a potent form of pan-Protestant poetic for a new age. In the context of the growing reconciliation of anti-radical Parliamentary forces, Bradstreet’s prefatory writers present her poetry as offering a tradition of formal verse and pan-Protestant heroics that, as “R.Q.” suggests, could oppose the slew of Royalist poetry. The neo-Elizabethan elegies, coupled with her pro-Parliamentary “Dialogue” and “Quarternions,” counter the Royalist elegies for Charles so crucial to Philips’s development as a writer. Once published with commendations from this community of compromise, Bradstreet’s emphasis on historical continuity and Parliamentary virtue can also serve to counter the radical reform espoused by groups such as the Levellers. In addition, Bradstreet’s emphasis on global reformation is important in terms of another development of 1649–50—the campaign against the Irish. As early as February 1649, the Rump was preparing for war with Ireland, and by August, Cromwell had landed in Ireland with at least one ex-New Englander, Hugh Peter, in tow (Gentles 326–56). Though the tactical aims of the Irish campaign mean that it was more than a Machiavellian ploy to busy giddy minds with foreign quarrels, the long-awaited attack on Catholics and Royalist-Anglicans did help unite Independents and Presbyterians in the face of a much-hated Catholic Other (Worden 191). Indeed, the 1649 sermon by Marshall that marked Rich’s return to Parliament after the Purge was in celebration of Parliamentary successes in Ireland, including Cromwell’s notorious massacres at Drogheda and Wexford (Worden 218; Gentles 361–67). By early July 1650, when Bradstreet’s book was published, Cromwell had already returned from Ireland and was preparing to do battle with the Presbyterian Scots, newly allied with Charles II against moderate English Presbyterians and Independents (Worden 222). In this context, the martial heroics of Bradstreet’s elegies and

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“A Dialogue” take on new meaning. Her vindication of anti-Catholic violence and her attack on “Scots” who “play false” behind mother England’s back celebrate past Parliamentary victory in Ireland and future militancy in Scotland and perhaps even further afield (“A Dialogue” 182). Bradstreet’s encouragement of warfaring Christians to prove their worth through “brandished swords” (190), her references to the Irish rebellion, and her calls for a battle against the Antichrist that will “Execute to the full the vengeance threatened” (189), all play to Parliament’s emphasis on the need for conservative conciliation in the face of Royalist, Catholic, and even Presbyterian threats to Britain’s borders. Ushered onto the London literary scene by a group of Parliamentary moderates, Bradstreet’s belated praise of Elizabethan heroes and timely defense of Parliamentary rights thus neatly suit the growing sense of England as a divine instrument, fighting for a united Protestant front against mounting Antichristian forces at home and abroad. If, then, in 1638–43, when her poetry was written, Bradstreet’s produces a neo-Elizabethan counterpublic, a discourse vindicating anti-monarchical action on behalf of Parliament, by 1650 the changed context and dedicatory apparatus put the neo-Elizabethanism of her poetry to the service of a now dominant Parliamentary public, busy pulling together a spectrum of moderate and conservative support in the face of fears of attacks on God’s elect. This English militarism had more than ideological advantages for the New England mission: New Englanders benefited in particular from the Scots war when, in 1651, Cromwell sent some of the 10,000 Scots prisoners to New England, sold as indentured servants. These were heartily welcomed by the economically depressed colonies, and in the same year the Massachusetts Bay General Court showed their approval of the Rump’s anti-radical domestic policies and military action by sending a letter pledging support of Parliament and Cromwell (Bremer 254, 268). The publication of Bradstreet’s poetry just a year earlier offers hope that a united front of transnational Protestant activism is preparing to face down the Royalist and Catholic threat not just within Europe but on a wider, global scale. Cromwell’s own foreign policies during the 1650s were fueled by a heady mixture of neo-Elizabethan anti-Catholicism and New England millennial speculation: historians such as Timothy Venning and Francis Bremer have argued that his attempts to settle the Spanish West Indies in particular were influenced on the one hand by his “obsession with the supposed international Catholic plot against Protestantism,” and on the other by John Cotton’s emphasis on the active role international Protestantism must take in bringing

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about the future millennium—not to mention the desire for British commercial dominance (Venning 5; Bremer 272–77). In this new context, Bradstreet’s reconstruction of pan-Protestant heroes and her forecasting of apocalyptic triumph take on a proto-imperial resonance. The Tenth Muse was popular in Old England: as J. Kester Svendsen notes, a reference to Bradstreet’s book appears in William London’s Catalogue of the Most Vendible Books in England published in 1658, alongside works by Shakespeare, Milton, and du Bartas (64). Bradstreet may have inspired a number of single-author editions of women’s poetry: verse collections by Elizabeth Major, Anne Collins, the anonymous “Eliza,” and even the Royalist Margaret Cavendish were all published following Bradstreet’s book.38 More important for our purposes, she also seems to have led a revival of interest in Elizabethan times and writings. Paul Stevens has argued that the 1650s saw “a regular outpouring of anti-Spanish propaganda” leading up to the 1655–58 war with Spain (373). This anti-Spanish propaganda began soon after the printing of The Tenth Muse with a number of publications focusing on the blessed Eliza’s reign: Fulke Greville’s The Life of the Renowned Sr Philip Sidney was finally published for the first time in 1651, along with Anna Weamys’s A Continuation of Sir Philip Sidney’s Arcadia; Bacon’s The Felicity of Queen Elizabeth and her Times was published the same year, and Sir Anthony Weldon’s The Court and Character of King James, in which the Civil Wars were blamed on a post-Elizabethan fall from grace, was published in 1650. Even Sir Walter Raleigh, popular throughout the early half of the century, reached a high-point of publication in 1650–52: four texts wrongly attributed to his authorship were published, as were at least five books that responded extensively to his life or works, and five of Raleigh’s own publications—including three editions of The History of the World (Beer 187–88). Bradstreet’s English publication therefore seems to have had quite an impact, opening the gates for the very pan-Protestant ghosts she elegized. By 1658, when her book was listed among the country’s most vendible, England was engaged in military action against a Spanish-Royalist alliance on the continent, and Milton himself entered the celebration of Elizabethan heroes with his printing of The Cabinet-Council, which he (wrongly) attributed to Sir Walter Raleigh.39 These neo-Elizabethan publications all hint at the importance of the New England woman for the British political scene, particularly given the government’s increasing attempts to divert internal conflicts onto international struggle. Poised on the threshold of Revolutionary change, Bradstreet pitches herself as the poet of past and future reformation heroics.

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Mixing blood and ideology, she offers a celebration of an expanded pan-Protestant militarism that will usher in a new transnational reign of the saints. Her poetry uses a particular version of history to rethink Old and New England’s geographical interrelations and global importance and, in so doing, it suggests—even more directly than Leigh, Wight, and Philips—that both women’s literature and histories of public culture demand a geographically flexible frame of analysis. For her public career only makes sense if we look beyond the parochial boundaries of England or New England to think of publics and counterpublics as operating in affiliation and overlap with their continental and colonial counterparts. The peripatetic history of Bradstreet’s writings draws our attention to the expansive geography of publicness in this period and the key role women writers could play within it. Women’s simultaneous exclusion from traditional institutions of publicness and inclusion in communities of migration and exile led them to offer distinctive contributions to the invention of public cultures that deliberately exceeded national borders.

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S cat tering and Gathering in Katharine E vans and Sarah C heevers: Conclusions

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he argument of this book has been that early women writers’ key role in British public culture helps us understand it as internally divided and inconsistent, uneven in terms of participation, riven with political conflicts and gender tensions, shaped by interested communities that defined themselves in opposition to dominant trends in religious and governmental policies and practices. In addition, as the introduction argued, and as Bradstreet’s case illustrates most fully, this public culture is also externally extended, affecting and affected by communities of literary production and political critique that deliberately overrun England’s borders. It is in this context of the expanded geography of public life, and the problems of cultural or religious inclusiveness this expansion entails, that A Short Relation (1662) by Katherine Evans and Sarah Cheevers is instructive. What follows is an analysis of their pamphlet as the basis for a focused discussion of some of the broader conclusions of this book on women’s key role in publics that are decidedly non-national in nature. Evans and Cheevers offer a traveling model of counterpublic activity that casts female figures as the proper bearers of Quaker conversion at home and abroad. The assimilative dynamic of that model, however, illustrates both the power and potential cost of transnational counterpublic address. While Philips composed heroic couplets in Ireland, Evans and Cheevers recorded their imprisonment in Malta from 1659 to 1662, where they had been detained by the Italian Inquisition while on a journey to proselytize in Alexandria and Cicilia. Their narratives were compiled and published by fellow Quaker Daniel Baker, who combines his framing commentary with the women’s letters, hymns, prophesies, and multiple accounts of their physical sufferings and verbal debates with Catholic authorities. Like the other writers in this book, A Short Relation helps unite and represent an ideologically specific group—in this case the Quakers—at a time of religio-political

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crisis, envisioning the two women at the center of an expansive counterpublic of traveling and publishing “Friends.” However, the “collectivist style” and “communitarian focus” of Quaker narratives means that this pamphlet foregrounds not a single woman but a pair (Gil 69, 123).1 It also does so at the changed context of sectarian persecution at the Restoration. As chapter 3 argues, the Restoration saw a reinvention of monarchy as a form of public representativeness, but it was also a time of continuing, indeed intensified, counterpublic activity and it was followed by a period in which women’s writing reached a new statistical peak.2 Scholars such as Tim Harris, N.H. Keeble, and Richard Greaves have charted the anti-monarchal critique and topical debate that animated nonconformist and republican circles and impelled their ongoing production of scribal news, petitions, and published books and pamphlets after 1660. In fact, the government’s attempt to control if not eradicate sectarianism backfired, for the effect of anti-sectarian legislation and persecution was not conformity but the creation of what Richard Greaves has called a “radical underground” of discussion and publication (4). This underground relied on female writers, printers, and hawkers.3 Though female sectarians in particular suffered from both the external oppression of anti-association laws and the internal surveillance of their own anxious brethren, Paula McDowell has shown the continuing vigor of their political interventions until at least the early eighteenth century.4 Indeed, rather than shutting down opportunities for women’s public commentary, as scholars such as Hobby have argued (Virtue 85), the Restoration saw women’s role catalyzing oppositional groups of readers and writers intensify, as they became representatives of a sectarian “underground” that was powerful even—or especially—in persecution and captivity. This underground was not homogeneous but comprised a number of distinct communities, pitched in debate not only with the dominant group of Anglican Royalists but also with each other. It comprised, that is, a number of counterpublics, of which the Quakers form a particularly visible example. As Kate Peters has argued, from their inception in 1652 Quakers deployed the press to coordinate a national organization, and this deployment only intensified with the Restoration.5 Quakers reacted to the anti-sectarian laws by establishing centralized records of Quaker sufferings and using meetings to collect and disseminate Quaker literature (Adrian Davies 112). In fact, altogether Quakers published at least 2,939 books in the last forty years of the century, their publications peaking between 1658 and 1662, during the lead-up to and fall-out from the return of monarchy

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(Keeble 129; Reay 111). As tools of conversion, these books circulated in Quaker preaching campaigns not only across Britain but abroad. Quakers and their books visited New England, Holland, France, the Palatinate, Turkey, and Italy; they translated their works into Hebrew, Arabic, Latin, and Dutch; they addressed letters to the king of Spain, the pope, the Great Turk, and the emperor of China (Vann 93; Braithwaite 401–33; Keeble 131). Quakers thus self-consciously used print and manuscript to turn a national community into a transnational, potentially global, one. As a number of scholars of Quakerism have argued, women played an important role in shaping this community (Barbour 44; Gil 4–5). They were particularly active in early itinerant preaching within and across national borders, traveling more often and further then their male counterparts. Thus in addition to writing and publishing, women Quakers helped with collating and distributing books both in Britain and abroad (Barbour 44).6 Within the Quaker community, emphasis on spiritual equality often coexisted with insistence on a traditionally gendered social hierarchy (Peters 124–52; Gil 75). Yet, these very kinds of tensions could produce new female public roles. In A Short Relation, for example, the editor Baker draws on both conduct books and the biblical rhetoric that shaped them to concede that women are the “weaker Vessel” (A2v). However, in typical Quaker fashion, he then reverses value and expectation to show earthly weakness countering and trumping the empty deceit of temporal power.7 He advises, “Wherefore let the Reader see hereby, how that the Lord hath chosen the foolish things of this life to confound the wise, and that the living God Eternal hath chosen the weak things, to confound and bring to nought the things that are mighty, subtle, and potent” (A2v). The collision or collaboration between gender normative and nonnormative moments in Quaker writing, that is, may produce new, even paradoxical female identities, in which women’s very marginal status makes them key to oppositional or revolutionary public activity. It is this paradoxical position that guaranteed their continuing importance to the counterpublics constituting the “radical underground.”

A Short Relation A Short Relation was first published in 1662, then again in an expanded edition as A True Account in 1663.8 The year 1662 was momentous for sectarians in Britain, particularly Quakers, as it saw the passage of a number of laws aimed at reinstating Anglican conformity and stamping out the sects, despite Charles II’s declared interest in

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toleration. These included the Quaker Act, which instituted stiff penalties for refusing to take the oath of allegiance (Quakers refused all oaths) and for attending Quaker meetings (Harris 63), and the Act for Preventing the Frequent Abuses in Printing, which limited the number of master printers to twenty and required them to obtain licenses from the secretary of state (Keeble 96). That same year, Roger L’Estrange was appointed Surveyor of the Press to root out seditious publications, with powers of search, seizure, and arrest (Greaves 216). In 1661, in the wake of a Fifth Monarchist rising, 4,000 Quakers were imprisoned, released later that year through the intervention of Charles II; in 1662 one newsletter argued that most of the prisons in England were filled with Quakers and Baptists (Achinstein, Literature and Dissent 59).9 One of these prisoners may have been A Short Relation’s publisher, Robert Wilson, arrested in October 1661, his books later burned as seditious (Greaves 216). Another may have been the pamphlet’s editor, Daniel Baker, who appends a short relation of his own travels to that of Evans and Cheevers, advertising that it was written in Newgate prison “where he suffers Bonds, together with many Brethren of Truth” (104). He thus associates female Quakers in prison in Malta with their imprisoned friends in England. Championing the Quaker community at a time of severe persecution at home, and zealous Quaker missionary work abroad, the pamphlet counters official Anglican Royalist depictions of Quakers as dangerous rebels and crypto-Catholics by emphasizing their visionary insight, their virtuous suffering, and—not least—their ability to out-debate their Catholic jailors. Like the other authors in this book, Evans and Cheevers draw on what I have called private spheres to ground their counterpublic activity. A Short Relation overlaps the subjects of the previous chapters, as the pamphlet presents its generation in interlocking circles of intimacy with fellow “friends” and of independence from (indeed persecution by) state institutions such as the Cavalier Parliament in England and, in particular, the Catholic Church in Malta. At the center of the text is the relation of the two female authors themselves, as Quakers often traveled in same-sex pairs. As Rosemary Kegl argues, A Short Relation figures the intense interdependence of Evans and Cheevers as a kind of marriage (70). Evans warns friars who want to separate the two women, for example, that “The Lord hath joined us together, and woe be to them that should part us” (13–4). The emphasis on joining is such that the women’s voices overlap: some sections of the pamphlet are attributed to either woman, some to both and other parts are left unattributed or the identity of the writer shifts mid-page with no warning.

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In a dynamic that recalls Philips’s poetry of female friendship, however, this fluid and interchangeable homoerotic relation is nested within a particular heterosocial community, though in this case one underwritten by the shared experiences of the ecstatic indwelling of the Holy Spirit and persecutory imprisonment rather then the elite commitments of a knowing few. Not only Baker but other traveling and persecuted men are named, such as George Fox, John Stubbs, Henry Fell, and Richard Scostrop (93), and the second expanded edition, A True Account, adds a new “short relation” of George Robinson’s “sufferings” in Jerusalem (title-page).10 At the same time, Baker holds up the women’s friendship as a model for the general Quaker community: he brought their writings to “public view,” he argues, so that “thereby every Member of the one Body may have a right understanding, and not only so, but also a sensible feeling not only of the trials and sufferings in part of these innocent Lambs, but also of the consolations of each other, as fellow-Members of the infinite Body which Christ Jesus the Lord is both King and Head” (66–67). As examples of mutual “consolation” for a community of sentiment as well as understanding, then, the women’s homoerotic marriage offers a blueprint for heterosocial Quaker relations. A Short Relation thus depicts these women at the center of a wider circle, itself figured by the kind of intimate language of family and friendship we have seen deployed in previous chapters. The women refer to fellow Quakers as “Friends,” “Brethren and Sisters,” “Fathers,” and “Nursing-Mothers in Israel” (12, 62, 87). Similarly, when Baker asserts that “he is worse than an Infidel that provideth not for his own family, especially them of his own house” (57), he is talking not about genealogical families but spiritual ones. The intensity of the women’s relationship inflects their affiliation with Baker in particular, who is presented as an intercessor on their behalf, an ecstatic reader of their manuscripts, and another spouse. Using language he reserves in another 1663 pamphlet for the power of God’s “mercy and goodness” (A Tender Greeting 3), for example, Baker figures his relation to Evans and Cheevers’s words as one of transformative intimacy: their manuscripts “were not only in my hands, but . . . even in my heart, within my bosom; and the Words of Wisdom’s Life did I wear as a Chain of precious Stones and Diamonds about my neck, and as Bracelets and Ornaments of a comely and delicate chaste Bride, about my hands and loins” (49).11 Evans addresses Baker similarly as biblical Spouse/Bridegroom: “thy beauty shineth indeed, thou art all glorious within and without; thy Garments are perfumed with all delightsome scents; We smell the sweet odors thereof, and do feel the fullness of

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Love and Life which runs from thy tender heart day and night to us, and in the same unity of Love do our hearts stream forth to thee” (76). Fluidity in gender identity is complemented by affiliation cast in a language that is not just heterosocial but heteroerotic—nonsexual, non-institutional, and (given the continued sexual slander against the sects) potentially scandalous.12 This language is inscribed in letters exchanged among the three authors, and Baker also prints a number of letters by the women “written to their Friends and near Relations” (48). As in Sarah Wight’s case, therefore, corporate Quaker identity is forged in part through the exchange of private letters made public. Drawing on the biblical erotic to depict an ideologically specific community of extended “family” and “friends,” the pamphlet inscribes nested circles of intimate dialogue and epistolary exchange as the ground of counterpublic activity. Withdrawal and regroupment within these private spheres enables engagement of a wide and diverse public culture. Early modern prisons may have encouraged secrecy or religio-political bonding, but they were not, in themselves, private institutions, and for dissenters in particular, as Achinstein succinctly puts it, “prison offered a pulpit” (Literature and Dissent 61). In A Short Relation, Evans and Cheevers address a multicultural congregation of potential converts, both within and without the prison walls in Malta: they preach to the friars and Inquisitors who interrogate them, the courtiers and congregants that visit the nearby Maltese church and palace, and the “divers Nations” imprisoned under the Inquisition with them (27, 36). The pamphlet reflexively extends this congregation into a transnational public. Baker tells the reader that he gathered the women’s letters, written “in a strange Land,” for “the good of many of their own Nation of England, who may right-well savor the tender love and virtue of true and pure natural affection, not only to their kindred and Father’s House, but also to their own Country” (51). In this way, he evokes a potentially national readership as the object of Evans and Cheevers’s address and affection. However, these letters include one to “God’s Elect Church in England and Ireland” and another to “friends in Ireland, to be read among the assemblies of Saints in Light” (67, 86). The letters thus advertise not a national readership so much as the circulation of Evans and Cheevers’s writings—whether read individually, read aloud at meetings, or published—within a multi-kingdom sectarian community, one that, in the Restoration context, may exist at odds with the dominant political culture of the nation. These divisions within the political nation are foregrounded in Evans’s account of her persecution at Salisbury and the Isle of

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Man (80), and the repeated examples of English perfidy in the form of the English Consul and his wife (4–5), an English friar (14), and diverse “men of own nation” who turn against the Quakers as they travel abroad (91, 103). Baker’s address to a national public is therefore complicated by the way all three writers register fractures within national life that foreclose homogeneous English identity by evoking sectarian difference, indeed opposition. In addition, as the references to Ireland suggest, Baker insists elsewhere that the pamphlet is generated within and for a wider, potentially mobile public of dispersed or traveling readers and writers. His second prefatory letter, for example, offers “A Salutation to the Whole Body of the Elect of God, whether gathered or scattered abroad upon the face of the Earth” (1). Quakers rejected Calvinist predestination, so that the “Elect” here refers to anyone who accepts the inner coming of Christ, the extension of the Holy Spirit that Quakers referred to as the Inner Light. As “scattering” is taken from Old Testament language of Israelite exile and diaspora, this “Elect” could be anywhere on the globe.13 Taken together, these terms suggest the pamphlet is aimed at Quakers in England, Quaker missionaries abroad, and even the other cultures Quakers were attempting to convert. As books were a significant element in Quaker missionary voyages, A Short Relation narrates Evans and Cheevers’s distribution of Quaker literature as part of their proselytizing (2, 3, 4). Baker’s address to a national public is therefore also complicated by his awareness that A Short Relation is itself a traveling text, produced within and aimed at engaging and ultimately assimilating a mobile, transnational public that opposes Anglicanism at home and Catholicism abroad. Indeed, Evans and Cheevers dramatize their imprisonment as part of a geographically and historically extended debate. As the women’s travels began before the return of monarchy, in 1659, and they were released after, in 1662, the historical rupture of the Restoration is relatively absent from this text, alluded to within a grander, biblical narrative of long-term persecution and triumph. To be sure, the pamphlet attacks other English sects and the restored Church of England (A3v, 104). However, what Evans and Cheevers primarily attempt to counter is an apocalyptically global Catholicism: Evans reports that one friar claims “we [Quakers] were but a few, and had been but a little while, and they [Catholics] were many Countries, and had stood many hundred years” (9), and she accuses another of having “the Inquisition, with all the Countries round about, on his side” (17). Depicted as a potent transnational institution, Catholicism extends its influence to England: Evans likens Catholic opposition to lay preachers

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to Anglican insistence on an ordained ministry (15), and Baker ends the pamphlet with a violent anti-Catholic prophesy that includes England in its scope: “Behold behold, Plagues, Plagues, Plagues are coming upon the Church of Rome, and upon her Heads in England, & in all parts of the world” (104).14 However, though England is a nostalgically evoked home base and site of continuing religious struggle in this text, its importance is both shaped and dwarfed by an apocalyptic conflict that takes place on a global scale. Given the pamphlet’s many millenarian references and the above discussions, what is at stake is not so much the present identity of a particular nation, as the future identity of the world, so that, as in Bradstreet, national identity is both forged within debates about the future of global Christendom and subsumed by transnational apocalyptic visions. Newly pacifist Quakers, however, will spread “Truth” not through what they scathingly refer to as “Carnal Weapons” but through the ideological weapons of pamphlets and preaching that carry the seeds of conversion (33).15 From their prison cell, Evans and Cheevers champion free debate, and the contest between different faiths is presented on one level as a transnational battle of books (7, 13). A Short Relation’s debates, its drama of conversion and counterconversion, therefore, occur within a wide historical and geographic frame in which women are central figures. Like Leigh, they are carriers of the “seed” of God’s Word, a role linked to the postlapsarian promise to Eve that the woman’s seed will vanquish the Antichrist. Evans overtly notes this association between redeemed female figures and God’s Word in a later pamphlet: “God, whose mercies are above all his works, did promise that the Seed of the Woman should bruise the Serpent’s Head” (A Brief Discovery 6).16 Similarly, in A Short Relation Baker introduces the two women as the “Earthen Vessels” for the “long suffering Seed” (1), and the pamphlet constantly puns on the word “travel,” with its overlapping early modern meanings of journeying, working, and giving birth. A friar educates Evans and Cheevers about Catholic holy days, for example, telling them the Virgin Mary conceived Christ on the day of their conversation. In response, one of the women goes into her own, competitive, holy birth: “Then as I was crying to the Lord in Prayer because of our long-suffering, & our strong travel & labor & no fruit (as did appear) the Lord said unto me, Be not grieved, though Israel be not gathered; the seed of Malta shall be as the stars of the sky for multitude” (43). The recurring and intertwined threads of biblical images of gestating/sowing seeds and laboring/ mobile travel makes female figures the proper vessels for a potentially international process of conversion. At certain moments, Quaker

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rhetoric’s gender fluidity enables Baker to adopt this maternal, laboring role: “But oh my soul, how hast thou been wounded in me, whilst I have traveled and mourned over you!” (4). In this way, A Short Relation envisions women and (intermittently) feminized men as the shapers and bearers of an oppositional public culture that begins in private spheres of textual dialogue but impacts a complex transnational constellation of Catholic and Anglican publics and sectarian counterpublics. In this transnational constellation, Quakers such as Evans, Cheevers, and Baker both oppose a hegemonic English state associated with corrupt Anglicanism and are potentially religio-politically dominating in their own right. Achsah Guibbory has argued that the Quaker leader Margaret Fell inscribes an “exclusive universalism” in her dealings with seventeenth-century Jews, reaching out to include them within the Quaker community, but doing so ultimately only on her own terms of Christian conversion (232). A similar contradiction informs A Short Relation, structured by the particular dynamic of withdrawal and engagement that characterizes counterpublics, a dynamic that becomes most visible in the above language of scattering and gathering. “Gathering” is also a biblical term, applied to Old Testament narratives of redemption and return to the Promised Land from exile.17 On the one hand, the process of gathering requires a movement outward in an attempt to draw the scattered “Elect” back into the fold. This necessitates an encounter with cultural, racial, and religious Others that can generate surprising cross-cultural dialogues. These are not the exchanges of an idealized multi-kingdom elite, as in Philips, nor the identifications of a militant pan-Protestant circle, as in Bradstreet. The Quaker travelers register new kinds of real and discursive contacts, beyond an elevated group of cultured European writers or heroic soldiers. Baker, for example, contrasts the oppressions of men “of our own Nation” to the relative toleration extended to Quakers by “Turks, Jews, Greeks, Heathens” (93) and even talks of the “Eternal God manifest in Turks, Greeks, Jews, Heathens, and Apostate Christians among the dark Nations” (94). In the extended second edition, Evans and Cheevers narrate the sympathy shown them by the Inquisitor’s Catholic brother (A True Account 255), and Robinson’s appended relation gives examples of “Turks, Greeks, and Armenians” who visit and receive him in a “friendly manner” and even save him when his life is threatened (289, 280, 287).18 The two editions of A Short Relation hold out the possibility of shared interests, conversational norms, and frames of behavior that cross traditional national, religious, and racial barriers of difference and even enmity.

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On the other hand, these same biblical narratives of gathering require a movement in, an absorption of cultural and religious difference into the Quaker community, which, at certain points, is identified with England itself. When Baker addresses a body “gathered or scattered abroad upon the face of the Earth” above, he inscribes a central, English base for redeemed subjects (1).19 Given the way “gathering” is intermittently located within England, it is not surprising that the pamphlet also presents more easily recognizable Others— the usual suspects against which an English identity can assert itself. As Naomi Baker has argued, therefore, though Baker identifies with representatives of other races and religions, he simultaneously reduces them to a “conventional, italicized” list (13). In the second edition, the women state that they are threatened by “Portugals, Jews and Irish” who “could as freely have burnt us, as they could have burnt wood” and talk of the Moors they wish to convert as “a bloody and savage people” (A True Account 259). Even at those moments when the “gathering” is not located within an English home, but seen as a dispersed global spiritual transformation, it is envisioned simultaneously as a freely chosen liberation from Catholic bondage (or Anglican persecution) and as a necessary obliteration of religious and cultural specificity in preparation for the future divine violence of the apocalypse and divine rule of the millennium. Evans and Cheevers pray “for the advancement of the Gospel of the Lord Jesus throughout the whole Earth, for the gathering of the Seed of the Elect of God, and for the raising of it up over the Seed of the Serpent, in power and great glory, to bear rule, and to have dominion over the whole World” (71). The above millennial desire is politically and socially leveling: drawing on biblical imagery, they predict earthly kings bound in chains and uprisings of the “poor” and “oppressed” (71, 87). However, it is also religiously (and therefore potentially racially and culturally) dominating, a form of Guibbory’s “exclusive universalism” that views dialogue with Catholics, Jews, and Muslims through the lenses of present conversion or future apocalyptic combat. The dynamic of “gathering” as absorption means that, in effect, in A Short Relation the regroupment that enables counterpublic activity becomes that counterpublic’s aim. Rather than simply enabling an oppositional community’s encounter with a dominant public, as in Nancy Fraser’s formulation, regroupment becomes part of the dynamic by which that community would itself come to dominate through infinite self-replication among Catholics and among, as Baker puts it, all the “Nations, Tongues and Kindreds” (92). The Quakers’ English identity of national origin thus exists in tension with a sectarian identity of global aspiration, itself

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modeled on the Old Testament nationhood of “Israelites,” but overlaid by a New Testament insistence on supranational, Christian assimilation of “a remnant” from all cultures and nations. The dynamic of withdrawal, engagement, and regroupment that mediates these identities registers both the power of a transnational counterpublic address that can envision non-national affiliations with those usually treated as cultural or religious enemies, and the potential costs of a model of discursive contact that insists on religious and cultural homogeneity under the gun of divine, end-of-times violence.

Conclusions In Fraser’s modern, socially democratic theorization, counterpublics ideally thematize rather than transcend the exclusions and power differentials that plague Habermas’s Enlightenment public sphere, foregrounding rather than forgetting the social and economic inequality that underlies cultural production. However, A Short Relation is one example of the way that, mired in the exigencies of historical change, counterpublics may have their own ways to forget, their own unacknowledged dynamics of exclusion. In A Short Relation, the promised apocalyptic violence is, of course, deferred, so that the desire for a global community of the “Elect” is never realized. Moreover, Evans and Cheevers’s narratives, like those of Baker and indeed Robinson, all register the continued persecution and sufferings of Quakers—they register, that is, the repeated failure of these Quakers to convert the people they encounter. These failures may become part of a familiar biblical narrative of a “little Flock” who struggle against the overwhelming forces of the Antichrist despite all odds (16), but they also present an array of cultural, racial, and religious differences left largely intact. Thus though A Short Relation may dream of global homogeneity— may dream of a supranational or global public sphere perhaps—it actually registers an unequal and continuing clash between ideologically and culturally specific groups, a transnational drama of public and counterpublic debate characterized by heterogeneity, discursive conflict, even real and fantasied violence. The case studies in this book offer us four potential models for understanding this transnational drama. Though not an aristocrat herself, for example, Philips evokes what we might call an aristocratic model of extended public culture, drawing on an elevated and educated republic of letters with its roots in Latinate Medieval culture, but given a particularly secular, pro-monarchal, and English emphasis in Revolutionary and then Restoration Britain.20 Her poems and plays

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of the 1660s in particular imagine an anglicized dominant public that extends across the borders of kingdom, in which English identities and ideas are invented from the cultural and geographic margins. Bradstreet revives a pan-Protestant model of intra-European conflict and debate for the New World, imagining a renewed or “New English” identity born from transatlantic exchange. Her poetry offers militant religion as the tie that binds clusters of Protestant readers and writers strung across the Atlantic archipelago. This pan-Protestantism also informs the millennial model drawn on by Leigh, Bradstreet, and Wight, in which sectarian or conformist identifications with Old Testament chosen nationhood exist alongside identifications with a global religious community, and the idea of England as textual and ideological center of godly public culture is superseded by a desired supranational body of saints. Evans and Cheevers also evoke this millennial model, but in their pamphlet millennialism is overlaid by another, traveling model of extended dialogue and debate, where books and people are imagined as essentially mobile, always in movement between one locale and another. Books are portable tools in A Short Relation. The pamphlet is written in one territory but ostentatiously intended for others. The narratives all dwell on travel as Baker, Robinson, Evans, and Cheevers walk and sail between one place and another—Baker’s vision of himself as a “delicate chaste Bride” or ecstatic reader even occurs on a ship (49). These examples suggest that analyses of public culture should focus not just on specific locales, such as metropolitan centers or colonial outposts, but on the movement of books and people that link these places as part of an extended discursive community. In the “pre-national constellation” of local and transnational publics and counterpublics I have proposed, the movement between one place and another may be thematized as a key factor in determining the shape and reach of public culture, and the possibilities for inclusion within it. In a period when the transportation of people and goods was slow, even dangerous, this traveling model exists in tension with a material circulation of books that was (by modern standards at least) irregular, beset by language barriers and problems of loss or accident. Yet, despite these material difficulties, A Short Relation’s insistence on travel frames, to a greater or lesser extent, all these models. They all, that is, share a sense of books in a material and ideological state of flux, as moving points of contact for interlocutors who are separated by geography but joined by common interests and historical horizons—including the horizons of the future. As these four different models overlap in messy ways, they are not always separable at any given textual moment—nor are they by any

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means exhaustive. However, it is worth making analytical distinctions between them because they help complicate colonial and postcolonial theories of early modern cultural contact. The language of self and Other, of plantation and appropriation, does permeate these works, and there are obvious political and historical reasons for thinking about when and how this language dominates in any given work or period. Moreover, each of the four models privileges specific groups (such as educated elites, Protestants, Christians), which are themselves lent cultural prominence by underlying social and political inequalities within Britain and between Britain and its neighboring kingdoms or distant colonies. However, taken together, my book’s case studies offer not a single master narrative of British imperial endeavor, but multiple stories of asymmetrical transnational dialogue and dispute, in turn shaped by competing political agendas. Within these multiple stories, the English people are imagined as old and new, marginal and central, dispersed by Old Testament narratives of diaspora and sublated by New Testament prophesies of apocalypse.21 Appeals to “Englishness” or an “English people” therefore habitually collide with more prominent, politically specific markers of affiliation.22 Indeed, arguably one of the key issues Revolutionary Period publics and counterpublics fought over was what an emerging English nation might be: would it be republican commonwealth, godly nation, royal kingdom, millennial (supra)nation? What would be its relations to Scotland, Ireland, France, the New World? These competing, politically distinct visions meant that the expanded public culture of the Revolutionary Period did not so much homogenize an imagined English community as foreground and fragment it, dividing it internally, along lines of political or religious conflict, and dispersing it externally, along lines of colonial and continental alliance. In this period, therefore, the imagined communities—to borrow Benedict Anderson’s phrase—forged by print are not primarily national. Rather, these communities rely on pre-national forms of social and textual integration—forms that are also not the traditional (often socially vertical) ties of kinship, neighborhood, and patronage, however. Katherine Lynch has argued that the Medieval and early modern continental Catholic Church used family bonds to create specific spiritual communities such as the beguines (77). In the more combative context of seventeenth-century Britain, this process of forging new communities through older languages of kinship was both decentralized and intensified. In the wars, alliances of blood and friendship were used to drum up armed support on both sides (Carlton, Going 51), yet simultaneously families and friends were split

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by opposing religious and political affiliations. Indeed, one of the great tragedies of the wars, as they were represented, was their effect on traditional alliances: as Lucy Hutchinson puts it “every county has the civil war, more or less, within itself ” (60).23 In the face of this perceived breakdown of established relations, the women writers in this book reinvent traditional ties of kin and companionship as the ground and model of counterpublic bonding, using old languages to mark new forms of voluntary social integration. It is within this internally conflicted and externally expansive public culture that women can take center stage. It is easy to see why women would embrace a decentered public: given the masculinization of even Revolutionary institutions of publicness, nonaristocratic women in particular had limited options. What is perhaps less obvious is why the men who could have happily continued in their homosocial textual dialogue included women writers, allied with them, even promoted them. Jessey, Wight’s Cambridge-educated amanuensis, had an extended and powerful network of political connections in England, the Netherlands, and the Massachusetts Bay Colony. Why did he need or want an adolescent girl to fuse and vindicate the London sectarian community? One answer might be that women, willy-nilly, forced themselves into seventeenth-century public culture, so that male writers primarily reacted to a fait accompli. Scholars such as Sharon Achinstein and Kate Peters have made this reactive argument, and it certainly fits an author like Dorothy Leigh, with her deployment of anti-patriarchal rhetoric that can be re-used by men in more radical contexts.24 However, though figures such as Philips, Wight, and Bradstreet also artfully insert themselves into public debates of some importance, this insertion is facilitated by like-minded men—they were courted into print by male writers rather than barred from it. So, men did not simply react to women writers but helped invent them in ways that, as I argued in the introduction, relied on containment and facilitation, on the collaboration and competition that produced heterosocial counterpublics. But why did men need this cross-gender collaboration? Hero Chalmers has argued in relation to Katherine Philips that “the marginalized condition of Royalists in the 1650s paves the way for male Royalist readers to identify with the political resonance of the qualities embodied by the feminine in her verse” (13). As this book has demonstrated, however, it is not just Royalist men who identify with the marginalized status of women in this turbulent period. In their rejection of university learning and ordained ministry, Quakers most openly embrace (and work to reverse) traditionally feminized positions

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outside state and church. When Baker defends a public role for the female “weaker Vessel” above, for example, he contrasts her to the “man of understanding” or “lofty man that must be laid low, who excels in that wisdom and knowledge which is not from above, but otherwise, brutish” (A3). Whatever his own education, Baker identifies not with those men privileged by homosocial institutions of publicness, such as university, church, and state, but with those “weak” women, vessels for Christ, who will help overthrow corrupt leaders and institutions, or “confound and bring [them] to nought” (A2v).25 Thus for Baker, gender politics becomes a way to rethink and articulate reversals and transformations within state politics. This sense of women’s power as symbols and articulators of religiopolitical reversal and transformation is registered by the men involved in or responding to the other books of this study: Leigh’s legacy as a zealous mother, whose troubling place at the edges of patriarchal theory creates a potentially anti-monarchal maternity; Philips’s position as a proxy, whose exclusion from traditional institutions of publicness like Oxford makes her a powerful figurehead for displaced, oppositional Royalists; Wight’s status as a holy innocent divorced from the state church, whose very youth and femininity signal the miraculous imminence of the millennium (A7); Bradstreet’s role as “Tenth Muse,” whose very marginality in terms of gender and geography legitimates her corrective reinvention of Old and New England communities (A8). Women writers and their interlocutors may draw on, even reinforce, gender hierarchies, and they operate in a social context in which men and women are by no means equal. The women in question are also a literate minority, and are often outnumbered by men even within their respective communities. Yet women writers’ active, rational, shaping contributions to these counterpublics mean they are not symbols of unruly women on top, and that they are not simply hijacked by male gatekeepers for a male public political agenda. Instead, they help invent that agenda. This book’s case studies present an array of women whose acknowledged—flaunted even— marginalization is precisely what makes them potent synecdoches of multiple new or renewed public cultures that exist at the edges of the institutions of parliament and church, and even of England itself, and that insist on an opposition to—even an overturning of—traditional or current political orders. As both symbols and articulators of religiopolitical reversal, therefore, seventeenth-century women writers help put the counter in counterpublics.

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N otes Introduction: Crossing Borders: From Private Dialogue to Public Debate 1. As “free conference” is printed in brackets, it may be a revision to the original text, either by Chidley or the printer. With the exception of titles, I have modernized spelling, where this does not interfere with the sense or scansion. 2. See Habermas’s first, influential book on the public sphere, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere. The continuing interest in locating a pre-eighteenth-century public sphere along Habermas’s lines is evidenced by a recent issue of Criticism (2004), edited by Joseph Loewenstein and Paul Stevens. Based on a cluster of 2002 MLA panels, it addresses the question “When is a public sphere?” Though its attempt to create a “tentative genealogy” of publicness is admirable, its focus on “an apolitical precursor” to Habermas’s eighteenth-century ideal leaves out the politically vested communities this book addresses (Loewenstein and Stevens, “Introduction” 202). Critics of seventeenthcentury studies who are more attentive to a pluralized and conflictual model of seventeenth-century publicness include James Holstun (Ehud’s Dagger), Mihoko Suzuki, and David Zaret (“Religion, Science, and Printing”). See also Joad Raymond, who has argued in relation to early modern newspapers that the expanded print culture of this period was “heterodox and conflictual” (“The Newspaper” 129). 3. Since Fraser published her critique, Habermas, too, has pluralized public debate. See Habermas, Postnational Constellation. 4. Michael Warner notes that even for Habermas, the inclusivity of the public sphere has never been realized, but “has always been structured by a set of ideals that were contradicted by its own organization and compromised by its own ideology” (46). 5. For scholars who rethink the relationship of public and private, see, for example, John Brewer on the terms in the long eighteenth century; Michael Warner on modern publics; and Dena Goodman on Old Regime France. Amanda Vickery offers a comprehensive critique of the concepts as the dominant organizing principle of gender discourse in studies of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.

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6. For scholars who question the public/private dichotomy in the seventeenth century see, for example, Raymond (Pamphlets and Pamphleteering 277), Lois Schwoerer (58), and Kari Boyd McBride (14). For a recent article that explores sixteenth- and early seventeenthcentury meanings of “private,” also see Longfellow. 7. Clark’s Working Life of Women was first published in 1919, Stopes’s The “Sphere” of Man in 1907. 8. This is a republication from Hutson’s earlier The Usurer’s Daughter (1994), in which she stresses that the dichotomy of private woman and public man was a “fiction” but that it nonetheless had real limiting effects on women’s “access” to “cultural production” (21, 51). Warnicke argues that women could participate in public life, but only “in indirect ways through the manipulation of their male relatives” (140). 9. Write or Be Written (2001), for example, edited by Barbara Smith and Ursula Appelt, includes only three essays out of twelve that explicitly address women’s relation to public politics. Similarly, the otherwise impressive A Companion to Early Modern Women’s Writing (2002), edited by Anita Pacheco, contains valuable contextual essays on women and education, religion, law, work, and writing, but lacks a comparable section on women and politics. 10. As Erickson notes, “Prohibitions upon girls and women appearing in public places like markets and fairs are entirely absent from early modern ballads and broadsides” (10). For women’s involvement in coffee shops, see Pincus. 11. See Hilda Smith’s All Men and Both Sexes (74–83) and Maureen Bell’s “A Dictionary of Women in the London Book Trade” and “Women Writing and Women Written” on printers and guilds. See also Dagmar Freist for female hawkers, printers, and booksellers. 12. Histories of women that detail their relation to public institutions include Crawford, “‘The Poorest She’ ” ; Willen, “Women in the Public Sphere”; and Mendelson and Crawford, Women in Early Modern England. Queens are the exception that proves the rule as regards women holding governmental court office and queens’ courts could offer a handful of aristocratic women court position and power. For female courts’ appropriation of masculine models of “institutional selfhood,” see McManus. 13. Catherine Belsey and Lena Cowen Orlin both analyze the analogous and contradictory relations between conduct literature and patriarchal theory. For an argument about the enabling potential for women writers of these contradictions, see chapter 1 in this book. 14. Though the idea of the church as an extended family was not new, the sects used an intensified language of attachment not just to Christ but to each other to facilitate bonding and, as Edwards notes below, to justify their relative autonomy from state institutions. On a Baptist “counterromance” of church affiliation that substitutes for hierarchical domestic arrangements, see Gillespie (Domesticity and Dissent 131–39).

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15. For arguments over religious settlements couched in terms of public and private, see, for example, Katherine Chidley’s arguments that “private men” (i.e., men without official position) can set up churches (The Justification 34, 51), or Daniel Featley’s The Dippers Dipt, which purports to quote Baptists saying: “The scripture puts no difference betwixt public and private; it is as lawful to worship God in a private house, to preach there, as in one of your Steeple houses” (10). For female sectarians on these debates, see Gillespie’s Domesticity and Dissent. 16. For Philips’s use of the term friend see Barash and chapter 3 in this book. The Quakers did not officially become known as the “Religious Society of Friends” until the eighteenth century, but drew on the Bible to describe themselves as “friends in the light” and “Friends of Truth” long before this. On the competing classical models of male friendship (from Aristotle, Plato, Catullus) available for potential revision—or rejection—by women like Philips, see Andreadis (43, 57). 17. For a different use of the familiar letter between writers on opposed sides of the Civil Wars, see Wilcher (162–67). 18. See, for example, Herrick’s “True Safety” (Hesperides 288) or Lovelace’s “The Grasshopper” (Lucasta 34–36). 19. For a detailed history of male friendship from the classical period to the Enlightenment, see Alan Bray. Though I differ from Bray in retaining a sense of friendship’s privacy (as seventeenth-century writers code it as exclusive, and, as Bray notes, intimate), we both analyze the wider social—and in my case political—uses of friendship. 20. Feminists who analyze the problematic status of the household in Habermas include Fraser, in Unruly Practices, and Marie Fleming. In his “Further Reflections on the Public Sphere,” Habermas concedes that “[u]nlike the exclusion of underprivileged men, the exclusion of women had structuring significance” on the development of the public sphere (428). 21. There are of course exceptions: see Jane Stevenson and Peter Davidson’s diverse anthology of women’s poetry across the British Isles; Norbrook’s “Women, the Republic of Letters, and the Public Sphere”; and Margaret Ferguson’s magisterial Dido’s Daughters. 22. Bell and Crawford show seventeenth-century women’s published writing starting at a low of 0.3 percent of total published material, climbing to 1.3 percent in the 1650s, and reaching a high point of 1.6 in 1690 (266–67). 23. For the dating of modern notions of an impersonal state (rather than governance embodied in the king) to this period or slightly earlier, see Skinner and Orr. For a sampling of scholars who stress the multikingdom or colonial context of British identity and governance in this period see Bradshaw and Morrill’s The British Problem, Schwyzer and Mealor’s Archipelagic Identities, and Baker and Maley’s British Identities. Scholars are just beginning to stress transnational or archipelagic

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27.

28.

29.

30.

31. 32. 33.

N ot e s pamphlet and news networks: see Joad Raymond, Pamphlets and Pamphleteering, and Ann Hughes, Gangraena. Begun by groundbreaking anthologies such as Greer et al.’s Kissing the Rod, and reinvigorated by a second wave of recovery of women’s manuscripts by groups such as the Perdita Project, the market for early women’s writing has grown greatly. Recent collections of articles include books growing out of the conferences sponsored by the Society for the Study of Early Modern Women, such as Crossing Boundaries: Attending to Early Modern Women, edited by Donawerth and Seeff. Recent anthologies of early modern women’s writing include Early Modern Women’s Manuscript Poetry by Millman and Wright. For an interesting anthology that couples writing by men and women, see Travitsky and Prescott’s Female and Male Voices. In addition to Holstun, mentioned above, Norbrook investigates the development of a republican tradition in Writing the English Republic; Nigel Smith the evolution of a public sphere of debate in Literature and Revolution; Achinstein the rise of practices of activist reading in Milton and the Revolutionary Reader; and Zaret the creation of public opinion in Origins of Democratic Culture. For a revisionist perspective, see Conrad Russell, Unrevolutionary England, 1603–1642. For a routing of revisionist arguments, see James Holstun’s Ehud’s Dagger. For Fell’s crucial role coordinating Quaker publications and organizing national campaigns from Swarthmoor Hall, see Peters, particularly chapter 2. Saltmarsh’s actions toward the end of his life are recorded in Wonderfull Predictions Declared in a Message (1648). For more on both men, see chapter 2 in this book. When the British Civil Wars appear in Habermas, they act as foils to his bourgeois public sphere. Arguing that systematic opposition to the government existed only “from 1727 on,” he states: “Until then political opposition at the national level had been possible only as the attempt to push one’s interests by resorting to violence in the forms of the Fronde and the Civil War” (Structural Transformation 64). Fraser’s theory allows us to see interested conflict as constitutive of reasoned public discourse rather than as antithetical to it. Scholars such as Jonathan Goldberg, Stephen Orgel, and Roy Strong have argued that the literature surrounding James I and his son, Charles, elevated the king as the embodiment of an abstract ideal of power. For an example of this kind of “prying” see Shohet’s suggestive argument that printed masques could circulate as a kind of news. For these and other key events, see Christopher Hill’s Century of Revolution (94–165). On this coalition as a powerful force in the Revolutionary conflict, see Brenner.

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34. The first figure comes from a search for all publications between these dates on Early English Books Online, and so does not distinguish between new books, republications, and new editions. The figures for 1642 and 1639 are from John Barnard and Maureen Bell’s statistical tables of books, compiled from Wing, Pollard, and Redgrave’s Short Title Catalogues (783). 35. Post-revisionist emphasis on opposition has generated a plethora of research on the early Stuart period. See, for example, Richard Cust, Alastair Bellany, Curtis Perry, Thomas Cogswell, Stephen Clucas, and Rosalind Davies. 36. Rich historical narratives of the rise of these diverse and conflicting groups abound. In addition to scholars already discussed, see Raymond on Scots Presbyterians (Pamphlets 161–201); Murray Tolmie and Tai Liu for the Independents and the sects; G.E. Aylmer for Leveller politics; Keith Lindley and Robert Ashton on English Presbyterian activity; and Lois Potter and David Underdown (Royalist Conspiracy) on Royalist activism. Bernard Capp’s The Fifth Monarchy Men and Christopher Hill’s The World Turned Upside Down are still the most comprehensive accounts of, respectively, the Fifth Monarchists and the radical groups generally in this period. 37. For other essay- or chapter-length articles analyzing women writers and seventeenth-century public spheres see Raymond’s analysis of female pamphleteers in Pamphlets; Schwoerer’s comprehensive survey of women’s political writings and the public, “Women’s Public Political Voice”; and Achinstein’s analysis of women’s use of reasoned discourse and the male backlash it provoked in her “Women on Top.” 38. Both Bradstreet and Philips’s husbands were sympathetic to their literary efforts, but were absent a great deal. Simon Bradstreet in New England and James Philips in Wales held government posts and were busy in land transfers and thus both left their wives often, traveling widely for business. See chapters 3 and 4 in this book. 39. For scholars on women and the sects in addition to those already discussed, see, for example, Phyllis Mack, Hilary Hinds, Keith Thomas, Nigel Smith (Perfection Proclaimed), Dorothy Ludlow, and Anne Laurence. 40. For women petitioners, see Suzuki, Anne McEntee, and Patricia Higgins. 41. On Royalist women, see Antonia Fraser, Ezell (The Patriarch’s Wife), Carol Barash, Hero Chalmers, and Catherine Gallagher. Channel’s amanuensis, Arise Evans, says, “you shall find more truth and substance in it, than in all Hana Trapnel’s songs or sayings” (7). 42. See, for example, “To my sister S.G.” (8), “To my sister, S.S.” (27), “When my brother was sick” (32), and “To my brother” (35) in Eliza’s Babes. 43. As Jeffrey Master puts it, early modern women were forced to “locate themselves in a textual economy normatively transacted between men” (8).

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44. For Swetnam, see Henderson and McManus. For Stuckley, see his sermon printed in Mall’s 1658 [A] True Account. 45. See, for example, Peter Stallybrass’s seminal essay on the question of woman, enclosure, and silence, and Suzanne Hull’s Chaste, Silent, and Obedient. 46. See the prefaces to Naylor’s 1661 Milk for Babes and his 1658 A Message from the Spirit of Truth, and Mack (200–01). 47. For the necessity of reading Quaker pamphlets through models of collaborative authorship, see Catie Gil. 48. Scholars who offer sophisticated analyses of gender fluidity in the early modern period include Wendy Wall (Imprint of Gender), Mary Beth Rose, Rachel Trubowitz, and Phyllis Mack. 49. With the possible exception of the role of queen. For Elizabeth I’s use of transgender positions, for example, see Carol Levine’s “Power, Politics, and Sexuality: Images of Elizabeth I.” 50. For Trapnel’s biography, see her Anna Trapnel’s Report and Plea. 51. There are, of course, exceptions. See, for example, the prefatory matter to Aemilia Lanyer’s Salve Deus Rex Judaeorum, where she attempts to construct a female community (The Poems). 52. Underhill published two tracts by Elizabeth of Bohemia, and another by Henrietta Maria. 53. In this emphasis on men and women’s collaboration, I differ from Suzuki, who focuses on a female or proto-feminist counterpublic. For a statistical analysis of women’s books of the period, with similar reservations about a female tradition, see Maureen Bell’s “Women Writing” (434–35).

Chapter 1 The Zealous Mother: Dorothy Leigh and the Godly Family 1. Both Leigh’s book and The Fathers Blessing bear the date 1616 on the title-page, but The Fathers Blessing was entered in the Stationer’s Register on October 29, 1615, whereas Leigh’s book was not entered until February 26, 1616, suggesting her book may have been published later. 2. Leigh’s book was published at least nineteen times before 1640, of which fifteen editions survive. After 1640, there are only four surviving editions from the seventeenth century. Page length and chapter numbers vary slightly from edition to edition, depending on print size; however, the content remains the same. All quotations will be taken from the 1616 edition unless otherwise stated. 3. Writers on James include Wormald, Doelman, Sharpe, Goldberg, and biographers such as Willson and Lee. 4. The 1622 and 1623 editions of Leigh’s book were bound with the 1621 and 1624 editions of The Fathers Blessing, respectively. A letter from Queries (with no author, date, or publishing information) has

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7. 8. 9.

10. 11.

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been added to the Early English Books tenth edition of The Mothers Blessing (1627) stating that the owner of this edition also found it bound with the 1624 edition of The Fathers Blessing. See Lewalski’s Writing Women, Ezell’s The Patriarch’s Wife, and Goldberg’s Desiring Women. Works dealing with conduct literature in a similar vein include Hilary Hinds, who states: “The family was represented as a ‘little church’ or ‘little state,’ and thus unquestionably patriarchal and authoritarian” (35), and Anne Rosalind Jones who, while mounting a sophisticated exploration of women poets’ multiple resistances to the exigencies of Puritan conduct, also presents that conduct as a univocal replication of the monarchist state: “As the king rules over his kingdom, the father rules over his family and flock” (“Nets and Bridles” 59). See Wall, Staging Domesticity. More recently, Lena Cowen Orlin similarly analyzes the inconsistencies in women’s roles in the family (100–01). Early in his career, Breton wrote elegies and dedications for Sidney, Spenser, and the countess of Pembroke, thus aligning himself with the pan-Protestant Leicester circle. However, he also wrote panegyrics for James I and published a criticism of dissent called A Murmurer in 1607. For an extended analysis of literary transvestitism in the Renaissance, see Harvey. I am arguing the reverse of Poole here, who claims that maternity only operates as a “facade” for Breton and that he “soon abandons all references to the maternal in either tone or content” (70). This ignores Breton’s many continuing references to his maternal persona. On Prince Henry’s death see William Hunt, “Spectral Origins,” and below. On the political debates surrounding the Addled Parliament, see Stephen Clucas and Rosalind Davies. For an account of the effects of Overbury’s murder, see Bellany’s The Politics of Court Scandal. There were moves to semi-Separatism during this period; for example, the London Jacob’s Church was started the same year Leigh’s The Mothers Blessing was first published. See Tolmie’s The Triumph of the Saints. In 1613, Frances Howard started divorce proceedings against the earl of Essex, in order to marry Robert Carr, earl of Somerset. During the divorce, there was a split between the early Arminian party (Neile, Buckeridge, Andrewes, and Bilson) who all voted in support of the King’s wishes for annulment, and the Anglo-Calvinists (King and Abbot) who opposed the divorce (Fincham and Lake 192). The public polarization over the scandal of the Essex divorce became even greater after it was discovered during 1615–16 that Somerset’s advisor, Overbury, who had opposed Somerset’s marriage to Frances Howard, had been poisoned. The Somersets were tried for murder in May 1616, and Overbury came to be seen as a Protestant martyr, persecuted by the powerful, Catholic Howard faction and the parasitic

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16.

17.

18.

19. 20.

21.

22.

N ot e s Carr (Bromham and Bruzzi 32–34; Bellany, The Politics of Court Scandal). Most sources agree on the identity of her father; however, the connection between Leigh and the William Leigh beneficed by Winthrop is less certain. Sources of biographical information on Leigh include a reply from the editor in Notes and Queries; Paul and Jane Schlueter’s An Encyclopedia of British Women Writers; and Bell, Parfitt, and Shepherd’s A Biographical Dictionary of English Women Writers. The first seven editions of Leigh’s were published by Budge, who also published volumes of elegies for the death of Prince Henry; books by conformist Anglicans (such as John Denison); and books by former Separatists who had returned to the Anglican fold (such as Richard Bernard). From 1627 to 1640 most of the surviving editions were printed by R. Allot, who published from a theologically varied group of mainly religious writers, including both conformist divines, such as Mathew Griffith, and nonconformists, such as Thomas Hooker, already in exile in New England at this time. Any conclusion drawn from publishers must be tentative, as they are of differing political commitments and chose books as much for market as for ideological value. However, Leigh’s publishing history before 1640 puts her with Calvinist theological writers with varying commitments to the Anglican hierarchy. On this masque, see David Norbrook’s “The Reformation of the Masque” and Barbara Lewalski’s chapter on Elizabeth in Writing Women in Jacobean England. She situates deference to royal authority within the context of a broader civic and religious duty, however, arguing that a strong faith will better enable her sons “to serve God, thy King, and Country, both in thy life and in thy death” (22). Snook’s analysis of Leigh’s “cultural politics of vernacular literacy” also emphasizes Leigh’s counsels on reading (80). See Milton’s An Apology against a Pamphlet (1642), for example, in which he berates Anglican clergy for pluralism and their condescending attitude to a populace that they themselves have trained to be ignorant (Complete Prose 932). The canons restricted preaching to those ministers examined by bishops for their conformity and licensed accordingly; those who were not licensed were told to read from the Book of Homilies and procure a licensed preacher once a month from their own salaries (Hill, Society and Puritanism 34–35). This was an attempt to control the political climate, as the pulpit was one of the major sources of government propaganda. The controversy between Puritans (who advocated stricter Sunday observance) and the defenders of village festivities revived during the period leading up to the Addled Parliament of 1614, when there was a surge of local activities against pastimes and plays (Marcus 66). So

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26. 27. 28. 29. 30.

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acrimonious were the battles between Puritan reformers and defenders of Sunday sports that Patrick Collinson has pinpointed this culture clash as a major factor in the Civil Wars: “England’s wars of religion began, in a sense, with the maypole” (Birthpangs 141). A Transcript of the Register of the Company of Stationers for 1615–16 shows pamphlets by and about Overbury in great demand. One of Leigh’s publishers, Robert Allot, later published one of Overbury’s books, Sir Thomas Overbury His Wife, in 1632. In 1618 James issued the first Declaration of Sports to settle debate over the Sabbath, but its polarization of the situation only confirmed pastimes as “part of the symbolic language of Stuart power” (Marcus 5); Charles reissued his father’s text almost fifteen years later, but in doing so only intensified the association among corrupt hierarchy, Laudian high-church reforms, and popular sports. For extended commentaries on the Sabbatarian controversies see Marcus, Whitaker, and Hill, Society and Puritanism, chapter 5. Conformists believed that since the ancient days of the church, the congregation had lost their right to elect their own minister (Lake, “Calvinism” 214). See Lake’s “Calvinism.” For a detailed historical account of the growth of opposition during this period, see Cogswell’s The Blessed Revolution. In the original edition, the cut line reads: “Yet know withal there is a King of Kings: / Who hoisteth up and headlong tumbleth down” (7). Roe talked of his subsequent ambassadorial post to Turkey that year as a form of “banishment” (Strachan 132). As neither edition contains the name of publishers or the place of publication, it is not certain where the two versions were published; however, Pollard and Redgrave’s Short Title Catalogue traces the first edition to Amsterdam and the second to London, published anonymously. The first edition was printed under a different title: The Answer of a Mother unto Hir Seduced Sonnes Letter (1627) and may have been an answer to a pamphlet ostensibly published from Douai in 1623 called An Epistle of a Catholicke Young Gentleman, perhaps written by an anonymous English convert on the continent (though actually published secretly in England). If so, A Mothers Teares takes part in a propaganda war, waged within England and across the channel by Catholics and Protestants engaged in ideological and then literal conflict. The quotations I have chosen appear in both editions of the text, unless otherwise stated, but the page numbering comes from the first, Amsterdam version, which is considerably shorter. A Mothers Teares also cites Elizabeth Joceline’s The Mothers Legacie as a precedent. For more information on Stam, and his printing of corantos for import into England, see Dahl. Dahl also states that Veseler was involved in printing the earliest known coranto from Amsterdam (31).

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33. Stam published The Unbishoping of Timothy and Titus (1636); A Breviate of the Prelates Intollerable Usurpations (1637); and XVI. New Quaeres Proposed to Our Lord Prelates (1637), all by Prynne. 34. For more on the conflict between Arminianism and Calvinism see Tyacke, “Debate: The Rise of Arminianism Reconsidered” and “Anglican Attitudes”; and Sommerville, Politics and Ideology. 35. As James emphasized pacifism in the face of growing continental strife, and Charles found himself first negotiating for the hand of a Spanish Catholic and then married to a French one, the traditional insistence on Catholics as agents of the Antichrist seemed less useful politically, particularly when apocalyptic zeal played such a major role in the anti-governmental publications of the Bohemian Crisis and Spanish match. 36. Roger Lockyer, Buckingham’s biographer, describes some of the antiCatholic feeling that surrounded the court favorite in Buckingham: The Life and Political Career of George Villiers. See also Holstun’s Ehud’s Dagger and Bellany’s “‘Rayling Rymes and Vaunting Verse.’ ” 37. Milton, for example, criticizing Presbyterians who were turning away from the more radical implications of the Revolution, alludes to their identification of Charles with Ahab in Eikonoklastes: “he that was once their Ahab, now their Josiah” (Complete Poems 794). 38. On Revolutionary Period women prophets see Purkiss, Gillespie’s Domesticity and Dissent, Holstun’s chapter on Anna Trapnel in his Ehud’s Dagger, and chapter 2 in this book. 39. For the flipside of this phenomenon, where Royalists use maternity in scurrilous attacks that satirize Parliamentary power through gross female embodiment, see the Mistris Parliament pamphlets (1648).

Chapter 2 At “Liberty to Preach in the Chambers”: Sarah Wight, Henry Jessey, and the New-Modeled Community of Saints 1. For this phrase, and a detailed documentation of the events leading up to the army’s march on London in August 1647, see Ashton. 2. Maureen Bell notes that because Wight’s words are published in Jessey’s text she “disappears, bibliographically, from view” (“Women Writing” 433). 3. Other critics who discuss Wight in general analyses of female prophets include Hobby (Virtue of Necessity 67, 69), Ludlow (155–60), Stevie Davies (123–35), and Nigel Smith (Perfection Proclaimed 45–51). 4. These records, reproduced among other sectarian documents in Burrage, are often attributed to Jessey and are, in fact, known as the “Jessey memoranda.”

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5. The elliptical nature of these notes means that it is hard to tell whether this is a reference to her testimony to the court or the title of a book. However, there are two surviving publications during this period by a Sarah Jones: the first book is by a woman identified as an Independent by Phyllis Mack (413), and the second is by a Quaker. Either or both of these authors could be the Sarah Jones mentioned in the Jacobs Church records and The Exceeding Riches of Grace. 6. The title-page attributes this publication to a John Hart, or “HART ON-HI,” and I have followed Wing’s Short Title Catalogue in doing the same, though Dailey attributes the work to one of Drake’s visitors, Jeremy Heartwell (442). 7. Hooker had moved to New England by the time of the book’s publication, but he was still in Old England at the time of Drake’s troubles, and appears as a character in the text. One historian suggests that Hooker may have arranged the publication before he died, or that it was published at his wife’s request (Williams 114). 8. On John Dod see Williams (119); on John Preston and John Forbes see Greaves and Zaller (3: 59; 1: 294). 9. For information on these performances, see Mares’s introduction to the play (lxii, lxv). 10. This 1654 edition was retitled The Firebrand Taken out of the Fire. It has a new, anonymous preface that presents Drake’s conversion as a counter to those who “rage horribly against God’s Ministers” ([A3]). 11. The Exceeding Riches of Grace was entered in the Stationer’s Register on May 20, 1647, but Jessey added to the book until at least July 16, the last date on the prefatory material. The second edition was published sometime after September 21, 1647, the last date on a revised prefatory letter from Jessey. It would make sense to see the first edition as published sometime between the two dates, probably, given Jessey’s apologies for his own errors of haste, in late July/early August (av). 12. Saltmarsh’s Free Grace in part uses spiritual affliction as a polemical tool to criticize preachers who rely too heavily on ordinances (17). He emphasizes instead that “Christ crucified is the foundation and cornerstone and rock for sinners” (29–30). 13. Jessey names eighty-two visitors in his preface, claiming “many more might be named,” and then sporadically adds new names later in the dialogues (9–10). For specific visitors, see below. 14. Although Wight’s fast was published first, Trapnel later claimed to have had her first prophetic experience in 1646 (Trapnel, The Cry of a Stone 3), so it is difficult to tell which woman was the originator of this spate of fasting prophesies. 15. As Dailey notes, Jessey’s list includes at least two moderate religious Presbyterians, indicating his desire to incorporate moderates of a range of denominations (453). 16. For these men, see, respectively, Greaves and Zaller (3: 195–96; 2: 61; 3: 32). Other men in Jessey’s lists who were connected to the army

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20.

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22.

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N ot e s include Thomas Coxe, military physician (Dailey 445); Richard Price, captain of a Welsh regiment (Greaves and Zaller 3:61); Thomas Palmer, army chaplain (Greaves and Zaller 3: 4); Robert Blake, organizer of Parliamentary resistance at Bristol (Greaves and Zaller 1: 72); and Isaac Knight, who met with officers to pray for the army before Pride’s Purge (Capp 253; Gentles 278). These images, an amalgam of Galatians 3.24 and 4.2, are evoked in similar terms by Saltmarsh in Free Grace (148). For more on Hannah Allen, her sectarian connections, and publications, see Bell, “Hannah Allen.” Ernestine van der Wall notes that Ranelagh is mentioned in the list of visitors as Lady “Renula,” along with Benjamin Worsley, a correspondent of Robert Boyle’s (“A Philo-Semitic Millenarian” 164). Other ladies who visit Wight include Lady Vermuyden and Lady Darcy, both of whom later also visited the prophet Anna Trapnel (Trapnel, The Cry of a Stone 2). Jessey mentions “Sir Ric Philips and his Lady, dau to Dr. Oxenbridge” (9). Katherine Philips’s mother was the daughter of Daniel Oxenbridge and married Sir Richard Philips in 1646 (Souers 12–18). This number includes Jessey himself, as well as John Simpson, Isaac Knight (another early leader at Allhallows), Edward Harrison, and Richard Price. Thomas Palmer, Samuel Fisher, John Browne (whose letter is added to the 1648 edition), Morgan Llwyd, and John Tillinghast also all joined the Fifth Monarchist movement. Although Jessey was more openly opposed to Royalism, it was disaffection with the Commonwealth government that led him to join the Allhallows Fifth Monarchist meetings in 1651. Jessey was a moderate and, with John Simpson, split from the group in 1657 over its identification of the Cromwellian government with the Antichrist (White, “Pastor” 107). However, his dedication to a belief that worldly governments would soon fall before the reign of the saints is clear throughout his career. For more on Fifth Monarchists, see Capp. Jessey cites Wight as proof of the coming fulfillment of the passage from Joel 2.28: God has promised “to pour out his Spirit in the last days” (A6v). In Storehouse, Jessey refers to the conversion of a Jew (35). For more on Jessey’s connection to the movement to readmit the Jews to England see Katz (“Menasseh Ben Israel’s Christian Connection” and Philo-Semitism 125–31) and Ernestine van der Wall (“A Philo-Semitic Millenarian”). Jessey also translated The Conversion of Five Thousand and Nine Hundred East-Indians in the Isle of Formosa, 1650 (Ball 109). This document described the missionary work of Robert Junius, which was seen as a sign that the preaching of the word to all nations, a necessary precursor to the millennium, was being accomplished (Ball 110).

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24. On the relationship between apocalyptic belief and sectarian practices of assimilation and exclusion, see Guibbory and the conclusion of this book. 25. See, for example, Purkiss’s sophisticated “Producing the Voice, Consuming the Body,” and Berg and Berry’s “Spiritual Whoredom.” 26. Along with contributing a preface to Mary Cary’s Little Horns Doom and Downfall (1651), Jessey’s recollection of the 1661 spiritual counsels of a ten-year-old, Mary Warren, was written down and published by Abraham Cheare as A Looking-Glass for Children (1673). Jessey’s interest in other miraculous signs of God’s favor or displeasure were recorded in his later publications, such as The Lord’s Loud Call to England (1660). 27. Jessey notes that Wight is raised from the dead like Lazarus and Dorcus (av). 28. There are seven surviving editions from before 1660 (it was published at least twice in 1647, 1648, and 1658). It was also republished in 1666. 29. Jessey promises to print these letters, along with the other conferences, in the second part that never materialized. Serrarius wrote a foreword to a translation of Sprigge’s sermons in 1654 (van den Berg 190). In 1658, the year he is mentioned in Jessey and Wight’s book, he contributed a letter on the conversion of the Jews to An Information Concerning the Present State of the Jewish Nation in Europe and Judea, variously attributed to either Jessey or Dury. For more on Serrarius’s career generally see van den Berg and van der Wall (“The Amsterdam Millenarian”). 30. Like The Exceeding Riches of Grace, this book is often attributed to Allen in bibliographies but claims to record Huish’s words. It is therefore perhaps better seen as a collaborative book. 31. See A Serious Letter Sent by a Private Christian, Advice Sent in a Letter from an Elder Brother to a Younger, and A Letter from a Christian Friend, which claims boldly “a Tyrant’s death is the people’s Antidote” (8), all published, like Wight’s book, in 1655. 32. For analysis of the importance of the Pauline epistles to Marian martyrs, see Knott (84–91). 33. For short biographies of these three men, see Greaves and Zaller (1: 63, 3: 195, and 3: 224). 34. Biddle was imprisoned in 1654, for his A Two-Fold Catechism, and Moone and Cottrell were imprisoned for publishing this book (Greaves and Zaller 1: 63). Tany was imprisoned for his attack on Parliament (Greaves and Zaller 3: 224). Spittlehouse was kept in custody early in 1654 for his criticisms of the government. He was rearrested in late 1654 for a new pamphlet criticizing the Protectorate (Greaves and Zaller 3: 195). 35. Hobby and Ludlow identify “R.B.” as Robert Bragge, an Independent minister and rector of Allhallows, who visited Wight

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37. 38.

39.

40. 41.

42.

43.

44.

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N ot e s (Hobby, Virtue 67; Ludlow 159). Dailey, on the other hand, identifies him as Robert Bacon, author of a Familist catechism (453), who seems a more likely candidate, given Moone and Cottrell’s other publications. Lucy Hutchinson, for example, while calling the rest of the Cromwell family “Cavaliers,” wrote approvingly of Bridget (208): “His daughter Fleetwood was humbled not exalted . . . but the rest were insolent fools” (209). Dailey confuses this Mrs. Fleetwood with Mrs. Hartopp, who visited Wight in 1647 (Jessey and Wight A1v), but who did not marry Charles Fleetwood until after Bridget Cromwell’s death in 1662 (Dailey 453). On earlier women writers’ use of Christ as erotic object, see Wall (Imprint of Gender 328). Both Allen and John Vernon, a close acquaintance of Allen’s who wrote the second preface to Allen and Huish’s book, knew the Lord Fleetwood of Wight’s letter, attending Particular Baptist meetings with him and working under him in Ireland. For more on Allen, see Hardacre, “William Allen.” George Yule claims Fleetwood was a member of Owen’s congregation (98). For more on the collaboration between Owen and Jessey see White (“Great Rebellion” 141). For more on Livewell Chapman, see Rostenberg. Allen was cleared of any involvement with the book, but the story goes that when called up to defend himself before Cromwell, he claimed that although he was not the author, had he been learned enough to write the pamphlet he would have done so (Hardacre, “William Allen” 303). In 1658, Cromwell sent Desborough to investigate Chapman on a book “reflecting on the government” (Rostenberg 225). Rostenberg speculates this book was The Captive Taken from the Strong (225). And, we might add, colonial or semicolonial conquest. Though space does not permit a discussion of this issue, many members of the sects, including Allen, were active in Cromwell’s policy of violence and land transfer in Ireland. For a brief discussion of Allen’s role in 1650s Ireland, and his disquieting attitude to Irish Catholics, see Hardacre (“William Allen” 297–302). For more on England’s vexed geopolitical relation to Ireland see the end of chapter 3 in this book and my forthcoming article on Katherine Philips in Ireland. Allen and Vernon were in part responsible for the divisions in Rogers’s Dublin congregation that caused him to leave Ireland in 1651 (Hardacre, “William Allen” 299), and so may be in direct competition with him here. In one of his addresses to the Corinthians, Paul denies any need of letters of recommendation from or to his audience, claiming “Ye are our epistle written in our hearts, known and read of all men” (2 Cor. 3.2).

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Chapter 3 The Knowing Few: Katherine Philips and the Courtly Coterie 1. Many of Philips’s coterie friends lived in London and Philips’s husband visited the city in an official capacity. However, we have no records of her visiting London extensively during this period, nor do we have records of her London friends visiting her. 2. See, for example, Arthur Marotti, Harold Love, and more recently, Robert Wilcher. Marotti and Love explain the importance of manuscript exchange to women writers, but do not relate these women to the politics of coteries. Wilcher’s extensive study of Royalists addresses Philips for three pages (333–35). 3. Harriette Andreadis and Arlene Stiebel, for example, give sophisticated readings of Philips’s homoerotic poetry, but do not link either Philips’s heterosocial or homoerotic verses to her Royalism. 4. For Patrick Thomas, see his introduction to Collected Works. 5. For other political readings of Philips, see also articles by Kathleen Swaim, Robert C. Evans, and James Loxley (“Unfettered Organs”). 6. Bouts rimés were competitions in which poets would take turns supplying the lines for given rhymes. The rondeaux was a complicated form that involved the repetition of phrases and the use of only two rhymes (Maland 56–59; Mourgues 118–40). 7. For Philips’s poems on these men, see her Collected Works (1: 100, 86, 96, 87, 83, and 143). For Vaughan’s responses, see Philips’s Collected Works (3: 182–84). For Finch’s manuscript dedication to Philips, see below. 8. See Patrick Thomas for the surviving fragment of this verse (Collected Works 1: 332). Berkenhead’s poem to Lucasia, “No Reprieve,” is in Henry Lawes’s Second Book of Ayres and Dialogues set to music (1655) (3). 9. For the other songs Lawes set to music see Philips’s Collected Works (1: 337, 356). Berkenhead’s biographer, P.W. Thomas, notes the Interregnum gatherings that occurred at Lawes’s house (143–44). 10. As Nigel Smith argues, after the King’s death: “For Royalists, elegy attaches itself to everything” (Literature and Revolution 287). 11. However, Moseley also notoriously published Milton’s 1645 Poems. 12. Lawes’s biographer states that he set poems in Musarum Oxoniensium Epibathpia to music (W.M. Evans 160), and Vaughan’s biographer that he is the “H. Vaughan, Jes. Col.” who contributed to Eucharistica Oxoniensia (F.E. Hutchinson 34). The other writer connected to Philips, Sir Edward Dering, contributed to a Cambridge equivalent, Irenodia Cantabrigiensis, in 1641. Other contributors to the

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15. 16.

17.

18. 19.

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N ot e s Cartwright volume also wrote for earlier collections: Joseph Howe, Martin Lluellin, Richard Hill, and Christopher Ware contributed to Eucharistica Oxoniensia, and Ralph Bathhurst, Thomas Severne, John Fell, John Finch, and Cartwright himself contributed to Musarum Oxoniensium Epibathpia. The authors of the Grenville volume include William Creed, Jasper Mayne, and Martin Lluellin, all of whom wrote for Cartwright. Records of the visitation are incomplete and attendance is difficult to determine because many men attended university but did not take a degree (Burrows 465–66). In addition, of the men writing poems for Comedies that signed their poems using initials only, three have not been identified. However, nineteen of the names in Cartwright match those called before the visitors during the 1640s, five contributors identify themselves as Oxford men in Comedies, and twelve more are included in Foster’s Alumni Oxonienses. Vaughan’s biographer states that he attended Oxford (F.E. Hutchinson 32–33) and Patrick Thomas that Francis Finch went to Balliol (Collected Works 1: 330). For a table of Oxford men who came before the visitors, see Burrows (465–571). During the early 1640s, New College’s cloisters and tower had become powder magazines, Frewin Hall had been turned into a canon foundry, and Christ Church’s quadrangle had been given the dubious honor of housing the army’s cattle (Hibbert 92). The condition of Fane’s release from the Tower in 1643 was an edict confining him within five miles of London (Hugh Maclean 197). Copies of The Faithful Scout (June 20 and June 27, 1651) and A Perfect Diurnal . . . in Relation to the Armies (June 23 and June 30) carry news of this uprising and defeat. With the exception of Philips’s poems on Lawes and Cartwright, which are taken from the original publications of their works, all Philips’s poems are from Collected Works, Vol. 1. For Lawes and Berkenhead’s careers, see their respective biographers, P.W. Thomas and Willa McClung Evans. The Lawes volume includes three verses by Dering, five songs and a commendatory poem by Berkenhead, one verse by Finch, and one by Cartwright. On this harmonic principle and its political resonance in masques, see Orgel and Strong. Cartwright’s 1636 university production of his The Royal Slave, commissioned for the last royal progress, included perspective scene designs by Inigo Jones, songs and instrumental arrangements by Lawes, elaborate Persian costumes, twelve dancers, and special effects—including an eclipse and a shower of rain. On the play’s performance and effects, see W.M. Evans (122–34) and G.B. Evans (171–83). For the manuscript poem, see Nigel Smith (Literature and Revolution 290).

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22. The two manuscript collections of her poems dating from the 1650s are the Tutin manuscript, an autograph of fifty-five poems (MS 775B), and a miscellany (MS 2. 1073), which includes fourteen of Philips’s poems from 1650 to 1651 (Beal, Index of English Literary Manuscripts 128–29). Another manuscript miscellany (MSS 6. 13) includes seventy-three of Philips’s poems, dated up until 1662. Sir Thomas Philipps also refers to a Royalist miscellany, which may include poems by Philips, John Jeffreys, and Andrew Marvell. For these, see Beal (Index of English Literary Manuscripts 130–36). For the poems held by Crouch—expelled by the Parliamentary visitors from Oxford—and Bridgewater, see Hageman and Sununu (“New Manuscript Texts” 180–81). Jenkin Jones threatened to publish Philips’s poem defending the King from poetic attack by Vavasor Powell (see above). Jeremy Taylor, an Oxford graduate and protégé of Laud’s, addressed his A Discourse of the Nature, Offices, and Measures of Friendship to Philips, and Davies dedicated his translation of Cleopatra to her. For arguments that Philips may have influenced Overton and Marvell, see respectively David Norbrook (“ This Blushing Tribute of a Borrowed ‘Muse’ ” ) and Allan Pritchard. Nigel Smith also links Philips and Marvell (The Poems of Andrew Marvell ). After the Restoration, manuscript collections of Philips’s work include one in Dering’s hand and another made by a professional scribe for Mary Aubrey (Beal, Index of English Literary Manuscripts 129–30). 23. Finch dedicated his 1653 manuscript Friendship to “D. Noble Lucasia-Orinda” (Patrick Thomas, Katherine Philips (“Orinda”) 28). 24. Patrick Thomas thinks the poem refers to Amoris Effigies (1651), but Berkenhead’s elegy on Charles I, Loyalties Tears (published anonymously in 1649), was republished with the initials “J.B.” in 1650, just before Philips’s poem was written (Collected Works 1: 341). Philips may refer to this elegy. 25. As Margaret Ezell argues, too often pseudonyms are read as “riddles to be solved” rather than as bonding techniques (“Reading Pseudonyms” 14). 26. The title is “To the Noble Silvander on His Dream and Navy, Personating Orinda Preferring Rosania before Salomon’s Traffic to Ophir in these Verses.” For Dering’s fragment, see Philips (Collected Works 1: 332–33). Hageman and Sununu give further examples of Restoration imitations of Philips (“More Copies” 131–46). 27. For violent images in Marvell, see, for example, his punning image of the Republic’s capitol as founded upon “A bleeding head” that “Did fright the architects to run” in “An Horatian Ode” (Complete Poems 69–70). 28. For these quotations, see “To the Much Honored Mr. Henry Lawes” (b1r); “To Mr. Henry Vaughan, Silurist” (line 8); and “To the Noble Palaemon” (line 17).

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29. Gallagher coins this phrase to describe the way Margaret Cavendish models her own authorship on the figure of the absolute monarch. Gallagher claims only women use the exiled King as a figure for authority, and that it renders Cavendish “eccentric because outside of anyone else’s circle” (“Embracing the Absolute” 26). Philips shows that this model of royal autonomy can operate for men and that its repetition creates the very circle of which Philips is a part. 30. For example, one of Marvell’s early lyrics, which can be found in the 1645 autograph manuscript of Henry Lawes’s brother, William Lawes, is titled “Thyrsis and Dorinda” (Marvell, Complete Poems 221). Sir Edward Dering’s verses in Lawes’s book, set to music by his wife, also refer to Doris and Chloris (24–25). 31. See Marotti on the dating of both poems to the early years of Donne’s marriage (John Donne 137, 156–57, 169, and 178). 32. Spenser’s Epithalamion, for example, presents marriage as procreational Protestant evangelism, its purpose: “Of blessed Saints for to increase the count” (English Sixteenth-Century Verses 23.423). 33. Goldberg argues that Donne appropriates the language of absolutism for his private sphere (107–11). 34. On Overton’s politically motivated revisions of Philips, see Norbrook (“This Blushing Tribute” 244). 35. For example, The Famous Tragedy of Charles I and Quarles’s Regale Lectum Miseriae both liken Cromwell to tyrants (Potter 118; Maguire 6). 36. See (Hey Hoe for a Husband) and New News from the Old Exchange. For a discussion of this kind of scandalous polemic, see Wiseman, “Porno-Political Rhetoric”. 37. Philips’s position may be similar to the Virgil of the eclogues, as a poet who writes pastoral during a period of massive land transfers, while remaining personally insulated through a problematic political affiliation. Cromwell is not Philips’s Augustus, however. 38. For an exploration of landscape poetry, see Fitter’s Poetry, Space, Landscape. 39. Powell’s manuscript poem is reproduced in full in Hageman and Sununu (“More Copies” 21–22). 40. Milton, for example, contrasts the King’s “parasites,” who imitate the royal will (Complete Poems 787–88) to the open trial of debate created by publication (Complete Poems 783). 41. The titles of the two editions are: Poems by the Incomparable Mrs. K.P. (1664), and Poems by the Most Deservedly Admired Mrs. Katherine Philips, the Matchless Orinda (1667). 42. For this miscellany, see Cowley, to whom it is often attributed. 43. Terminology for the inhabitants of Ireland during this period is vexed. The terms used at the time—New English, Old English, and Old Irish— were slippery, as ethnic distinctions were blurred by the history of settlement, intermarriage, and religious affiliations. I use Anglo-Irish

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46.

47.

48.

49.

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51. 52.

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because it connotes the cultural Englishness of this group, the majority of whom were from waves of English Protestant settlement in Ireland. For more on naming, see Connolly (103–43). On the Adventurers see Beckett (The Making of Modern Ireland 87); on Philips’s particular situation, see Souers (157–58). Lady Elizabeth Boyle, Lady Anne Boyle, and Frances Wentworth. For her exchanges with Orrery and Armourer, see her Collected Works (2: 48, 60) and above. For her poems to Orrery’s nieces see Collected Works (1: 177, 201, 221, 223, 227). The authors of the rival translation are: Edmund Waller, Sir Charles Sedley, Charles Sackville, Sir Edward Filmer, and perhaps Sidney Godolphin—though one manuscript copy attributes the fifth act to Sir Samuel Tuke (Philips, Collected Works 2: 71). Philips’s Pompey was performed at the Smock Alley Theater on February 18, 1663. Orrery’s play was performed privately on October 18, 1662, and then publicly at Smock Alley on February 26, 1663 (Beal, In Praise of Scribes 160). Orrery claimed Charles II asked him to write a heroic drama (W.S. Clark, Dramatic Works 23). For a theorization of the connections between England’s Civil Wars and the wars of its subject kingdoms, Ireland and Scotland, see Pocock. At the Restoration, Orrery used the rebellion to define Anglo-Irish loyalism by contrast with Catholic perfidy—the murkier Protestant allegiances of historical fact notwithstanding. See his An Answer to a Scandalous Letter (1662) and anonymously published The Irish Colours Displayed (1662). After the Revolutionary Period, Cromwellian settlers and New English loyalists united to form a powerful class of landholding Protestants. See Barnard (“Crisis of Identity” 54), Beckett (The Making of Modern Ireland 111), and Connolly (13–14). This speech is similar in Corneille. All quotations from Philips’s translation, its prologue by Roscommon, and the commendatory poem by Orrery are taken from Collected Works, Vol. 2. For the dating of these poems to 1650 and 1652, see Patrick Thomas (Collected Works 1: 363, 367). Their version reads: “Yes, I do Love, but must not let the flame / Dazzle me so as to neglect my Fame . . . She that great Caesar loves should in her soul / Abhor th’appearance of a crime so foul” (2.1. 1–2, 7–8). For an association between Cromwell and Julius Caesar, see Marvell’s “An Horatian Ode” (Andrew Marvell: The Complete Poems lines 81–82). Norbrook, Nigel Smith, and Chalmers all show Pompey deployed by Royalists as well as republicans (Writing the English Republic 83–86, 263; Literature and Revolution 207; 87–89). Dering also used Pompey as a metaphor for the triumph of Royalist poetry in the Cartwright volume [A6v].

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54. See “On the 3d September” (23–24) and “On the Numerous Accesse of the English” (3–4). 55. Even the Protestant Ormonde was characterized as “an Irish man” for treating with the Irish rebels (Milton, The Works 3: 315). 56. In January 1663, Philips’s English editor, Charles Cotterell, presented a copy to the duchess of York. In April, Philips sent Dublin publications to England (Philips, Collected Works 2: 68, 77). By May, Cotterell presented a print copy to the King and the London publication occurred later that summer (Philips, Collected Works 2: 90, 85). 57. On the Restoration attempt to control the press see Weber and Raymond (Pamphlets 323–82). 58. The four poems written or published in Ireland are by Orrery, PhiloPhilippa, Roscommon, and Cowley (from the Dublin miscellany). The author with Irish connections is James Tyrrell, whose mother (heir of James Ussher, archbishop of Armagh) brought printed copies of Pompey to England (Philips, Collected Works 2: 77). Though Tyrrell later became an outspoken Whig, he was related to Cotterell, Philips’s English editor.

Chapter 4 New England Becoming Old: Anne Bradstreet and the Coterie of Ghosts 1. For accounts of the Pequot war and the Antinomian controversy, see Cave and Hall, respectively. 2. There are two seventeenth-century editions of Bradstreet’s work. The 1650 London edition, The Tenth Muse, and the 1678 Boston edition, Several Poems. This chapter focuses on the first edition, from which all quotations by Bradstreet and her prefatory writers are taken. 3. Dudley was elected in May 1637 (A. Jones 234), and the Pequot massacre occurred on May 26, 1637 (Cave 150). 4. For a useful summary of these relations, see Hugh Amory’s “British Books Abroad.” 5. There is some evidence to suggest that Dudley was descended from John Dudley, duke of Northumberland, as was Sidney’s mother, Mary Dudley. Wade White traces the lineage that may have connected Thomas Dudley to the Lords Dudley, although the issue is complicated by the fact that no one knows the identity of Dudley’s paternal grandfather (11–30). Thomas Dudley did use a seal showing descent from the younger son of a baronial house, however (11). 6. Bradstreet also wrote poems to her husband during this period, but these were not published until Several Poems. In terms of the men’s education, Ward, Simon Bradstreet, John Cotton, and Winthrop were all graduates of Cambridge. Samuel Woodbridge and his brother, Benjamin, attended Oxford (Morison, Founding 362–63).

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7. For scholars who note critical tradition’s dismissal of Bradstreet’s early poetry, see, for example, Timothy Sweet (168), Ivy Schweitzer (291), and Phillip Round (154). 8. For the popularity of Foxe’s Book of Martyrs in New England, see Wright (36–38). 9. Dudley’s commission was to aid the siege of Amiens, but as Amiens was taken peaceably he did not see any military action and soon returned to England (Jones 20–21). 10. On The Swedish Intelligencer in England, see Gerald Maclean (54). This is listed, along with a number of pamphlets of the 1620s and 1630s, in several New England libraries (Wright 25–27, 38). 11. As Scott and Reynold’s pamphlets were seditious, both the dates and places of publication are unreliable: Pollard and Redgrave’s Short Title Catalogue assumes they were printed in London. 12. On the use of neo-Elizabethanism in the seventeenth century to defend and oppose the Stuart kings, see Anne Barton, C.V. Wedgwood, D.R. Woolf, John Watkins, and Curtis Perry. For Elizabeth’s importance as a figure of female authority for women writers see Lisa Gim and Mihoko Suzuki. 13. Both James and Elizabeth were equally reluctant to aid the Dutch in rebellion against their royal ruler (Hill, Puritanism and Revolution 115), and Sidney, Raleigh, and Essex were all at different times frustrated by Elizabeth’s lack of enthusiasm for engaging in pan-Protestant heroics. 14. On the Armada, see Scott’s Robert Earl of Essex His Ghost and Reynolds’s Vox Coeli (3; 34). 15. These poems are published in full in Farmer, along with other verses from the manuscript and a brief introduction to its contents. 16. See, for example, the image of Elizabeth as the woman clothed in the sun by Francis Delaram in 1617–19, and that of her as an Amazon warrior defeating the Beast of the Apocalypse by Thomas Cecil in 1625 (Strong 164–65). 17. A 1559 Elizabethan proclamation was published as Injunctions Given by the Queenes Majestie (1641); Elizabeth’s Golden Speech was printed as Queen Elizabeths Speech to Her Last Parliament (1642); and another speech was published as A Most Excellent Remarkable Speech (1643). On Burgess and Marshall, see C.V. Wedgwood (17–20). 18. Dudley’s will mentions “Several pamphlets,” “New books [news books?]” and “Small writings” (Wright 39)—any of which could be the news items sent over by Pelham. Dudley’s letter is to the countess of Lincoln. 19. Jessey, for example, wrote to John Winthrop Jr. in the summer of 1637 about Burton, Bastwick, and Prynne (Jessey, “To John Winthrop, Jr.” 461–64).

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20. Raleigh’s elegy to Sidney, published in Spenser’s Colin Clout’s Come Home Again, portrays Sidney as the perfect soldier and poet (Spenser, The Poetical Works 365). 21. For a sophisticated discussion of these gender reversals, see Schweitzer. 22. Country can mean nation or county in this period, so either Bradstreet evokes Sidney as a national hero, while distancing herself from his local region, or she both avows and disavows a British identity. Either way, the line betrays an ambivalent connection to Britain. 23. At least one copy of Histrio-mastix traveled to New England in the early seventeenth century (Wright 29). 24. For the wealth of elegiac literature on Sidney, see the collection of essays edited by Van Dorsten, Baker-Smith, and Kinney. 25. Sweet also argues that Errata is a corrective, although he reads Bradstreet’s poetry as a woman’s correction of “the dominant discourse” of male poets (161). 26. The other muse she leaves out in her list of muses, in addition to Erato, is Urania. For more on her, see Gillespie (“This Briny Ocean,” 103). As the muses drive Bradstreet from Parnassus at the end of her elegy to Sidney, omitting Urania may allow Bradstreet to distance herself from a pagan poetic tradition, while covertly claiming a reformed tradition indebted to figures such as du Bartas, who as I note below Christianized Urania. 27. Wade White notes that Bradstreet’s reference to du Bartas in the elegy to Sidney is based on Sylvester’s translation (141). See the introduction to Snyder’s edition of Joshua Sylvester’s translation for du Bartas’s impact on England. Sylvester’s first completed edition of Divine Weeks was published in England in 1608 (Snyder 1: 68). 28. The list includes, among others, biblical figures, such as Moses and David; Classical writers and orators, such as Homer and Cicero; and influential Italians, such as Petrarch and Tasso (Sylvester 1: 436–41). 29. As Christopher Hill notes, in the 1640s the old idea of revolution as a circle or return—especially of heavenly bodies—began to give way to the concept of revolution as a momentous change in the existing political order. See his “The Word Revolution,” in A Nation of Change and Novelty (82–101). 30. Acrasia’s Bower of Bliss is perhaps the most obvious example of the polarized gendering of Protestant masculine knighthood against luxurious feminine courtliness. Britomart, however, occupying the hybrid position of female knight, offers a more complex meditation on the relation between Protestant heroism and femininity. 31. The poem is dated March 20, 1642, in the 1678 edition of Bradstreet’s published poetry, which, given Bradstreet’s habitual use of old style dating, puts it in the same year as the elegy to Elizabeth. See Wade White (253).

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32. This quotation is from Ill Newes from New England (1652), a pamphlet attacking New England intolerance by a Particular Baptist, John Clarke (Bremer 252), but Cotton Mather said something similar after the Civil Wars: “Whereupon ensued such a change of Times that instead of Old England’s driving its People into New, it was itself turned into New” (qtd. in Stout 170). This widespread sense of role reversal even affected Winthrop, who noted in his Journal that the Revolution more or less put an end to migration to New England, in terms similar to Bradstreet’s poem. For Winthrop, see Delbanco (385). 33. Bradstreet was not the only writer to imagine the Revolutionary Period as the start of wider reformation, but she was one of the earliest. On the English belief that the Civil Wars were an international event, see Hill (Puritanism and Revolution 112–37). Milton, in his 1644 Areopagitica asks, “Why else was this nation chosen before any other, that out of her as out of Sion, should be proclaimed and sounded forth the first tidings and trumpet of Reformation to all Europe?” (Complete Poems 743). 34. For Raleigh’s long-lived popularity and republications of this text, see Beer. 35. Holmes prepared one of John Cotton’s defenses of Congregationalism for the press and Stubbes was a client of ex-Massachusetts governor, Henry Vane Jr. (Bremer 221). Some of the dedications are signed with initials. Three other sets of initials appear in the dedicatory verses: “C.B.” appears twice and “R.Q.” Both Wade White and Derounian-Stodola have identified one “C.B.” as the classicist Cassibelan Burton and the other as Clement Barksdale (260; 135). Barksdale seems unlikely, though, as he was an Anglican minister and would presumably have not appreciated Bradstreet’s argument that England must “root out Prelates” and let “sturdy Tyburn [be] loaded till it crack” with malignants in “A Dialogue” (147). White and Derounian-Stodola are both uncertain about “R.Q.” White offers Robert Quarles, though he died in 1640 (262–63). Derounian-Stodola suggests the Separatist Roger Quatermayne (135). 36. For a list of Bowtell’s publications, see Wing’s Short Title Catalogue. 37. For Ward’s connection to Rich see Morison (Builders 221–24 and Founding 368). 38. The anonymous Eliza’s Babes was published in 1652, Anne Collins’s Divine Songs and Meditacions and Margaret Cavendish’s Poems and Fancies in 1653, and Elizabeth Major’s Honey on the Rod in 1656. 39. For the military context and the significance of Milton’s attribution to Raleigh at this time, see Stevens.

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Scattering and Gathering in Katharine Evans and Sarah Cheevers: Conclusions 1. Both Gil and Peters stress Quaker collaboration, though neither addresses Evans and Cheevers’s pamphlet. 2. Though women’s publications dropped at the Restoration, they rose again by 1670 and in 1690 reached their highest peak of the century (Bell and Crawford 266). 3. For radical women publishers in particular, see Bell, “Seditious Sisterhood.” For Quaker women writers in addition to scholars mentioned elsewhere in this chapter, see Moira Ferguson and Mack. 4. See McDowell’s Women of Grub Street. 5. Peters’s book explores Quaker deployment of the press in fascinating detail for the years 1652–56. 6. Barbour estimates that of the 620 Quaker authors published before 1700, eighty-two were women, and that of the 3,853 books published then, 220 were by female authors (46). Foxton raises the number of Quaker women authors to 234, by counting women’s contributions to multi-authored books (Gil 4). 7. For Quakers’ use of “the ancient Christian tradition of paradox” in defense of women’s speech and writing, see Mack (172). 8. All quotations will be taken from the first edition, A Short Relation, unless otherwise stated. 9. Keeble calculates that up to 15,000 Quakers were imprisoned during the later seventeenth century, and that some 450 died in prison (187). 10. Stubbs also took copies of Margaret Fell’s books to Holland, and prepared a 1660 English-Hebrew edition of her 1656 A Loving Salutation (Guibbory 215–16). According to one contemporary source, on this journey Stubbes and Fell “threw pamphlets about the streets” in Hebrew, Arabic, and Latin (Braithwaite 429). 11. Baker’s A Tender Greeting, published from Worcester prison, states that God’s “goodness and mercy” is over those that fear Him “as a lovely banner, and comely Ornament of praises and his fear seated in your hearts” (Baker 3). Quakers believed their divinely inspired words were potentially as spiritually powerful as those of the scriptures. 12. For Quaker use of a biblical erotic in their address, see Leo Damrosch (123–24). Damrosch argues that the strongest bonds between Quakers were homosocial (124), but actually gives examples of intense erotic language from both same-sex and male-female interlocutors (123–24). 13. For example, see Psalms, where God threatens to punish Israel’s idolatry by lifting his hand “to scatter them in the lands” (106.27). 14. On the pamphlet’s linking of absolutist Catholicism with the English government, see Kegl (72–73).

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15. The Quakers’ first official declaration of pacifism occurred in 1661 (Reay 153). 16. The language of “seed” also recalls God’s Old Testament genealogical promise to Abraham’s seed and Paul’s non-genealogical Christian interpretation of this: “There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither bond nor free, there is neither male nor female: for ye are all one in Christ Jesus. And if ye be Christ’s, then are ye Abraham’s seed, and heirs according to the promise” (Gal. 3.28–29). 17. For example, see Ezekiel, where God promises to gather the “house of Israel” from where it is scattered among other nations (28.25). 18. The women were finally released at the request of another Catholic, Lord d’Aubigny, Lord Almoner to Henrietta Maria, through the intervention of George Fox and another friend, Gilbert Latey (Braithwaite 432). 19. Abroad can mean generally dispersed or outside the home or the nation in this period. 20. For a discussion of the key role gender and women played in the shift from Latin to English literacy as an index of empire, see Margaret Ferguson. 21. As Naomi Baker argues “Englishness is not a unified construct” in this period (11). 22. On the Bible as a source for English nationalism, and the tensions within prophetic national forms between godly nationhood and an “England divided against itself” into the elect and others, see Collinson (“Biblical Rhetoric” 35). 23. For depictions of real families and friends split by war, see Royle (178–80) and Carlton (Going 39–51). 24. For Achinstein, see “Women on Top.” On Quaker women’s activity as “a fait accompli of Quakerism,” to which Quaker men then had to react, see Peters (141). 25. Apart from a role as an officer in the Parliamentary navy, Baker’s life is sketchy, so we do not know whether he attended school or university (Reay 18).

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I ndex

Abate, Corinne S., 6 Achinstein, Sharon, 15, 18–19, 186, 188, 196, 202n.25, 203n.37, 223n.24 Adolphus, Gustavus, 148–9 Allen, Hannah, 84, 210n.18, 212n.38 Allen, William, 33, 92, 98–103, 211n.30, 212n.41 n.43 n.44 Captive Taken From the Strong, The, 92, 98–103, 212n.42 see also Huish, Deborah Amory, Hugh, 218n.4 Amussen, Susan, 8 Anderson, Benedict, 195 Andreadis, Harriette, 124, 201n.16, 213n.3 Anselment, Raymond, 109–10, 114 anti-monarchal, 19, 20, 176, 184, 197 Appelt, Ursula, 200n.9 Armies Remembrancer, The, 175 Armstrong, Nancy, 39 ars moriendi, 46, 73, 75, 77, 82, 83 Ashton, Robert, 76, 203n.36, 208n.1 Aubrey, Mary, 108, 113, 119, 124, 215n.22 Aylmer, G.E., 203n.36 Backscheider, Paula, 141 Bacon, Sir Francis, 180 Bacon, Robert (“R.B.”), 92, 94–7, 212n.35 Baker, Daniel, 183–94, 197, 201, 222n.11, 223n.25 Baker, David J., 201n.23

Baker, Naomi, 194, 223n.21 Baker-Smith, Dominic, 220n.24 Ball, Bryan, 210n.23 Barash, Carol, 15, 107, 122, 124, 201n.16, 203n.41 Barbar, Sarah, 18 Barbour, Hugh, 185, 222n.6 Barebone, Praisegod, 25, 71 Barksdale, Clement (“C.B.”), 177, 221n.35 Barnard, John, 203n.34 Barnard, Toby, 217n.49 Barton, Anne, 219n.12 Bastwick, John, 155, 168, 219 Beal, Peter, 106, 215n.22, 217n.46 Beaumont, Francis, 110 Beckett, J.C., 133, 139, 217n.44 Beer, Anna, 173, 180, 221n.34 Beilin, Elaine, 39 Bell, Maureen, 28, 89, 200n.11, 203n.34, 204n.53, 206n.15, 208n.2, 210n.18, 214n.12, 222n.3 Bell, Richard, 13, 22, 201n.22, 222n.2 Bellany, Alastair, 46, 203n.35, 205n.12, 206n.14, 208n.36 Belsey, Catherine, 41, 200n.13 Berg, Christine, 211n.25 Berkenhead, Issac, 123 Berkenhead, Sir John, 105, 108, 110, 112, 115–17, 119–20, 123, 130, 142, 213n.8 n.9, 214n.18 n.19, 215n.24 Berry, Philippa, 211n.25 Biddle, John, 94, 211n.34 Blackborow, Sarah, 26, 29

250

Index

Booth, Mary, 29 Bowtell, Stephen, 175, 221n.36 Boyle, Lady Anne, 217n.45 Boyle, Lady Elizabeth, 217n.45 Boyle, Katherine, Viscountess Ranelagh, 84, 210n.19 Boyle, Robert, 210n.19 Boyle, Roger, earl of Orrery, 132–4, 140–2, 217n.45 n.46 n.48 n.50, 218n.58 Bradshaw, Brendan, 201n.23 Bradstreet, Anne, 3, 13, 24, 32, 33–4, 145–81, 183, 196–7, 203n.38, 218n.2 n.6, 219n.7, 220n.22 n.26, 221n.35 “Dialogue between Old England and New, A,” 167–73, 179, 221n.35 “Elegie upon . . . Sir Philip Sidney, An,” 155–9 “In Honour of Du Bartas,” 159–62 “In Honour of . . . Queen Elizabeth,” 162–5 “Quarternions,” 154, 164–5, 172–3, 181 Tenth Muse, The, 143, 146, 159, 173–81 “To Her most Honored Father,” 165–6 compared to Evans, Katherine and Cheevers, Sarah, 183, 190–1, 193–4 Bradstreet, Simon, 144–5, 159, 174–5, 203n.38, 218n.6 Bragge, Robert, 81, 211n.35 Braitwaite, William C., 185, 222n.10, 223n.18 Bray, Allen, 201n.19 Bremer, Francis, 149, 153, 155, 159, 162, 175, 179–80, 221n.32 n.35 Brenner, Robert, 202n.33 Breton, Nicholas, 42–3, 46–7, 60–1, 205n.9 n.11 Brewer, John, 199n.5

Bridgewater, third earl of, see Egerton, John Bromham, A.A., 60, 206n.14 Brown, Louis Fargo, 99 Browne, John, 210n.21 Bruzzi, Zara, 60, 206n.14 Buckingham, duke of, see Villiers, George Burgess, Cornelius, 153, 219n.17 Burrage, Champlin, 72, 208n.4 Burrows, Montagu, 109, 214n.13 Burton, Cassibelan (“C.B.”), 177, 221n.35 Burton, Henry, 154–5, 168, 219n.19 Butler, James, duke of Ormonde, 132–4, 139–40, 142, 218n.55 C.B., see Burton, Cassibelan; Barksdale, Clement Cade, Jack, 175 Caldwell, Patricia, 2, 147, 148 Calvert, Giles, 31 Capp, B.S., 203n.36, 210n.16 n.21 Cardinale, Susan, 31 Carlton, Charles, 23, 195, 223n.23 Carr, Robert, earl of Somerset, 57, 205n.14, 206n.45 Cartwright, Ebenezer, 28 Cartwright, Johanna, 24, 28 Cartwright, William, 105, 108–9, 123, 126–7, 213n.12, 214n.12 n.13 n.17 n.19 n.20, 217n.53 Comedies, Tragi-Comedies, with Other Poems, 108–11, 113–17, 126, 214n.12 n 13 Lady Errant, The, 126–7 Cary, Mary, 24–5, 27–30, 211n.26 Cave, Alfred, 218n.1 n.3 Cavendish, Margaret, 22, 25–7, 180, 216n.29, 221n.38 Cecil, Robert, 152 Cecil, Thomas, 219n.16 Chalmers, Hero, 107, 117, 138, 196, 203n.41, 217n.53 Channel, Elinor, 25, 203n.41

Index Chapman, Livewell, 98–9 212n.40 n.42 Charles I, 30, 46, 56, 60–2, 64–5, 88, 92, 107, 109–10, 112–13, 115, 118, 120, 126, 128–9, 132, 138–9, 145, 149–50, 152–3, 155, 168, 174, 178, 202n.30, 207n.24, 208n.35 n.37 Eikon Basilike, 18–20 Charles II, 17, 60, 73, 110, 116, 130, 132–3, 138–9, 141, 150, 176, 178, 185–6, 217n.46 Cheare, Abraham, 211n.26 Cheevers, Sarah, 34, 183–94, 222n.1 This Is a Short Relation, 34, 183, 185–94, 222n.8 see also Baker, Daniel; Evans, Katherine Chidley, Katherine, 1–3, 9, 23, 26, 27, 30–1, 66, 70, 199n.1, 201n.15 Chillenden, Edmund, 176 Clark, Alice, 5, 200n.7 Clark, William Smith, 138, 217n.46 Clarke, Elizabeth, 93 Clarke, John, 169, 221n.32 Clarke, Samuel, 9 Clinton, Elizabeth, countess of Lincoln, 49, 219n.18 Clucas, Stephen, 203n.24, 205n.12 Cogswell, Thomas, 203n.35, 207n.27 Coiro, Anne Baynes, 152 Collins, Anne, 24, 180, 221n.38 Collinson, Patrick, 57, 148, 171, 207n.22, 223n.22 conduct literature, 7–8, 37–43 and gender politics, 41–3, 47, 185, 200n.13 and public politics, 7–8, 38–41, 43–7, 205n.6 and sermons, 50 conference, 1–2, 67, 84, 86 Connolly, S.J., 217n.43, n.49

251

conventicle/separating congregation as base of public debate, 11–12, 27, 33, 67–73, 75, 86, 88–90, 92, 98, 101–2, 107 and female parity, 71–5, 84 as private, 9–12, 27, 67–9, 70–3, 76, 78, 86, 88, 92, 98, 101, 107 see also counterpublics; public Corneille, Pierre La Morte de Pompée, 106, 131, 133–4, 136, 138, 140, 217n.50 coterie, 3, 105, 108–9, 119, 121–3, 126, 132, 213n.1, 213n.2 as base of public debate, 3, 12, 33, 105–7, 119, 123–4, 130–2, 142, 145, 167, 173 and female parity, 126–7, 130, 137, 141, 177 ghostly, 145–6, 155, 159, 161–2, 164–7, 173, 177 politics of, 107, 111, 124, 146, 164, 173–4 as private, 3, 12, 33, 105–6, 119, 123–4, 145, 165–6 see also counterpublics; public Cotton, John, 149, 175, 179, 218n.6, 221n.32 n.35 Cottrell, James, 94, 211n.34, 212n.35 counterpublics, 3–5, 8–9, 12, 16, 20–2, 25–6, 29, 31–5, 38, 69, 72–3, 75, 106–7, 132, 142, 153, 173, 191–7, 204n.53 and dominant publics, 4, 17, 33–4, 88–9, 106, 130–2, 134–42, 146, 173–4, 179, 184, 191–4 elitist, 33, 105–8, 112, 116–19, 123, 127, 130–2, 139, 142, godly, 32–3, 38, 40, 54–5, 58–9, 65–6

252

Index

counterpublics—continued neo-Elizabethan, 33–4, 145–53, 155, 158–9, 165–6, 173, 179 sectarian, 33–4, 67–70, 72–3, 75, 78–9, 81–2, 85–92, 97–8, 102–3, 183–5, 186, 188–93 transnational/multi-kingdom, 3, 13–15, 21, 33–4, 59–65, 88–90, 100–3, 143–51, 155–73, 181, 183–5, 188–95 see also Fraser, Nancy; public; Warner, Michael Cowley, Abraham, 10, 128, 133, 216n.42, 218n.58 Cradock, Walter, 69, 81 Crawford, Patricia, 8, 13, 22–3, 71, 200n.12, 201n.22, 222n.2 Creed, William, 113, 214n.12 Cressy, David, 153–5, 162, 169–70 Cromwell, Elizabeth, 29, 94–6 Cromwell, Oliver, 66, 90, 94–6, 99–100, 110, 117, 122, 126, 174, 178–9, 212n.41, 216n.35 n.37, 217n.53 Cromwellian regime, 14, 16, 32, 86, 101, 115, 117, 129, 133, 137, 210n.21, 212n.43, 217n.49 n.53 cross-gender identification, 3, 13, 26, 29–31, 42, 46, 73, 79, 97, 102–3, 108, 196 Crouch, Nicholas, 119, 215n.22 Cust, Richard, 58, 148–9, 159, 203n.35 Dahl, Folke, 207n.32 Dailey, Barbara Ritter, 69, 81, 84, 209n.6 n.15, 210n.16, 212n.35 n.36 Damrosch, Leo, 222n.12 Davidoff, Leonore, 5 Davidson, Peter, 201n.21 Davies, Adrian, 184 Davies, Godfrey, 110

Davies, John, 119, 135, 215n.22 Davies, Rosalind, 203n.35, 205n.12 Davies, Stevie, 208n.3 Davis, Colin, 34 Davis, Natalie Zemon, 6 Declaration of the Army, The, 88 Delbanco, Andrew, 221n.32 Dering, Sir Edward, 108, 113, 115–16, 119, 121, 123, 132–3, 213n.12, 214n.19, 215n.22 n.26, 216n.30, 217n.53 Derounian-Stodola, Kathryn Zabelle, 174, 221n.35 Dillon, Wentworth, earl of Roscommon, 132–3, 135, 139–40, 141–2, 217n.50, 218n.58 Dod, John, 73, 74, 75, 209n.8 Dodd, A.H., 113 Doelman, James, 44, 204n.3 domestic, see conduct literature; family Donne, John, 108, 124–6, 216n.31 n.33 Drake, Joan, 72–5, 77–8, 80, 82, 83, 89. du Bartas, Guillaume, 143, 155, 157, 159–66, 176–7, 180, 220n.26 n.27 Dudley, Thomas, 144–5, 148–9, 151, 154–5, 159–60, 165–6, 218n.3 n.5, 219n.9 n.18 Duppa, Bishop, 109 Dury, John, 91, 211n.29 Eberwein, Jane Donahue, 147 Edwards, Thomas, 1–2, 10, 23, 27, 31, 200n.14 Egerton, John, third earl of Bridgewater, 119 Eliot, Sir John, 62 Elizabeth of Bohemia, 51–3, 59–61, 204n.52 Elizabeth I, 18, 42, 143, 145, 148–55, 158–73, 176–7,

Index 204n.49, 206n.17, 219n.12 n.13 n.16, 219n.17, 220n.31 see also neo-Elizabethanism Eliza’s Babes, 24, 26–7, 180, 203n.42, 221n.38 Erickson, Amy, 23, 200n.10 Evans, Arise, 204n.41 Evans, G. Blakemore, 108 Evans, Katherine, 34, 183–94, 222n.1 This Is a Short Relation, 34, 183, 185–94, 222n.8 see also Baker, Daniel; Cheevers, Sarah Evans, Robert C., 213n.5 Evans, Willa McClung, 213n.12, 214n.18 n.20 Ezell, Margaret, 39, 107, 119, 203n.4, 205n.5, 215n.25 Facey, Jane, 54 Fairfax, Thomas, 81, 90, 121 Faithful Scout, The, 214n.16 family as base of public debate, 2–3, 32–3, 38–40, 46, 54, 58, 107, 145, 172, 188, 195–6 and gender politics, 39, 41–2, 46–8, 205n.8 Habermassian model, 11, 34, 205n.6 as private, 9–11, 39, 77 and public politics, 8, 9–10, 39–41, 43–6, 51, 53–7, 59, 63, 65, 144–5, 156, 166, 172, 188, 195–6 spiritual, 2–3, 9–11, 46–8, 53, 58, 101, 187–8, 200n.14 as writing community, 2–3, 32–4, 38, 53–6, 59, 101, 146, 165–6, 187 see also conduct literature; maternity; patriarchy Fane, Mildmay, 112, 214n.15

253

Farmer, Norman, 152, 219n.15 Feake, Christopher, 29 Featley, Daniel, 201n.15 Fell, Henry, 187 Fell, John, 214n.12 Fell, Margaret, 11, 16, 191, 202n.27, 222n.10 Ferguson, Margaret, 201n.21, 223n.20 Ferguson, Moira, 222n.3 Fiennes, Frances, 87 Fiennes-Clinton, Theophilus, earl of Lincoln 145, 149, 159 Fifth Monarchist movement, 21, 27, 84, 94–5, 98–9, 129, 186, 203n.21 n.36 Finch, Francis, 108, 110, 112, 114, 116–17, 119–20, 130, 142, 213n.7, 214n.13 n.19, 215n.23 Finch, John, 214n.12 Fincham, Kenneth, 45, 205n.14 Firth, Charles, 110 Fisher, Samuel, 11–12, 210n.21 Fitter, Chris, 127, 216n.38 Fleetwood, Lady Bridget (née Cromwell), 95, 212n.36 Fleetwood, Lord Charles, 95, 99, 212n.36 Fleming, Marie, 201n.20 Fletcher, John, 110 Forbes, John, 73–4, 209n.8 Foster, Joseph, 214n.13 Fox, George, 16, 187, 223n.18 Foxe, John, 54–5, 63, 148, 170, 219n.8 Fraser, Antonia, 203n.41 Fraser, Nancy, 3–5, 8–9, 12–14, 17, 34, 105, 112, 192–3, 199n.3, 201n.20, 202n.29 see also counterpublics Freist, Dagmar, 15, 200n.11 Gallagher, Catherine, 122, 203n.41, 216n.2 Gardiner, Robert, 214n.12

254

Index

gender 124–7, 137, 139, 147, 156, 165, 197, 199n.5 fluidity, 2–3, 29–31, 42, 47, 50, 55, 79, 91, 97, 103, 121–3, 129, 156, 188, 191, 204n.48 n.49, 220n.21 hierarchy, 4, 6, 11, 25–6, 41, 47, 185 see also cross-gender identification; heterosocial Gentles, Ian, 174, 178, 210n.16 Gerard, John, 117 Gil, Catie, 184–5, 204n.47, 222n.1 n.6 Gillespie, Katharine, 6, 12, 15, 69, 71, 80, 147, 156, 167, 200n.14, 201n.15, 208n.38, 220n.26 Gilroy, Paul, 147 Gim, Lisa, 219n.12 Goad, Thomas, 48 Goldberg, Jonathan, 38–9, 202n.30, 204n.3, 205n.5, 216n.33 Goodman, Dena, 199n.5 Goodwin, Thomas, 69, 81 Greaves, Richard, 87, 95, 99, 169, 176, 184, 186, 209n.8 n.16, 210n.16, 211n.33 n.34 Green, Mary Anne Everitt, 116 Greer, Germaine, 202n.24 Grenville, Sir Bevill, 110, 214n.12 Greville, Fulke, 180 Guibbory, Achsah, 144, 191–2, 211n.24, 222n.10 Gura, Philip, 153, 169 Guy, Hannah, 70 Habermas, Jürgen, 3–4, 7–8, 11–12, 14–15, 17–22, 193, 199n.3 n.4, 201n.20, 202n.29 Hageman, Elizabeth H., 215n.22 n.26, 216n.39 Hall, David, 144, 202n.27, 218n.1 Haller, William, 148

Hardacre, Paul H., 99, 212n.28 n.41 n.43 n.44 Harris, Tim, 184, 186 Harrison, Edward, 81, 210n.21 Harrison, Thomas, 81, 110, 130 Hart, John, 73–4, 77, 209n.6 Hartlib, Samuel, 91 Harvey, Elizabeth D., 205n.10 Harvey, Mary (later Lady Dering), 113, 117, 119 Heath, Thomas, 29 Henderson, Katherine Usher, 204n.44 Henrietta Maria, 92–3, 107, 110, 118, 126–7, 204n.52, 223n.18 Henry IV, 51, 148, 151, 160–2 Herrick, Robert, 11, 201n.18 heterosocial authorship, 31, 28–31, 69, 83–4, 90, 102, 105, 107–8, 183, 187, 196–7 dialogue, 8, 12, 74 collectivity, 13, 32, 72, 85, 95, 108, 116–17, 132, 196 and heteroerotic, 188 and homoerotic, 125, 187 see also cross-gender identification; gender (Hey Hoe for a Husband), or the Parliament of Maides, 216n.36 Hibbert, Christopher, 214n.14 Higgins, Patricia, 203n.40 Hill, Christopher, 57, 61–2, 155, 202n.32, 203n.26, 206n.21, 207n.24, 219n.13, 220n.29, 221n.33 Hill, Richard, 213n.12 Hill, Thomas, 87, 98 Hinds, Hilary, 203n.39, 205n.6 Hobby, Elaine, 16, 184, 208n.3, 211n.35 Hodges, Thomas, 77 Holmes, Nathaniel, 174, 176–8, 221n.35 Holmes, Urban Tigner, 160

Index Holstun, James, 13, 15, 79–80, 199n.2, 202n.25 n.26, 208n.36 n.38 homoerotic, 107, 136, 213n.3 and heterosocial, 108, 124–5, 130, 187 and public politics, 123–4, 127–8 homosocial institutions, 7, 8, 14, 16, 25, 27, 108, 114, 116, 197, 222n.12 relations, 31, 42, 196 Hooker, Thomas, 73–4, 206n.16, 209n.7 Hudson, Geoffrey, 23 Hughes, Ann, 202n.23 Huish, Deborah, 92, 98–103, 211n.30, 212n.38 see also Allen, William Huish, James, 99 Hull, Suzanne, 204n.45 Humble Petition . . . to the Blessed Elizabeth, The, 153 Hunt, William, 46, 51, 205n.12 Hutchinson, Anne, 143–4, 156 Hutchinson, F.E., 130, 213n.12, 214n.13 Hutchinson, Lucy, 196, 212n.36 Hutson, Lorna, 6, 200n.8 Interregnum, see Revolutionary Period Ireland, 95, 99–103, 106, 108, 212n.38 and Katherine Philips, 13, 33, 131–42, 212n.43 n.44, 216n.43, 218 n.58 and New England, 168, 178–9 Ireton, Bridget, 29 James VI and I, 3, 18, 20–1, 32, 37–40, 42–6, 48, 51–62, 65, 82, 103, 129, 150, 169, 202n.30, 204n.3, 205n.9, 207n.24, 208n.35, 219n.13

255

Basilicon Doron, 37–8, 43–4, 51–9 Trew Law of Free Monarchies, The, 37, 38, 65 Janson, Maija, 45 Jarvis, William, 28 Jeffries, John, 132 Jennings, Francis, 144 Jessey, Henry, 29, 67–99, 101, 174, 196, 208n.2 n.4, 209n.13 n.15 n.16, 210n.20 n.21 n.22 n.23, 211n.27 n.29, 212n.36 n.39 Exceeding Riches of Grace, The, 16, 32–3, 67–70, 72, 75–93, 95, 97–9, 101, 209n.5 n.11, 211n.30 Lords Loud Call to England, The, 211n.26 Storehouse of Provision, A 88, 93, 98, 210n.23 “To John Winthrop, Jr.”, 219n.19 “To Mr. Winthrop, Gov. of Massachusetts Bay,” 77, 81 see also Wight, Sarah Jocelin, Elizabeth, 48, 207n.31 Jones, Anne Rosalind, 205n.6 Jones, Augustine, 144, 148–9, 156, 218n.3, 219n.9 Jones, Inigo, 214n.20 Jones, Jenkins, 119, 130, 215n.22 Jones, Sarah, 22–4, 30, 72, 209n.5 Jonson, Ben, 56, 75 Katz, David, 68, 88, 210n.23 Keeble, N.H., 184–6, 222n.9 Kegl, Rosemary, 186, 222n.14 Kelly, Joan, 5 Kiffin, William, 69 King Charls His Tryal, 19 Kinney, Arthur S., 220n.24 Knight, Issac, 210n.16 n.21 Knight, Mary, 117 Knollys, Hanserd, 69 Knott, John R., 211n.32

256

Index

Lake, Peter, 45, 54, 57, 205n.14, 207n.25 n.26 Lanyer, Aemilia, 204n.51 Laud, William, 46, 62, 71, 109, 144, 155, 168, 201n.39, 215n.22 Laurence, Anne, 71, 203n.39 Lawes, Henry, 108, 110–11, 115–20, 130, 213n.8 n.9 n.12, 214n.17 n.18 n.19 n.20, 216n.30 Lee, Maurice, 204n.3 Leigh, Colonel, 69 Leigh, Dorothy, 3, 13, 32–3, 37–66, 204n.1 n.2 n.4, 206n.15 n.16 The Mothers Blessing, 32, 37–40, 42, 45–61, 66 compared to Bradstreet, Anne, 146, 167, 181, 193–4 compared to Evans, Katherine and Cheevers, Sarah 190, 193–4 compared to Philips, Katherine, 106, 107, 129, 193–4 compared to Wight, Sarah, 67, 69, 71, 73, 84, 92, 193–4 Letter from a Christian Friend, A 211n.31 Levine, Carol, 204n.49 Lewalski, Barbara Kiefer, 39, 52, 61, 205n.5, 206n.17 Lincoln, earl of, see Fiennes-Clinton, Theophilus Lindley, Keith, 203n.36 Linebaugh, Peter, 88 Liu, Tai, 70, 76, 87, 203n.36 Llewellyn, Mark, 107, 124 Lockyer, Nicholas, 81, 208n.36 London, William, 180 Longfellow, Erica, 200n.6 Lovelace, Richard, 11, 201n.18 Loxley, James, 109, 213n.5, 214n.12 Lynch, Katherine, 195

Mack, Phyllis, 15, 68, 203n.39, 204n.46 n.48, 209n.5, 222n.3 n.7 Maclean, Gerald, 151, 219n.10 Maclean, Hugh, 214 Madan, Falconer, 109 Maguire, Nancy Klein, 138, 141, 216n.35 Major, Elizabeth, 24, 180, 221n.38 Maland, David, 107, 213n.6 Mall, Thomas, 204n.44 Mallet, Charles Edward, 109 Malta, 183, 186, 188 Marcus, Leah, 56, 88, 206n.22, 207n.24 Mares, F.H., 209n.9 Marotti, Arthur F., 111, 213n.2, 216n.31 Marriott, John, 109 Marshall, Stephen, 46, 149, 153, 171, 174–6, 178, 219n.17 Marvell, Andrew, 119, 121–2, 215n.22 n.27, 216n.30, 217n.53 maternity and authorship 30 and cross-gender identification, 30, 42–3, 61, 65 and public politics, 32, 38–40, 49–56, 58–9, 61, 65–6, 167–72, 179, 197 and religion, 42, 46–7, 49–56, 61–5, 84, 187 see also family; patriarchy Mazzola, Elizabeth, 6 McBride, Kari Boyd, 200n.6 McDowell, Paula, 13, 128, 184, 222n.4 McEntee, Anne Marie, 203n.40 McKerrow, R.B., 50 McManus, Claire, 200n.12, 204n.44 Melville, James, 44 Mendelson, Sarah, 23, 200n.12 Mermin, Dorothy, 107

Index millenarianism, 87, 144 see also Fifth Monarchist movement Millman, Jill Seal, 202n.24 Milton, John, 16, 19, 44, 55, 127, 202n.25, 216n.40, 218n.55, 221n.33 n.39 Apology against a Pamphlet, An, 206n.20 Areopagitica, 20, 221n.33 Cabinet Counsel, The, 180 Eikonoklastes, 19, 208n.37 Poems, 213n.11 Mistris Parliament, 208n.39 Monumentum Regale, 112 Moody, Ellen, 107 Moone, Richard, 94, 211n.34, 212n.35 More, Anne, 124 Morison, Samuel Eliot, 145, 147, 218n.6, 221n.37 Morrill, John, 23, 133–4, 201n.23 Moseley, Humphrey, 110–12, 213n.11 A Mothers Teares Over Hir Seduced Sonne, 61–6, 207n.30 Mourgues, Odette de, 213n.6 Musarum Oxoniensium Epibathpia, 110, 213n.12 nation national identity, 34, 147–53, 156, 167, 169–73, 184–5, 189–96, 220n.22, 223n.19 national institutions, 14, 87, 191 national narratives, 24–5, 34, 54, 64 national public sphere, 3, 13–15, 142–4, 184–5, 188–91, 195–6 national renewal, 164, 171 religious nationhood, 25, 63–5, 86–8, 100, 147–53, 168, 172, 193–5, 223n.22 see also counterpublics; public

257

Naylor, James, 29, 204n.46 Neile, Richard, 45, 205n.14 neo-Elizabethanism, 34, 143–68, 171–3, 176–80, 219n.12 see also counterpublics Netherlands, 33, 67, 73, 91–2, 155, 162, 196 Amsterdam, 13, 28, 32, 38, 61–2, 75, 91, 207n.30 n.32 New England, 27, 29, 32–3, 46, 73, 143–9, 153–7, 159–62, 165–76, 178–81, 197, 219n.8 n.10, 220n.23, 221n.32 Massachusetts Bay Colony, 13, 143–6, 149, 154–5, 167, 169–72, 179, 196, 221n.35 New World, 20, 144–5, 154, 157, 159–60, 162, 166, 170, 172–3, 178, 194–5 New Model Army, 16, 25, 27, 67, 76, 77, 79, 81, 87, 89, 90, 95, 174–5 New News from the Old Exchange, 216n.36 Norbrook, David, 5, 15, 17, 19, 124, 201n.21, 202n.25, 206n.17, 215n.22, 216n.34, 217n.53 Noyes, Gertrude, 50 Nuttall, Geoffrey, 80 Ogilby, John, 138 Orgel, Stephen, 202n.30, 214n.20 Orlin, Lena Cowen, 6, 200n.13, 205n.8 Ormonde, duke of, see Butler, James Orr, Alan, 201n.23 Orrery, earl of, see Boyle, Roger Otten, Charlotte, 39 Overbury, Thomas, 45–6, 205n.12 n.14, 207n.23 Overton, Richard, 77 Overton, Robert, 119, 126, 215n.22, 216n.34

258

Index

Owen, Anne, 108, 119, 124, 126, 130, 132 Owen, John, 88, 98, 108, 212n.39 Oxford, 108–20, 123, 131 Oxford, University of, 89, 108, 118–19, 146, 176, 218n.6 as homosocial institution, 7, 114, 197 royalism of , 13, 105, 109–14, 116–17, 131, 214n.13, 215n.22 Pacheco, Anita, 200n.9 Parfitt, George, 28, 206n.15 Parr, Susan, 27–8 patriarchy, 2, 5–6, 28–30, 58, 66, 125 absence of, 23–5, 47–54, 61, 131–3 domestic, 8, 11, 32, 37–43, 45, 47–8, 200n.13 religious, 23, 47–9, 144, 187 royal, 23, 32, 37–41, 43–5, 48–9, 53, 59, 65–6 see also family; maternity Patterson, Annabel, 157 Pelham, Herbert, 154, 219n.18 Perkins, William, 8, 41, 43 Perry, Curtis, 203n.35, 219n.12 Peter, Hugh, 29, 81,178 Peters, Kate, 184–5, 196, 202n.27, 222n.1 n.5, 223n.24 Philips, Katherine, 3, 10, 13, 16, 24, 32–3, 84, 105–42, 196–7, 203n.38, 210n.20, 212n.43, 213n.1 n.7, 215n.22 n.24 n.26, 216n.29 n.37, 218n.56 “Countrey Life, A,” 128, 136 “Dialogue between Lucasia and Orinda, A,” 108 “Friend, A,” 125–6, 127, 137 “Friendship in Emblem,” 125, 127 “Friendship’s Mysterys,” 108, 124–5

“On Mr. Francis Finch,” 114 Pompey, 131–42, 217n.46, 218n.58 “Retir’d Friendship to Ardelia, A,” 128 “To the Memory of the Most Ingenious and Vertuous Gentleman Mr Wil: Cartwright,” 113–16 “To Mr. Henry Vaughan, Silurist,” 120, 123 “To Mr. J.B. the Noble Cratander,” 120 “To Mrs. M.A.,” 108 “To the Much Honoured Mr. Henry Lawes,” 116–19 “To my Lucasia,” 137 “To the Noble Palaemon,” 120 “To (the Truly Competent Judge of Honour) Lucasia,” 130 “To the Truly Noble Sir Ed: Dering,” 121 “Upon the Double Murther of K. Charles,” 128 compared to Bradstreet, Anne, 146, 161, 167–8, 172, 177, 180–1 compared to Evans, Katherine and Cheevers, Sarah, 183, 187, 191, 193–4 compared to Leigh, Dorothy and Wight, Sarah, 146 Phillips, Rev. James, 113, 117, 126, 129, 203n.38 Pincus, Steven, 200n.10 Pocock, J.G.A., 217n.47 Pollard, A.W., 207n.30, 219n.11 Poole, Elizabeth, 24, 30, 65 Poole, Kristin, 39, 42, 50, 52, 205n.11 Pope, Mary, 24 Potter, Lois, 74, 93, 203n.36, 216n.35 Powell, Vavasor, 94, 99, 128–30, 215n.22, 216n.39 Preston, John, 73, 209n.8

Index Prince Henry, see Stuart, Henry printing/print culture, 4, 12, 30, 44, 48, 92, 94, 106, 119, 135, 144, 174, 175, 180, 186, 199n.2, 207n.32 Pritchard, Allan, 215n.22 private, see conventicle; coterie; family; public prophecy and authority, 28–9, 68–9, 82–3, 85, 90, 92 female, 3, 22, 24–5, 30, 33, 52, 65–6, 70, 75–80, 97, 152, 166, 175, 208n.38 male, 16, 30, 64, 85, 90–1 prophetic exchange, 88 prophetic history, 52, 88, 121, 146, 148, 153, 155, 162, 163–5, 170–3 Prynne, William, 62, 154–5, 157, 168, 208n.33, 219n.19, 220n.23 public and private, 2–3, 5–17, 25–8, 32–5, 30–45, 70–5, 97–8, 100–2, 111–12, 199n.5, 200n.6n., 201n.15; in Bradstreet, Anne, 145–6, 155–6, 165–7, 172; in Leigh, Dorothy, 38–9, 45–6, 48–9, 55, 66; in Evans, Katherine and Cheevers, Sarah, 186–8, 191; in Philips, Katherine, 105–8, 119, 124–7, 131–2, 142; in Wight, Sarah, 67, 69–70, 78–9, 82, 86, 88, 92–3, 95–7, 101–3 public culture 1–5, 15–22, 25, 191–7, 199n.2 n.4, 202n.25, 203n.37 public culture and conflict, 2–4, 20–3, 192–3, 202n.29 public identity, 3, 8, 11, 16–17, 21–7, 42–3, 50, 65–6, 71,

259

85–6, 91, 101, 106–8, 119, 131, 162, 185 public institutions/power, 7, 10, 14–15, 39, 41, 51, 58–9, 72, 94, 114, 116, 200n.12 representative publicness, 17–19, 25, 43–4, 108–9, 111–12, 141–2, 123, 131, 184 transnational/multi-kingdom public culture, 3, 8, 13–15, 27, 44, 88, 91–2, 102–3, 106–7, 131–42, 173–81, 188–95, 201n.21 n.23 see also counterpublics; Habermas, Jürgen; nation Purkiss, Diane, 68, 208n.38, 211n.25 Pym, John, 62 R.B., see Bacon, Robert; Bragg, Robert Rabinovitch, Eyal, 4 Raleigh, Sir Walter, 150, 155, 172–3, 180, 219n.13, 220n.20, 221n.34 n.37 Ranelagh, Lady, see Boyle, Katherine Raymond, Joad, 34, 109, 199n.2, 200n.6, 202n.23, 203n.36 n.37, 218n.57 Reay, Barry, 185, 223n.15 n.25 Rediker, Marcus, 88 Restoration, 3, 13, 17, 28, 31, 33–4, 86, 106, 108, 131–3, 138, 140–2, 176, 184, 188–9, 193, 215n.26, 218n.57, 222n.2 Revolutionary Period, 3, 7, 10–11, 16, 21–2, 25, 32, 65, 68, 92, 105, 107–8, 110, 113, 124, 131, 134, 141–2, 195, 221n.33 Reynolds, John, 150–1, 155, 219n.14 Rich, Adrienne, 147

260

Index

Rich, Robert, earl of Warwick, 145, 159, 175, 178, 221n.37 Richardson, Edward, 80 Robinson, George, 187, 191, 193–4 Roe, Thomas, 42, 60, 149, 207n.29 Rogers, John, 101, 212n.44 Rolle, Margaret, 29 Roscommon, earl of, see Dillon, Wentworth Rose, Mary Beth, 204n.48 Round, Phillip R., 147, 219n.7 Rous, Thomas, 61 Royle, Trevor, 223n.23 Rump Parliament, 94, 113, 174, 176 Russell, Conrad, 202n.26 Saltmarsh, John, 16, 69, 77–8, 81–2, 90–1, 97, 202n.28, 209n.12, 210n.17 Free Grace or the Flowings of Christ’s Blood, 77, 209n.12, 210n.17 Letter from the Army, A, 81 Wonderfull Predictions Declared in a Message, 90, 202n.28 Saltonstall, Richard, 69 Sawday, Jonathan, 141 Schellenberg, Betty A., 15 Schwoerer, Lois G., 22, 200n.6, 203n.37 Scostrop, Richard, 187 Scott, Thomas, 151–5, 162, 168, 219n.11 n.14 Robert Earle of Essex His Ghost, 150–2 Sir Walter Rawleighs Ghost, 150–2 Vox Populi, 152 Scott-Luckens, Carola, 69, 83, 84 Seeff, Adele, 202n.24 A Serious Letter Sent by a Private Christian, 211n.31 Serrarius, Peter, 91, 211n.29 Shakespeare, William, 167, 180 Sharpe, Kevin, 204n.3 Shepherd, Simon, 28, 206n.15

Shifflett, Andrew, 135 Shoemaker, Robert B., 7 Shohet, Jennifer, 202n.31 Sidney, Mary, 161 Sidney, Sir Phillip, 28–30, 33, 42, 143, 145, 155–66, 172, 177, 205n.9, 217n.46, 218n.5, 219n.13, 220n.20 Simmonds, Martha, 29 Simmons, Thomas, 31 Simpson, John, 81, 94, 210n.21 Skinner, Quentin, 201n.23 Smith, Barbara, 200n.9 Smith, Hilda, 21, 30–1, 200n.11 Smith, Nigel, 15, 19, 90, 202n.25, 203n.39, 208n.3, 213n.10, 214n.21, 215n.22, 217n.53 Snook, Edith, 39, 206n.19 Snyder, Susan, 160, 220n.27 A Solemn Engagement of the Army, 81 Sommerville, J.P., 45, 208n.34 Souers, Philip Webster, 113, 116, 123, 132, 210n.20, 217n.44 spectacle/spectatorship, 18, 52, 56, 67, 79, 82, 90, 139 Speght, Rachel, 28, 31 Spenser, Edmund, 42, 125, 161, 163–5, 177, 205n.9, 216n.32, 220n.20 Spittlehouse, John, 94, 99, 211n.34 Sprigge, Joshua, 81, 85, 87, 88, 211n.29 Stallybrass, Peter, 204n.44 Stam, J.F., 62, 207n.32, 208n.33 Stanford, Anne, 172 Stearns, Raymond Phineas, 170 Stevens, Paul, 180, 199n.2, 221n.39 Stevenson, Jane, 201n.21 Stiebel, Arlene, 124, 213n.3 Stone, Lawrence, 38 Stopes, Charlotte Carmichael, 5, 200n.7 Stout, Harry S., 169–70, 221n.32 Strachan, Michael, 61, 207n.29 Stranger, Hannah, 29

Index Strong, Roy, 202n.30, 214n.20, 219n.16 Stuart, Henry, Prince of Wales, 44–5, 51–2, 205n.12, 206n.16 Stubbes, Henry, 174, 176, 221n.35, 222n.10 Suckling, Sir John, 110 Sununu, Andrea, 215n.22 n.26, 216n.39 Sussman, Charlotte, 12 Suzuki, Mihoko, 4, 15, 199n.2, 203n.40, 204n.53, 219n.12 Svendsen, J. Kester, 180 Swaim, Kathleen M., 125, 213n.5 Swedish Intelligencer, The, 148–9, 219n.10 Sweet, Timothy, 147, 158, 219n.7, 220n.25 Swetnam, Joseph, 28, 31, 204n.44 Sylvester, Joshua, 157, 160–2, 220n.27 n.28 Tany, Thomas, 94, 211n.34 Tasso, Torquato, 122, 220n.28 Taylor, Jeremy, 119, 215n.22 Taylor, John, 52, 71 Tennenhouse, Leonard, 39 Thirty Years War, 145, 147–8, 153, 156 Thomas, Keith, 203n.39 Thomas, P.W., 116, 123, 213n.9, 214n.18 Thomas, Patrick, 107, 213n.4 n.8, 214n.13, 215n.23 n.24, 217n.51 Thurloe, John, 99 Tolmie, Murray, 69, 70, 76, 85, 203n.36, 205n.13 Tomlinson, William, 29 Toon, Peter, 88 Topp, Elizabeth, 26–7 Trapnel, Anna, 25, 31, 65, 80, 90–1, 203n.41 Anna Trapnel’s Report and Plea, 31

261

Cry of a Stone, The, 24, 27, 79, 209n.14, 210n.19 Strange and Wonderful News, 27 Travers, Rebecca, 29 Travitsky, Betty, 39, 202n.24 Trubowitz, Rachel, 204n.48 Tyacke, Nicholas, 49, 66, 208n.34 Underdown, David, 110, 123, 174, 176, 203n.36 Underhill, Jane, 31, 204n.52 van den Berg, J., 211n.9 van der Wall, Ernestine, 91, 210n.19 n.23, 211n.29 Van Dorsten, Jan, 220n.24 Vane, Henry, 176, 221n.35 Vann, Richard T., 185 Vaughan, Henry, 108, 110, 119–20, 123, 127–9, 130, 213n.7 n.12, 214n.13, 215n.28 Vaughan, Jonathan, 85, 93–4, 96–7 Vaughan, Thomas, 130 Venning, Timothy, 179–80 Vernon, John, 99–100, 212n.38 n.44 Veseler, Joris, 62, 207n.32 Vickery, Amanda, 199n.5 Villiers, George, duke of Buckingham, 56, 62, 64, 73, 152, 208n.36 Virgil, 151, 173, 216n.37 Vowell, Peter, 117 Wales, 20, 106, 110, 113, 119, 127, 129–32, 172, 203n.38 Wall, Wendy, 40, 97, 204n.48, 205n.7, 212n.37 Waller, Edmund, 118, 140, 217n.46 Ward, Nathaniel, 146, 174–7, 218n.6, 221n.37 Warner, Michael, 4–5, 199n.4 n.5 Warwick, countess of, see Wray, Frances Watkins, John, 219n.12

262

Index

Wayne, Valerie, 39, 46 Weamys, Anna, 28–30, 180 Weber, Harold, 218n.57 Wedgwood, C.V., 219n.12 n.17 Weldon, Sir Anthony, 180 Wentworth, Thomas, 132, 217n.45 Wheatley, Christopher, 140 Whitaker, W.B., 207n.24 White, B. R., 68–9, 71, 210n.21, 212n.39 White, Elizabeth Wade, 145–9, 159, 167, 174, 218n.5, 220n.27 n.31, 221n.35 Widmann, Ruth Louise, 132 Wight, Sarah, 3, 13, 67–99, 101–3, 106–7, 197, 210n.19 n.23, 211n.29 Exceeding Riches of Grace, The, 16, 32–3, 67–70, 72, 75–93, 95, 97–9, 101, 209n.5 n.11, 211n.30 Wonderful Pleasant and Profitable Letter, A, 92–9, 102–3 compared to Bradstreet, Anne, 146, 171, 174–5, 181, 193–4 compared to Evans, Katherine and Cheevers, Sarah, 188, 193–4 compared to Philips, Katherine, 129, 193–4 see also Jessey, Henry Wilcher, Robert, 201n.17, 213n.2 Wilding, Michael, 168 Willen, Diane, 200n.12

Williams, George Hunsten, 72, 209n.7 n.8 Willson, D. Harris, 204n.3 Wilson, Robert, 186 Wing, Donald Goddard, 29, 209n.6, 221n.36 Winthrop, John, Jr., 219n.19 Winthrop, John, Sr., 77, 81, 159, 206n.15, 218n.6, 221n.32 Wiseman, Susan, 68–9, 82, 216 Wither, George, 154 Wood, William, 154 Woodbridge, Benjamin, 170, 174–5, 177 Woodbridge, John, 174, 176–7 Woodbridge, Mercy (Dudley), 174 Woodbridge, Samuel, 146, 218n.6 Woodhouse, A.S.P., 76 Woolf, D.R., 219n.12 Woolrych, Austin, 117, 129 Worden, Blair, 174–5, 178 Wormald, Jenny, 37, 204n.3 Wray, Frances, countess of Warwick, 145 Wright, Gillian, 149, 202n.24, 219n.8 n.10 n.18, 220n.23 Yule, George, 212n.39 Zaller, Robert, 87, 95, 99, 169, 176, 209n.8 n.16, 210n.16, 211n.33 n.34 Zaret, David, 15, 19, 57, 199n.2, 202n.25